I smile and shrug. “Kind of. But then I saw you out the window, and I just... abandoned him at the bar. Anyway, he wrote his number on a beer mat and put it in my coat pocket. I found it last week.”
Max laughs. “Wow. And you sayI’msmooth?”
“I know. Who’d have thought you’d have competition on that front?”
“So, are you going to call him?”
I found the beer mat while I was packing up the last of my things for the move, and it fell out of my coat pocket. I turned it over in my hands and smiled, then placed it gently into the box of stuff that would be staying in Tash’s loft.
I feign deliberation. “Yeah, maybe. Just to hedge my bets, you know.”
“Oh, absolutely. Very wise.”
I shuffle forward on the mattress and kiss him—a kiss that’s long and full and intense, so he can be in no doubt at all I’m just teasing.
“In all seriousness,” I whisper, “you should know, I don’t make a habit of this.”
His eyes crease at the corners, a tiny spray of crow’s-feet. “Of what?”
My heart is cartwheeling in my chest. “Sleeping with guys on the first date.”
“First date.” He pretends to think about this. “But isn’t this technically like... our four-hundredth date, or something?”
I smile. It’s what I wanted him to say. “Maybe.”
Beneath the covers, he runs a hand across my hip. “It doesn’t count, Luce. We’re exes.” Then he catches my eye, rolls onto his back. “That came out wrong. What I mean is, it’s you and me. We’re past all that.”
“Yeah. We can just skip straight to the good stuff.”
“Exactly.”
“Pick up where we left off.”
He rolls back toward me, fixing me with smoke-gray eyes. “Yep.”
But... wherewasthat? I mean, where did we leave off?
I’ve been burning to ask him since Friday night. Since our kiss, and that spark that turned into dynamite right there on his sofa. Since yesterday morning, when we returned from the shops with coffees from the Italian deli that ended up going cold and untasted in the kitchen. Since yesterday afternoon, when he eventually left the bed and invited me into the shower. I’ve spent the past forty-eight hours in a kind of daze, suspended in dreamy disbelief, but so far I’ve been unable to break the spell by saying the words I’m saying now.
“Why... did you end it, Max?” I whisper. The question’s almost too hard to ask.
His gaze tracks back and forth across my face, like he’s trying to pin down the right answer. “I had to,” he says, eventually.
I trace a shape against his left pectoral with a single finger. His skin is still beach-brown, muscles undulating beneath it, his body—nearlya decade on—seemingly an even better version of how it was before. He’s always been a runner, into sport, but now his physique looks more attended-to, like he might lift a few weights from time to time, too. I feel briefly self-conscious, wonder whether he’s been comparing the me of today to the girl he loved back then.
I don’t think I’ve changed, much. I haven’t got the ballerina physique of my sister, or Jools’s natural beauty—but when I compare myself to old photos, I don’t see a lot of difference, except maybe an easing of the youth from my face.
“Were you... scared of the commitment?” Our plan had been to move to London after graduating, and we’d already talked about finding a place there together, until a conversation with his friend Rob made me think I’d got that wrong. We argued about it one afternoon—about whether he was going to live with me, or with Rob and his other friend Dean—just a week before he broke things off. So I convinced myself that was why—but he kept saying it wasn’t.
“No,” he says again now, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Did you meet someone else?” I asked him this back then, of course. But maybe some things are easier to admit in retrospect.
He shakes his head. “I was single for two years after we split up.”
We’re still facing each other, so close our lips are almost touching, fingers gliding over skin. It’s as though we’re having the most intimate discussion of our lives, rather than getting stuck along a succession of conversational dead ends.
His forehead gathers into a frown. “Have you ever... had to walk away from something because you knew it was the right decision—even though it broke your heart?”
