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Helen went straight back into the party. Maybe the noise would drown out the sound of the Helen inside her head yelling obscenities at the Helen out there in the world. She hadn’t kissed Alex. He’d kissed her, which wasn’t the same at all, and he had been very drunk. So long as Helen hadn’t kissed him back, she decided, it barely counted as a kiss at all.
She’d promised herself that she wasn’t going to drink too much at the party, but the punch was lovely. Punch wasn’t really drinking, was it? People kept telling her it was mostly fruit. Helen let a nice young man hand her another cup.
‘Having a good time?’
Dominic appeared at her elbow. He looked more than a little uncomfortable in his chainmail. He’d abandoned the helmet and there was a thin sheen of sweat sticking his hair to the side of his face. Helen shrugged. ‘The room looks nice.’
He glanced around. ‘And apart from the décor?’
She wasn’t sure what to say. Her head was spinning with Alex and her, and Alex and Emily, and Emily begging her not to say anything. Helen opened her mouth and closed it again, which Dominic seemed to interpret as simple party-weariness. ‘Do you want to get some air?’
She nodded and then remembered that Alex was probably still out there. ‘Maybe out the other way?’
‘The car park?’
‘Mmmm.’ She smiled brightly, as if going and loitering in the car park in the middle of a party wasn’t odd behaviour. ‘Emily not with you?’
She formed the words as lightly as she could. Emily was her friend. She absolutely did not hope that she’d fallen down a well.
Dominic glanced around as he held the main door open. ‘No. I don’t know where she is actually.’ His tone was grim.
Had he found out? Helen kept her voice casual. ‘No problem there is there?’
He didn’t answer straight away. ‘She’s probably dancing or something.’ He pulled a face that suggested he viewed dancing as a strange and alien activity, possibly worthy of academic interest from anthropologists but not something one would wish to engage in personally.
Outside there were three steps in front of the door, down to the gravelled car park. They sat down, next to one another, on a low wall at the top of the stairs.
‘Sorry we’ve not made a decision about the job yet.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Ugh.’ He groaned deep in his throat.
‘What?’
‘You’re too nice. You should be furious with us. You’re clearly the best candidate. Theo should have offered you a permanent job years ago.’ Dominic shook his head. ‘No. Not even that. You should be teaching in a far better department than ours. I don’t get why you haven’t been snapped up by some other university. What about Exeter? Weren’t they expanding?’
‘I don’t know.’ Helen couldn’t make eye contact. ‘I like it here I guess.’
‘You’re insane.’
He might have been right, but Helen couldn’t leave the university. That was where Dominic was, so that was where she had to be. She had tried to get over him, but other men bored her. She thought back to the speed dating. Eighteen men she’d met and not a single one had been worth contacting again. It wasn’t a problem with the men. It was her. She’d much rather see Dominic every day, even knowing she’d never be with him. The thought popped up that she could tell him about Emily and Alex. Then maybe ... maybe once he’d got over that? She shook her head. She didn’t even have the courage to hope. Everything she felt for him had been screwed up into a tiny parcel, but instead of throwing it away, she’d kept hold of it, tight and secure in the very centre of her soul, and now it was a part of who she was.
‘Do you remember the first time we met?’
The tightly wrapped parcel unfurled a little. Helen nodded.
‘What do you remember?’
‘Third year lecture series. The last lecture on a Friday afternoon, so it was always half empty. “The witch, the wife, the madonna, the whore – Anne Boleyn and the place of women at the court of Henry the eighth.”’
‘Wow. I didn’t realise it made such an impression.’
‘I’ve still got the notes.’ She stopped. ‘I mean I’ve got all my old notes.’
‘But do you remember us actually meeting?’
She nodded. She remembered. It was the most highly valued and frequently examined few minutes of her life. ‘I didn’t pluck up the courage to come and talk to you until the end of the fourth lecture.’
He shook his head ‘Pluck up the courage?’
‘You were scary. Really sort of intense.’
‘It was my first term teaching. I was bricking it.’
‘It didn’t show. I came to ask you to explain the assignment question, but you spent so long explaining that the cleaner came and chucked us out of the room.’
Dominic laughed. ‘And do you remember after the cleaner chucked us out?’
Of course she did. It was the thing she always tried to think about just before she fell asleep, so that she might have a chance of dreaming a better ending. It had barely even been a moment. The two of them standing in an empty corridor. For a second, not even that, a fraction of a second, she’d thought he was leaning towards her. She’d thought he was going to ... It was only a moment.
She shook my head. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Of course. It was silly anyway. I nearly asked you to go for a drink you know.’
‘I was a student.’
‘I know.’ He swallowed. ‘Anyway that wasn’t the first time we met.’
‘It was!’ Of course it was. She’d spent the last ten years thinking about it. He couldn’t tell her now that she’d been fixating on the wrong moment.
He shook his head. ‘Do you remember the start of that term? They had a sort of social thing for third years, PhD students and staff. I think it was supposed to inspire you to think about applying for post-grad study.’
Helen remembered. ‘Yes! I had a really good talk with Dr Schaeffer about the place of gender studies within the wider humanities.’
‘You had two glasses of red wine, trapped the poor man in a corner and told him he was a puppet of the patriarchal establishment.’
‘That is not how I remember it.’
‘Well it’s what happened. I was watching.’
‘You were watching me?’
‘You were magnificent, like a lioness in full flight.’
‘Lionesses don’t fly.’
‘In full flight doesn’t mean literal flight.’
‘I think it does.’ Why was she arguing with him about this? Why wasn’t she letting him call her magnificent? ‘You noticed me?’
‘I couldn’t look at anything else.’ He laughed slightly. ‘I was devastated when you turned out to be a student. My student.’
She didn’t know what to say. He’d noticed her. He’d noticed her before she even noticed him. And they had had a moment. It wasn’t in her head. It was real. It was fleeting, but it was real. But it was still a long time ago. ‘Oh well. It all turned out for the best.’
‘What?’ He looked confused.
‘Well, you’re happy with Emily, aren’t you?’ She asked the question lightly, but Helen was making a bargain with herself in her head. If he said he was happy then she wouldn’t tell him about Emily and Alex, but if there was even the slightest hint that he wasn’t, then she had no choice, did she? Because if he was already having doubts, then it would definitely be better that he knew the truth. ‘And I’m ... I’m fine doing my thing.’
‘Of course.’
Of course. So that was that. She wouldn’t say anything, like she’d never said anything before, and Emily would get her big white wedding, and Helen would be her bridesmaid and people would make jokes about ‘always the bridesmaid’, and Helen would laugh politely to start with, and then a bit later she’d tell them off for making lazy gendered assumptions, and then, later still, she’d sneak out of the reception and cry.
They ought to go back into the party. He ought to go back to his fiancée. Helen stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get back in.’
His fingers wrapped around her wrist. ‘Wait.’
She stopped but didn’t turn around. His hand was on her arm. It was such a tiny thing, but it was filling her senses. Her heart jumped.
‘What if it hadn’t turned out all right?’
She turned around. She didn’t dare say anything. It was happening again. It was a real moment, and it was happening now.
‘What if I was wasn’t happy with Emily? Not unhappy with Emily even, with everything?’
‘What do you mean?’
He stood up, and this time she knew she wasn’t imagining it. He bent his face towards hers, and then stopped. ‘Is this what you want?’
She couldn’t respond. She should say no. She should push him away. She’d pushed Alex away without any trouble. That was exactly what she should do now. She didn’t. She lifted her face to meet his. She told herself that he was kissing her, that he started it, and he did, but she didn’t stop him. Helen wrapped her arms around Dominic’s neck, and let him pull her body against his. She opened her mouth a fraction, and let him slide his tongue between her lips. She embraced him wholeheartedly, like she did every night in her dreams. Everything in the world was this kiss. Earthquakes could have struck, volcanos exploded, hurricanes whistled right through the building, Helen would not have noticed at all. She certainly wouldn’t notice a handle turning, a door being pushed, and a person standing dead still in the doorway beside them.