Page 27 of Game, Set, Match

‘You want us to come back with you?’ asked Gaynor, throwing Trish a look.

Hannah shook her head and bolted for the door. ‘I’ll be fine. See you all in the morning.’ She hurried out of the bar, then stopped on the pavement and leaned over, resting her hands on her knees as she took some deep, calming breaths.

‘Hannah, are you OK?’ said a voice. She looked up to find Rob had followed her outside.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, giving him a smile that she suspected might be a bit manic. ‘Just a bit hot in there.’

‘Can I walk you back?’

Hannah paused for a moment, processing the question. He looked kind and sincere, like he genuinely didn’t want her to walk back alone. But there was also something else; a kind of reluctance, like maybe he didn’t want to give her the wrong idea. It made her feel like saying yes would just be another step down the road towards making an idiot of herself.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll be OK on my own.’

Rob nodded and gave her a soft smile. Was it regret, or relief? Hannah couldn’t tell. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, fast-walking up the road until she reached the bottom of the steps. She tucked her skirt into her knickers and ran up them two at a time, pushing herself through the pain until it felt like her lungs would burst.

The others were in the hotel bar when Hannah came in from her swim, a Club Colina bathrobe over her bikini and flip-flops on her feet. They were slumped on a sofa with their shoes kicked off in a heap under the table, a bottle of wine in a bucket in front of them.

‘Oh wow, you’re still up,’ said Jess. ‘We thought you’d gone to bed. Grab another glass.’

Hannah took one from the bar and fell onto the same sofa as Trish, kicking her flip-flops onto the pile.

‘How long did you swim for?’ asked Jess, reaching across to slop some wine into Hannah’s glass.

‘An hour,’ said Hannah. ‘Only planned to do fifty lengths, but it was really nice so I kept going.’ She’d convinced herself that it was about exercise, but that was a lie. She’d kept her mind occupied by holding imaginary conversations with Graham, her mum, her dad and Luke, but Rob kept creeping into her thoughts. His smile, his arms, the clean, manly smell of him. In the end she started mentally singing every Britney Spears song she knew, which was a lot, and yet still every lyric seemed to be about Rob.Baby, can’t you see I’m calling? A guy like you should wear a warning.

‘You’re crazy,’ said Jess with a huge yawn. Hannah noted that it was the second time she’d been called that this evening.

‘How was the bar after I left?’ she asked.

‘Fun,’ said Gaynor. ‘The band were great. We stayed for another hour or so, drank a lot of sambuca, then shared a couple of taxis up the hill with the guys. Olly tried to grope me so I gave him a dead leg.’

‘Trish and Rob were all over each other,’ said Jess with a sly grin.

Hannah’s head snapped up, a swooping, acid feeling in her stomach. ‘Really?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ slurred Trish. ‘We were just chatting. And you guys joined in.’

‘With what?’ asked Hannah before she could stop herself.

‘We were ranking the coaches in order of how many women we guessed they’d slept with,’ laughed Gaynor. ‘We were right to put Aaron at the bottom, bless him.’

‘Rob wouldn’t give us a number,’ added Jess. ‘But he wasDEFINITELYat the top.’

‘I’m not sure he even KNEW the number,’ said Gaynor.

‘Wow,’ said Hannah, the acid feeling pooling into something heavy and viscous in her stomach. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Trish still would, though,’ teased Gaynor with a grin.

Trish shrugged. ‘Yeah, course. I don’t want tomarryhim, I’d just be happy to get laid. I haven’t had a shag in two years.’

‘Really?’ Gaynor slopped some more wine into Trish’s glass.

‘Yep.’ Trish covered her mouth as she did a small belch, then drowned it in more wine. ‘I’m a thirty-five-year-old divorcee with two kids under ten, which makes me damaged goods.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Jess dismissively.

‘It’s true,’ Trish continued. ‘Men my age usually want to date twenty-year-olds, so the only offers I get are men over fifty who I don’t fancy, or casual hook-ups with total randoms. The whole system is rigged to make women like me feel like shit.’