Chapter 18 #2
‘You all right?’ Jacob murmured next to me, hoisting his camera bag further up one shoulder as the queue inched forwards.
‘Fine,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. Jacob’s fingers found mine, giving them a squeeze that said I’m here. I smiled at him, message gratefully received, albeit doing next to nothing to still my rapidly beating heart.
As soon as I saw him, it felt like someone had tied a ten-tonne weight around my heart and thrown it overboard, my fingers tightening so hard in Jacob’s that I heard him suck his breath in sharply between his teeth.
There he was. Stood on the cracked top step of the community centre dressed all in black.
Black shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal a hint of olive skin, black trousers, black hair in its normal unruly tangle that on anyone else would look scruffy but on him, looked just right. Perfect, in fact.
Luca’s eyes flickered down the line, a brief nod or smile for someone he recognised, before catching on mine.
His smile dropped, like a storm cloud passing in front of the sun, and my chest stung in response.
I watched as a thousand emotions passed across his face, rippling the muscles along his jawline.
Surprise, as if he wasn’t 100% sure I would come tonight.
Betrayal. Anger. Pain. That last one made me look down at my feet for a second, shame and regret flooding over me as I was hit with the memory of him stood in that doorway, the remnants of whatever had been between us lying broken at his feet.
By the time I looked up again, Luca had turned sharply on his heel, muttering something in Ivan’s ear.
Ivan’s eyes found me in the queue; he gave a brisk nod of understanding and then Luca was gone, ducking inside the hall just as we reached the stone steps.
‘Aha, the woman that made it all happen,’ Ivan announced grandly, holding both arms open wide and pulling me in for a hug.
‘Hardly,’ I mumbled into the bobbly knit of his cardigan, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
‘Luca just had to .?.?.’ Ivan threw his thumb vaguely over one shoulder, eyes rolling heavenward as though searching for a plausible end to that sentence. Clearly coming up short, he turned to greet my mum. ‘And this must be the infamous Ms Thompson?’
‘Oh gosh, what’s she been telling you?’ I heard Mum titter behind me as Jacob and I stepped inside.
‘I’m sorry, have we come to the right place?
’ Jacob let out a low whistle, his head performing a slow one-eighty from shoulder to shoulder as he gawked at our surroundings.
The hall was packed. Neat rows of mismatched chairs on either side of a makeshift aisle were already filling up, the air thick with a heady cocktail of one too many perfumes which, while a little overwhelming in such a small space, did a good job of hiding the damp smell.
Rainbow-coloured bunting crisscrossed from one side of the hall to the other, the lights turned down low enough to reveal a canopy of a thousand glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the roof above us.
‘And they say you can’t polish a turd. Well, never have I seen a more beautiful, sparkly turd in all my life!’ Jacob declared, the shutter of his camera firing like a machine gun. He was right. It was beautiful.
‘And to think they want to close this place down,’ someone tutted to my right.
I turned to see a woman with a 1960s hairdo that looked highly flammable and a practical button-down shirt dress.
From the framed photograph on Derek’s desk, I recognised her to be his wife.
Derek was stood beside her sporting the most hideous brown suit and yellow shirt combination that I had ever seen, clutching a paper plate piled high with beige food.
‘Yes, terrible. Truly terrible,’ he agreed, doing an uncanny impression of a turkey with the skin under his chin as he shook his head so vigorously that a bit of whatever he’d just stuffed into his mouth flew through the air, landing on the back of a poor unsuspecting passer-by.
‘When I heard that their funding had been cut, I told my team to drop everything. This was the number one priority.’ Number one priority, my arse.
I pressed my lips tightly together as I pulled my notebook out of my bag, feeling a familiar jolt of electricity as I ran my fingers over the blank page.
The thrill I always got whenever I started a new story, of not knowing where it might take me.
But there was only one ending that I was interested in tonight.
Even when I wasn’t looking at him, I knew where Luca was at all times.
Could feel his presence as he moved about the hall, smiling and mingling with everyone but me.
His lashes splayed across his cheeks, his eyes catching mine over the shoulder of a woman in a cherry-red kimono, as if he could feel it too.
This maddening, undeniable pull between us, as though both our hearts were tied to either end of a fishing line.
A frown burrowed itself into his forehead and he looked away again.
‘So stubborn,’ I muttered angrily to myself, cursing Luca’s refusal to meet me halfway.
‘Sounds like someone else I know.’ Jacob lifted his camera away from his face for a second to give me a knowing look.
I scowled at him, clicking the top of my pen up and down, up and down, as I watched the kimono-wearing woman turn and hurry over to where two young boys were passing a can of Coke back and forth between them with the saucer-eyed, lip-licking look of two children who’d already consumed far too much sugar.
‘Well, go on then,’ Jacob urged, giving me a firm shove in the square of my back that sent me stumbling forwards. Luca’s jaw tensed as he saw me approaching, turning in a wild, desperate circle before tagging onto a group of people to his right.
‘So sorry to interrupt, but do you mind if I borrow this one for a second?’ My hand clamped down on Luca’s forearm, his whole body going rigid at my touch.
‘I’m actually in the middle of something,’ Luca said tightly, still refusing to address me directly. The woman to his left peered up at him, with clearly no idea who he was.
‘Just one second,’ I repeated, teeth clenched as I dragged him away from the group, heart pounding from the effort. Or maybe it was the feeling of his skin against mine. Warm and smooth and oh so familiar.
‘What?’ he said briskly, snatching his arm free.
‘I thought we should talk.’
‘About what?’
I sighed. So, he was playing the let’s-pretend-it-never-happened card. Fair enough. My own version was so dog-eared and tattered from overuse that it was barely discernible these days.
‘About us.’
‘Us?’
It was said quickly, but I still felt the kick.
The mocking undertone that kids used to tease their friends who still believed in Father Christmas.
A man in a pink shirt walked past, clapping Luca on the back in greeting.
Luca’s face broke into a smile, that gorgeous, crooked smile that still turned my insides to liquid, the one I used to be able to draw from him so easily.
God, what I’d give for him to smile at me like that again.
But it vanished as soon as the man went to find his seat, his face hardening when he turned back to me.
‘Yes, you and me,’ I pressed gently.
Luca sighed. ‘There is no you and me, Jenny. There never was. I realise that now.’
‘That’s just not true.’ I took a small step forward, my hand reaching for his arm, but he recoiled, colliding with a chair in his haste to keep that physical boundary between us.
My hand dropped uselessly by my side, the ache that had taken root since I saw Luca stood in the hospital doorway, fingers clenched around that cellophane-wrapped bouquet, burying an inch deeper into my chest. ‘I was going to tell you Luca, truly I was. ’
‘No, you weren’t.’ He shook his head with the pained conviction of someone who’d been here before. Who’d lived through it once and vowed to never do so again. The unspoken comparison to Rachel made me wince.
‘I wanted to. I just .?.?.’ My voice trailed off, a fierce, desperate need to correct this misplaced belief he had about himself suddenly more important than finishing that sentence.
‘It was never a question of you not being enough, Luca. You are enough, I want you to know that. I need you to know that.’
Luca scoffed, scuffing his shoe against the floor. ‘Could have fooled me.’
He turned to leave but I grabbed his hand, afraid of what it might mean to watch him walk away from this thing we’d both been cradling so carefully between us. This maddening, beautiful, petrifying thing, which I realised in that moment I didn’t want to end.
‘Luca, please ,’ I begged, my grip tightening around his wrist. I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person so much when they were standing right in front of you.
But this hard-faced, stony-eyed man looking back at me was not the Luca that I knew.
I missed that Luca. The one who annoyed me at least fifteen times a day.
Who used to smile whenever he saw me, his eyes sparking with something hot and fiery.
The one I could feel slipping away from me.
‘I can’t do this again, Jenny,’ he hissed fiercely, his eyes like two flames when they finally met mine.
Two dwindling flames on the verge of being snuffed out.
‘I can’t open my heart to someone, trust them with the deepest, darkest parts of myself, only to learn that their heart belongs to someone else.
’ His voice was frayed, painful. A bitter cocktail of regret and guilt burnt the back of my throat as I watched Luca’s fingers rake his hair back from his face.
God, that beautiful, perfect face. It looked broken, hardened in places it shouldn’t be.
‘I have to protect myself, Jenny, and I’m not about to stand here and beg you to pick me, because that’s not fair. To you. To me. To any of us.’