Gabi’s night had gone well – she’d snagged the attention of Lee, the guy she’d had a crush on since the previous party – but Anna’s night had been… Well, not what she’d expected.
Jeremy had been there. She’d been prepared for that. He’d asked her to dance. She’d expected that too. He’d been charming, making her laugh about carrying on with salsa instead of joining his sister in her latest fitness craze (Burlesquercise), but when the song had finished, he hadn’t lingered. In fact, he’d gone straight off and danced with another woman. Anna had got the distinct impression he was just being chivalrous, that she was just one in a long list of wallflowers he’d decided needed rescuing. For some reason that had irritated her.
But whathadshe been expecting? That with all herjoie de vivreand sparkling conversation, a catch like Jeremy had been pining away for her for the last six weeks? That he’d come along that night in the hope of seeing her?
It was fine. She didn’t want him to want her. And she certainly didn’t want him, nice as he was. However, despite all her breezy inner protestations, as she’d watched him execute moves far above her skill level with a girl with a very swooshy ponytail, she’d been aware of a door slamming shut inside herself. A door she hadn’t even known had been open.
That was the moment she’d decided to make her excuses to Gabi and head home.
When Anna walked back inside her house, it seemed empty, even though all her possessions were still exactly where she’d left them. Nothing was missing. Except, maybe, the card that should have been on her mantelpiece, the flowers that should have been in the vase on the dining table.There was no Valentine’s fizz in the fridge, and there would be no laughter and warmth between the sheets of her bed when she finally crawled into it later on.
She missed him so much.
Most of all, she missed his touch. Not just the sex – that would be easy to get, if she were so inclined, a physical need to be met like hunger or thirst – but she missed those little moments of contact that only came with familiarity and intimacy. She missed having someone to snuggle up with on the sofa. Someone to kiss her goodbye in the mornings. Someone to fall asleep on during a train journey home after a night out in London. All seemingly tiny, inconsequential things. Except they weren’t. It had taken losing them to make her realize how essential they were.
Anna tried to ignore the feeling that she was an empty shell, nothing else inside her but this ache for something she couldn’t have. She tried to distract herself by pottering around, slipping off her shoes, hanging up her coat, putting the kettle on to make herself a cup of herbal tea she didn’t really want. But the void inside just throbbed.
Eventually, she turned on a single lamp in the living room and sat down in the corner of her sofa. It was so tidy, so neat. That was Anna’s natural state. She found it easy to put things away, to keep things ordered, but it wasn’t how their home had been when Spencer had been alive.
She reached over to the coffee table and pulled the newspaper out from the shelf underneath, then flapped the pages open and messed them around a bit, before crumpling a section up and letting it slide onto the floor. That was how he’d always left it.It had driven her mad, but now she almost missed the socks down the side of the sofa cushions and the boxers that only made it halfway into the linen basket.
She sank back into the sofa and sighed. Would it ever stop, this feeling? Wasn’t time supposed to heal all wounds? In her opinion, Time was doing a pretty crappy job. Buck up, Time! Sort yourself out. After all, it kept marching her steadily away from the last moment she’d seen Spencer living and breathing, whether she wanted it to or not. Surely it owed her a little something in return?
She tucked her legs up under herself and reached for her phone. This was a bad idea, but it had been a difficult night to get through; she was going to allow herself one small concession, one tiny weakness.
She pulled up her messages, found Spencer’s name, then scrolled back to 14 February three years earlier. He’d died a little over a month later, but on that Valentine’s Day Spencer had sent her a series of funny little text messages, crammed with emoticons and saucy suggestions about how they should spend the evening together when he got home.
Anna smiled as she reread them, revelling in not just the words but the memories of that night, memories that only two people in this world had been party to, and now she was the sole keeper of. It would be wrong to let them fade and die.
But reading it back, remembering it all, was like picking at a scab. It started with that feeling, that delicious temptation, knowing there was something you wanted to do but shouldn’t. Oh, and then the moment came when you let your self-control crash and gave in to it. Bliss. Relief. Everything focused on that moment of instant gratification.
But it didn’t stay that way for long. The wound was open again, and it began to sting and seep. There was a price to be paid for that split-second of euphoria, and Anna paid it in full as she stared at the bright screen of her mobile, full of Spencer’s personality captured in letters and stupid little cartoon faces, and the ache deepened until it was almost unbearable.
But then an idea crept into her head, a magnetic tug pulling her to a destination she didn’t want to visit. To take her mind off it, she opened up the photos app on her phone and began scrolling back through the images of them together, lingering on them the way she’d wanted to at her mother-in-law’s the previous Sunday (it had been secondary school pictures that day: toothy smiles, trophies and too-big blazers), but eventually she reached the earliest ones, and as many times as she tried to swipe down to reveal more, the pictures bounced back up to the top of the screen, stubbornly refusing to do as she asked.
And the tugging towards that bad idea, that black hole, was still there in the background, whispering to her, hypnotizing her to the point where she numbly opened her contacts and found the favourites. Spencer’s name was at the top. She stared at it.
You said you wouldn’t do this again, that sensible little voice in her head whispered.You promised yourself that Valentine’s Day would be different from New Year’s Eve,but her finger pressed the screen while the inner voice was still talking, and the phone began dialling his number. Even though her heart was beating double-time, due to the memory of what had happened last time she’d done this, she held the phone up to her ear.
The ringing on the other end of the line stopped and she held her breath, waiting for what came next. However, instead of Spencer’s message,she heard a generic robotic voice instructing her to wait and speak after the tone.
How the heck had that happened? Had she been in such a flap last time that she’d managed to press the wrong button and delete his voicemail greeting? No, that wasn’t right. You could do that to your own message but not to someone else’s. It didn’t make sense.
She pressed the end call button in frustration. What had just happened? Had it been a wrong number? Seconds ticked by as she glared at her phone screen, holding her breath, and then she dialled again. This time there was no message at all.
The call connected.
‘Hello?’
Anna froze.
Was that him? It had only been one word. She couldn’t tell! She couldn’t think! Once upon a time, she’d been able to tell his voice from anyone else’s, and it cut her to the core that she’d lost that treasured skill and hadn’t even realized it.
‘Spencer?’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘Is that you? Please let it be you.’ She started to cry. ‘I have so much I want to say…’
For a long time, there was nothing but silence. No voice. Not even the sound of someone breathing – which, in a rather morbid way, made sense – but she felt a presence. Someone was there. Someone was listening.
And so she started to speak. She began to say everything that had been boiling up inside her for two years, ten months and twenty-two days.
