Almost…
Because he’d never discovered what they really felt like, despite once wanting it more than life itself.
Putain… it reallywastime to escape.
He’d done what he’d come to do and covered Greg’s absence. He’d also done what he’d really come to do and discovered that the way Sophie felt about himhadchanged. She hadn’t wanted him here but it hadn’t felt like she still hated him. That moment of eye contact in the alley that neither of them had been able to break fast enough…
Mon Dieu… how intense had that been?
There was still something there. Something that hadn’t died along with everything else. It was the last thing he wanted it to be but he hadn’t been able to suppress that frisson of emotion fast enough to avoid recognising what it was. Hope.
And hope – like love – was an indulgence that Luc didn’t allow himself to feel. It was dangerous. It couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t real and yet it could still be broken and those sharp edges could do untold damage.
He turned off the camera and put it back into its case. He only had to walk across the space between the tables on one side and the dancing on the other and, with the increasing movement of guests, it was quite possible that no one would notice him leaving.
But he left it a moment too late.
The band had just launched into a new song – one that brought cheers from the crowd.
‘All You Need is Love’.
The Beatles.
The Fab Four.
The familiar notes of the Summer of Love anthem hit Luc like the proverbial ton of bricks. He strode across the terrace flagstones and down the wide steps to the gravelled driveway. He couldn’t get away from here fast enough.
The reminder of what they’d laughingly called themselves in their own summer of love was adding insult to injury.
The Fab Four.
Tom, Sophie, Hannah and Luc…
6
TWELVE YEARS AGO
Everything began that night.
At the party to welcome Tom home to London.
And Luc, of course, because he and Tom had been pretty much inseparable since the day they’d met in the most unlikely of places – in the tunnel under a rail bridge that was only ever used for things you didn’t want to be witnessed. A place where the litter amongst the nettles was a serious health hazard and water dripped from soot-blackened stones onto spray-painted gang insignia. People had died under that bridge, any sound they made drowned out by the trains thundering overhead.
No place for a boy from the quiet prestige of Dulwich that’s for sure. A kid his own age who probably had no idea of how big a mistake he was making buying drugs from a member of that particular gang.
Luc had felt just as much out of his comfort zone when he’d stepped into this Georgian mansion that was Tom’s family home, mind you, but that was more than a decade ago. He might have been intimidated, that first time, by the vast space of rooms that could have swallowed the whole council flat he’d grown up in, but they were filled with the warmth of this family.
A realfamily. A mother and father who loved each other. A kid sister who was annoying but cute. They acted as though the extraordinary height of their ornate plaster ceilings and the exquisite chandeliers that hung from them were nothing out of the ordinary. That the people in the room were what mattered.
That Luc mattered, simply because he was Tom’s friend. Perhaps they’d sensed, from that first day, that Luc might be the only person Tom would listen to. The one that could be allowed to help him navigate what had become some turbulent teenage years.
Backpacking around Europe together, travelling cheaply and sleeping in more than a few dodgy hostels had cemented a friendship that had grown over the years into an unbreakable bond, but it was during their time in Paris that the future really began to come into focus.
Tom fell in love with food.
And Luc discovered his hobby of photography was, in fact, going to be a lifelong passion – he just needed to find a way to make a living out of it.
So, here they were, at a party to celebrate the fact that they’d come home and were ready to take the first steps into a future that seemed brighter than anything Luc had ever imagined for himself.
