Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
I saw him before he saw me.
It was a Friday in November, and I wasn’t supposed to be there.
Melanie’s seventeenth birthday, a last-minute thing – she’d got the tickets cheap off someone at work and rang me at six o’clock asking if I fancied it.
I’d said yes because Ross was busy. Revision, he’d told me.
Group session at Jamie’s flat. He’d be back late and I shouldn’t wait up.
I’d believed him because I always believed him, because not believing Ross was like not believing gravity. It simply didn’t occur to me.
The club was one of those places in town that looked grim in daylight – peeling posters on the door, a puddle of something unidentifiable on the steps, bouncers who acted like they’d rather be anywhere else.
Inside it was dark, loud, and packed with bodies moving under coloured lights that turned everyone the same shade of blue and pink.
Melanie bought us drinks at the bar – vodka cranberry, sticky glasses, ice already melting – and pulled me towards the dance floor.
I went with her because I was a seventeen-year-old out on a Friday night who needed to dance away the nagging feeling I’d had for weeks that something in my life was off.
We danced for a while. The music was terrible – generic dance tracks that all blurred into each other – but it didn’t matter because Melanie was funny and drunk and kept grabbing my arm and shouting things I couldn’t hear.
I was laughing, letting the bass thump through my chest and thinking that I should do this more often, go out without Ross, be a person on my own instead of half a person waiting for him to make me whole.
Then Melanie went to the bar for another round, and I was standing on my own at the edge of the dance floor. I turned my head, stared across the room, and there he was.
Ross. At the far end, near the speakers, half hidden by the crowd but unmistakable because I could have found him blindfolded in a stadium. I knew his shape, the way he stood, the tilt of his head, the way his shoulders moved. I knew him better than I knew my reflection.
He wasn’t at Jamie’s flat. He wasn’t revising.
He was pressed against a girl I’d never seen before, his hands on her hips, his mouth on hers, kissing her like I didn’t exist.
My drink slipped. I caught it before it fell, but the vodka sloshed over my hand and on to the floor.
The cold shock of it on my fingers was the only thing keeping me upright because the rest of my body had gone numb.
A biological shutdown that happens when your brain sees something it can’t process and just turns the lights off for a second to buy itself time.
I stood there. The music kept going. The lights kept flashing.
People pushed past me, and I didn’t feel them.
I watched Ross’s hands move to the girl’s waist, watched her lean into him, watched his fingers press into the fabric of her top, and I thought: He touches me like that.
Exactly like that. The same hands, the same pressure, the same way of pulling someone closer like he can’t get enough.
I wasn’t special. That was the thought that cut through everything else. I wasn’t special. I could have been anyone.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough for Melanie to come back with the drinks and say something I didn’t hear, then follow my gaze across the room and go very still beside me.
Long enough for the song to change. Long enough for Ross to step back from the girl and laugh at something she said, then turn his head casually, scanning the room with that confidence he carried everywhere, and find me staring at him from six metres away.
His face dropped. It fell, like a mask coming off, and underneath was something raw and panicked that I’d never seen on him before. The girl said something to him, and he didn’t answer. He just gawped at me across the dance floor. I watched the colour leave his face, and I thought: Good.
I turned around and walked away.
It wasn’t dignified. I knocked someone’s elbow, and their drink went sideways.
They swore at me, and I didn’t stop. I shoved through the crowd, past the bar, down the corridor where the toilets were.
The fire exit was propped open with a crate, and I went through it and out into the car park behind the club where the air was freezing and smelled of bins and cigarettes.
I bent over with my hands on my knees and breathed and breathed and breathed.
The cold hit the back of my throat, and my eyes were streaming, but I wasn’t crying yet because the tears hadn’t caught up with the anger.
Because I was angry. Not heartbroken yet, that would come later, in bed at three in the morning with the lights off and my phone face down on the carpet – but furious. A white-hot fury that consumed me until I could taste it, bitter and metallic, like I’d bitten my tongue.
He’d lied to me. Looked me in the eye and told me he was revising, and then put his hands on someone else like I meant nothing to him.
Like three years of us – three years of everything I’d given him, every secret, every first, every night I’d spent tangled up with him in his single bed – could be ignored while he kissed a stranger in a nightclub on a Friday.
‘Kim!’
The fire door banged open behind me. Ross came through it at a half run, jacket in one hand, out of breath, face white in the street light. He stopped when he saw me and held up both hands like I was something dangerous.
‘Let me explain,’ he said.
‘Don’t.’
‘Kim, please—’
‘Don’t you dare.’ My voice came out low and nothing like my own. ‘Don’t you dare stand there and tell me you can explain that.’
‘It was a mistake.’ He came closer. One step, then another, hands still raised. ‘She means nothing. She’s nobody. I’d had too much to drink, and she came over. It was stupid, and I’m sorry. Kim, I’m so sorry.’
‘You told me you were revising.’
‘I know.’
‘You lied to my face.’
‘I know. I know I did, and I’m a prick, and I don’t deserve you, and I’ll do anything to fix this. Anything. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’
He was close enough now that I could smell him – aftershave and sweat and the sweet chemical fog of the club still clinging to his jacket. His eyes were wet. His hands were shaking. He looked wrecked, and I was glad. In that moment, I hated him so much that my vision blurred with it.
‘You can’t fix it,’ I said.
‘I can. I will.’
‘You had your hands on her.’
‘I know.’
‘Like she was yours.’
‘She’s not. You are. You’re the only person who’s mine, Kim, and I was an idiot. I swear to you it will never happen again. On my life. On everything. I love you, and I made a mistake, and I’m begging you to let me make it right.’
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to shove him backwards through the fire door and watch it slam in his face and walk away and never see him again. I wanted to be a woman who could cut someone off cleanly and walk out of the car park into the rest of her life without glancing back.
But that wasn’t who I was, and Ross knew it. Because Ross knew me better than anyone on earth. He knew exactly which strings to pull, which words to say, and how to stand close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his body without him touching me.
He lifted one hand and brushed a strand of hair off my face. I flinched, but I didn’t step back.
‘Please,’ he said. Quieter now. ‘Please, Kim.’
And something in me changed. I could feel it happening.
The anger didn’t leave. It stayed right where it was, hot and tight and pulsing.
But it folded into something else, something that wrapped around the love I still felt for him and fused with it until I couldn’t tell them apart.
I hated him. I wanted him. I couldn’t stand the sight of him and I couldn’t bear to let him walk away from me.
Because if he walked away, then the girl in the club would get him, and every other girl after her, and I’d be left with nothing but the knowledge that he’d chosen them over me.
I couldn’t survive that. The wanting was bad enough. The losing would kill me.
So I stayed. I let Ross put his arms around me, pressed my face into his chest, and I held on.
And neither of us said anything else because there was nothing else to say.
He’d cheated on me and lied about it, and I’d caught him in the act.
And instead of ending it, I’d let him pull me back in, and we both knew what that meant.
It meant he could do it again. It meant the rules had changed, and the new rules were: Ross does what he wants, and Kim forgives him, because the alternative is too frightening to face.
I hated him. I hated myself more.
But I didn’t let go.
That was the night I learned something about myself that I’ve carried ever since, buried so deep I almost forgot it was there.
That my love and my anger weren’t opposites.
They were the same thing wearing different faces, and the more one burned, the hotter the other got, until staying felt like self-destruction and leaving felt like dying, and I chose the destruction every single time.
I chose him. I always chose him.
Even when he gave me every reason not to.