Six
Stay
On my first day at Pebbles & Paper, I spot my old boss Georgia as I’m heading from the bus stop to the shop.
I stiffen for a moment before diving down the side street to my right. I can’t face her, not after the way we left it—with me accusing her of betrayal and her begging me to stay. Because the truth is, there was a lot to love about working at Figaro. That feeling of knowing we’d built something pretty great between us. The family vibe, the banter.
I walk a little too swiftly in the opposite direction to Georgia, my ankles wriggling as I navigate the cobblestones. It’s a warm day, and I’ve broken out a cotton skirt and sandals for the occasion. Above my head the sky is a faultless blue, still as a lagoon.
The morning passes as smoothly as I’d hoped—there’s a steady stream of browsers, a few purchasers, but nowhere near enough people to overwhelm me at any point. Ivan’s here anyway, in case I have any teething problems on my first shift. He takes great pleasure in pointing out just how many of the items in stock are unique and handmade. I think about Caleb’s story from last week and smile.
So far, I’ve sold some birthstone jewelry, a few toiletries, a handmade silk scarf, several greetings cards, a pair of bookends, and a box of artisan chocolates. Ivan seems to think that’s a decent morning’s takings, and for a moment I wonder how he ever manages to break even, before reflecting on the staggering markup there is on most of the items I’ve sold.
Things pick up a bit over the course of the afternoon, and by the time I next look up, it’s five o’clock. Checking my phone as I get ready to leave, I smile as I see a message from Caleb.
Thoughts on Shakespeare?
I’m his biggest fan, I respond.
We meet at dusk outside the walled garden of Shoreley Hall, where Caleb’s bought tickets for an open-air production of Romeo and Juliet.
“You can translate,” he says, handing our tickets to the steward. He’s brought a rug with him, plus a picnic in a carrier bag.
“Me?”
“Yeah—you know, being a writer. And apparently Shakespeare’s biggest fan.”
I laugh, prod him gently in the small of his back with my fingertips as we enter the garden and search the grass for a place to sit.
The walled garden looks magical, like something out of a fairy tale. Long lines of bulbs loop between the branches of the trees, the air full with the scent of late-spring dew and thickening grass. The flower borders are resplendent, bursting with tangerine-toned tulips and wallflowers, blossoms blazing from the plum, cherry, and apple trees.
Beyond the redbrick wall, the sky is suspended indigo, those last rich minutes before it fades to black and a galaxy of stars erupts above our heads. The space is warm, packed tight with bodies and humming with conversation, dappled with laughter.
“This is inspired,” I say, as Caleb lays out the picnic rug.
“Well, I was trying to think of how to persuade you to see me again. And an old friend of mine mentioned he was in this, so . . .” He spreads his hands to finish the sentence.
I laugh. “Yep, it was Shakespeare that swung it. Would definitely have turned you down otherwise.”
We share a loaded glance, and I wonder if he’s picturing last night, too—the minutes melting away as we kissed, that feeling of having stumbled across something special.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, deadpan.
“So, what part’s your friend playing?”
He flicks through a copy of the program. “Count Paris.”
“Oof.”
“What? Is that bad?”
I keep my face straight. “Couldn’t possibly say.”
He laughs and starts unpacking the food. “Knew there was a reason I should have paid attention in English. Speaking of which, you haven’t sent me your pages.”
I grimace a little. I’d been wavering over hitting send first thing this morning, before being flooded with self-doubt. “I know.”
He smiles. “I probably shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, I want to, I just . . . I might polish them up a bit first.”
He nods. “If you change your mind, it’s cool. Really. Right—are you hungry? Had to guess what you’d like.”
“Talk me through it.”
“Well, I am trying to impress you, so most of it’s posh. But I did throw in some Scotch eggs and cocktail sausages. Plus . . .” He lifts up a bag. “Couldn’t go without Scampi Fries.”
I shake my head. “This is amazing. You guessed so well.” I survey the feast of garlic-stuffed olives, vegetable samosas, four-cheese focaccia, smoked ham, and chicken salad spread out on the rug. “You succeeded—I’m seriously impressed.”
“Wasn’t sure what you’d want to drink, so I bought prosecco, and”—he examines the bottle—“rhubarb pressé.”
“I’ll go for some pressé, please.”
He takes the bottle and starts to unscrew the lid before hesitating, then swearing softly.
“What’s up?”
“Forgot glasses,” he says, laughing. “We’re going to have to swig from the bottle.”
“That might lower the tone,” I joke, nodding at the people surrounding us, who are all equipped with plastic champagne flutes.
“Okay,” he whispers. “We’ll have to wait till the lights go down.”
As if on cue, a drum strikes onstage, the lights in the garden fall, and a hush descends over the murmuring crowd. Moths flit through the air as the stage becomes illuminated.
An actor steps forward into the spotlight. “Two households, both alike in dignity,” he bellows. “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . .”
Across the rug, Caleb reaches out, takes my hand, and squeezes it. “Okay, we’re safe. Swig away,” he whispers. And as I smile, I feel an overwhelming swell of relief that I decided to call him last week, rather than hold out for the memory of a man nearly ten years in my past.
Though today’s been warm—weather more suited to summer than late spring—neither of us was prepared for how sharply the air temperature would dip as the Capulets and Montagues’ feud wore on. By the time the actors are lined up onstage taking their bows, I am shivering and my teeth are chattering, despite drowning in the jumper Caleb draped over me during the half-time interval.
Caleb’s friend, who was playing the doomed Count Paris, was very good, but there’s a large crowd around him at the end, and we decide it’s too cold to wait to say hi.
“God, sorry,” Caleb says, once we’ve gathered up our things and have joined the queue to exit the walled garden. “Didn’t think it would be quite this Baltic.” We’re surrounded by people who clearly do this sort of thing all the time and have come prepared in layers, hats, and thick coats. My skirt and emergency jumper are clearly marking me out as a first-time outdoor-theater fan.
Once we’ve made it outside, we both hesitate. I’m pretty sure neither of us wants the night to end, but we’re still at that point of getting to know each other where we need to discuss what we’re going to do next.
“Fancy coming back to mine?” Caleb asks, slipping an arm around my shoulders. I like the feeling of being held close by him, of our bodies pressed together, of his warm, unflinching frame.
I look up at him and smile. “Sounds good.”
We walk briskly back in the direction of his cottage, hand in hand. He didn’t say anything as he wrapped his fingers around mine, and I didn’t pass comment. It felt the most natural thing in the world for him to do.
The night sky is lustrous with stars now, the coastal air sharp and salt-filled. Above the rows of rooftops, the moon hangs low, like a candlewax disk stamped into the blackness.
“So, shall we mark it out of ten?” Caleb asks, as we pass the town’s little art gallery, a display of seascapes illuminated in its window.
“The play or the date?” I say, then catch myself. I mean, this was a date, wasn’t it?
Caleb doesn’t appear to pick up on this split second of self-doubt. “Let’s go with the play. Not sure I’m quite up to being scored yet.”
“Of course. Sorry. Okay—I’m giving it a firm nine. You?”
“I’m going with . . . seven.”
“Seven?”
“Sorry. But I do like my plays to have a happy ending.”
“Even the Shakespearean tragedies?”
He laughs, then winks. “See, I always just thought it was a love story.”
In his kitchen back at the cottage, Caleb offers me a nightcap, and when I decline, says, “Do you mind me asking . . . ?”
“Booze just doesn’t really . . . agree with me.”
“So, do you drink at all, or . . . ?”
I shake my head. “Not anymore.”
He nods, apparently entirely unfazed by this. “Well, I can offer you an impressive array of hot drinks.”
“You can?”
He rubs his chin. “Yeah, I seem to collect—don’t you do this?—random boxes of herbal teas, about five different types of coffee . . . I’ve got hot chocolate, and Horlicks, and . . .” He starts rummaging in a cupboard.
“Coffee’s fine,” I say with a laugh.
So he makes us both coffee, and while the water’s boiling I wander back into the living room and over to a row of photos on one of the walls, all bearing Caleb’s penciled signature on their mounts. There’s a windswept vista of the dunes at the far end of Shoreley beach; a deer midleap above a five-bar gate; a shot of a bride and groom on their wedding day with the flare of a setting sun behind them; a black-and-white shot of an older woman laughing, who looks strangely familiar.
I feel him at my shoulder, watching me looking.
“These are insanely good,” I say, feeling almost intimidated by his talent.
“Thank you,” he says modestly. He is standing delectably close. I can smell the scent of his washing powder, the faint trace of aftershave lingering on his skin. “That was my stepsister’s wedding day. And that last one’s my mum.”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, realizing now why she’d looked familiar.
Caleb heads back into the kitchen to finish making the coffee. I move over to two more framed pictures on the mantelpiece above the wood burner. One is of Caleb standing on a bridge with two other men about his age and an older man and woman. In the other, he’s sitting around a dinner table with his mum, his stepsister, another younger woman, and a younger lad.
He appears at my shoulder again, hands me a mug. “My parents divorced when I was ten, so I have about a million stepsiblings.” His smile as he says this doesn’t quite reach his eyes, in a way that reminds me of Jools whenever she talks about her family.
I sit down on the sofa, tuck my legs up beneath me. “Do you get on?”
Caleb draws the curtains, then passes me a blanket before switching on an ancient-looking lamp that flickers and fizzes in protest.
“We do,” he says, sitting down next to me. “It’s more that . . . I don’t know. I was an only child, but my parents have both had new families for getting on twenty years now. So I sometimes wonder . . . where I fit in. If that makes sense.”
It does, and I feel a sting of sadness for him. “Do they live close?”
He shakes his head. “Dad’s in Devon, Mum’s in Newcastle. Like, as far from each other as they could possibly be. And me, come to that.” He smiles. “How about your folks?”
“Oh,” I say, with an irrational onrush of guilt, which I get whenever I talk to anyone whose family background isn’t entirely happy. “Well, my parents are sort of . . . this crazy fairy tale.”
“Yeah?”
I sip my coffee. “Yeah, they met on holiday when they were twenty, fell pregnant with my sister, and have been stupidly in love ever since.”
He smiles. “Nice. What’s their secret?”
“I guess . . . they always saw themselves as soulmates.”
His smile falters slightly. “My dad used to say that about every woman he met after my mum.” I catch the faintest of eye rolls as he speaks.
I wrinkle my nose in sympathy. “That must have been weird.”
“Let’s just say, it definitely killed that old-fashioned idea of the fates aligning, love being written in the stars . . . that sort of thing.” His smile returns. “Must have been nice for you though, to see living proof of the real deal.” To his credit, he says this without a shred of cynicism.
“Are you and your dad close now?”
He sips his coffee. “To my shame, yes. I’ve always kind of idolized him.” He laughs. “Really wish I didn’t, actually. He’s just . . . infuriatingly cool.”
“What does he do?”
“Wildlife cameraman. You know, for documentaries and stuff. So, yeah—I basically just wanted to be him, my whole life.”
“That’s where you got your wanderlust?”
He nods. “I guess after Helen and I broke up, I was like . . . Yes. That’s what I need to do next.”
I feel my chest clench with trepidation. “So . . . will that be . . . soon?”
He holds my gaze for a moment or two, then releases a breath. “No. I mean . . . no. It’s not like I’m taking off next week, or anything. I’ve got nothing planned, not yet.”
I force myself to smile, but inside, I’m catastrophizing. Of course someone as lovely as Caleb wouldn’t just turn up in my life, catch-free. Men like him don’t actually exist. Of course he’s about to up and leave for the other side of the world—that’s why he’s more than happy to rent. He doesn’t want to put down roots. And maybe for that reason he’s not interested in starting anything serious, romantically speaking, either.
“You mentioned you went away, after uni?” Caleb says.
“Um, not for long. Just three months.”
Eyes eager, he leans forward and asks me more, but it’s hard to match his enthusiasm when I talk about it, and eventually his questions peter out.
“I had to cut the trip short,” I conclude, lamely.
He nods. “How come?”
“Oh, you know. Just . . . wasn’t meant to be.”
He doesn’t know, of course, but thankfully he doesn’t probe any further, and then we sit in silence for a little while, finishing our coffees. I feel horribly guilty suddenly—like I’ve spoiled the night by ending on such a low note. But then he sets down his mug before turning to brush the hair from my face. “Warmed up yet?”
I smile, shake my head. “Nope. Not yet.”
“Well, maybe I can help with that,” he whispers, leaning forward to kiss me.
“I mean, I’m literally freezing,” I whisper back, as his lips move to my neck. On the wall, our shadows loom large in the lamplight.
This time, as we kiss, I venture a hand beneath his T-shirt, running my fingers over his skin, skimming his ribs, the ridges of his muscles.
Please don’t go anywhere, I think, as he groans softly. This has barely even started, but already I don’t want it to end.
Go
Sunday night, forty-eight hours after my date at the restaurant with Max.
We’re in bed, trying to muster up the energy to order in some sushi, which basically sums up exactly how decadent this weekend has been. We’ve left the flat just once since our date, popping out yesterday morning for sustenance, which essentially involved shoving half of Waitrose into a trolley. Now we’re nose-to-nose on the mattress, a breeze from the open window stroking my hot, bare shoulders, the gossamer kiss of pillows against my face.
Max’s bedroom is pale and clean, high-ceilinged with sash windows. Lots of light. The iron bed frame is set against a rugged wall of exposed brickwork and piled with white bed linen the texture of marshmallows. There’s just a smattering of other items in here—a cornflower-colored rug on the floorboards, mounted speaker in one corner, blond-wood chest of drawers, and full-length mirror propped near the window. I keep catching myself glancing around, trying to spot things I recognize, little trinkets from our past, but there is nothing.
The flat is calm and peaceful, like we’re in a village rather than London, with windows so well glazed you can’t really hear much traffic. Occasionally there is the muted thump of feet above our heads, but it’s nothing like sitting in the living room in Tooting, where even the light crossing of a room upstairs resembles a stampede. Max told me last night he chose this flat partly for the neighbors, doing extensive research on them before he signed the contract.
“Is that legal?” I laughed.
“You think journalists have to dig for a living, try doing what I do. You wouldn’t believe the things I find out about people.”
I reach out now to touch his face. His skin is bright and damp with exertion. “You know, the night I saw you in Shoreley . . . I’d just started chatting to this guy, in the pub.”
He props himself up onto one elbow, raises an eyebrow. “Chatting chatting?”
I smile and shrug. “Kind of. But then I saw you out the window, and I just . . . abandoned him at the bar. Anyway, he wrote his number on a beer mat and put it in my coat pocket. I found it last week.”
Max laughs. “Wow. And you say I’m smooth?”
“I know. Who’d have thought you’d have competition on that front?”
“So, are you going to call him?”
I found the beer mat while I was packing up the last of my things for the move, and it fell out of my coat pocket. I turned it over in my hands and smiled, then placed it gently into the box of stuff that would be staying in Tash’s loft.
I feign deliberation. “Yeah, maybe. Just to hedge my bets, you know.”
“Oh, absolutely. Very wise.”
I shuffle forward on the mattress and kiss him—a kiss that’s long and full and intense, so he can be in no doubt at all I’m just teasing.
“In all seriousness,” I whisper, “you should know, I don’t make a habit of this.”
His eyes crease at the corners, a tiny spray of crow’s-feet. “Of what?”
My heart is cartwheeling in my chest. “Sleeping with guys on the first date.”
“First date.” He pretends to think about this. “But isn’t this technically like . . . our four-hundredth date, or something?”
I smile. It’s what I wanted him to say. “Maybe.”
Beneath the covers, he runs a hand across my hip. “It doesn’t count, Luce. We’re exes.” Then he catches my eye, rolls onto his back. “That came out wrong. What I mean is, it’s you and me. We’re past all that.”
“Yeah. We can just skip straight to the good stuff.”
“Exactly.”
“Pick up where we left off.”
He rolls back toward me, fixing me with smoke-gray eyes. “Yep.”
But . . . where was that? I mean, where did we leave off?
I’ve been burning to ask him since Friday night. Since our kiss, and that spark that turned into dynamite right there on his sofa. Since yesterday morning, when we returned from the shops with coffees from the Italian deli that ended up going cold and untasted in the kitchen. Since yesterday afternoon, when he eventually left the bed and invited me into the shower. I’ve spent the past forty-eight hours in a kind of daze, suspended in dreamy disbelief, but so far I’ve been unable to break the spell by saying the words I’m saying now.
“Why . . . did you end it, Max?” I whisper. The question’s almost too hard to ask.
His gaze tracks back and forth across my face, like he’s trying to pin down the right answer. “I had to,” he says, eventually.
I trace a shape against his left pectoral with a single finger. His skin is still beach-brown, muscles undulating beneath it, his body—nearly a decade on—seemingly an even better version of how it was before. He’s always been a runner, into sport, but now his physique looks more attended-to, like he might lift a few weights from time to time, too. I feel briefly self-conscious, wonder whether he’s been comparing the me of today to the girl he loved back then.
I don’t think I’ve changed, much. I haven’t got the ballerina physique of my sister, or Jools’s natural beauty—but when I compare myself to old photos, I don’t see a lot of difference, except maybe an easing of the youth from my face.
“Were you . . . scared of the commitment?” Our plan had been to move to London after graduating, and we’d already talked about finding a place there together, until a conversation with his friend Rob made me think I’d got that wrong. We argued about it one afternoon—about whether he was going to live with me, or with Rob and his other friend Dean—just a week before he broke things off. So I convinced myself that was why—but he kept saying it wasn’t.
“No,” he says again now, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Did you meet someone else?” I asked him this back then, of course. But maybe some things are easier to admit in retrospect.
He shakes his head. “I was single for two years after we split up.”
We’re still facing each other, so close our lips are almost touching, fingers gliding over skin. It’s as though we’re having the most intimate discussion of our lives, rather than getting stuck along a succession of conversational dead ends.
His forehead gathers into a frown. “Have you ever . . . had to walk away from something because you knew it was the right decision—even though it broke your heart?”
“No,” I say truthfully. It was you who broke my heart that day.
To my surprise, his eyes begin to brim with tears. I’ve barely had time to register them before they’re spilling down his cheeks, striking the pillow like raindrops.
Swearing softly, he sits up, then climbs out of bed and heads into the en suite. I sit up too, a little stunned. I’ve never seen Max properly cry before. Not even when he was facing me on that bridge in Norwich, rain-soaked and stricken, just before he walked away.
You were the one who left, Max. I thought it was what you wanted. How can you still be hurting this much?
I hear the splashing of water before, a minute or so later, he comes over to the bed again, seemingly now composed. He sits on the mattress next to me, takes my hand, works my fingers in his. “I know I owe you more than this, Luce, but . . . all I can tell you is that it felt like the right thing to do, back then.” He shakes his head. “That isn’t to say I don’t have massive regrets. I’ve spent so much time . . . thinking about where we might be now, if we hadn’t broken up.”
To hear him say all this now feels like watching a rocket soar into the sky, only to crash back down to earth moments later. Because while it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one with regrets, doesn’t that mean parting was pointless, if we’ve both been feeling this way?
I revisit my all-too-familiar fantasy of what Max and I would be doing now if he’d never ended it. We’d be living together in a beautiful flat—or maybe even a house. We’d have lots of friends, hundreds of shared experiences to cherish. We’d have seen the world, hosted the wedding of the century. We’d be cat people, definitely. And we’d be planning a family. A noisy, colorful tribe to fill our hearts with love all over again. My life would have taken an upward trajectory, rather than failing to ever really get started.
But worse than that, perhaps, is that I would undoubtedly have stayed at university for that final year, been awarded my degree. And then I would have moved to London with Max, found a proper job. By now, I’d be years into my career. I would never have gone to Australia, I wouldn’t have met Nate, and I wouldn’t have lost everything.
“Lucy?”
I shake my head. An unwelcome vision of Nate—his leering face—has lodged in my mind. “Sorry?”
“I was asking what you want,” Max says, gently.
“What I want?”
He nods. “I feel like enough time has passed to maybe . . . And I know I don’t deserve you, Lucy, but—”
My heart rushing forward, I lean over, smother his words with a kiss.
It doesn’t even occur to me to wonder why it would be important for time to have passed.
Max has to catch an early train to Leeds on Monday morning. He says he’ll be there until late Thursday, in meetings and on site visits to a high-end mixed-use development in the city center—the subject of a dispute his firm is working on, with millions at stake, apparently. But we arrange to meet on Friday night, as soon as he’s returned to London.
Back in Tooting, the house feels gloomy and lonely, rattling with street noise and the sound of intermittent gunfire from next-door’s TV. I quite like noise, normally—I find it comforting—but after a weekend cocooned in the smooth, gleaming sanctuary of Max’s flat, it’s easier to see this place for the unloved rental it is. Grimy corners and stark surfaces, peeling paint and zero water pressure, the faintest scent of damp.
I’m aching to talk to someone, but Jools and Sal are still on the night shift, and Reuben is at his girlfriend’s place in Leyton.
I make a cup of tea, head upstairs, check my phone. Just one message, from Max.
The best weekend ever. You’re amazing. Until Friday. xx
I call my sister. Predictably, she’s already in her office at work—she’s head of business development at a digital marketing agency—sipping a green juice, which I guess she’d call breakfast. She’s dressed for the warm weather in a cream blouse with capped sleeves, her bobbed blond hair immaculate as spun gold. My heart flexes when I see her, mostly because I know how much she’ll worry when she finds out why I’m calling.
“I’ve got something to tell you.”
She peers at the screen, like she’s searching for clues in the murky backdrop of my bedroom. “What? What is it? Is everything okay?”
I release a breath. The reassuring little speech I’ve prepared vanishes from my head completely. “I’m . . . Me and Max . . .”
Her face tightens. “You and Max what?”
“I think . . . we’re going to give it another shot.”
Her face crumples within a second. I hadn’t expected her reaction to be so immediate. “No, Luce. Please, not him.”
“Tash, it’s okay—”
“No, it’s not. It’s not okay.” For a moment, I think she’s about to start hyperventilating.
“He feels awful about how it ended, before.”
She shakes her head, like that’s irrelevant. I watch her try to compose herself. “I just think you could do . . . so much better. There must be so many good guys out there. Why don’t you wait until you start work, see if there’s anyone nice at your new place?”
“Because,” I say weakly, “it’s Max. He was always my one that got away. The person I was meant to be with. You know?”
“Except he wasn’t, was he?” she says, her voice softening slightly like she’s breaking bad news. “You split up, and then didn’t speak for nearly a decade.”
“But now . . . we’ve found each other again.”
It feels weird to be discussing Max like this. We’ve rarely done so in the intervening years—Tash never forgave him for what he did to me, plus he was evidently long gone. There never seemed to be very much point in talking about him.
“Lucy,” Tash says, her voice more urgent now, “it’s just nostalgia. You know that, don’t you?”
“Or maybe he’s my soulmate.” I decide against mentioning what my horoscope said the day I bumped into Max, since I’m pretty sure that would be enough to tip her over the edge completely.
Tash’s forehead pinches together. “You know, I was reading this article the other day about how people think they’ve met their soulmate when it’s actually . . . just lust. That all the fireworks and the love at first sight is just a bunch of chemicals shooting around. That it’s the slow-burn connections that mean the most.” The way she says this implies she suspects Max and I would be at the lighter-fuel end of the emotional depth spectrum.
“What about Mum and Dad? They’re definitely soulmates. Or you and Simon.”
She pauses for a moment, staring at the screen like she no longer recognizes the person looking back at her. “I just don’t want you to get hurt again, Lucy,” she says, eventually, like she knows she’s losing the argument—and almost, by extension, me. “After you broke up, when you came back from traveling, you were like . . . a different person.”
She assumes Max did that to me, but I don’t tell her it was actually nothing to do with Max—or at least, a lot less to do with him than she thinks. I never confided in her about what happened in Australia. And so much time has passed now, I doubt I ever will.
Back then, she used to say I’d forgotten how to take risks, be spontaneous. Well, what is agreeing to see Max again if not a risk, proof I’ve rediscovered my sense of adventure?
“Please, please just promise me you’ll think about this, before rushing into anything,” Tash says.
It’s a bit late for that now, I think. But her heart looks almost as if it’s breaking, so I nod, tell her yes. “He’s away with work this week. I promise I’ll think it through properly before the weekend.”
I know what she’s thinking: Max went on holiday for a fortnight, and now he’s “away with work” for a week? She probably suspects he ran off with someone else back then. If nothing else, I know she thinks I’m making a big mistake.
But how can that be true, when being with Max never felt anything but right?
By the time Christmas rolled around at the end of our first term at uni, we’d been friends for three months. Friends who flirted a lot, whom everyone assumed were already together. Who messaged all day then decamped to each other’s rooms at night. Who met for coffee on campus, sat together in the pub, saved seats for each other in the cinema.
I’m still surprised we held back from taking it further for so long: we were both single, frequently uninhibited by booze, fully intimate with the details of each other’s lives. But Max said afterward he was afraid of messing up our friendship, and I was probably too filled with self-doubt to make the first move. After all, this was Max—so popular on campus, so handsome, the kind of guy people gravitated toward—and I’d never even had a boyfriend before, not a serious one.
I knew he’d had a girlfriend back home in Cambridge. They’d broken up over the summer—she was staying on there, to go to actual Cambridge University. I’d stalked her a bit on social media, which didn’t help my confidence issues—she was gorgeous in a sunny, carefree way that made me convinced Max would be compelled to seek her out again at some point.
So three months passed, and then it was December and I was packing to go home to Shoreley at the same time that Max was due to catch the bus back to Cambridge.
He walked into my room early afternoon on our last day on campus, holding up a hoodie. His hair was damp, and he smelled faintly of that herby shower gel all the guys I knew seemed to like, so I assumed he’d just been for a run.
“Found this under my bed,” he said.
“You star.” I smiled. “I’ve been looking for that.”
He hesitated then, seeming disoriented suddenly, which was very unlike Max. He always knew what to say, was never lost for words. His success in the law student mooting competitions was testament to that.
Appearing to recover, he smiled, continued to hover by my bed. It was stripped bare, the sheets in a bin bag ready to be shoved straight into my parents’ washing machine back in Shoreley. “Hey, I bumped into Anna at the canteen earlier. Finally got the balls to tell her my name isn’t Matt.”
I smiled. One of Max’s tutors, who’d been getting his name wrong all term—even though she was reportedly already convinced he had the potential to be a top barrister. “Was she embarrassed?”
“Yeah. So much so, she bought me a mince pie and a coffee.”
“Worth it, then.”
“Ha,” he said, because it was a running joke between us that the canteen coffee was little more than tepid, discolored water. And then, suddenly, “You should come to Cambridge.”
“Sorry?” I lowered the T-shirt I’d been folding.
“Come to Cambridge. Stay for a bit. Feels weird I won’t see you for three weeks.”
I nodded. “I know. I’ll miss you.”
He looked down at the floor. “I nicked something earlier, too. From the canteen.”
“Did you?” I was confused for a moment. What did he mean? Max was far too honest to steal.
He nodded, then reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced a sprig of green plastic, slightly bent.
Mistletoe.
A smile spread through me, and my heart started to spin, instantly out of control on an axis I didn’t know it had.
Max lifted the mistletoe with one hand, his other arm behind his back, gray eyes steady against mine. “I needed an excuse, Luce. To do something I’ve been wanting to do since we met.”
My blood got hot then and my heart became wild, every part of me rushing with wanting. And so I stepped forward, put my lips to his, and then we were kissing, hard and warm and fast, Max’s arm firm across my shoulders as the gap between us closed. And soon the mistletoe was somewhere on the carpet, kicked under the bed as we toppled onto it.
Somewhere along the corridor, someone was playing Christmas music, a jingling tambourine-heavy melody. Doors were squeaking and banging, there were footsteps and voices, laughter and whooping, the ever-present scent of browning toast in the air. We were surrounded by people, and yet—just as I had felt on our very first night in halls—their presence only seemed to heighten the privacy between us, hidden away behind my closed door.
I wanted to sleep with him. It didn’t seem to matter that this was our first kiss, let alone anything else. I knew Max and I had something special, even though we hadn’t explored what that was yet. I felt a future with him. I sensed it. Some inexplicable knowing that we were destined for each other.
“Lucy,” he breathed, as we began to tug at each other’s clothes, “have you . . . Have you . . . ?”
“No,” I breathed back. “But it’s okay. I want to.”
“Are you sure? Because it’s fine if . . .” The words were muffled, but I knew he meant them.
“Yes,” I gasped, kissing him harder, more insistently. I didn’t even care that I was wearing my scruffiest jeans, and a T-shirt so old the logo had faded right off it, or that I was completely free of makeup. I could only think of Max—the deep press of his kiss, the damp warmth of his newly clean skin. “Yes, I’m sure.”
So Max was my first, on that bright, chilly December afternoon in my university bedroom. And it was nothing like the way my sister or friends had described it—not awkward, or painful, or just a little bit lacking. It was full-hearted and special, tender and memorable. Everything I’d hoped it would be.