“He feels awful about how it ended, before.”
She shakes her head, like that’s irrelevant. I watch her try to compose herself. “I just think you could do...somuch better. There must be so many good guys out there. Why don’t you wait until you start work, see if there’s anyone nice at your new place?”
“Because,” I say weakly, “it’sMax. He was always my one that got away. The person I was meant to be with. You know?”
“Except he wasn’t, was he?” she says, her voice softening slightly like she’s breaking bad news. “You split up, and then didn’t speak for nearly a decade.”
“But now... we’ve found each other again.”
It feels weird to be discussing Max like this. We’ve rarely done soin the intervening years—Tash never forgave him for what he did to me, plus he was evidently long gone. There never seemed to be very much point in talking about him.
“Lucy,” Tash says, her voice more urgent now, “it’s just nostalgia. You know that, don’t you?”
“Or maybe he’s my soulmate.” I decide against mentioning what my horoscope said the day I bumped into Max, since I’m pretty sure that would be enough to tip her over the edge completely.
Tash’s forehead pinches together. “You know, I was reading this article the other day about how people think they’ve met their soulmate when it’s actually... just lust. That all the fireworks and the love at first sight is just a bunch of chemicals shooting around. That it’s the slow-burn connections that mean the most.” The way she says this implies she suspects Max and I would be at the lighter-fuel end of the emotional depth spectrum.
“What about Mum and Dad? They’re definitely soulmates. Or you and Simon.”
She pauses for a moment, staring at the screen like she no longer recognizes the person looking back at her. “I just don’t want you to get hurt again, Lucy,” she says, eventually, like she knows she’s losing the argument—and almost, by extension, me. “After you broke up, when you came back from traveling, you were like... a different person.”
She assumes Max did that to me, but I don’t tell her it was actually nothing to do with Max—or at least, a lot less to do with him than she thinks. I never confided in her about what happened in Australia. And so much time has passed now, I doubt I ever will.
Back then, she used to say I’d forgotten how to take risks, be spontaneous. Well, what is agreeing to see Max again if not a risk, proof I’ve rediscovered my sense of adventure?
“Please, please just promise me you’ll think about this, before rushing into anything,” Tash says.
It’s a bit late for that now, I think. But her heart looks almost as if it’s breaking, so I nod, tell her yes. “He’s away with work this week. I promise I’ll think it through properly before the weekend.”
I know what she’s thinking:Max went on holiday for a fortnight, and now he’s “away with work” for a week?She probably suspects he ran off with someone else back then. If nothing else, I know she thinks I’m making a big mistake.
—
But how can that be true, when being with Max never felt anything but right?
By the time Christmas rolled around at the end of our first term at uni, we’d been friends for three months. Friends who flirted a lot, whom everyone assumed were already together. Who messaged all day then decamped to each other’s rooms at night. Who met for coffee on campus, sat together in the pub, saved seats for each other in the cinema.
I’m still surprised we held back from taking it further for so long: we were both single, frequently uninhibited by booze, fully intimate with the details of each other’s lives. But Max said afterward he was afraid of messing up our friendship, and I was probably too filled with self-doubt to make the first move. After all, this wasMax—so popular on campus, so handsome, the kind of guy people gravitated toward—and I’d never even had a boyfriend before, not a serious one.
I knew he’d had a girlfriend back home in Cambridge. They’d broken up over the summer—she was staying on there, to go to actual Cambridge University. I’d stalked her a bit on social media, which didn’t help my confidence issues—she was gorgeous in a sunny, carefree way that made me convinced Max would be compelled to seek her out again at some point.
So three months passed, and then it was December and I waspacking to go home to Shoreley at the same time that Max was due to catch the bus back to Cambridge.
He walked into my room early afternoon on our last day on campus, holding up a hoodie. His hair was damp, and he smelled faintly of that herby shower gel all the guys I knew seemed to like, so I assumed he’d just been for a run.
“Found this under my bed,” he said.
“You star.” I smiled. “I’ve been looking for that.”
He hesitated then, seeming disoriented suddenly, which was very unlike Max. He always knew what to say, was never lost for words. His success in the law student mooting competitions was testament to that.
Appearing to recover, he smiled, continued to hover by my bed. It was stripped bare, the sheets in a bin bag ready to be shoved straight into my parents’ washing machine back in Shoreley. “Hey, I bumped into Anna at the canteen earlier. Finally got the balls to tell her my name isn’t Matt.”
I smiled. One of Max’s tutors, who’d been getting his name wrong all term—even though she was reportedly already convinced he had the potential to be a top barrister. “Was she embarrassed?”
“Yeah. So much so, she bought me a mince pie and a coffee.”
“Worth it, then.”
