Always You and Me

Chapter Eighteen Eleven Years Earlier

Chapter Eighteen

Eleven Years Earlier

‘Have you ever been in love?’

The question came out of nowhere. My hand wobbled, and the cat’s-eye-effect eyeliner took a detour that made me look like a circus clown. It was typical of Andie to suddenly turn an innocuous conversation into interview practice for her journalism course. It was all the more bizarre because the last question she’d asked was whether she could get away without wearing a bra under the strappy top she’d picked out for the party. Frankly, I was far happier discussing her boobs than my former love life.

My silence was a dead giveaway that she homed in on with unnerving accuracy. She was going to make an excellent journalist. She rolled over on my bed, where she’d been scrolling through her phone, and focused her attention on me. I hid as much of my face as I could behind a tissue as I wiped off the wonky eyeliner.

‘You have, haven’t you? You’ve been in love. How come you’ve never said anything about it before?’

Andie wriggled on her belly, commando fashion, to the edge of the mattress so she could better study my face. ‘Was it that Pete boy who you dated in first year, the one with the weird earlobes?’

Despite the intensity of her gaze, I smiled. ‘There was nothing wrong with his ears,’ I said loyally. I might not have been in love with my first-year boyfriend, but I was still willing to defend him – and hopefully throw Andie off course in the process.

I should have known better. She was relentless.

‘Nah. It can’t have been him. You weren’t even that sad when you two broke up.’

She was right. Neither of us had been when Pete and I went our separate ways.

As my best friend, who’d occupied the room next to mine in our student accommodation, there wasn’t much Andie and I hadn’t shared during our time at university. And yet, somehow, we had got almost to the end of our second year and hadn’t once ventured down this particular conversational avenue. Probably because I was pretty good at negotiating one-eighty-degree swerves whenever the topic came close.

‘Well, it definitely can’t have been that bartender bloke in the club we used to go to, because you said he was a weird kisser.’

‘I’m sure I never said that.’

‘You did,’ Andie said, pulling herself upright and crossing her legs. ‘You said his tongue was too big.’

I bit my lip to stop the smile, but it got out anyway. ‘So, according to you, I only go out with guys with peculiar body parts.’

‘Just reminding you how it went down,’ Andie said, tapping the side of her head with a forefinger. ‘Steel trap, you know. It’s going to come in handy when I’m a world-famous investigative journalist.’

That might have been the opportunity to redirect the conversation to Andie’s big glittering future, but I missed it by a whisker.

‘So, this guy you were in love with . . . where does he come into the picture? I thought you said you’d never dated anyone seriously from back home. Was he a holiday romance?’

For the life of me I didn’t know why I didn’t just lie and make up some steamy story about a summer fling under foreign skies with a smoking-hot local. Although Andie probably wouldn’t have believed me.

‘Come on, Lily,’ she urged, using the same wheedling tone that had got us into countless clubs and bars for free over the last two years. ‘Who was the guy who broke your heart?’

This time I waited until I’d reapplied my eyeliner before replying.

‘Who says my heart has ever been broken?’

Andie’s grin slowly slid away when something I hadn’t even realised had escaped must have shown in my eyes.

‘It’s okay, Lily,’ she said, sounding unexpectedly contrite. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Even though I do tell you absolutely everything.’

She did. I knew more about the guys she’d dated than I’d ever wanted to. I wasn’t a prude – far from it – but there were images burned into my brain that I’d probably never be able to erase, of her passion-fuelled relationships that had shorter sell-by dates than the milk in our fridge.

‘It was no one,’ I said after a long moment of internal debate. I knew Andie, she’d be hounding me all night for more information if I didn’t say something now. She’d follow me at the party like a determined stalker, convinced that was how good investigative journalists got their stories. For all I knew, it might very well be true.

‘It was the boy who lived next door to me.’

For a moment Andie looked a little disappointed at the cliché, but perhaps she caught a whiff of the wistfulness that still, even now, managed to creep into my voice whenever I thought about Josh . . . despite the fact that I tried very hard not to do so anymore.

‘Ahh . . . I see, the classic next-door neighbour shtick,’ she said, nodding wisely. ‘You fell in love when you were toddlers splashing around in the paddling pool, but he never knew you existed until you were sweet sixteen, when suddenly . . . bam . . . he was head over heels.’

‘He’d moved away by the time I was sixteen,’ I corrected. ‘And we were never a thing.’

She leant forward, balancing her weight on her forearms, positioning herself up in my grill. Her face was close enough to admire how carefully she’d applied her own make-up tonight. She’d definitely made a big effort for her blind date.

‘Oh, that’s even worse. Unrequited love. You never told him how you felt, but he still broke your tender teenage heart, didn’t he?’

‘You should be thinking about writing romantic fiction instead of becoming a journo,’ I told her, reaching for the black halter-neck top I was wearing to the party. ‘We were friends, that’s all. Really good friends. If my heart got hurt, it was only because, despite our good intentions, we never kept in touch after he moved away.’

Finally, I seemed to have told her a story that she could file away under the heading ‘Mildly Interesting, But Not At All Spicy’.

‘Oh, well. You never know who’ll be at the party tonight. Maybe my mystery guy will bring a mate with him. Or maybe there’ll be another bloke with an oversized body part who’ll take your fancy.’

I snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said.

The party was in full swing when we got there. We could hear the thumping throb of music before we’d even started walking up the hill from the bus stop.

We had to stop twice on the five-minute walk for Andie to slip out of her ridiculously high shoes and rub her pinching toes.

‘Why did you wear them if they hurt your feet that much?’ I asked reasonably.

She gave me a scowl as she tried to persuade the blood to return to her little toes. ‘Darren said his friend is really tall.’ She looked up and grinned mischievously from behind the fall of her blonde hair. ‘And fit. He’s super, super fit. Have I mentioned that yet?’

I gave an over-exaggerated, long-suffering sigh. ‘Only about a thousand times. Do you know anything else about him, other than the fact that your cousin thinks you’ll fancy the pants off him?’

Andie gave an uncaring shrug. ‘What else is there to know?’

‘Well, his name might be nice for starters. Or what he studies. Or what he’s into.’

She frowned as though faced with some really tough interview questions. ‘Erm, I think his name is John . . . or maybe Johnnie? And I’ve no idea what he’s studying. And as far as what he’s into . . .’ She checked her watch. ‘Well, I’m hoping in about ten minutes or so, the answer to that one is going to be “me”.’

‘You’re impossible,’ I said on a laugh, taking the bottles of cheap wine from her as she hopped on one leg to put her shoes back on. ‘Perhaps this one doesn’t want to be another notch on your bedpost.’

Andie paused for a moment, as though the absurdity of that statement deserved her full attention. She shook her head, making the silver hoops in her ears glint beneath the streetlight. ‘Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.’

But as extra insurance against rejection, she leant forward and jiggled her cleavage into position.

‘Poor bloke doesn’t stand a chance,’ I said, feeling almost sorry for her unsuspecting date. It was like watching a black widow spider close in on its prey.

The place was heaving and the front drive was already filled with an overflow of people clutching cans, bottles, or plastic beakers full of cheap plonk.

‘One day it would be nice to drink a wine that couldn’t double up as paint stripper,’ I said as I placed the bottles we’d brought with the dozens of others on the kitchen table.

I picked a random bottle and filled two plastic cups to the brim. Andie was still busy on her phone.

‘Is your cousin here already?’

She slid the mobile back into her jeans pocket and gave a nod before scoping out the room again.

‘He messaged about half an hour ago saying they’d arrived. But he’s not replied to my message since then and isn’t picking up his phone.’

‘He probably can’t hear it above the music,’ I grumbled, raising my voice to a shout to be heard.

‘Alright, grandma,’ Andie teased, downing half of her drink in a single gulp. ‘Shall we circulate and see if we can spot them?’ She was already heading out of the kitchen.

Andie didn’t need a wingman, she did just fine on her own – and she especially didn’t need one tonight, with her blind date already in the bag. Even so, I followed her into the jam-packed hallway. We had an unspoken pact to keep an eye out for each other. I knew her cousin had vouched for this unknown John bloke, but I wouldn’t be happy leaving her until I’d seen him myself. The guys went to university in another city and I didn’t know how well Darren knew him.

‘Over there,’ she said, turning and grabbing my elbow to ensure I was keeping up. ‘That’s Darren on the left by the window, and I’m guessing – or rather, hoping – the guy beside him with the broad shoulders and great bum is my date.’

I tried to follow the direction where she was looking, but unlike Andie, I wasn’t wearing skyscraper heels, and it was hard to see over the sea of heads bobbing up and down to the beat of the music. It was only when we were halfway across the room that the crowd thinned out enough for me to see where we were headed.

There were two figures standing beside the open window. Both had their backs to us. Andie’s cousin was in a pool of light but the person beside him was much harder to make out as they were half hidden in the shadows. All I could see for sure was that his hair was dark and that my friend’s assessment of his physique had been accurate. A t-shirt was stretched taut across a pair of muscular shoulders. His jeans were faded, fashionably ripped, and slung so low on his narrow hips I could read the brand name of the underpants he favoured. I had to agree that the bum they covered looked every bit as cute as Andie had claimed.

I was disappointed with myself at the sudden pang of something that felt an awful lot like envy. I’d never been one to go solely on a person’s looks, but even before this guy turned around, I was interested in him. And he wasn’t mine to fancy. He was Andie’s.

‘Hey, Darren,’ Andie called out, managing to find a segue between songs to make herself heard. Her cousin spun around, a broad grin splitting his face when he spotted her. He jabbed his companion in the ribs, who also turned.

Several things happened in that moment. I heard Andie’s appreciative ‘Phwoar’ as though it was coming from a great distance, even though she was right beside me. My knees suddenly turned to jelly, my feet froze to the ground, while the contents of my stomach considered making an unwelcome reappearance.

Andie didn’t seem to notice I was no longer following her. Her attention was only on the two figures by the window. She threw her arms around her cousin in an enormous hug, somehow managing to never once take her eyes off the guy standing beside him. The guy who was looking right beyond her and staring straight at me.

Andie disengaged herself from her cousin’s arms and turned her thousand-megawatt smile on his friend.

‘Hi there. I’m Andie, and I’m really hoping that you’re John.’

I don’t know if he even heard her because he was still looking pretty dazed. That made two of us.

‘Way to make a good impression, Andie,’ Darren teased, giving his cousin’s shoulder a playful shove. ‘I never said his name was John, it’s—’

‘Josh,’ I said, my voice infused with at least fifty different emotions.

Andie’s head whipped around faster than a tango dancer to study my face. It still felt frozen in shock. There were a hundred questions in her eyes, none of which I was capable of answering. Comprehension only dawned when Andie looked back at her blind date and saw the way his eyes were still locked on my face.

‘Fuck me,’ she said softly, catching on far more quickly than her cousin.

‘Do you two know each other, then?’ Darren asked, his hand gesturing between Josh and me.

It looked as though neither Josh nor I had the ability to construct a sentence, so it was left to Andie to educate him.

‘ Of course they know each other, dummy. Josh used to live next door to Lily.’

I had no idea how she’d worked it out so quickly, but if nothing else it proved she’d made an excellent career choice. She was going to be a great investigative journalist.

There were still about two yards separating Josh from me. And even though I’d lived through this scene countless times in my head, it wasn’t following any of the rules. We should be clenched in an enormous hug by now, or he should be spinning me around in his arms – although admittedly that would have been tricky, given the crowded room. Or we should have been kissing. The last was always a stretch, given there had only been one occasion when I’d felt the touch of his lips on mine, and that had been the day the Bakers had moved away, five years ago. But no one forgets their first kiss, do they? And Josh had been mine.

But in all my fantasies there had never been an awkward chasm between us that apparently neither of us knew how to bridge.

Gradually the dumbfounded expression on Josh’s face dissolved into a smile. It grew slowly, the way it always had done, reaching his eyes way after his lips were engaged.

‘Lily.’ He said my name like it was lyrics in a song, and it might as well have been, because suddenly my heart was singing. His voice was deeper than the last time I’d heard it. It was lower and somehow more soulful than it had been at seventeen.

‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ he said. ‘You look . . .’

My insecurities had a field day filling in the blanks in that sentence. Twenty looks very different to fifteen, and I felt raw and exposed as his eyes swept over me.

‘Older?’ I suggested, desperate to plug the gap.

‘Fantastic,’ he corrected. This time his eyes smiled first.

Around us the music was pounding, but in this corner of the room we were enveloped in a pocket of silence.

‘Why don’t you guys go and get us some more drinks,’ Andie suggested pointedly to her cousin.

Darren’s eyes dropped to her half-full plastic cup. ‘You’ve still got some,’ he said reasonably.

Andie lifted the cup and drained it in one. ‘And now I haven’t,’ she said, speaking to him volubly with her eyes. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be a language he was particularly familiar with.

‘I think they want to talk about us, so we have to leave,’ Josh said, his eyes twinkling in amusement.

Darren looked surprised. ‘Why didn’t they just say so then?’ he asked, taking the empty beaker from his cousin’s hands.

Josh looked down at my still largely full glass. No way was I knocking it back like Andie had. Something told me I needed to keep my wits about me.

‘Would you like a top-up?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, shivering as his fingers grazed mine when he took the wine from me.

‘You used to only drink cherry cola,’ he said, as though out of all the changes he’d seen, that one was the most remarkable.

‘There’s a six-pack of it in our fridge,’ Andie told him, giving Darren a gentle shove in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Don’t move,’ Josh said as he went to follow his friend.

I shook my head, my throat too full to allow me to speak.

Andie barely waited until they were out of earshot before letting out the kind of sound I thought only lottery winners made.

‘Bugger me, Lily. Can you believe this, because I bloody well can’t.’

I shook my head, having to forcibly tear my gaze away from Josh’s retreating back as he wove through the crowd. He was easy to follow, for he was taller than almost all the other guys in the room.

‘It’s as if you magicked him up from your past,’ Andie declared dramatically. ‘Like voodoo.’

I knew what she meant. What were the chances of the very person I’d been talking about just hours earlier turning up tonight?

‘Well, if we did cast a spell, it’s gone catastrophically wrong, hasn’t it?’

Andie’s pretty features scrunched into a frown. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s here for you, isn’t he? He’s your date, not mine. Darren told him about you, and he’s come all this way to meet you.’

‘You’re joking, right?’ Andie asked, as though it was her fate tonight to be surrounded by total idiots. ‘One look at you and I could have been standing there stark naked and he still wouldn’t have noticed me. Come on, Lily, it’s not been that long since you’ve hooked up that you’ve forgotten what it’s like when someone has eyes only for you.’

‘That’s not how it was.’

‘He couldn’t look away from you.’

‘He was just surprised to bump into me again.’

‘Yeah, well, from the way it looked I have a feeling you’ll be bumping into each other again in a totally different way pretty soon.’

In the split second before I refuted her words, my head filled with an image that was going to be hard to shake off. ‘Josh and I have only ever been friends. It was never anything more.’

‘Well, that was then, and this is now,’ Andie said emphatically, her voice dropping unnecessarily as she spotted the two men beginning to cut a path back towards us.

‘He doesn’t want me,’ Andie said, spelling it out in case I was still in any doubt. ‘And as much as I love you, I don’t want your sloppy seconds.’

Josh and Darren were too close now for me to put her straight on that one, so I just shot her a glance that she chose to ignore. She saw the smile Josh was giving me and stepped to one side, in every sense of the phrase, as he passed me a fresh glass of wine.

‘Go for it,’ she mouthed silently, before linking her arm through Darren’s and dragging him away until they were swallowed up by the crowd.

It was Josh who suggested leaving the party, but it was as though he’d read my mind – not too accurately, I hoped, because there was definitely some stuff in there I didn’t want him to know.

Having a conversation at the party had been impossible, and trying to lip-read what he was saying involved a little too much staring at his mouth for me to stay focused. After the fifth ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ Josh bent down, positioning his mouth so close to my ear, his words probably left fiery scorch marks on my skin.

‘Do you want to get out of here?’

I nodded, half terrified, half excited, at the thought of being alone with him, which was ridiculous considering the thousands of hours we’d spent in each other’s company in the past. But as Andie had so succinctly put it, that was then, this was now.

‘Will your friend be okay if we leave?’ Josh asked, which ought to have been foremost in my thoughts, rather than his. But then, he had come all this way to meet Andie. Perhaps that was still on his agenda?

‘We could ask her to come with us?’ I said, hoping he couldn’t see how little I wanted that to happen.

Josh shook his head, and a lock of hair fell on to his forehead and stayed there. I wanted to brush it back so badly, I had to ram my hand into the pocket of my jeans before I ended up embarrassing the hell out of myself.

‘I’d prefer it to be just you and me,’ Josh said, making my heart skip momentarily out of rhythm as he placed a hand at my waist to guide me through the crowded party. The black halter top was short, not quite meeting the low waistband of my faded jeans. Had his fingers ever touched that narrow strip of skin before, I wondered? I didn’t think they could have, because nothing about this felt in the least bit familiar or comfortable. It was old and yet at the same time very, very new.

Back in the hallway I couldn’t see Andie or Darren anywhere, so I reached for my mobile, immediately regretting the move when it made Josh remove the hand loitering at my waist.

It was too noisy to call her, so I rattled off a quick message. Her reply pinged back almost immediately.

Have fun. C U later. Use condoms. xx

‘What did she say?’ Josh asked. I’d shut the message down as fast as I could, but still couldn’t be sure he hadn’t glimpsed it on the screen. ‘Will she be okay on her own?’

I loved the fact that he was concerned about the welfare of someone he’d only just met, unless it really was Andie he was interested in after all. The idea that he could think of me in any way other than purely platonically still didn’t seem feasible.

My own feelings were far less complex. He was the boy who’d stolen my heart without having the faintest idea that a theft had taken place. Fifteen-year-old me had been surprisingly good at hiding what she felt. I just hoped that, five years later, I still remembered the technique.

The night air was a cooling balm that hit us the moment we left the house. The driveway was still crowded with partygoers so we pressed pause on any attempt at conversation until we began walking back down the hill.

‘It’s incredible finding you again,’ Josh said, his grin wide beneath the amber glow of the streetlamps.

‘I don’t think I was the one who was lost,’ I said, immediately regretting the unfiltered retort that I hadn’t been quick enough to catch.

He had the grace to look a little guilty. He bit his lower lip, leaving tiny white marks on the sensitive skin.

‘I guess I deserved that,’ he said.

‘I just thought we were going to try to stay in touch, that’s all.’ That was definitely my fifteen-year-old self speaking, but I was powerless to silence her.

‘I wanted to. I mean, I intended to, I really did. But you know . . . other things got in the way. And the longer I left it, the madder I knew you’d be that I’d not kept my word.’

‘You must be really scared about how I feel now, after five whole years have passed.’

His eyes weren’t serious, but his words were. ‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Fucking furious,’ I said, ruining it by breaking out into a grin. ‘I might never forgive you.’

His own smile was back, confident that I wouldn’t be mad at him for long, simply because I’d never been able to sustain it in the past.

‘It’ll give me something to work towards,’ he said, and as much as I tried to dismiss his words, they really made it sound as though seeing him tonight wasn’t going to be a one-time thing.

The walk back to the bus stop was filled with back-and-forth catch-up questions about our families. Josh seemed genuinely interested in how my parents were doing, and that scored him loads of points.

‘Who lives in our old house now?’ he asked, looking nostalgic as his thoughts went back to the first stable home he’d ever known.

‘A couple of solicitors moved in after your family sold it.’

‘Did they have kids?’ His question surprised me. I shook my head, my hair catching in the evening breeze and blowing around my face. I could feel his eyes on it.

‘No. They were an older couple. Why do you ask?’

He gave a shrug that tried to look casual and didn’t quite pull it off.

‘I don’t know. I guess I was wondering if you’d found anyone else to climb our tree with.’

I could play it cool. I could make him think he’d been easy to forget. But what was the point? We’d both know I was lying. ‘No. I never climbed our tree again after you left.’

He gave a slow nod, and something that hadn’t been there before began to glimmer in the dark.

We hadn’t discussed where we were heading, and it wasn’t until we reached the bottom of the hill that I thought to ask what he wanted to do. ‘We could go to a pub, if you like,’ I suggested. ‘There’s a fairly decent one not far from here.’

His nose wrinkled a little. ‘I’m not sure if that’s just swapping one noisy environment for another.’

I bit my lip, Andie’s message still very much in my head as I made an alternative suggestion. ‘Or we could get the bus back to my place. Everyone is out for the evening.’

His eyes went to mine.

‘Would you be okay with that? Are you comfortable with it just being us?’

I couldn’t think of a single guy I knew who’d bother asking me that. Suddenly the two-year age difference between Josh and the boys I usually dated was even more apparent.

‘More than okay,’ I said, wondering if I was being too obvious, but not really caring.

‘Then let’s do it,’ he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders in a purely companionable way.

There was a small parade of shops beside the bus stop, one of them a twenty-four-hour SPAR.

‘Shall we pick up something to drink?’ Josh asked, glancing at the brightly lit shop.

‘We probably should, unless you fancy cherry cola.’

His laugh was the same, but strangely more grown-up than it had been. So many changes. Uncovering them was like a treasure hunt, and I was an eager explorer.

Inside the shop I gravitated towards the special offer section, with the wines my student grant preferred, even if my palate didn’t. Josh however had gone to an entirely different section.

‘Do you like Merlot?’ he asked, holding up a bottle that cost four times more than the ones I’d been looking at.

‘I don’t know. How good is it at taking the enamel off your teeth? That’s usually the type I go for.’

That laugh again. If it wouldn’t have looked weird, I’d have taken out my phone and recorded it, just in case tonight was all I was ever going to get before he walked out of my life again.

He bought the bottle, refusing to allow me to pay anything towards it. He slipped it into the rucksack he’d collected from beneath a pile of coats at the party. As he closed the flap, I glimpsed a rolled-up sleeping bag and wondered where he’d be staying tonight.

The bus journey flew by. We went upstairs, even though the lower deck was practically empty. I climbed the steps first, glad I’d chosen to wear the jeans that fitted me better than all the others in my wardrobe. Josh was keeping up a constant flow of conversation, but it faltered as though he’d briefly lost his train of thought as he ascended the steps behind me.

The lounge in our house was quite frankly awful. The settees were lumpy and uncomfortable, and it didn’t matter how many colourful throws and scatter cushions we used to disguise them, they were still gross.

‘We could sit in here, if you like,’ I said, opening the door like a reluctant estate agent and showing him the bleak option, ‘or we could hang out in my room.’

It wasn’t as provocative as it sounded. My bedroom was on the ground floor and would have been the formal dining room of the house before the landlord converted it to a student rental. It was bigger than the other bedrooms, and had a fireplace and French doors that led on to a garden we did absolutely nothing with, so was kind of a jungle.

‘This is huge,’ Josh exclaimed, looking around in amazement at the room that housed a double bed, wardrobe, desk, and a small two-seater sofa bed. He crossed the room to stand before the French doors. ‘Do these open?’

‘If you can get past the stuck-on paint they do,’ I said, already heading to the kitchen for wine glasses.

By the time I returned he’d managed to open both the doors, allowing a warm summer breeze into the room. Something fragrant from the neighbour’s garden was in the air, suffusing the room with a soft musky aroma.

Josh opened the wine with a corkscrew on a penknife he plucked from his rucksack.

‘You still carry a penknife around with you?’ I asked, not sure why it made me happy to discover traits of the boy I’d known were still there.

The conversation and the wine flowed easily as we sipped on our drinks and travelled down the lanes of our memories. Every sentence seemed to start with a Do you remember when . . . I remembered it all. I always had, and yet for some reason I was surprised that Josh did too.

We sat side by side on the sofa bed my parents had bought – ‘in case you want to have guests,’ as they’d said at the time.

‘I think it was more to ensure that anyone staying overnight didn’t have to share my bed,’ I told Josh with a grin.

He looked oddly shocked at my words, before slowly shaking his head. ‘I keep forgetting that you’re all grown-up now. I keep thinking of you as still being fifteen.’

I blinked several times, not sure if I was brave enough to say the words, but knowing I couldn’t stop them from coming.

‘I’m not a kid anymore, Josh.’

I took a large gulp of Merlot, trying to drown the thought that I’d never felt less mature than I did right then, with his gaze on me. I’d caught him looking at me several times, and each time he did I was powerless to stop the breath from catching in my throat.

His eyes were on me now, lingering on my lips before dropping to my throat, which was swallowing convulsively, and then briefly dipping lower to the shadowy space between my breasts. If he looked any harder, I was pretty sure he’d be able to see my heart beating crazily beneath the fabric of my top.

I took yet another mouthful of wine, surprised to see the bottle was almost empty.

‘It’s so good to see you again, Lily,’ Josh said, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

Very deliberately I set down my wine glass and leaned a little closer towards him. What I wanted couldn’t have been any clearer, but just in case he was in any doubt, I ran my tongue over my lower lip.

His breath hitched. I heard it, even above the blood thundering in my ears.

Very slowly, as though he could neither believe he was doing this, nor stop himself, Josh reached out and threaded his fingers through my hair and cupped the back of my neck.

‘I don’t know if this is a good idea, Lily,’ he said, his voice suddenly hesitant.

His eyes were black, the pupils practically taking over the entire iris, and for the first time ever, I felt the kind of desire I thought only existed in romantic fiction.

‘I’m sure it is,’ I said, my voice hoarse. ‘It’s such a good idea. In fact, I think it’s the best one we’ve ever had.’

And before he had a chance to refute my words, I bridged the distance between us and brought my lips within an inch of his. Then I stopped. I didn’t want to have done all the work. I wanted him to want me too.

His lips crushed mine. There was no tentative teasing. There was no peck that subtly grew to become something deeper. It was nought to sixty and then more . . . so much more. His tongue found mine and I welcomed it as I leant into the kiss. My head was spinning, and it could have been the Merlot, but I was sure it was actually Josh. Always Josh. Forever Josh.