You never forget the first time you kiss somebody. A tender act somehow more intimate than when you first sleep together, because in that moment, you are so utterly vulnerable: it feels as though so much is at stake, like everything can change in one delicate act, one exquisite touch. No matter what happens after that, for good or bad, it is a memory that plays back via all the senses, a point in time you can return yourself to with absolute clarity. It is a precious treasure at the heart of the growing hoard in a relationship that strengthens and endures, and it is the bittersweet remnant you cannot purge from your mind when everything has turned to ashes.
Bittersweet, yes: not merely bitter, because it is the sweetness that burns. It is the feelings of joy and excitement and desire and hope that remain so painfully vivid. If I close my eyes right now I can feel, see, hear, smell and taste everything about that kiss, and I can become again who I was in that moment. I can see the future as it appeared to me then, and remember the two of us as the people I believed us to be.
I wish I could erase all of it, but I can’t. I wish I wasn’t so easily taken back there by hearing a song on the radio, or catching a scent of curry on damp clothes. But mostly I wish I could delete what I said to him the instant before our lips met, because that is what truly mocks me now.
I felt exhausted but exhilarated as Peter drove us both back to Inverness. In a day replete with me surprising myself, for an encore I realised that I couldn’t wait to tell people at work what I’d been doing. In the past I’d have been looking forward to telling colleagues about the seminar or conference I had attended over the weekend, but this prospect was so much more exciting. It was the thought of shocking them, of seeing their perceptions of me given such a shake. I even rather malevolently fantasised about phoning up and telling my father, to appal him. The boys-and-toys factor would have rubbed salt too.
‘Thank you so much for today,’ I said to him, as we pulled up outside my house. ‘And thank you for not telling me. I think I’m starting to remember what fun is.’
‘Yeah, if you ever need a dose of enjoyable pointlessness in your life, I’m your man. Honestly, when I have kids, they’ll be the ones dragging me away from the play-park. That’s half the reason I’d want to have them: an excuse to do silly stuff; to just play.’
I caught myself noting that he wanted children. I tried to pretend it was an idle thought, but I was fooling nobody.
‘Kids should do silly stuff,’ he added, looking more reflective. ‘I had a little too much seriousness, too much properness in my childhood. That’s why my inner kid is a bit too close to the surface: he’s finally got the keys, so he’s driving half the time. And that’s why I’m glad I met you. You say you’re boring but I think you’re inspiring. You make me want to screw the nut and make more of myself.’
‘Thank you.’
I reddened, my fingers gripping the door handle. My instinct was to feel awkward and thus to bail in a heightened moment like this, and then inevitably I’d go away and over-analyse it later. The thing was, right then I didn’t feel awkward, and whatever was heightened about this moment, I wanted more of it.
‘Actually, and I feel slightly guilty about this, but can I undo my good influence and tempt you not to screw the nut for a few more hours? Pub and a curry? You weren’t going to change everything with one evening’s programming anyway, were you?’
‘That’s precisely the internal logic that’s kept me from being a millionaire. I like your thinking.’
Despite being the one who had proposed an evening at the pub, I took the car into town. This was for two reasons: one was that I had a laparoscopic colectomy in the morning and needed to be sharp; but more immediately I wanted my judgement to be as keen the night before. While I was getting showered and changed, I had been struck by an unaccustomed feeling of giddiness, of which I was instinctively wary.
As I took my seat opposite Peter, watching the overspill pool on the dark wood at the bottom of his pint glass, I felt a sense of freedom. Normally on a Sunday evening my mind would be already on the next day’s work, yet being in the pub with its sights and smells and the hubbub of chat served to remind me that Sunday evening was still the weekend if I wanted it to be. Emily was often posting on Facebook about going out with colleagues and students, referring to Monday-morning hangovers with what was ostensibly ‘old enough to know better’ regret, but which I recognised as perverse pride.
I could barely remember the last time I had done this. I used to go out with friends – colleagues – but these days they all had kids or spouses. There didn’t seem to be as many girls’ nights as there once had been. It was only really at Christmas that the department went out together: big gatherings, trying to show a social side to the trainees. Even then, it tended to be one or two drinks then off to a restaurant where they had a mass booking for about thirty people. To me it seemed to defeat the ends of socialising to go out in such a huge group, as in practice you only got to talk to the four or five people sat closest to you, and if you were unlucky they were the four or five people you had been hoping to avoid. That said, maybe I was the one that most people didn’t want to get stuck with. Certainly the younger trainees seemed rather skittish around me.
But that Sunday night was like the nights out I remembered from when I was younger, when I felt like I was winning. Simply chatting, laughing and enjoying an atmosphere that seemed all the more convivial because of the awful weather that had blown in all of a sudden. There’s nothing quite like rain lashing the windows to make you feel snug, and I was feeling particularly cosy that evening. It was starting unmistakably to resemble a date. Apart from there being only the two of us, the conversation was venturing ever deeper into getting-to-know-you territory.
I talked about the whole Bladebitch thing because I wanted my side of it out there, and because, despite our conversation of Friday night, I still felt we had to get past it. He was sympathetic, and by that I don’t just mean he agreed with me, or acted like he agreed with me in order to keep the atmosphere pleasant. What surprised me was that he had clearly thought about the issues behind the blog, rather than merely the business of my being hacked and exposed. Too many men dismissed the blog as a catalogue of career-specific feminist grievances. Peter understood that it was really about work-life balance.
‘I once heard someone say that what you need in order to be happy is something you like to do and someone you like to be with,’ he told me. ‘The first shouldn’t prevent the second: that’s all you’re saying, isn’t it? And the danger is that giving too much to the first makes you forget all the good things about it.’
From there he got me talking about happier times in my career, and I remembered the person I used to be not so long ago, the girl who was taking on the world. For the first time in ages I believed she might be coming back.
It was bucketing down with rain when we came out of the curry house, the crisp clear weather of earlier like a memory of a different day. We made a sprint to my car after I said I’d drive him home. He lived in town, but even at a ten-minute walk he’d be drenched by the time he got home.
He directed me to pull up outside a recently built residential development: twin compact blocks of modern apartments. I had passed them a hundred times and always thought they seemed corporate and soulless, though they looked toasty and dry on a night like this. My own place, by contrast, looked like anyone’s idea of a cosy cottage, but it was draughty from so many little nooks that it was a bugger to keep warm.
There was a moment’s silence between us after I put the car in neutral and pulled on the handbrake. It was as though we both still had so much to say but were burdensomely aware that time had run out, not only on the evening, but on a very special few days.
It felt like the weekend needed a denouement. A cheerio or a ‘see you on Monday’ would have seemed so deflatingly banal. I was trying to think of something appropriate to say, but really I didn’t want to talk.
Peter spoke quietly, barely audible above the music playing on the car stereo.
‘At the risk of blowing it merely by saying this, I want to kiss you. But I’m afraid if I do that, I’ll break whatever magic spell is keeping you interested in me. Like the opposite of the princess and the frog: suddenly I’d be changed into someone you want nothing to do with.’
‘I don’t believe in fairytales,’ I told him. ‘People don’t just transform into something else overnight. So kiss me.’