Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Ross and I had been together for three months, or maybe four – I’d lost count because I’d started measuring time differently.
Not in weeks or homework deadlines or how long until half term, but in firsts.
First kiss, in the school library. The first time he waited for me after last period and walked me most of the way home, peeling off two streets before mine so nobody would see.
The first time he rang me at half nine on a Tuesday and talked until my mum shouted up the stairs that she needed the phone.
First proper argument – about nothing, about whether I’d been flirting with someone at a party when I hadn’t even spoken to the boy in question – and then the first make up afterwards, which felt sweeter than any of the good bits that came before it.
I kept a list. Not written down, because that would have been mad, and if Lisa had found it I’d never have heard the end of it. But I kept it in my head, a running tally of evidence that what Ross and I had was different from what other people had. Special. Ours.
Nobody at school knew. That was part of it – the secret made everything more exciting, like the two of us existed in a separate room that nobody else could get into.
We didn’t hold hands in corridors. We didn’t sit together at lunch.
If someone mentioned his name, I’d shrug and say I didn’t really know him, and the lie made me smile inside.
Lisa thought I was being weird.
‘You’re miles away again,’ she said one lunchtime, waving a chip in front of my face. ‘You’ve gone all dreamy. Are you on something?’
‘I’m just tired,’ I said. ‘Didn’t sleep well.’
‘You never sleep well lately.’ She bit the chip in half and studied me. ‘Is there a boy?’
My stomach flipped. ‘No.’
‘Liar.’
‘There’s no boy, Lisa.’
She let it go, but she gave me one of those looks – brow furrowed, lips pressed together, the glare she saved for when she knew I was holding something back and was deciding whether to push.
Lisa was good at pushing. She’d been my best friend since year seven, and she could read me better than anyone, which was exactly why I couldn’t tell her.
If I told Lisa, the secret would stop being mine and Ross’s.
It would become gossip, currency, something to be picked apart and analysed over a shared bag of crisps in her bedroom.
I didn’t want that. I wanted to keep it whole.
So I kept my mouth shut. I smiled at her, changed the subject, and the warmth in my chest spread a little further because even the lying felt like proof. You only protect something this fiercely when it matters.
That was how I thought back then.
Ross was – I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like every other girl talking about every other boy.
He was different. Not different in the ways that mattered, probably, looking back with over twenty years of distance, but different in the way he made me feel, which at fifteen was the only measurement I had.
He listened properly, leaning forward, watching my mouth while I spoke.
He asked questions. He remembered answers.
He told me things about himself – his dad leaving, his mum’s drinking, the cold feeling he got in the house when she’d been on the wine all afternoon – that he swore he’d never told anybody else, and I believed him because I wanted to, and because his expression when he said it was too raw to be practised.
I was in deep. I knew it, and I didn’t care.
‘You’re doing it again,’ Lisa said, a week later.
We were in the canteen, and I’d zoned out while she was talking about her mum’s new boyfriend.
‘Honestly, Kim, it’s like talking to a brick wall.’
‘Sorry. Sorry, I was thinking about the art project.’
‘You were not thinking about the art project.’
I laughed. She laughed. And for a second I almost told her – the words were right there, sitting on my tongue – but then the canteen doors swung open and Ross walked in with two of his mates, and I bit down on the urge so fast I almost felt my teeth click.
He didn’t glance at me. That was the rule. In public, we were nothing to each other – two people who went to the same school, passed each other in corridors without a flicker. It drove me slightly mad, in the best way. The gap between what everyone else saw and what I knew was true felt like power.
Looking back, I think it also felt like training.
Training for what, I didn’t ask myself at the time. But I was learning, without realising it, that love and secrecy could live in the same body, and that hiding something didn’t make it less real. If anything, it made it more real. Brighter. More precious. More mine.
I should have wondered why he wanted to hide it at all.
It was a Friday – I remember that much because Lisa’s mum was out and we were at Lisa’s house, and Lisa’s mum only went out on Fridays because she had a standing arrangement with a woman from her aerobics class.
Lisa and I were supposed to be revising, which meant we’d spread our folders across the kitchen table, opened a packet of Hobnobs, and accomplished precisely nothing for the first forty-five minutes. Then the doorbell went.
‘That’ll be Sam,’ Lisa said, already standing.
‘Sam?’
‘Sam Foster. From English. He said he might come over.’
‘You didn’t mention that.’
‘Didn’t I?’
She was halfway to the front door, and I heard her open it, and then I heard a voice that wasn’t Sam Foster’s, and my stomach dropped through the floor.
Ross walked into the kitchen behind Lisa, hands in his pockets, smiling, as if turning up at my best friend’s house on a Friday evening was the most natural thing in the world. Sam was behind him, seeming sheepish.
‘All right?’ Ross said. To both of us. Casually.
I watched his gaze skim over me without pausing, and for a second, something cold moved through my chest.
Then he sat. Lisa got Cokes from the fridge, Sam said something about the maths homework, and the evening arranged itself around me like a stage set I hadn’t agreed to be in.
I told myself it was fine. He was being careful, that was all.
The rule was the rule. In public, we were strangers, and Lisa’s kitchen counted as public because Lisa didn’t know.
So I sat opposite him and smiled at Sam’s jokes, ate Hobnobs, and pretended I was just another person at the table.
But under my skin, my blood was humming because he was there, right there, close enough to touch if I reached across the biscuit packet.
It was maybe an hour in when I saw it.
Lisa was talking to Sam about some film she’d watched, gesturing with a Hobnob, animated and loud in the way Lisa always was when she was enjoying herself.
I was half listening, half watching Ross’s hands on the table – his fingers tracing a slow, absent circle on the wood – when something shifted under the table and Lisa’s sentence caught, just for a fraction of a second, a tiny hiccup in the flow of words that nobody would have noticed unless they were looking for it.
I was looking for it. I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe, or the low alert that had been running in the background since Ross walked through the door without warning me first.
I glanced down.
It was quick – barely a second – the tablecloth was in the way, and I couldn’t be sure of what I was seeing.
But I swore Ross’s foot was resting against Lisa’s.
Not the way feet collide under a crowded kitchen table.
Deliberately. The side of his trainer pressed against the side of her sock, and neither of them moved away.
My blood went cold.
I lifted my head. Ross was watching Sam, nodding at something, expression completely neutral. Lisa was still talking, the Hobnob in her hand, her cheeks maybe slightly pink, but that could have been the warm kitchen. Neither of them looked at me. Neither of them looked at each other.
And just like that, the foot was gone. Ross shifted in his chair and reached for his Coke, and whatever I’d seen – or thought I’d seen – dissolved into four teenagers sitting around a table.
I couldn’t tell whether it had been real or whether my brain had built it from nothing because I was so wired, so watchful, so desperate for every tiny detail of Ross’s body to mean something.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur.
I laughed when people laughed. I finished my revision notes.
I said goodbye to Ross and Sam at the door without touching him, without a glance, without anything, because that was the rule, and the rule was there for a reason, and I was a good secret-keeper, wasn’t I?
Lisa closed the door and turned to me.
‘Ross Mercer’s fit,’ she said. Grinning.
My stomach lurched. ‘Is he?’
‘Come on. You’ve got eyes.’
‘He’s all right,’ I said.
It came out raspy, and Lisa raised an eyebrow. Then she shrugged and went to put the kettle on, and the moment slid away from both of us.
I didn’t sleep that night.
I lay in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin and replayed it over and over – the foot, the hiccup, the pink in Lisa’s cheeks – trying to decide if I’d seen something real or invented something terrible.
I had that sick, jittery feeling you get when you know something bad might be true but you haven’t proved it yet, so you can still choose not to believe it.
I chose not to believe it.
The next day, I rang Ross from the payphone at the end of my road, ten pence in the slot, heart thudding so hard I felt it in my jaw.
‘I need to ask you something,’ I said.
‘Go on then.’
‘Last night. At Lisa’s. Were you – was there something going on? Under the table. With your foot and hers.’
Silence. One second, two. Then he laughed a warm, slightly baffled laugh, the sound a person makes when someone has said something genuinely absurd.
‘What are you on about?’
‘I saw it, Ross.’
‘You saw what? My foot was under the table because that’s where feet go, Kim. I wasn’t playing bloody footsie with your mate, for God’s sake.’
‘It looked—’
‘It looked like nothing, because it was nothing.’ His voice softened.
It sounded as though he shifted the phone against his ear, twinned with the rustle of fabric, and I could picture him so clearly – leaning on the wall in the hallway, one hand in his pocket, his dark hair falling forward.
‘Kim. Listen to me. You’re imagining things. You’re making something out of nothing because that’s what you do when you’re anxious, and I get it, I do, but there is nothing going on with me and Lisa. All right?’
I wanted to push. I wanted to say that Lisa’s cheek had flushed and her words had stumbled, and his foot had been too still beside hers, resting there with pressure that doesn’t happen by accident.
But he sounded so sure. So calm. So gently confused by the accusation that my certainty crumbled, and in its place came something worse – shame.
Hot, prickling shame, because I was being that girl, the jealous girlfriend who sees threats everywhere, who can’t enjoy a nice evening without inventing a crisis.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘All right. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. Just trust me.’
Trust me. Delivered with such confidence.
I took those words and held them close, and I let them smooth over the ugly thing I’d seen, or thought I’d seen.
By the time I hung up the phone and walked home, I’d already started rewriting the evening in my head.
The foot was accidental. The blush was the warm kitchen.
The stumble in Lisa’s voice was a crumb of Hobnob caught in her throat.
Nothing had happened, because Ross said so, and Ross wouldn’t lie to me, because what we had was special.
I believed him because I wanted to.
But later, when it was too late, I’d learn my lesson.