Even though I’m sitting in business class for the first time in my life, I’m pissed off. And what’s pissing me off even more is I know I’m being unreasonable. I’d been not exactly dreading the flight, but I hadn’t been looking forward to being stuck in the middle of a row with hardly any legroom and maybe someone snoring next to me, so I should be happy – business class is incredible. Nick and I have a sort of little cubby to ourselves. The seats themselves are fairly similar to the usual seats on a plane, but bigger, and there’s loads of legroom and these little dividers either side of our seats, cutting us off from the rest of the passengers. There are TV screens in the dividers, together with noise-cancelling headphones and a little pack with socks and an eye mask and ear plugs. And we were given champagne as soon as we sat down. Nick put his straight on the tray, but I swigged mine – I don’t care what time it is, I needed a drink.
‘It was the best way to get an upgrade,’ Nick says. ‘I don’t know why you’re sulking.’
‘I’m not sulking,’ I say and drink more champagne. ‘It just pisses me off how easy it all is for you.’
‘Oh, that seems reasonable,’ he says and grins, annoyingly. ‘I wasn’t flirting.’
‘You so were!’
‘I wasn’t! I was being charming!’
‘Yeah. You almost charmed her knickers right off.’
He laughs. ‘I can’t believe you’re jealous!’
‘Get over yourself!’ I hiss. ‘I’m not jealous.’
He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. ‘Cass is jealous,’ he sings under his breath and I have an urge to smother him with the complimentary pillow.
I drain the rest of my champagne, sit back and close my eyes. Was I jealous? I felt uncomfortable when Nick started his spiel. I felt embarrassed for the woman when she fell for it so easily and started almost simpering. She couldn’t do enough for him. And I was standing right there. Yes, he’d asked for an upgrade for his ‘friend’, not girlfriend, but even so! It was rude.
And I was pissed off at how easy it was for him. It was why I didn’t like him when I first met him. At college, we’d been told to arrive at 9 a.m. to queue for our modules. I’d got there at eight fifteen just in case and I wasn’t even the first there. I’d started talking to a girl called Chloe in the queue and we got on so well that we hadn’t even noticed the doors hadn’t opened at nine o’clock. At nine fifteen, this bloke breezed up, went right up to the door and said, ‘I thought they said be here for nine?’
Everyone in the queue grumbled about how long we’d all been waiting while Nick hammered on the door and when the admin guy finally opened it, Nick beamed at him, went into this full-on charm offensive and ended up being first in line for his modules. And then he just buggered off again.
‘So is that it then?’ Nick said, his eyes still closed.
‘Is what it?’
‘You’ve remembered all the stuff that annoyed you about me, so when we get to New York, we’re just going to go off and do our own thing?’
I blink. ‘Isn’t that what we were going to do anyway?’
He opens his eyes. Stupid long eyelashes. ‘I was thinking maybe we could, I don’t know, go out for dinner or something. Or have you got plans?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No plans.’ And then I mentally kick myself. How to make myself sound like a total loser in just two words. ‘I mean, there are things I want to do, obviously, but nothing arranged.’
‘I was thinking that maybe I could try to … make things up to you.’
I shift in my seat so I can look at him more easily.
‘I had hoped that getting you this upgrade would do the trick, but turns out I fucked that up too.’ He grins.
‘I don’t want to get back together,’ I say, quickly.
He shakes his head. ‘No, of course not.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That means of course you don’t want us to get back together. I broke your heart.’
His bluntness startles me. ‘Yes. You did.’
He nods. ‘I didn’t mean to, you know?’
I stare at him. ‘I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yeah. I mean, I think so.’
‘Because, you know, at the time … when we talked about it, you didn’t seem to get that at all.’
‘I know. But I’ve thought about it a lot since then and I realised … it’s what you do. It’s your thing. It’s your way of avoiding getting close to people. You flirt and you charm and everyone falls in love with you and then you leave. You did it with me, you did it with uni. As soon as something isn’t one hundred per cent going your way, you’re off. I could take it personally or I could think that it says more about you than it does about me.’
He stares at me and I can feel butterflies taking flight in my stomach. Why did I feel the need to say that when we’re going to be sitting in an enclosed space for the next six hours?
‘You’re right,’ he says.
‘I’m … what?’
He does the little pursed mouth thing he always did when he was thinking. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot since I … ’
‘Cheated on me?’
‘Yeah. And I basically came to the same conclusion. It’s a really boring clichéd fear-of-intimacy thing, isn’t it?’
I shake my head. ‘You’re unbelievable.’
‘What?’
‘You’re actually trying to charm-bomb this.’
‘Charm-bomb?’
‘That’s what Chloe always called your schtick. You know, when you hadn’t done the reading for a seminar and the lecturer had stated “no excuses” and you’d come in with some old bollocks about your washing machine or your nan or – what was that one? Bloody sponsored hill walking? And you’d get away with it. Every time. Charm-bomb.’
‘You know what’s so great about this?’ He gives me the bloody full charm-bomb twinkle. ‘We haven’t even taken off yet.’
We sit quietly during the security announcements and the ‘emergency doors are here and here’ demonstration and, as I always do, I try to concentrate really hard on how to use the oxygen masks and inflatable life jacket, but I’m still not confident I could do any of it in the event of a crash.
And then the plane starts speeding to take-off. Take-off is my favourite bit of flying. It’s the bit when you say goodbye to where you are and know for sure that you’re going somewhere else. Unless you die on the way.
‘I hate take-off,’ Nick says. ‘Distract me.’
‘Read the magazine,’ I say.
‘The magazine’s shit,’ he says. ‘Tell me where you want to go in New York.’
He’s turned his body away from the window so he’s facing me directly. I look over his shoulder at the grass at the side of the runway, the plane speeding up.
‘The Empire State Building, obviously,’ I say.
‘Obviously,’ he agrees.
‘Maybe the Statue of Liberty, but I’m not that bothered.’
‘Right.’
‘I’m not so interested in the touristy stuff. I just want to feel like I live there. I want to do stuff that New Yorkers do. I want to … ’
We’re at the point in take-off when the plane starts to go so fast you feel like you can’t really stand it, when it pushes you back in your seat. Nick grabs my hand and even though it makes my stomach leap, I let him.
‘You want to what?’ he says and I can hear a note of panic in his voice.
‘I want to try out a different life,’ I say. ‘Even just for a few days.’
He opens his eyes and stares at me. I stare back. He pulls on my hand and I move towards him. I look down at his mouth. Still full. Still tempting. I press my lips against his and immediately feel lost. And found. I press closer to him, the armrest between us digging into my stomach. I feel his hand on the back of my neck and I slide my tongue across his bottom lip. He tastes the same. Of course he does. But I’m shocked by how familiar this is. He was always an incredible kisser. Sometimes I didn’t want to do anything but kiss him. It was always hard to stop. My mind is filled with images of previous kisses. Our first kiss outside college. Kissing on the sofa in his student flat, my shirt buttons all undone, the remote control digging into my back, the time he pulled me into an empty office at uni and we leaned against the photocopier and the room lit up with a flash of yellowy light.
I pull back and look at him. His eyes are still closed and I try to rearrange my face to make sure I look … unruffled.
‘Wow,’ he says, opening his eyes. His pupils are almost entirely black.
‘We are never getting back together,’ I say.
‘Yeah, OK, Taylor Swift.’ He sits back in his seat.
A flight attendant appears with a trolley and presents us with a breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and coffee. Once she’s stepped away, Nick says, ‘I have a suggestion to make.’
‘Go ahead,’ I say.
‘What if we treat this as a freebie? New York, I mean.’
‘A freebie?’
‘You know – what happens in New York stays in New York.’
My mouth is suddenly so dry that I can’t even swallow the scrambled eggs. I sip my still-too-hot coffee to try to wash them down.
‘We’re obviously both still attracted to each other,’ Nick continues.
I nod. There’s no point in denying it.
‘But neither of us thinks it’s a good idea to get back together, right?’
I nod again.
‘So how about we take these three days and then move on? No regrets.’
I swallow hard. Could we do that? The thought of spending three days with Nick – kissing Nick, fucking Nick – has already flooded my body with adrenaline. But. It’s a bad idea for so many reasons.
‘We agree not to tell anyone,’ Nick says. ‘It’s between us. Just us.’
I shift in my seat to look at him and he cups one hand up around his eye. It’s a blatant attempt to win me over and for a second I resent it – it’s charm-bomb all over again. But then I lean back in my seat and put my hand up next to my eye, so our hands have created a little cave around our faces.
‘What do you think?’ Nick says, his face so close to mine that I can’t focus on any part of it. I can smell him and he smells the same as he always did – lemony and musky. I want to lick his mouth. I want to lick more than his mouth. Three days. Three days in New York with Nick and then back to real life.
‘Why not?’ I say.
He smiles. ‘Do you want me to tell you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I really don’t.’
‘So we’re doing this?’
‘We’re doing this,’ I agree.
He drops his hand and I almost shudder. The intimacy has gone so quickly. But then he holds his hand out and says, ‘Deal?’
I grin and slide my hand into his. ‘Deal.’