Fifteen years earlier
It was astonishing how we managed to avoid each other in our final year, pinned apart by the same desire.
Wherever you were likely to be, I wasn’t, and I guess it was the same for you.
Even the English department became a safe zone, as you spent all your time at home working on your art.
There were occasional glimpses, of course – you and Rachel seen through the window of Foyles bookshop, you and Jack driving along Woodland Road in your pale blue car, a few seconds of looking before I turned away.
We didn’t share the same friends – yours, for obvious reasons, had dropped me; mine and Sam’s thought your crowd, with their loud public-school voices and their bottomless bank accounts, were a joke.
Different parties (if I ever went to them), different pubs (if I ever went to them); you kept your house in Clifton, while Sam, Liv and I rented in St Paul’s.
So there was just the one, devastating confrontation with Jack a week or so before finals.
How long did it last – a minute, maybe two before Sam rescued me, taking my elbow and leading me away.
And yet in that time, with that smile, knowing, intimate, challenging, he deftly took me right back into the heart of our night together so that I could remember the penetration of him, not you, his hands in a press-up position either side of my head.
Memories I refused to examine hammering against my brain.
‘Are you OK?’ Sam said, catching sight of my face a moment later.
Just a shake of my head was enough for him to put down his glass of wine and take me home.
No need to ask me what was wrong; I’d just lost a parent.
I had, as they say, the mother of all excuses.