His smile widened and he loosened his grip on my hand, let it fall and started packing his syringe thingy away.
‘What exactly is that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just a useful bit of kit I like to carry with me, I travel a lot – and sometimes to places with much scarier bugs than a common-garden English wasp.’
I nodded. This was probably not the time to tell him the closest time I’d got to being anywhere abroad was a hen night in Dublin with my cousin. Expensive foreign holidays weren’t a feature of my upbringing. Not that nobody hadn’t wanted to travel; it’s just that other things … other priorities … had made it impossible.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you when I came running over,’ he said. ‘I was just taking a few shots of the garden.’
I laughed softly, closing my sore finger in my other hand. ‘You did make me jump. I thought I was alone. Not many people know this place exists. Not even Londoners.’
‘I stumbled upon it on a previous visit, but it was dark then, and I always promised myself I’d come back during the daytime. I’m about to go travelling and I have a connecting flight tonight from Heathrow, so it seemed a shame not to take the opportunity while I was in London.’ He stared up at the golden light filtering through the ivy.‘This place is just so …’
‘Magical,’ we both said at the same time, breaking into matching smiles. And for a couple of seconds that was all that mattered.
‘Why here? Why not one of the bigger tourist spots?’
‘I love exploring new places, finding those hidden, unusual parts of a city that add to its personality … its identity. London is so much more than the Thames and Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Nelson’s Column. It’s alsothis…’ He spread his arm to indicate the garden in which we were both standing.
‘Yes,’ I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. It occurred to me how unusual it was to find a man who wasn’t just interested in how things seemed, who liked to peel back the surface and find out the truth they held.
‘It’ll be our secret, then,’ he said and smiled at me again. However, this time it was more intimate. It felt as if he was inviting me to join a club where we were the only two members. I was ready to sign up on the spot, no fourteen-day cooling-off period required.
The conversation had reached a natural pause, a place where it would have been easy to walk away, continue my tour of the garden, but I didn’t make a move towards my sandals, still sitting by the edge of the fountain.
I searched my brain frantically for words – any words – that might prevent this moment from coming to an end. My gaze latched on to his camera. ‘Can I see what you’ve taken?’
Great. Now he knows the barefoot, bee-sting girl is nosey as well as weird and a little bit accident-prone.
He looked uncomfortable for a moment, then said, ‘Sure.’ I followed him over to his tripod, where he hit a lever to release the camera. He held it out so I could see the screen on the back but kept his hands on it so he could operate the various buttons.
The first pictures were gorgeous. He’d captured the light slanting through the elaborate windows, lighting up the leaves of the trailing climbers from behind so they glowed with colour.
‘Oh …!’ I said as he moved the images on again. Amidst the sun-drenched foliage, there was now a figure … Me. The sun was above and behind me, lighting my long, mousey-but-wavy hair up at the edges into a golden halo. I twisted my head and shot him a questioning look.
His mouth grimaced but his eyes kept smiling. ‘You walked into the shot as I pressed the shutter. I was so absorbed in what I was doing, I didn’t realise you were there until I saw you through the viewfinder. And then you screamed—’
‘I didn’t scream,’ I quickly corrected him, hoping I was right.
The humour in his eyes told me just how loudly I had proved myself wrong. I twisted my mouth to hide a smile as he scrolled through the next few images. ‘Just the one shot …?’ I couldn’t help but notice two or three more.
‘I always fire off a few at a time. Complete habit. But I’ll delete them if you want?’
I looked down at the display and exhaled. I’m a pretty self-contained and private kind of person. It should have been an automatic ‘yes’, but, in this picture, I didn’t look like a little girl lost, no idea which direction her life should take.I looked like a young woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be. I almost looked beautiful.
‘No,’ I said, twisting my head to meet his eyes. ‘Don’t delete them. It would be a shame.’
I suddenly became aware of just how close we were standing to each other. I found myself staring at his lips, and when I tore my gaze away and met his, he was looking at me with a strange intensity. ‘Can I take your photograph?’
‘I thought you already did that,’ I said quietly, unsure why his question had sent a quiver through me.
‘I’d like to take one of you looking at the camera, looking at me the way you are just now.’
Oh. Like that.
Like I wanted to kiss him.
I swallowed. Did he know that? Could he tell? My pulse began to trot. Maybe I did need an EpiPen after all. ‘W-why?’
