‘How did you do it?’ he said after a hard swallow.
Annie tipped her head.
‘How’d you get the security guard to let us into the library last night?’
‘Hah!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘I’ve been bringing Jim my mom’s rocky road every Thanksgiving since I got here. He owed me.’
‘You gave away your care package baking?’
‘Totally worth it. Or it will be.’ Annie waggled her light brows. Even in Welsh summers her cheeks grew freckled while her fair lashes and brows all but disappeared against her flushing skin. Harri always teased her about being secretly Welsh, and she always insisted Luna was hardly a Welsh surname.
Harri’s name was Welsh through and through; the Welsh spelling of ‘Harry’ and the same surname as half his street in Neath, the market town where he’d grown up.
‘Pity we won’t be here to see everyone’s reactions,’ Harri said, still smiling but looking down at his hands clasped in his lap.
A sleepy groan from one of the flatmates set off a grumpy sound in another. Someone rolled over then all fell still again.
Just after two this morning, the five of them, Annie, Harri, Gregor, Ioan and Catherine, had crossed the bridge in the student village and watched from the bushes as Annie tapped on the window, summoning the library security guard. They’d watched on, giggling and shushing one another drunkenly, as she spoke with him, working her magic.
Jim had thrown his head back in a laugh and unlocked the turnstile. He’d been surprised when Annie motioned for the hidden gang to join her and they’d all spilled out onto the path, but he’d let them inside anyway telling them in his own American drawl to ‘make it quick, five minutes max.’
Annie had saluted and told the group to ‘roll out!’
Within minutes they’d scattered through the stacks, pulling out titles from the shelves, searching for any book with a full-face portrait on the cover and applying the googly eyes.
Only half an hour before, Annie had proudly presented her willing recruits with the sticky sheets, outlining the mission she’d been planning in secret for who knew how long.
It had been a professional hit. By the time the security guard let them out again, filing innocently into the dawn light, every biography from Aneurin Bevan to Waldo Williams, every serious study of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Shakespeare – anything with a face – was be-googled and carefully re-shelved for unsuspecting undergrads to stumble upon in the autumn, by which time the guilty occupants of flat 170 would be scattered across the face of the earth.
‘Aber’s not going to forget us any time soon,’ Annie said as their smiles turned wistful.
‘How could it?’ Harri said, a new impulse of desperation blooming within him. He was going to have to say something, because if not now, moments before she put five thousand miles between them for Christ knows how long, then when? When would they next be together like this?
He’d tried to tell her how he felt umpteen times. The first time, when he simply fancied her like mad, way back in freshers’ week at the foam party when they’d been slipping around on the dancefloor and his eyes were stinging with whatever the hell they put in that stuff, and his dazzling, exciting new acquaintance had been laughing raucously and gripping his bare arms with her slippery fingers, when there’d been so little space between them it had felt like they might be about to kiss. But then the lights had come up and there were blokes with mops sweeping the drunk first years off the floor and out into the night.
He’d tried again that first Valentine’s Day when getting to know her better had only strengthened his interest in her, and he’d bought her those pathetic yellow roses in cellophane and she’d looked at them with unreadable tranquillity, saying, ‘Yellow roses for friendship, right?’ and he’d mentally kicked himself for being too slow to get to the supermarket before all the red ones sold out.
‘Sure,’ he’d said, shrugging the flowers off like they were little more than an afterthought while he’d picked up the ciders, and another big wedge lodged itself between them, even as their friendship took a giant leap forward.
They’d become devoted friends as their first year was drawing to an end, and so, by the time he finally plucked up the courage to confess that he liked her, ‘no, a bitmorethan like, truth be told,’ after an all-night study session that ended in them dozing against the headrest of his bed, most definitely too tired to even consider getting to their last nine o’clock lecture on Harold bloody Pinter, he had felt triumphant. But when he was done talking, his lips close against the top of her head, her arm resting across his stomach, all he’d got back was the soft sound of her breathing. She’d fallen asleep and missed the whole outpouring.
He’d been hit by frustration at first, and then relief that he hadn’t spoiled things between them. After all, she’d never explicitly shown him she shared any of his heated feelings. There’d been moments where he’d suspected she had, but after closer analysis, he’d put it down to her friendly, bold Texan ways, and she was like that with everyone, pretty much.
It had never been the right time after that. Either she was seeing someone or she was in one of her swearing off dating phases (usually accompanied by her asking Harri to help her cut new bangs over the sink – he wasthatdeep into the friend zone) and he’d started to take his bad luck as a sign that if they hadn’t got it together by now, it was never going to happen.
By their second year, Annie’s friendship, like the petals of the yellow roses she’d allowed to dry out and kept on the windowsill, had become a pure, perfect thing to him, far more precious than any risky student romance could ever have been.
But now they were graduates, both turned twenty-one. They would no longer be flatmates and study buddies or daring library raiders armed with googly-eye stickers. They were actual adults facing a whole new world and there was a possibility they could face it together – as well as a danger that things between them could dwindle away to nothing, what with them soon to be living an ocean apart.
‘Heartburn?’ came Annie’s voice, cutting through his thoughts.
Harri snapped his palm away from his chest where he’d been rubbing at the ache inside.
‘Nope, I’m good. Listen, Annwyl…’ He shifted a little closer so their stirring flatmates couldn’t possibly hear. ‘You’re leaving, and…’
Annie’s eyes narrowed in concentration.
He always called her Annwyl when other people were out of earshot, and she’d never protested, assuming it was a Welsh form of Annie. Should he tell her now that it really meant ‘my dear one’, or rather, it meant so much more than that since the word was wrapped up in his pride for his Welsh heritage and his language? When he called her Annwyl it was a name somehow recalling hundreds of years of affection whispered between Welsh lovers. He really should stop using it.
