‘I can’t believe you made me get on a motorbike,’ I said, my arms still wrapped around Nick’s waist minutes after we had come to a standstill. ‘My legs don’t work.’
‘Your legs do work,’ Nick said, calmly peeling away my arms and knocking down the kickstand with his boot. ‘Can you stand up?’
‘No.’ I was not lying.
In twenty-eight years, I had never been on a motorbike. When I was little, my uncle had come off his and spent an entire summer in traction. While I found his agony hilarious at the time – very few things were as funny to a seven-year-old girl as a grown man in a full-body plaster cast – the message was clear: get on a motorbike and you will die. My mother had been quite vocal about it, my uncle had been lucky but every single other person who came within fifteen feet of a motorbike was absolutely, definitely, one hundred per cent guaranteed to die. And like everything else my mother had banged on about over and over and over, I took the message to heart and considered it gospel.
Until an attractive man asked me to get on the back of his bike …
‘It’s the best way to see Milan,’ Nick explained, manoeuvring himself out of his seat and attempting to loosen my vice-like grip on the handles behind me. ‘Didn’t you love it?’
I stared at him with wide-open eyes. ‘I have had my eyes closed for the last twenty minutes.’
‘We were only on the bike for five,’ he replied. ‘Come on, it’s safe now.’
‘I’m not getting back on it,’ I said, letting him lift me off the leather seat of the bike, holding my breath until I felt solid ground beneath my feet.
‘Then you’ll walk home,’ he said without flinching. ‘Now look, wasn’t that worth it?’
The sun was so strong, it was hard to see exactly where I was until Nick pulled the sunglasses off the top of my head and slid them over my eyes.
‘Honestly,’ he sighed and tilted my head upwards. ‘Look up there.’
We were parked beside what looked like a big church until I raised my eyes up and realized that it just kept going. And going and going and going.
‘Woah.’
‘I think that’s what the new pope said when he came here for the first time,’ Nick commented. ‘It’s the duomo. Isn’t it amazing?’
The blinding white spires of the cathedral stretched so high, it looked like they would split the sky and make it bleed. Back on the ground, I stumbled backwards, dizzy from looking upwards and still trying to find a spot where I could take it all in. It was basically the size of the village I had grown up in. I was impressed. I’d never been especially religious – me and my sisters hadn’t been raised to believe in anything other than being home in time for tea – but I’d always been impressed by churches and cathedrals. The idea that someone, or rather a lot of someones, would dedicate their lives to building something so epic without so much as an iPhone to help them blew my mind. I couldn’t even put up a picture without the spirit level app. Not that I ever put up my own pictures, but I did like playing with the app.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, feeling as though I could look at it for days and never get bored. ‘How have I not seen this before now?’
‘You’ve been walking around with your eyes closed?’ Nick pulled on my arm. ‘Let’s go.’
I pulled up my shades to show him that my eyes were wide open. ‘We’re going in?’
‘No.’ He leaned in and pressed his lips against mine, quickly enough for it not to be a big deal to anyone around us, but long enough to make all the blood rush to my head. ‘We’re going up.’
As much as I hated how arrogant and self-righteous Nick could be, I loved the fact that he took charge and made plans. I was so used to being the Boss of Everything at work and waiting for Charlie to plan anything more exciting than a lunchtime trip to Subway that it made a nice change. He made me feel like a girl, rather than a bossy loser.
‘This way.’ He pushed me through a metal detector, surrounded by very tall men in very impressive uniforms, carrying very big guns. I cowered, keeping my eyes down and praying that they wouldn’t shoot me. Nick gave them all manly nods and kept on going. ‘You don’t mind a few stairs, do you?’
‘No …’ I wasn’t entirely sure. How many stairs were a few?
‘Ladies first, then.’
In front of me was a very narrow, very dark, stone staircase. I peered around the corner, only to see it twist upwards into the darkness after four or five steps, and looked back at Nick. He gave me a bright sunny smile, followed by a gentle push on the arse.
‘Is there not a lift?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But we’re not using it.’
‘Gotcha,’ I said, turning my back to him and trying to delicately dab away the sweat that was already speckling my forehead from being out in the morning sun. ‘How many steps is it?’
‘To the top?’ he asked, turning to squint at a sign in Italian behind him. ‘That would be nine hundred and nineteen.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Great workout. I haven’t had my run today.’
‘You run?’ he asked.
‘No.’ I replied. ‘I don’t.’
‘One foot in front of the other, Tess.’ Nick gave me a second, considerably less gentle shove. ‘There are people waiting.’
‘Easy,’ I said, my legs already protesting. ‘Piece of cake.’
‘You enjoying yourself?’ he asked as we rounded the second corner. ‘With the project, I mean?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, pleased to discover I could speak and climb upstairs at the same time. Tess Brookes, multitasker. ‘I’m loving it, actually, and I’ve got so many great shots. It’s fun, documenting Al’s new baby.’
‘More fun than advertising?’
I reached out to run my hand along the cold stone wall of the staircase and kept going.
‘It’s different,’ I said, not wanting to start a row in such an enclosed space. ‘I know you don’t approve but I love working in advertising. It’s a different kind of challenge, though.’
‘Explain it to me,’ Nick’s voice sounded so close but I didn’t dare turn around to look at him in case I fell. The staircase was narrow and winding and stiflingly hot. ‘I want to understand.’
‘To me, both jobs are about telling a story,’ I said, turning another blank corner. Oh good, some more stairs. ‘With advertising, you have a blank page or fifteen seconds of airtime, and someone wants you to tell the story of their product as clearly and convincingly as possible. With photography, it’s the same. There’s a story in every picture and it’s up to you to tell it. It’s really easy for me to see a concept in my head, advertising or photograph, but to put it on paper or on TV and have everyone else get exactly what I was trying to say? That’s the challenge. And I love that.’
‘OK, I get that.’ There wasn’t even a trace of exertion in Nick’s voice. ‘But it sounds like a creative thing, not something you should be whoring out for a Pot Noodle.’
‘I don’t consider it whoring.’ I was concentrating too hard to make air quotes but I was still thinking them. ‘I consider it a challenge.’
‘Convincing people their lives aren’t complete until they’ve bought whatever you’re selling is a challenge?’ he went on. ‘Telling them they aren’t good enough until they’ve bought a new pair of trainers? I don’t think I’ll ever get that.’
‘Maybe I’m just not as precious about things,’ I said, my breath coming shorter, my thighs starting to burn. It was all very sexy. ‘And I don’t think about it that way. I’m just trying to do a good job.’
‘But you’re a photographer now, right?’ His transatlantic lilt came in at the end of the sentence. If I hadn’t been heaving for breath, I might have made a sarcastic comment. ‘Surely you can see that working in advertising eats away at the soul?’
‘Mm-hmm,’ I said, panting. ‘What if I haven’t given up advertising?’
He didn’t reply and I was fairly certain it had nothing to do with his being out of breath. Didn’t he say he’d been for a run this morning? How was he still upright? My legs were so heavy but I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking if we could slow down.
‘Are we nearly at the top yet?’ I asked.
‘No.’ he replied. ‘Not even close.’
I wondered how they would get my body back down if I died in the staircase. Hopefully, they would make Nick carry it back down to teach him a lesson but I assumed he would probably just chuck me out a window and leave me for the Alsatians. Except I hadn’t seen any Alsatians in Italy and I didn’t think I could cope with the indignity of being eaten by a group of dachshunds. So I kept on going. Sweating, heaving and staggering onwards, ever onwards.
Just as I was considering giving up on Nick, life and breathing in general, I turned the last corner and caught a glimpse of a painfully bright sky ahead of me.
‘Thank you Sweet Baby Jesus and all the angels,’ I whispered, scraping the sweat from my forehead and searching for something sacred-looking to kiss. Somewhere along the last one hundred steps, I’d gone from lightly glowing to looking like I’d been in a spinning class for fourteen hours. Which was actually a ridiculous thing to say – I mean, as if I’d ever been in a spinning class in my entire life?
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Nick grabbed my hand and stepped in front of me, pulling me along a narrow walkway. I was so busy putting one foot in front of the other and waiting for the sparkles in front of my eyes to go away that it took me a moment to look up and realize where we were. ‘Milan might not be the most classically beautiful city in Italy but this is pretty bloody impressive.’
‘We’re on the actual roof,’ I said, my fingers tightening around Nick’s. ‘That is the actual edge of the actual roof!’
‘I know.’ He stopped in front of another, shorter but steeper, open-air staircase. ‘Where did you think we were going?’
‘Somewhere that passed health and safety codes?’ I suggested, pointing at the steps in front of me. ‘I’m not going up there!’
‘Yes, you are,’ Nick said. ‘Because you can’t sit down on this part; pretty easy to fall over the edge, too. That’s much harder up there. You can sit down when we get to the top.’
It was all I needed to hear. Shoving him out of the way, I scrambled up the last twenty steps and emerged on the glowing white roof of the cathedral.
‘It looks a bit like a sci-fi Houses of Parliament,’ I said, staggering along the slanted roof and sitting down on the first stable-looking surface I could find. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘No.’ Nick sat down in front of me and pulled out his phone.
‘Well, I’m not in a rush to go back down.’ I leaned backwards and stared up at the sunny sky while my leg muscles tried to relax. ‘I’m knackered.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pointing his phone directly at me. ‘We’ll take the lift. Smile for the camera.’
‘The lift?’ The few muscles that had managed to calm down tensed right back up. The camera phone clicked and Nick grinned. ‘Delete that immediately, it is not my best angle.’
‘I’d have to agree,’ he replied. Thankfully, I was already so red in the face from my climb, he couldn’t tell I was blushing. ‘So what, you’re not a big fan of heights?’
‘Not the biggest,’ I said, still pissed off about the lift revelation. It was a bit of an understatement, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself, like I had the time Amy made me go on the big wheel at the village funfair and they had to stop it to get me off, mid-panic attack. Not even slightly humiliating for the sixteen-year-old me. ‘But it is nice and quiet up here.’
Nick held up one hand and started ticking things off. ‘You don’t like motorbikes, you don’t like heights, you don’t like climbing stairs—’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t like climbing stairs,’ I interrupted, my chest still heaving.
He didn’t even bother to say anything, just raised his eyebrows and carried on.
‘You don’t like the opera, you like a drink – but from what I can tell, drink most certainly does not like you – you’re jealous, impulsive and can’t walk in high heels for more than five minutes.’
‘Quite the catch.’ I pulled my knees up under my chin, tucking my skirt around my thighs so as not to show all the statues of saints my knickers and wrapped my arms around myself. ‘I’d totally go out with me.’
‘Last night you said you wanted to talk about stuff,’ Nick shoved his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. ‘So, stuff. Go for it.’
‘I’m not very good at talking about myself.’ I dropped my eyes, partly because it was so bloody bright on the roof of the duomo and partly because I didn’t know if I could talk to him and look at him at the same time. ‘Can you give me a brief or something?’
‘You could sell me three different kinds of kitchen cleaner but you can’t tell me what you’re thinking?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘You’re the professional question asker, I think you should start.’
‘Tess Brookes …’ He cleared his throat and held out an imaginary microphone. ‘If you could be anywhere in the world, doing anything at all, with anyone at all, where would you be and what would you be doing and who would you be with?’
‘I think I’d be here, doing this,’ I replied, surprised at my own answer. ‘I think I’d be with you.’
‘Not with the mountain climber from London?’ he asked, something difficult to read crossing his face.
‘You mean Charlie?’
Nick pressed a finger against a seam in the roof. ‘Charlie … sounds like a solid sort of bloke.’
‘He – he is.’ I felt sick, talking about him with Nick. Charlie didn’t even know Nick existed. Nick didn’t know I’d slept with Charlie a week ago. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d felt more like Vanessa, even when I was pretending to be her. ‘He’s brilliant. But things change, don’t they?’
Nick flicked his head in an indeterminate gesture, as though he couldn’t decide whether or not to agree, and looked out over radiating streets of Milan.
‘People change,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I think they don’t know they’re changing until it’s already happened, though. You get so used to being one person, its weird when you wake up and everything is different.’
‘Do people change though?’ He turned back to me, the sky making his eyes seem more blue than grey today. ‘Can people fundamentally change who they are?’
I rested my chin on my knees and felt a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But the things they want can change, even if they’re the same person deep down.’
‘My mum always told me, I want never gets,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘I think she just meant biscuits at the time but Christ Almighty, that was an important life lesson.’
‘My mum told me a lot of things,’ A montage of tellings-off and head shaking and disappointed expressions ran through my head to a sad soundtrack. ‘Turns out I probably shouldn’t have been listening to her quite so much. What was it you wanted that you didn’t get?’
‘We’re doing you now,’ Nick said, skilfully avoiding the question. This was why he was the professional question asker. ‘So the Charlie thing, you’re telling me you were in love with a man for ten years, you shagged him, he rejected you and now you’re totally over him?’
‘When you put it like that, it does make me sound like a bit of a shallow twat,’ I pointed out. ‘But in a nutshell … I don’t know what to think. I love Charlie; he’s one of my best friends. But maybe that’s all he was meant to be. Someone I love, not someone I’m in love with.’
He pulled a pair of Ray-Bans out of his shirt pocket and slid them over his eyes, even though he had his back to the sun.
‘Because you’re in love with someone else?’ he asked.
Even though I’d said it once, said it and meant it, I opened my mouth and the words wouldn’t come out. I shut it quickly as my stomach flipped, just in case something did come out. Something I liked to call … vomit.
‘Excuse me, could you take our picture?’
A tiny Asian woman tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a camera without waiting for me to agree. A little befuddled, I stood up, wobbling on the slanted roof, and tried to focus on the happy family in front of me.
‘Sorry it’s taking so long,’ Nick shouted. ‘She’s a professional.’
‘Professional what?’ the father replied as everyone in the photo chuckled.
‘Assassin,’ Nick answered and their laughter stopped abruptly. ‘And pastry chef. And do you still babysit on weekends?’
‘Here you go.’ I handed back the camera as the father snatched it from me and hurried his family away from us as quickly as possible, which, given the steep slant of the roof, was not an easy escape. ‘Do you like making people feel uncomfortable?’
‘Me?’ He looked surprised. ‘Yeah, actually, I think I do. I spend so much time trying to make them feel comfortable and getting them to spill their guts, it’s fun to mess with someone a little bit.’
‘Ah …’ I sat back down carefully, combing my damp hair over one shoulder and out of my way. ‘You like manipulating people.’
‘Says the girl who convinces people to pay over the odds for hand sanitizer.’
Ooh, I’d touched a nerve.
‘I’ve never worked on a hand sanitizer campaign,’ I replied as coolly as possible. ‘I was just making an observation.’
‘This is the problem,’ he said, eyes hidden behind the safety of his sunglasses, ‘you don’t really know anything about me.’
I didn’t reply right away but sat staring at him, without a tinted barrier of my own, and thought about my conversation with Paige the day before. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know his favourite film; I didn’t know his middle name or where he grew up or what his dad did for a living. But that didn’t change the way I felt.
‘What do you want me to say?’ I asked. ‘You’re right. I know everything there is to know about Charlie, from his shoe size to when he lost his virginity, but I never felt this way about him. Or anyone. It’s not based on what you like to eat for breakfast – and God knows it’s not an intellectual decision that I’m making. It’s just how I feel. When I’m with you, I feel like me.’
Nick took a deep breath in and breathed it out heavily, rubbing his temples, tanned forearms flexing. ‘I’m older than you, you know.’
‘Good God, no,’ I flung my arm against my forehead in mock horror. ‘Someone call the police!’
A couple nearby looked startled and the man pulled out his phone.
‘Oh no, no,’ I shouted, flinging my arms out wide. ‘It was a joke. No police. No polizia.’
The woman reluctantly lowered her husband’s hand, giving me a ‘just say the word’ look before staring at Nick like she wanted to turn him into stone.
‘I’ve been through this before.’ Nick, oblivious to the drama unfolding around us, carried on talking about his favourite subject. Himself. ‘And it’s all well and good to have feelings but attraction isn’t enough to make a relationship work. What happens when the sex burns out? What’s left then?’
‘The feelings?’ I was confused. ‘Aren’t they separate to the sex?’
‘Are they?’ Nick asked.
‘Wow!’ I felt my eyes widen, combined with a sudden need to punch him really hard. ‘It sounds to me like you’re saying I have an irrational teenage crush on you because you’re good in bed and you’re just in it for the sex.’
‘That’s not what I said.’ He looked away, rubbing his knuckles over his stubbly chin. I shifted around from cheek to cheek. Sitting on a hard, hot roof was not comfortable. ‘But you tell me, what is all this really based on? How can it actually work?’
I closed my eyes and tried to come up with an answer that didn’t involve physical violence. When I was a kid, Amy and I were obsessed with Disney movies and I had always been cynical of how quickly the princesses fell head over heels in love. Yes, Prince Eric was a hot piece but really, Ariel, you’re going to give up your entire life and the ability to breathe underwater to shack up with some bloke you barely know at sixteen?
But with Nick, I felt something I’d never felt before. Not the irresistible urge to make a deal with a sea witch, but there was a pull, a friction. Something that got under my skin and made me want to be near him, even though I sort of wanted to slap the taste right out of his mouth at the same time. And when I was with him, I felt different: calmer and more grounded but still like fireworks were going off in my brain … and in other places. When I was with him, I felt more like myself than I ever had before.
And that was what I wanted to say to him, up there on the roof of the duomo while he patronized me about his advanced age. But instead, I felt myself go hard and cold and pulled away.
‘Someone really fucked you over, didn’t she?’ I heard the words come out of my mouth before I really thought about saying them. ‘Doesn’t being so damaged get exhausting?’
‘That would be an easy answer for you, wouldn’t it?’ Nick replied, laughing. ‘That I had a bad experience with some other woman, that it’s nothing to do with me and you?’
‘You didn’t have a bad experience?’ I asked. I knew that he had, he’d already told me. I just didn’t know the details but I was bloody well going to get them.
‘You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ Nick said. ‘And thanks for proving my point.’
I could feel my temper starting to get the better of me. I’d let him call all the shots so far and enough was enough. What was the worst that could happen? Apart from him breaking my heart and me throwing myself off the roof of a cathedral?
‘No way!’ I leaned forward on my knees and snatched the sunglasses off his face and chucked them behind me.
Somewhere on the level below, I heard a rattle, a clunk and a couple of yelps but nothing sounded fatal so I carried on.
‘Fuck you, if you think you can say something like that and walk away,’ I said, shoving him hard in the chest. ‘I’m sitting here, trying to be honest and talk about actual feelings that I’ve never even had before and you think you can put your Top Gun shades on and laugh at me and treat me like a kid? Fuck off, Nick!’
‘You owe me a pair of Wayfarers,’ Nick said. He was staring at me like I had lost my mind. And I was worried that I might have. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’
‘Did you miss the part where my mouth was moving and sound was coming out?’ I asked, waving a hand in front of his eyes. ‘Because I can repeat myself if you need me to?’
‘I got the “fuck you” part,’ he said. ‘Was there more after that?’
I blinked back into the moment and looked around at the small audience we had gathered. As soon as they saw him staring, they all looked away. And looked right back again when he turned his attention back to me.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said while trying to get to my feet with a modicum of grace. ‘One minute you want me, the next minute you’re laughing at me. You want me to tell you the truth and then you don’t want to hear it. I’m not the one who can’t be honest, Nick. You’re so busy covering up all your shit, that you can’t even hear what I’m saying. You can’t see me because you’re still obsessed with something else but I don’t know what that is. I’m going, I can’t do this.’
‘Oh shit!’ He pushed himself up to his feet, Converse proving themselves much more adaptable to a slanted cathedral roof than leather-soled flip-flops, and grabbed my arm. ‘Fine, sit down. I’m an emotionally dead dickhead – is that what you want me to say?’
‘No,’ I said, shaking off his grip. ‘I want you to tell me what you’re thinking without a bitchy comeback or a patronising bag of wank coming out of your mouth.’
‘You really have got a way with words.’ Nick took hold of my arm again, his grip tighter this time, and pulled me back towards him. ‘I’ll admit I’m shit at this. That’s why I don’t do it.’
I huffed and relaxed my arm. Fighting him was not easy on my messed-up shoulder and I had visions of him suddenly letting go and me tumbling helplessly over the side of the cathedral.
‘And that’s why you shag girls you meet on assignments and assume you’ll never have to see them again?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Assignments. Holidays. Bars I never intend to frequent again. It’s easier.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.’ I grudgingly let him guide me back down to a very uncomfortable sitting position.
‘And that’s how I know you don’t have a dick,’ he answered. ‘It is fun. For a while. And then one day you wake up with a girl in your bed and you don’t know her name and all you want is for her to leave so you can pretend she was never there in the first place. That’s when it stops being a good time.’
‘You wish you’d never met me?’ I asked, my old friend nausea turning over my stomach again.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I wish I’d never met my ex, Amanda.’
I sank sideways, from my knees onto my bum, skirt blowing in the breeze and revealing my pants to everyone on the roof, saints and sinners alike.
It had a name.
‘Oh,’ I said. I’d used all my words; I was all out. ‘She’s the ex?’
‘I’ve had a lot of exes.’ He stared up at the top of the tallest spire with his hand over his eyes. ‘But yeah, I think she’s the one you mean.’
‘Heartless cow who broke your heart and convinced you all women were untrustworthy bitch faces so you swore that you’d never love again?’
His face cracked into an unwilling smile. ‘You’ve met her then?’
‘Read a lot of books,’ I shrugged. ‘Actually, that’s not true. I’ve watched a lot of telly. There’s loads of Amandas on TV. And I lived with one for a long time, so I know those women exist. They cause a lot of problems for the rest of us.’
‘Really?’ He leaned his head to one side, his hand still covering his face. ‘They cause problems for you?’
‘It becomes a branding issue,’ I said, nodding. ‘It only takes one bad apple to ruin the whole barrel. Or bushel. Or whatever apples come in. You get one shitty woman running around and it gives the rest of us a bad name. When really, the other apples are fine.’
‘You lost me on the apple metaphor,’ Nick said, inching towards me and resting his hand on my ankle, lightly holding me in place, like I might float away. ‘But I think I get what you’re saying.’
‘It wasn’t a very good metaphor,’ I admitted. ‘One shit woman ruins it for the rest of us. Please continue.’
‘It’s not a fun story,’ he said, hesitating for a moment. ‘But I suppose you deserve to hear it. I met her in London, she was from LA – I think I told you that in Hawaii – and it was really intense, right from the beginning.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ I pressed my lips together and reminded myself I’d asked for this. Stupid Amanda, the stupid heartbreaker.
‘She was in London to audition for something she didn’t get and she went back to LA and I couldn’t stop thinking about her.’ He paused and I rearranged my stony face until I looked more like I was listening attentively and not taking down details for the bounty hunter I was planning to hire to hunt her down and kill her. ‘My dad is American, meaning I have dual citizenship, right? So I packed up and followed her to LA and things were amazing for the first year. I loved living in the sun. We had this really amazing flat with a hot tub and you could see the Hollywood sign from our roof deck. It was mental.’
‘Sounds brill,’ I muttered, adding to my notes. Of course she was an actress. Bleurgh.
‘All I wanted was to make her happy.’ Nick let out a half-hearted laugh but he still wasn’t smiling. ‘But things got tough after a bit. She wasn’t getting the roles she wanted and I was getting offered so much work. I turned a lot of stuff down at first but in the end, I had to take jobs so we could pay our rent and that meant quite a bit of travelling. I was back in the UK a lot, out in Australia, in the Far East and she hated it. She wouldn’t come with me in case she got an audition – the only time we went away was when we went to Hawaii – but she said she didn’t trust me when I was travelling.’
‘Why wouldn’t she trust you?’ I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. I could handle a lot of things but me and Rachel from Friends knew there was one absolute truth in this world and that was ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’.
‘That’s the funny thing,’ he said. ‘She didn’t trust me – when really, I shouldn’t have trusted her. Came back early from a trip one day and found her shagging some random bloke in the hot tub. She wasn’t even having an affair. She didn’t even have the decency to go out and fall in love with someone else. She would just go to auditions or to the gym and bring back some random shit and shag him in my house.’
‘Oh.’
There wasn’t a lot else I could think to say.
‘It was my fault, of course, because I kept leaving her.’ His grip around my ankle tightened for a second and then relaxed again. ‘And after that, it was all downhill. I tried to stay home more but she was angry that I didn’t trust her so the more I hung around in LA, the more she would go out and not come home.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ I frowned, trying to work out what he was telling me. ‘You mean, she cheated on you more than once and you didn’t dump her?’
‘No.’ He looked done in. ‘I loved her.’
‘Right.’ I gave him a big, bright sunny smile. ‘Just checking.’
Men.
‘But in the end, she decided she’d had enough.’ He threw his hands up in the air, giving me just enough time to flex my ankle before he grabbed it again. ‘She met some rich old fucker with a palace in the hills and I came home one day and she’d gone. Said she couldn’t live with my mistrust any more.’
‘So you moved to LA to be with her,’ I said out loud, piecing the timeline together for my own sanity. ‘Then she cheated on you and you put up with it and then she moved out because you didn’t trust her?’
He nodded.
‘Why didn’t you dump her when you found out she was shagging around?’ I asked, thinking of all the incredibly feeble reasons my friends and I had been given when being blown off. ‘What made you stay?’
‘I loved her,’ he said again, as though it made everything make sense. ‘That was all there was to it. I couldn’t explain it but I loved her. I’d never felt that way about anyone before. So, you know, there’s a chance that’s why I’m not incredibly keen on rushing into a relationship based on nothing but feelings.’
‘Aren’t all relationships based on feelings?’ I asked, thinking I was fighting a losing battle. ‘Isn’t that what relationships are?’
‘And that’s why I don’t have relationships,’ he replied. ‘Ever.’
‘Then what is this?’ As someone who hadn’t even cried when Bambi’s mother got shot, I had been crying a lot lately but right now, I had nothing. My eyes were so dry and sore from the sun, from staring at him for so long, my tear ducts were exhausted. I was exhausted. ‘Why did you bring me up here and make me tell you how I feel, if feelings don’t matter? If my feelings don’t matter?’
‘I do care about you.’ He moved his hand from my wrist, not holding my hand, but gripping my forearm so tightly I could feel my blood pumping under his fingers. ‘But I’m trying to be honest. I don’t know if this can work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish it could.’
I closed my eyes, only to see a Nick-shaped silhouette staring back at me.
‘Do you even want to try?’ I asked.
‘I do,’ he said. His voice was strong, even if he didn’t sound certain. ‘Sometimes. Most of the time.’
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I opened my eyes and stared at my feet, waiting for my eyes to readjust to the sunlight. ‘And the rest of the time?’
‘I don’t know if I trust you.’ He wiped a nonexistent tear from my cheek. ‘And I don’t know if I trust myself. I’ve got really used to my life the way it is and I never expected to want to be with anyone again and then bam, you appear out of nowhere. The thing is, I don’t know if we’d be very good for each other. I don’t know if I’m any use to you.’
As calmly as I could manage, I peeled his hand off my wrist and took it in mine, squeezing it as tightly as I could.
I felt so powerless, it was all happening to me and I hated it. ‘Do I get any say in this?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing I can do?’
He rested his gaze on our hands and squeezed my hand back.
‘I want to try,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to get fucked over again. I really loved her and that wasn’t enough. I don’t know what is.’
Never in my entire life had I hated someone I’d never met quite so much. And I lived in a world where Big Brother was on the telly every year.
‘I’m not her, I wouldn’t do what she did,’ I said, somewhere between desperation and rage. If only I knew which words to use to convince him that I could make him happy. ‘I wouldn’t ever cheat or lie.’
‘But you did lie. You already lied to me.’
Nick let go of my hand and sat cross-legged right in front of me but in that moment, he might as well have been a million miles away. I tried to think of the right thing to say. I wanted to promise that I would take care of him and make him happy and that I would do all the things that he had wanted to do for Amanda but, deep down, I knew he already knew that. He just didn’t believe me. He had already felt the way I felt; he’d been through these exact emotions and had his heart ripped out, torn to pieces, eaten, puked up and then chucked in the wheelie bin for good measure.
Love wasn’t rational but neither was fear. He was afraid and as I knew very well, there weren’t many things that could keep you locked up in your box as well as fear could. But knowing that and accepting it were two different things. Surely there had to be something?
‘Nick.’
I touched the tips of my fingers to the back of his hand and waited. He looked at me for a moment, his eyes too narrow for me to read, his jaw tight and solid. And then he grabbed me, took hold of the back of my head and crashed his lips against mine. I reached out, to hold him, to know it was happening, to make it happen. One hand found a fistful of his shirt, the other was flat against the roof, steadying myself. He kissed me so hard that when he pulled away I could taste blood in my mouth – only I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine. I pressed my hand against my mouth, the pulse in my fingers slower than the pulse in my lips.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked when I found my voice again.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, tracing a thumb across his own lips before clambering up to his feet. He held out his hand to help me up and snaked his arm around my waist, holding me to him. ‘I’m really happy when I’m with you. That’s all I know.’
‘I’m happy when I’m with you.’ I tried to smile and felt a light in my eyes, even though the corners of my mouth didn’t really move. ‘Shall we start there and see where we go?’
‘I’ve heard worse ideas,’ he said, drawing me in for another kiss, something softer and more socially acceptable on the rooftop of a Catholic church. I copped a quick feel of his arse, hoping that Baby Jesus was looking the other way, but still managed to earn a reprimanding stare from a nonna across the way.
It was totally worth it.