Chapter 7
Rachel
A few weeks after the common room party, I found myself in A&E. I was sitting in the waiting room with one eye squeezed shut, trying to focus on anything but the sensation of having had iron filings sprinkled liberally across my left cornea.
After I’d been there a good while, a figure appeared in what remained of my peripheral vision. With some effort, I looked up. And even through just one tear-filled eye, I knew it was – impossibly – him.
Josh had said he’d ring me, as the party wrapped up. So I’d spent the following few days thinking he might call, or maybe come to see me at halls. But then the days turned into weeks. I hadn’t wanted to ask Ingrid, not keen to appear needy. So I’d resolved to move on.
And yet. The memory of that dynamite kiss kept tugging me back to him. I couldn’t stop replaying our colliding smiles, the flame of his gaze. The magnet of his body pressed to mine. Surely I hadn’t imagined it, that forcefield between us?
I was immediately conscious of my mismatched tracksuit and unwashed face. In contrast, Josh wore dishevelment perfectly, endearingly scruffy in loose jeans and a soft woollen sweater, his disordered hair framing those dancing eyes.
Given several weeks had elapsed since our kiss, I felt cautious. Then again, he hardly seemed to be trying to escape me.
‘What happened?’ he asked, his face etched with concern as he sat down next to me.
‘I think I’ve got something in it.’
‘Do you want me to look?’
I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I can’t even open it.’
‘I’ll wait with you.’
‘It’s two a.m.’
‘Night owl,’ he said. I could sense rather than see his peat-dark eyes fixed on me. His soft, curious smile. ‘Hey, how come you’re by yourself?’
I smiled back at him. ‘It’s two a.m.’
‘I came to halls a couple of times.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I tried calling. I left messages.’
‘Oh.’ We had a communal phone, in the bathroom of all places, with a whiteboard next to it.
But expecting any of us to be reliable message-takers was always going to be a tall order.
Besides, there was rarely space, among the myriad scrawled insults and cock-and-balls sketches and coded orders for mushrooms and weed.
‘So anyway, the other day, I kind of . . . wrote to you, instead. A soppy little letter.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d done it. ‘You’ll probably get it tomorrow.’
I felt my heart open out in my chest, a tiny parachute. ‘What does it say?’
‘Ah, I couldn’t possibly. I think the mortification would genuinely finish me off.’
Something about the way he said this made me nervous. ‘So, how come you’re here? Are you okay?’
‘Um, it’s kind of embarrassing.’
I considered for a minute what he might mean. ‘Is it appendage-related?’
At this, he laughed. ‘What? No. What?’
I laughed too. ‘Sorry! I assumed when you said embarrassing—’
‘—it must be to do with my penis?’
At this, a woman two chairs away huffed, loudly. She was bleeding quite heavily from the temple, which I guessed meant she wasn’t in the mood for smut.
I put a hand over my face, letting my hair form a curtain around my rapidly heating cheeks. ‘Can we pretend I didn’t just say that, please?’
He reached out, gently tucked my hair back behind my ear. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because. You look lovely when you blush.’
Eventually, as dawn was beginning to dilute the darkness, I got seen by a doctor. She diagnosed a scratched cornea, then gave me drops, an eye patch, and precisely zero sympathy for having been clumsy with my contact lens.
Josh got us a cab back to campus, then walked me to my block. Without saying anything, we sat down together on the wall outside.
It was getting light, the sky flaring pink. Somewhere nearby, a robin was singing. The morning smelt of pine needles and frost.
‘You never did tell me what you were in for,’ I said, after a moment.
He laughed softly. ‘Ah. Well, that was actually a strategic decision.’
I nudged him with my elbow. ‘Hey, I look like an actual pirate. We’re all friends here.’
I immediately regretted the clumsy turn of phrase, because – was it my imagination, or did he momentarily look slightly crushed?
He let out a reluctant breath. ‘Okay. Well, I should probably start off by saying I’m not one of those people who dials 999 if they get a splinter or stub their toe.
But, last night . . . I thought I was having a heart attack.
I mean, I really did believe it.’ He stared up at the sky, where the candy-floss clouds were fringing gold.
‘I have this weird fear that I’m going to die young. ’
‘Why?’ I whispered.
‘Because none of the men on my dad’s side of my family have made it past the age of thirty.’
I felt a little simmer of shock. I turned to look at him, my mouth opening involuntarily. ‘Including your dad?’
He nodded. ‘He died when I was four.’
‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’
I’d never had cause to think I was having a heart attack, but I could imagine how real the fear must have felt. A primal kind of panic – like choking, or drowning. The loneliest kind of helplessness.
Instinctively, I reached for his hand. The world was fridge-cold that morning, but his fingers in mine were warm.
And it didn’t seem weird, or too soon. It felt just right.
I leaned forward, put my lips to his. He responded instantly, bringing a palm to my face.
My mouth parted, letting him in for a kiss that was startlingly intense for such a tender beginning.
His lips were laced with sugar from the vending machine hot chocolate we had earlier pooled our change to share.
‘I would ask you in,’ I whispered, as we drew apart after a few moments, ‘but, you know. The patch.’
‘Is it weird to say I like the patch?’
‘Yes, that’s incredibly weird.’ I smiled. ‘It’ll be off in a couple of days.’
Three nights later, I called him to confirm the patch was gone and my squint cured. He asked me to dinner, and suggested Sorelli’s, a local trattoria where people queued out of the door for the slow-cooked ragù.
After platefuls of candlelit pasta, and laughing so hard, for so long, that I was risking heartburn, we returned to halls, where I invited him up to the room that had once been his.
We were standing by my kettle, valiantly pretending to be interested in drinking coffee, when he turned and kissed me again mid-sentence, as if he simply couldn’t wait another moment.
I kissed him back. Seconds began to race. He slid his hands beneath my top, my bloodstream liquid vertigo as his fingers hit my goosebumped skin. He moved closer, pressing against me. The friction felt nuclear. Between my legs, a wet, pulsing heat.
We kissed for a while longer, before I pulled him gently on to my single bed, and slowly, slowly, he reached down to where I was aching and arching for him. And, from that moment on, he was the only man in the world, my orbit, the universe.