Several things happened in that moment. I heard Andie’s appreciative ‘Phwoar’ as though it was coming from a great distance, even though she was right beside me. My knees suddenly turned to jelly, my feet froze to the ground, while the contents of my stomach considered making an unwelcome reappearance.
Andie didn’t seem to notice I was no longer following her. Her attention was only on the two figures by the window. She threw her arms around her cousin in an enormous hug, somehow managing to never once take her eyes off the guy standing beside him. The guy who was looking right beyond her and staring straight at me.
Andie disengaged herself from her cousin’s arms and turned her thousand-megawatt smile on his friend.
‘Hi there. I’m Andie, and I’m really hoping that you’re John.’
I don’t know if he even heard her because he was still looking pretty dazed. That made two of us.
‘Way to make a good impression, Andie,’ Darren teased, giving his cousin’s shoulder a playful shove. ‘I never said his name was John, it’s—’
‘Josh,’ I said, my voice infused with at least fifty different emotions.
Andie’s head whipped around faster than a tango dancer to study my face. It still felt frozen in shock. There were a hundred questions in her eyes, none of which I was capable of answering. Comprehension only dawned when Andie looked back at her blind date and saw the way his eyes were still locked on my face.
‘Fuck me,’ she said softly, catching on far more quickly than her cousin.
‘Do you two know each other, then?’ Darren asked, his hand gesturing between Josh and me.
It looked as though neither Josh nor I had the ability to construct a sentence, so it was left to Andie to educate him.
‘Of coursethey know each other, dummy. Josh used to live next door to Lily.’
I had no idea how she’d worked it out so quickly, but if nothing else it proved she’d made an excellent career choice. She was going to be a great investigative journalist.
There were still about two yards separating Josh from me. And even though I’d lived through this scene countless times in my head, it wasn’t following any of the rules. We should be clenched in an enormous hug by now, or he should be spinning me around in his arms – although admittedly that would have been tricky, given the crowded room. Or we should have been kissing. The last wasalways a stretch, given there had only been one occasion when I’d felt the touch of his lips on mine, and that had been the day the Bakers had moved away, five years ago. But no one forgets their first kiss, do they? And Josh had been mine.
But in all my fantasies there had never been an awkward chasm between us that apparently neither of us knew how to bridge.
Gradually the dumbfounded expression on Josh’s face dissolved into a smile. It grew slowly, the way it always had done, reaching his eyes way after his lips were engaged.
‘Lily.’ He said my name like it was lyrics in a song, and it might as well have been, because suddenly my heart was singing. His voice was deeper than the last time I’d heard it. It was lower and somehow more soulful than it had been at seventeen.
‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ he said. ‘You look ...’
My insecurities had a field day filling in the blanks in that sentence. Twenty looks very different to fifteen, and I felt raw and exposed as his eyes swept over me.
‘Older?’ I suggested, desperate to plug the gap.
‘Fantastic,’ he corrected. This time his eyes smiled first.
Around us the music was pounding, but in this corner of the room we were enveloped in a pocket of silence.
‘Why don’t you guys go and get us some more drinks,’ Andie suggested pointedly to her cousin.
Darren’s eyes dropped to her half-full plastic cup. ‘You’ve still got some,’ he said reasonably.
Andie lifted the cup and drained it in one. ‘And now I haven’t,’ she said, speaking to him volubly with her eyes. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be a language he was particularly familiar with.
‘I think they want to talk about us, so we have to leave,’ Josh said, his eyes twinkling in amusement.
Darren looked surprised. ‘Why didn’t they just say so then?’ he asked, taking the empty beaker from his cousin’s hands.
Josh looked down at my still largely full glass. No way was I knocking it back like Andie had. Something told me I needed to keep my wits about me.
‘Would you like a top-up?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said, shivering as his fingers grazed mine when he took the wine from me.
