Chapter 6
Chapter Six
We head in the wrong direction.
Not wrong geographically – Ross doesn’t know where I live, so he can’t know that turning left out of the restaurant takes us along the river towards the main road, away from the car park where I left the Volvo.
But I don’t correct him. I let him lead, and I fall into step beside him.
The rain has eased to a fine mist that settles on my coat and my hair and makes the street lights look blurred and soft.
I don’t say anything because saying something would mean acknowledging that I should already be in the car, already texting Alex, already halfway home.
Instead, I’m here. Strolling through Bristol at ten on a weeknight with a man my husband doesn’t know exists.
The guilt should be unbearable. It isn’t. That’s what frightens me.
‘I parked the other way,’ I say eventually, once we’ve crossed the bridge and turned on to the path that runs along the water. The river is dark and flat, reflecting the lights from the buildings on the far side, and the air smells of wet stone.
‘I know,’ Ross says.
‘You know?’
‘I saw you looking back at the car park when we came out.’
I glance at him sideways. ‘And you went the other way on purpose?’
‘I went the other way because you let me.’
I don’t have an answer to that. He’s right, and we both know it, and the truth of it sits between us on the wet pavement like something neither of us wants to pick up.
We continue for a while without talking.
Our footsteps fall into a rhythm – his longer, mine quicker to keep up – and there’s a strange comfort in it, the two of us moving through the city at night without anywhere we need to be.
Traffic rumbles in the distance, music comes from a pub on the far bank, and a siren wails somewhere towards Broadmead, but here on the river path it’s quiet.
‘This is mad,’ I say.
‘A bit.’
‘I mean it. This is completely mad. I’m a married woman walking along a river in the dark with—’ I stop, because I don’t know how to finish the sentence. With my ex? With an old friend? With the boy I kissed in a library when I was fourteen, and who over the next few years became everything to me?
‘With me,’ Ross says, gentle, almost amused.
‘With you. Yes.’ I pull my coat tighter. ‘And I don’t even know what I’m doing.’
‘You’re walking.’
‘Ross.’
‘You’re walking, Kim. That’s all. We had dinner, and now we’re walking. Nobody’s committed a crime.’
‘I told my husband I was at a work party.’
‘I know.’
‘So it’s not just walking, is it? It’s walking and lying. Which is worse.’
He doesn’t argue with that. He puts his hands in his pockets and looks out across the river. I watch his profile against the lights – the line of his jaw, the slight downward turn of his mouth – and a ripple of something stirs deep in my stomach.
We reach a bench near a set of steps leading up to the road. I stop, and Ross stops too, and we stand there facing each other with the river behind us and the mist thickening around the street lights.
‘I should double back,’ I say. ‘Get the car.’
‘How far is Keynsham from here?’
‘Five miles. Seven, maybe, depending on the route.’
‘I’ll go with you back to the car park, then.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
‘I know I don’t have to.’
We turn around and go back the way we came.
The mood shifts slightly, as if the fact that we’ve acknowledged the end of the evening has made the remaining minutes feel sharper.
More loaded. I’m aware of how close his arm is to mine.
I’m aware of the way his shoulder moves with each stride, the sound of his breathing, the faint scent of him that I caught earlier in the restaurant – clean, warm, faintly woody – still there underneath the damp night air.
‘Do you remember the window?’ he says.
I laugh before I can stop myself. ‘The window at school?’
‘The one round the back of the science block. The latch was broken, and you could push it open from outside.’
‘And you used to climb through it to get into the corridor after hours.’
‘We used to climb through it.’
‘Once. I climbed through it once, and I scraped my knee on the frame and spent the rest of the evening convinced Mr Davies was going to find the blood and have it tested.’
‘You genuinely thought the school was going to run a DNA analysis on a scraped knee?’
‘I was fifteen. I didn’t know how forensics worked. I just knew I was going to get caught and expelled, and my mum would never speak to me again.’
Ross laughs, and the sound carries across the water. ‘And instead, nothing happened.’
‘Nothing happened because you went back the next morning and wiped the frame with your sleeve.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’ He’s smiling now, the way he used to when it was just us and nobody else was watching. ‘God. We were so careful. All that sneaking around, all those coded notes, all that panic about someone finding out. Like we were running some sort of covert operation instead of just—’
‘Being teenagers who fancied each other.’
‘Yeah.’
We walk in silence for a few steps. The bridge is ahead of us, lit orange, with a couple crossing from the other side, arms linked, heads down against the mist.
‘It feels a bit like that tonight,’ I say quietly.
Ross glances at me. ‘Like what?’
‘Like being teenagers. Hiding something. Taking the long way around so nobody sees us.’
He nods slowly. ‘Except we’re not teenagers.’
‘No.’
‘And you’re married.’
‘Yes. I’m married.’ I say it firmly, as though stating it out loud might strengthen my resolve. ‘And this isn’t – whatever this is, it isn’t that. It’s not a secret relationship. It’s two old friends having dinner.’
‘Is that what we are? Old friends?’
‘What else would we be?’
He doesn’t answer. We cross the bridge and turn on to the side street that leads to the car park. The noise of the traffic fades behind us, and the street narrows, terraced houses on one side, a high wall on the other, and suddenly it’s very quiet and very dark, and the only sound is our footsteps.
Ross stops.
I stop, too, a half-step ahead of him, and turn. He’s standing under a street light that makes his face look pale and angular, his eyes darker than they are, the mist beading on the shoulders of his coat.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he says.
‘Depends what it is.’
‘What would happen if we weren’t sensible?’
The question hangs in the air. My pulse kicks up, and it thuds in my wrists, my throat, the backs of my knees. The street is empty. The houses are dark. Somewhere a cat crosses the pavement and disappears under a parked car. The silence that follows feels enormous.
‘What do you mean?’ I say, though I know exactly what he means.
‘I mean—’ He takes a breath, runs a hand through his damp hair, and stares at me with an expression I haven’t seen since we were sitting side by side in that library with the rain against the windows and the whole world shut out.
‘I mean, what if we stopped pretending this is just two old friends having dinner? What would that look like?’
‘Ross—’
‘I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just asking the question.’
My mouth is dry. My heart is pounding. I should say something sensible like, It would look like a disaster. It would mean my marriage falling apart, my daughter’s life turned upside down, and everything I’ve built for the last fourteen years burning to the ground. That’s what it would look like.
But the words don’t come, because Ross steps forward, and his hand comes up, and his fingertips touch my jaw the way they did twenty years ago – light, tentative, as if he’s giving me every chance to move away – and I don’t move.
I stand there on a dark street in Bristol with my car keys in my pocket and my husband’s unanswered text still resting in my bag, and I don’t move.
He kisses me.
His lips are warm and dry and still taste of red wine.
For three or four seconds the years collapse and I’m fourteen again, sitting in a library with the radiators humming and his mouth on mine for the first time, and my whole body lights up with it – the recognition, the pull, the deep-rooted muscle memory of wanting someone so completely that everything else disappears.
Then the guilt arrives.
It doesn’t creep. It crashes. A wave of it, slamming through my chest and into my stomach, and suddenly I can see Alex’s face, Olivia’s face, the kitchen table where we eat dinner every night.
I see the school run, the mortgage, the life – the life that exists five or six miles from this spot – and I jerk back so hard I stumble, catching myself against the wall.
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘Ross, I can’t. I’m sorry.’
He drops his hand. His face shifts – not anger, something else. Concern. Confusion. He takes a half-step towards me, and I take a full step back.
‘Kim—’
‘I shouldn’t have come tonight. I shouldn’t have agreed to dinner, I shouldn’t have let you walk me anywhere, I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Kim, wait—’
‘No.’ My voice is louder now, sharper than I want it to be, and it echoes off the terraced houses and the high wall, and the empty street. ‘No. This is done. Whatever this is, it’s done. I’m going home.’
I turn and walk away. My legs are unsteady, and tears build behind my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. Not here. Not in front of him.
‘Kim.’ He’s behind me. Not shouting, not chasing, just my name, spoken clearly and calmly across the wet pavement. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—’
‘It’s fine.’ I don’t turn around. I keep going, my boots loud on the tarmac, my breath coming in short, ragged bursts that fog in the cold air.
‘Will you text me? Just to let me know you got home all right?’
I don’t answer. I reach the end of the street, turn the corner, and he’s gone.
The car park is two minutes away. I manage it in one, half running, my coat flapping, my bag banging on my hip. I fumble the key fob, and the Volvo flashes its lights at me. I get in, slam the door, and sit there with my hands gripping the wheel and my forehead pressed against the cold leather.
My lips are tingling. I can still taste the wine on them, still feel his fingertips on my jaw, and the memory of it makes my stomach lurch with something that is equal parts longing and shame.
I kissed him back. For three seconds, maybe four, I kissed him back.
And in those seconds I forgot everything – Alex, Olivia, the house, the lie, the ring on my finger.
I forgot it all, and the worst part, the part that makes me feel sick as I sit in the dark car park with the engine off and the mist crawling across the windscreen, is that I didn’t want to stop.
I wanted to stay in that kiss forever.
I pull out my phone. Alex’s message is still there, unanswered. I type a reply with trembling fingers – On my way home now, sorry, ran over. See you soon x – press send, and drop the phone into my lap and close my eyes.
The kiss on the end of the text. That little x. It burns.
I start the engine, reverse out of the space, and drive towards Keynsham. The roads are quiet. The wipers sweep the mist from the glass. The radio comes on, something bland and acoustic, and I turn it off because I can’t bear the sound of someone else’s feelings right now.
All I can hear is Ross saying my name on that dark street. All I can feel is his hand on my jaw.
I drive home to my husband and my daughter and my life, and I tell myself that tonight was the end of it. A mistake. A moment of madness that I’ll bury so deep it can’t reach anyone.
But my hands won’t stop shaking.
And my lips won’t stop tingling.
And somewhere, underneath all the guilt and the fear and the cold certainty that I’ve done something unforgivable, a small, treacherous part of me is already wondering when I’ll see him again.