“Yes, please,” I reply with a grin.
After dinner, Albertand Mellie retire to the sofas and Jackson and I wander outside to the balcony. As kids, we often used to sit out here with our backs against the side walls, bouncing a tennis ball back and forth. As the nights wore on and the conversations inside grew louder and more raucous, we’d find ourselves quietening down and opening up to each other.
“It’s been a while since we’ve been out here together,” Jackson says as he rests his elbows on top of the chunky stone balustrade.
“All we need is a tennis ball,” I reply.
His face lights up and he ducks back indoors.
I smile at the bank of sparkling stars stretched out overhead. There’s a strip of darkness where the mountains are, and below, the twinkling lights of the town. It’s as though the stars are in the valley as well as in the sky.
As I breathe in the scent of the roses climbing up the walls, I realize that this is the exact same place where I was standing when Jackson and I almost kissed—the closest call we ever had.
We were twenty-one, but we’d had other near misses too. Bad timing has been the story of our lives.
When we were seventeen, the chemistry between us had already been building for years. I was convinced that it would beoursummer, that we’d finally move our relationship out of the friend zone. Jackson had told me that a girl called Chloe was also going to be staying, but I wasn’t worried. He knew her from back home and he’d said that she was a year older than him and a total princess. Her mother was a Manhattan socialite—a friend of his mum’s—and Chloe was coming to brush up on her French before taking a degree in the subject.
Nothing Jackson had said had led me to believe that she was a threat, but as soon as I saw her my stomach bottomed out.
I’d always been curious about Jackson’s life in New York. I only knew the version of him that existed in summertime, here at the château, but there was a whole other Jackson out there who lived in another space and time zone.
This girl seemed to speak to that Jackson. She was stunning: long dark hair, tanned skin glistening with oil. She was wearing a skimpy red bikini and Jackson was stretched out on a sun lounger beside her. I remember his broad back rippling with muscles as he reached out, handing her a cigarette that she casually brought to her lips. She took a drag and returned it to him without even glancing his way, and I felt like I was falling as a cloud drifted up from his face. I had never seen Jackson smoke before.
The dread that engulfed me as I watched them endured all summer.
Eventually she took something from him that would bindhim to her in a way that I never could. He gave himself to her—physically, emotionally, wholeheartedly—and I thought that we’d never be able to come back from it.
But their relationship was tumultuous: they were always breaking up and getting back together, and I was a passenger on their roller coaster—only their lows were my highs and vice versa.
At university I moved on and met a lovely guy called Nick. We were together for eighteen months and had talked about getting a place together after graduation, but then I arrived in France at the age of twenty-one to find that Jackson was single. He was adamant that he and Chloe were over for good, and the more time we spent together, the more I believed him and the less I found myself missing my boyfriend back home.
One night, Jackson and I were out here, looking at the view, and our elbows were just barely touching, but I was so hyperaware of this teeny-tiny point of contact that I was almost too scared to breathe in case he noticed and put distance between us.
I knew I shouldn’t be thinking about him in that way—I’d been imagining a future with Nick—but I couldn’t help it.
I still remember that conversation so clearly…
“I love it here,” I recall Jackson saying.
“Me too,” I replied.
“Chloe has never really got the appeal.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “She got bored quickly, missed city life.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted to settle here then,” I commented.
“No,” he agreed ruefully.
“How would that ever have worked? You need to move here one day, right?”
He didn’t answer, but I heard him when he sighed. I turned to face him, inadvertently breaking the contact between us.
“What’s wrong?”
I can still picture his sad smile. “I don’t know that I’m cut out for all this.”
