Ivy Lane: Winter: by Cathy Bramley

shoe inwards awkwardly.
    I looked at her foot and then up at her face, my expression questioning and waiting.
    ‘It’s just that I’ve got a cat called Pebbles.’ She blushed, pushed her thumb up to her mouth and began to chew on the nail. ‘She’s expecting kittens and I think your cat is the father.’
    I gasped. ‘Cally? But he’s only a kitten himself! He’s not even one yet!’ My brain was whirring: what were my responsibilities, how would we know for sure if they were his kittens, would I have to keep some of the litter?
    ‘I believe male cats are,’ she cleared her throat, ‘sexually active from as young as six months old.’
    ‘Oh.’ I was momentarily glad that my face was coated in a purple layer as it probably went some way to hiding my mortification.
    Slightly bewildered, I fetched my phone and we swapped numbers and she promised to get in touch when the kittens were born. I waved her off, shut the door and leaned against it heavily.
    Great. Even my cat has got a girlfriend.
    I turned my phone over and over in my hand and felt my heart thump against my chest.
    It was the last day in November. Tonight I was officially going to give up on the idea of Aidan and me ever getting together.
    I had neither heard from him nor been brave enough to contact him myself. And that meant, according to my self-imposed ultimatum, that as of tomorrow I was declaring myself on the market. I shuddered at the expression, it made me sound like a house, or a second-hand car, or worse, downright desperate. Perhaps ‘open to amorous advances’ would be more appropriate. A bit Jane Austen, though.
    Well, pardon me, Jane Austen.
    Gemma’s words when I’d said I was waiting for Aidan to phone me.
    I still had his number.
    He didn’t have mine.
    Oh my word. Aidan didn’t have my number! Why on earth had that not occurred to me before?
    My heart ached suddenly and I hauled myself back upstairs to the bathroom. My fingers were shaking as I rinsed the oil from my hair and peeled the rubbery mask from my face.
    Was this it, then? The end of the line for Aidan and me? What if I was throwing away something special out of pride or propriety or fear? I pressed my fingers to my lips and stared at my pink face in the bathroom mirror while my heart debated the matter in hand with my head.
    Heart: I’ve come so far this year, building a new life for myself, a new career, a new town, why shouldn’t I be the one to make the call? What’s the worst that could happen?
    Head: He could turn you down and then you’d be devastated.
    Heart: But that kiss – kisses, in fact – I haven’t been imagining it, I’m sure; there was chemistry between us, a connection.
    Head: True . . .
    Before my head had completely made its mind up my heart had decided on behalf of both of them and my entire body was already quivering.
    I swallowed, scrolled through my contacts to where I had saved his number, as yet undialled but already stored under ‘favourites’.
    My finger hovered over his name. And I pressed the call button.
    The number began to ring. An English dial tone. Phew. At least he was still in the country, in the same time zone as me, it would have been awful if he was somewhere else and it was the middle of the night . . .
    ‘Hello, Aidan’s phone?’
    It was a woman. I could hear the smile in her voice, she sounded breathless and distracted, as if I’d interrupted something . . .
    Perhaps I
had
interrupted something. Something of a personal nature. My mouth went dry and my heart hammered in my ears. ‘I . . . I . . . sorry, wrong number.’
    I cut off the call and dropped the phone into the sink.
    Why, why, why had I listened to my heart instead of my head? Of course he would have found someone else by now – he was talented, handsome, entertaining, kind-hearted . . . Of course he wouldn’t still be single.
    Arrghhh!
    A sudden picture of Aidan and a woman lying in bed, languid and lazy from love-making made my stomach flip over and I