‘You asked why I bought a ridiculously overpriced beach hut on the Dorset coast.’
My heartbeat stills, pausing the wall going up around me.
‘Daisy was the closest thing I had to being with you.’ His eyes flit back and forth across my face. ‘I haven’t changed anything inside her. I couldn’t.’
My hand drifts to the heart and our initials Jackson scratched into the end of the bench all those years ago. Without looking, my fingertips trace the etchings in the wood.
He follows my movement. ‘J and E forever. I meant it then when I wrote it and I still mean it now,’ he says softly. ‘I’ve never stopped loving you even though you didn’t love me back.’ He runs his fingers through the tumble of his hair, pushing it away from his face yet again. ‘You didn’t want anything to do with me, but I could never get you out of my head. My heart.’
A tidal wave of emotions hits me full force on hearing that he felt about me exactly as I’ve felt for him for all this time. The bricks in the wall around my heart slowly start to tumble.
‘But I’ve always loved you.’ Tears spill out of my eyes. ‘I thought you’d hate me and I couldn’t bear that to happen. You were the most important thing in the world to me and I wanted to be on my own rather than you reject me.’
‘You never gave me the chance.’
There are tears tracking down his face now. I want to touch him. Wipe his face free of the salty pain.
‘I could never hate you.’ His voice cracks. ‘I thought you didn’t want me. I was a painful reminder of everything you went through. I thought in the end I was doing the right thing by freeing you from that memory.’
His body quivers with emotion. I want to close the space and reach for him, but I don’t know how. I’m scared if I do it wrong that he’ll reject me or even worse disintegrate and I won’t know how to make it right.
He pushes himself upright, away from me, and rubs at his forehead as if he’s struggling with something internally, then without speaking he stands and goes to the cupboard at the back of the hut and comes back carrying a light tan wooden box from under the bench.
I take one look at it and my heart stops as if a metal band has been fixed tight around it and someone’s tightening the screws. ‘You kept it.’
‘Of course I kept it.’ There’s a break in his voice which sends a pain through my already tight chest and when I look over at him, his gaze has settled on me. ‘I haven’t ever forgotten what we went through. Did you think I was sailing through life not giving a damn?’
I hesitate. If I’m honest that’s exactly what I’ve thought at times. Angry that he got to live his life whereas mine was tainted. ‘Sometimes I did,’ I confess, my voice small.
He places the box on the bench next to me and sits down on the other side of it. ‘How did we make such a mess of all this?’
‘I don’t know.’
He puts his hand on the box, but doesn’t open it. I swallow, feeling every movement and sound that my throat makes.
‘I love you.’ His voice is soft and full of emotion. ‘I’ve always loved you even before that first time we ever had sex. You got me. You knew me better than anyone else. I probably never explained it properly, but I was an awkward fifteen-year-old who didn’t know how to say how important you were to me. I’ve had years since to think about it though.’ He pauses, his fingers tracing the inscription burnt into the lid of the box. It mirrors the scratches under my fingertips. ‘It hurt when you wouldn’ttalk to me. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I tried everything to get to talk to you and just met dead ends. And then Mum told me to give you space, so that’s what I did. But it wasn’t because I’d given up on you. On us. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘I thought it was the right thing to do,’ I whisper, shifting slightly to half face him, but I can’t look at him. ‘I couldn’t tell you what really happened. I couldn’t face you. I was a coward,’ I say, ashamed.
There’s quiet as we both digest each other’s words. He reaches for the box and opens the lid, laying it back fully so the contents are laid bare.
I kept no mementos of her because I thought I didn’t deserve them. But there were times I ached to see her picture again and the more the years passed the more the memory I have of the scan has pixellated and faded. I reach in and pick up the black-and-white grainy picture. A single tear escapes and I dash it away, but all that does is give permission for the rest of the tears I’ve been bottling up to run freely down my cheeks. My fingertip traces the tiny blob on the scan.
‘Do you ever think about her?’ I ask.
It’s taken seventeen years to have this conversation, but it feels important. As if it’s filling a gap that’s been achingly empty.
‘You always call her a her. But we didn’t know, did we?’
I shake my head. ‘No. It was a feeling and it stuck.’
‘Yes. I do.’
I tilt my head towards him.
He answers my question. ‘Think about her. Not all the time, but I do. Although, I always think of her as a him.’ His mouth twitches into a tiny smile.
‘He or she would have been seventeen now. Older than we were at the time,’ I say. My mind drifts to all the questions I often pose myself. What would they be like? Me or Jackson?Would they have a great sense of humour or be studious and serious? Blonde or dark?
