The Road Trip - Softcover

O'Leary, Beth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593335023 ISBN 13: 9780593335024

Verlag: Berkley Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Two exes reach a new level of awkward when forced to take a road trip together in this endearing and humorous novel by the author of the international bestseller The Flatshare.

What if the end of the road is just the beginning?

Four years ago, Dylan and Addie fell in love under the Provence sun. Wealthy Oxford student Dylan was staying at his friend Cherry’s enormous French villa; wild child Addie was spending her summer as the on-site caretaker. Two years ago, their relationship officially ended. They haven’t spoken since.

Today, Dylan’s and Addie’s lives collide again. It’s the day before Cherry’s wedding, and Addie and Dylan crash cars at the start of the journey there. The car Dylan was driving is wrecked, and the wedding is in rural Scotland—he’ll never get there on time by public transport.

So, along with Dylan’s best friend, Addie’s sister, and a random guy on Facebook who needed a ride, they squeeze into a space-challenged Mini and set off across Britain. Cramped into the same space, Dylan and Addie are forced to confront the choices they made that tore them apart—and ask themselves whether that final decision was the right one after all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Beth O'Leary is a Sunday Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She wrote her debut novel, The Flatshare, on her train journey to and from her job at a children's publisher. She now lives in the Hampshire countryside and writes full-time.

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Dylan

 

"The road of friendship never did run smooth, is what I'm saying," Marcus tells me, fidgeting with his seat belt."

 

This is my first experience of a heartfelt apology from Marcus, and so far it has involved six clichŽs, two butchered literary references and no eye contact. The word sorry did feature, but it was preceded by I'm not very good at saying, which somewhat undermined its sincerity.

 

I shift up a gear. "Isn't it the course of true love that never runs smooth? A Midsummer Night's Dream, I believe."

 

We're by the twenty-four-hour Tesco. It's half past four in the morning, the air thick with duvet-darkness, but the bland yellow light from the shop illuminates the three people in the car in front as if they've just moved into a spotlight. We're close behind them, both following the slow, rattling path of a lorry ahead.

 

For a flash of a second I see the driver's face in the rearview mirror. She reminds me of Addie-if you think about someone enough, you start to see them everywhere.

 

Marcus huffs. "I'm talking about my feelings, Dylan. This is agony. Please get your head out of your arse so that you can actually listen."

 

I smile at that. "All right. I'm listening."

 

I drive on, past the bakery. The eyes of the driver in front are lit again in the mirror, her eyebrows slightly raised behind squarish glasses.

 

"I'm just saying, we hit some bumps, I get that, and I didn't handle things well, and that's-that's really unfortunate that that happened."

 

Astonishing, really, the linguistic knots in which he will tie himself to avoid a simple I'm sorry. I stay silent. Marcus coughs and fidgets some more, and I almost take pity and tell him it's all right, he doesn't have to say it if he's not ready, but as we idle past the bookie's another flash of light hits the car in front and Marcus is forgotten. The driver has wound the window down, and she's stretched an arm out, gripping the roof of the car. Her wrist is looped with bracelets, glimmering silver-red in the car lights' glare. The gesture is so achingly familiar-the arm, slender and pale, the assertion of it, and those bracelets, the round, childish beads stacked up her wrist. I'd know them anywhere. My heart jolts like I've missed a step because it is her, it's Addie, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

 

And then Marcus screams.

 

Earlier, Marcus gave a similarly horrified scream when we passed a Greggs advertising vegan sausage rolls, so I don't react as fast as I perhaps otherwise would. As the car in front stops sharply, and I fail to hit the brakes on the seventy-thousand-quid Mercedes that belongs to Marcus's father, I have just enough time to regret this.

 

Addie

 

Bang.

 

My head whips up so fast my glasses go flying backward off my ears and over the headrest. Someone screams. Oww, fuck-a pain shoots up my neck, and all I'm thinking is God, what did I do? Did I hit something?

 

"Shit the bed," Deb says beside me. "Are you all right?"

 

I fumble for my glasses. They're not there, obviously.

 

"What the hell just happened?" I manage.

 

My shaking hands go to the steering wheel, then the handbrake, then the rearview mirror. Getting my bearings.

 

I see him in the mirror. A little blurred without my glasses. A little unreal. It's him, though, no question. He's so familiar that for a moment I feel like I'm looking at my own reflection. Suddenly my heart's beating like it's shoving for space.

 

Deb's getting out of the car. Ahead, the bin lorry moves off and its headlights catch the tail of the fox they braked for. It's moving onto the pavement at a saunter. Slowly, the scene pieces itself together: lorry stops for fox, I stop for lorry and behind me Dylan doesn't stop at all. Then-bang.

 

I look back at Dylan in the mirror; he's still looking at me. Everything seems to slow or quieten or fade, like someone's dialed the world down.

 

I haven't seen Dylan for twenty months. He should have changed somehow. Everything else has. But even from here, even in half darkness, I know the exact line of his nose, his long eyelashes, his snakeskin yellow-green eyes. I know those eyes will be as wide and shocked as they were when he left me.

 

"Well," my sister says. "The Mini's done us proud."

 

The Mini. The car. Everything comes rushing back in and I unclick my seat belt. It takes three goes. My hands are shaking. When I next glance at the rearview mirror my eyes focus on the foreground instead of the background and there's Rodney, crouched forward on our backseat with his hands over his head and his nose touching his knees.

 

Shit. I forgot all about Rodney.

 

"Are you all right?" I ask him, just as Deb says, "Addie? Are you OK?" She pokes her head back in the car, then grimaces. "Your neck hurting too?"

 

"Yeah," I say, because as soon as she asks I realize it does, loads.

 

"Gosh," Rodney says, tentatively shifting out of the brace position. "What happened?"

 

Rodney posted on the "Cherry & Krish Are Getting Hitched" Facebook group yesterday evening asking for a lift to the wedding from the Chichester area. Nobody else replied, so Deb and I took pity. All I know about Rodney is that he has a Weetabix On The Go for breakfast, he's always hunching and his T-shirt says, I keep pressing Esc but I'm still here, but I think I've pretty much got the gist.

 

"Some arsehole in a Mercedes went into the back of us," Deb tells him, straightening up to look at the car behind again.

 

"Deb . . ." I say.

 

"Yeah?"

 

"I think that's Dylan. In that car."

 

She scrunches up her nose, ducking down to see me again. "Dylan Abbott?"

 

I swallow. "Yeah."

 

I risk a glance over my shoulder. My neck protests. It's then that I notice the man stepping out of the Mercedes passenger seat. Slim-built and ghostly pale in the dark street, his curly hair just catching the light of the shopfronts behind him. There goes my heart again, beating way too fast.

 

"He's with Marcus," I say.

 

"Marcus?" Deb says, eyes going wide.

 

"Yeah. Oh, God." This is awful. What am I meant to do now? Something about insurance? "Is the car OK?" I ask.

 

I climb out just as Dylan gets out of the Mercedes. He's dressed in a white tee and chino shorts with battered boat shoes on his feet. There's a carabiner on his belt loop, disappearing into his pocket. It was my idea, that, to stop him always losing his keys.

 

He steps forward into the path of the Mercedes' headlights. He looks so handsome it aches in my chest. Seeing him is even harder than I expected it to be. I want to do everything at once: run to him, run away, curl up, cry. And beneath all that I have this totally ridiculous feeling that someone's messed up, like something didn't get filed when it should have up there in the universe, because I was supposed to see Dylan this weekend, for the first time in almost two years, but it should have been at the wedding.

 

"Addie?" he says.

 

"Dylan," I manage.

 

"Did a Mini really just total my dad's Mercedes?" says Marcus.

 

My hand goes self-consciously to my fringe. No makeup, scruffy overalls, no mousse in my hair. I've spent bloody months planning the outfit I was supposed to be wearing when I saw Dylan again, and this was not it. But he doesn't...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593335023
• ISBN 13: 9780593335024
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland