‘How did you know I was speaking this evening?’ she asks. ‘I didn’t even get to ask you that amidst all the madness of tonight. How did you know?’
‘My dad told me.’
‘Your dad?’
‘Well, yes, and that’s a story in itself,’ I explain to her. ‘He even let me take his precious car.’
‘No way.’
‘I know! Look, this is our hotel now. Let’s go in and relax with a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Kate and I wake up the next morning in a luxurious king-size bed, wrapped in soft white sheets with our bodies entangled, and I can’t help but take a moment to watch her in admiration as she sleeps. She is smiling, a picture of pure contentment, and I yearn to touch her but don’t want to wake her from her deep slumber, a well-earned rest after a year that is bound to have exhausted her on so many levels.
I’ve never met anyone who cares for others like she does. She is fiercely loyal, she is unconditional and imperfect, she is passionate and raw, and she is the only person I know who sees right into my soul as I do into hers.
We are soulmates and we will never be apart again, no matter what happens from here on in. Of that I’m sure.
I go to the shower as she snoozes and make a coffee, then I smile in disbelief when the porter delivers a continental breakfast to our room with the morning papers.
‘I forgot we ordered breakfast,’ says Kate as she stretches her arms and wakes up at last. ‘Oh God, are we really in the newspaper? I don’t think I’m mentally prepared to seethat. I hate seeing myself or reading back the words I said.’
I find the page and hold it up while munching on a croissant, and she covers her mouth in mock awe.
We can’t wait to be wed, says the main headline and then it reads:The love story of two young people from opposing communities who survived a bomb, and of community resilience.
‘Please don’t read it out, I’m cringing!’ says Kate, which of course makes me want to read it out loud all the more.
‘Kate Foley, a nurse and charitable campaigner, and David Campbell, a science teacher, first met when their paths crossed on the day of a tragic bomb that ripped the hearts out of their community, but brought theirs together.’
Kate pretends to block her ears so I stop and instead scan the rest of the article to myself.
‘They don’t know about how I spotted you at the bowling alley when you had purple hair,’ she says as she comes to where I’m sitting at a round breakfast table by the window in the hotel room. ‘Or how you flirted with me when I came into the ice-cream shop!’
‘You mean,youflirted with me!’ I protest.
‘Yeah, but you stood there staring with your mouth open,’ she says, sitting on my knee and draping her arms around my neck. ‘You were love-struck. You couldn’t even speak.’
‘You said you liked my T-shirt,’ I remind her as I nuzzleher neck. She lifts a croissant and tries to nibble on it as she laughs.
‘It was a plain white T-shirt,’ she says sarcastically. ‘Like how much more obvious could I have been? Who on earth could say they liked a plain white T-shirt? Oh, the innocence! It was the best I could think of at the time!’
The cool November rain batters the windows outside our fifth-floor hotel room and, just as I’ve felt so many times before, when we are together it’s as though time stands still and the rest of the world doesn’t matter. I’ve learned however that it does matter, and I’m strong enough inside now to play my part in a bigger world for us both; a world that will see us grow in love and extend it to others who need us both, be that her family or mine.
‘It’s so good to be together again,’ she says to me, kissing my forehead and then wiping off crumbs that come from her lips. ‘I’ve missed you like my heart had been smashed and stood upon. I’m not myself without you.’
‘Yes, you are,’ I tell her, and I really mean it. ‘You are everything to me and I’m everything to you, but you are complete in yourself and that’s why I love you so much. You’re strong, you’re compassionate, you’re beautiful, and that will never, ever change.’
‘How come you always know the right words to say?’ she asks me, echoing a question I used to ask her so many times.
‘I was taught by the best,’ I reply, looking into her eyes with sincerity.
Kate lifts her phone and checks the time.
‘We don’t have to check out for another hour,’ she says with a cheeky glint in her eye. ‘So, David Campbell, how about we make good use of this room while we still have it? It’s about time we started practising really hard to make a Kate or David junior, isn’t it?’
I race her to the bed and we bounce onto it, and then wrap ourselves in each other’s arms.
‘You haven’t lost your touch either,’ I tell her as my hands wander on her velvet skin. ‘Youstillknow all the right words to say.’
