The Spark

Chapter 1.

Then

He felt as strongly as I did. Looking back, that was always the best part. With Jamie, it was never one-sided. He loved me in a way that felt like we’d been matched by the universe, the chemistry from colliding stars.

We’d met at high school. A spark straight away, even though we weren’t yet teenagers. We lived two streets apart, though we may as well have been under one roof. We walked to school side by side, pretended to study together at night, learnt to love music in his bedroom, one earphone each. He taught me how to play cards and flirt. I liked to make him laugh till he had to leave the room. We were each other’s oxygen, inseparable to the point that teachers commented. His parents thought it was adorable. My mother declared us insufferable.

We kissed for the first time on my fifteenth birthday – back row of the cinema, mouths hot and hesitant and shy. Exactly two years after that, we slept together – though everyone already assumed we’d long since done the deed. That had made it even better, because the holding out was a secret we shared. Twenty-four months of snatched glances and sweet anticipation, squeezed hands and whispered compliments.

The moment itself, in the firm familiarity of Jamie’s bed and his arms, was exactly how I’d imagined. The months of longing made everything magical. Meaningful and assured, my heart turning to helium.

In our sixth-form yearbook, we were named Couple most likely to get married . We got a lot of stick for that, but we didn’t care.

The day of our A-level results, Jamie, Lara and I took a bottle of cava to the riverside in the shadows of the Tudor buildings backing onto Elm Hill.

Finding a sun-worn patch of grass, we lifted our faces to the hot blue sky. Above our heads, doves sailed serenely between the pantiled roofs. Down on the river, people were messing about in hired punts. We could hear the splash of struck water, the occasional blurt of a disgruntled goose.

Next to me, Jamie reached for my hand. My mind galloped, the stress of results day finally starting to ebb away. Our future was a gift I’d been waiting for for years, and now it was here, moments from being unwrapped.

Lara popped the cava cork. My best friend, my fiercest ally. I’d known her since day one of primary school. ‘Freedom,’ she declared, then passed the bottle to me.

‘Freedom.’ I drank, the bubbles tart on my tongue, before handing it to Jamie.

‘Four A-stars.’ Lara looked at Jamie. ‘Cheers for showing us all up.’

He snapped the head off a daisy and flicked it at her.

Lara had spent the past few years rebelling hard and barely studying. But she’d done better than me and only marginally worse than Jamie. She was just naturally bright like that.

‘Your mum and dad will be so proud,’ I said to Jamie.

Jamie could have done anything, gone anywhere. We all knew it. He’d wanted to be an architect since he was old enough to ask where buildings came from.

He groaned. ‘They still want to take me out for dinner tonight.’

‘Just you?’ Lara said. ‘Not Neve too?’

I shot Lara a look. ‘You should go,’ I told him.

He shook his head, lay back on the grass. ‘They’ll only lecture me.’

About how you’re ruining your life, staying here with me.

Jamie’s father had made his fortune in real estate six years earlier, and now he had money to lavish on his sons, and grand ambitions for Jamie, his youngest. Russell Group university, exotic travel, well-connected friends and acquaintances, members’ clubs. First-class and five-star everything. Essentially, Jamie was destined to become a clone of Harry, his older brother.

‘I’m not going to dinner with them,’ Jamie said, rolling towards me, fixing me with his lodestone eyes. No-one could spellbind me with their gaze the way Jamie could.

Lara tilted her head. ‘I think you’re the only person I know who’s more stubborn than me.’

I wasn’t sure I agreed. Jamie was principled, not stubborn – though I knew Lara would say there wasn’t a difference.

We passed the cava bottle between us, getting steadily tipsier as the grass drank in damp and the sky grew dark. We made the short walk into the city centre, dumping the empty bottle in a bin. I wished, afterwards, that we hadn’t thrown it away.

The three of us stayed out till the early hours, moving from bar to bar. Jamie’s hand was around my waist the whole night. Our phones ran out of battery. Lara left us to go to a party with a boy she’d just met. Eventually, as dawn spilled like milk over the church spires and rooftops, Jamie and I found ourselves kissing against the bowed wall of an alleyway. The prospect of our future burned in my mind like the rising sun. We stumbled the two miles back to his mum and dad’s house, anaesthetised by booze.

We wobbled upstairs to his bedroom. Shared a pint of water, kissed, had sex with our clothes still on. We gasped each other’s names again and again as the bed rocked and squeaked beneath us.

Twice, I saw the light go on in the hallway. Heard the creak of a floorboard, then muffled voices.

It was only later that I realised how loud we’d been. How disrespectful. That I’d given his parents another reason to loathe me, if they didn’t have enough already.

I woke late and alone. Sitting up, head thrumming, I could hear voices again. Only this time, they weren’t muffled.

Sunlight was pouring like warm water through a gap in the curtains. I craved fresh air. Jamie’s room was stacked high with half-packed cardboard boxes, the precursor to his parents’ forthcoming move to Putney. Jamie’s grandfather had died that spring, after years of needing constant care, so now his parents were fulfilling a long-held ambition to move to London.

They had wanted Jamie to move there too. But Jamie knew I couldn’t afford to go to uni in London. So he’d told his parents he wanted to study architecture in Norwich, and move into a house with me. We’d been together three years by then – but what they’d once thought adorable had turned into a cause for concern. They kept sitting him down, asking if he was sure. Chris, his dad, even took him out for beers and reminded him there were ‘lots of women’ out there. He asked Harry to talk sense into him.

I’d never asked Jamie to stay. I wouldn’t have. I wanted the best for him, too.

They had taken all his posters down. The walls were now scarred with smudges of Blu Tack. I felt a twinge of sadness that I would probably never see this room again. The room where we’d fallen in love. Where we’d spent so many hours laughing, touching, kissing. Planning all the ways in which we’d stay together for ever.

Eventually, the door opened and Jamie walked in, carrying something under his arm. He set it down, then sat heavily on the edge of the bed. I could see the back of his neck had flushed red, the way it did whenever he was upset.

I leaned over to see what it was. A painting – though I didn’t recognise it. It looked American, depicted four people in a diner after dark. It had a desolate, almost eerie aura, and I loved it instantly, even though I didn’t understand it.

‘They all waited for me at the restaurant last night,’ Jamie said eventually, flatly. His light brown hair was damp, indicating he’d already showered. He smelt of Lynx and toothpaste. ‘My grandma was there. She’d been wanting to give me this, to say congratulations.’ He gestured to the painting. ‘It was my grandad’s. He knew how much I loved it.’

I realised how it must have looked: that I’d encouraged him to stay out drinking last night. Sod your parents, scrap your plans, you only live once . Not only that, but they’d had to listen to us too, when we finally stumbled home. We’d been so thoughtless.

But the truth was, I loved Jamie’s family. I envied them. I enjoyed feeling, even for just a few snatched moments every now and then, that I was somehow a part of what they had.

‘Guess what Dad just told me,’ Jamie said.

An impossible challenge. I waited.

‘He bought a flat, a couple of months ago. In London. Soho. For me to live in.’

I didn’t say anything, though I felt ribbons of disquiet kinking through me.

‘Kind of like . . . a leg-up,’ he said.

Not to me. A leg-up was Lara being awarded money from a hardship fund so she could go to uni. Being bought a flat was... a lottery win.

They’d done the same for his brother Harry, helped him out with an apartment in Zurich, where he now lived and worked as a banker. He was ten years older than Jamie, and I’d only met him once, a few years earlier. I could only remember that he smelt very strongly of tobacco.

Still. His parents having money wasn’t Jamie’s fault. I’d known him when they were struggling financially, too.

‘A flat in Soho sounds... pretty amazing.’ I reached out and stroked the back of his neck. His skin was warm and smooth as a pebble on a beach. He arched against me slightly, the tension sinking from his shoulders.

‘Money’s not everything, Neve.’

I was pretty sure only people with money said stuff like that. But I let it slide.

‘I mean, yeah. London could be good. But they’re missing one massive thing.’

‘What?’ I whispered.

‘I wouldn’t have you.’

This could only mean that me living in that flat with him was explicitly Not An Option. Or possibly conditional of the whole arrangement.

‘I want to be with you,’ he said. ‘Let’s build a life here.’

‘Don’t sacrifice anything for me.’

‘I won’t. I’m not. I love you.’

I leaned forward and kissed him, felt him shiver. ‘What does it mean?’

‘What?’

‘The painting.’

‘Grandad said... it was about loneliness. Or maybe fear. It was painted during the war.’

I kissed him again. ‘Your parents think I’m holding you back.’

‘I don’t care. I love you. I love you, Neve.’

I slid my hand inside his dressing gown and felt him inhale, breath sharp with pleasure as my fingers skated over his skin. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to show him, again, just how much I loved him.

People kept telling me it was impossible that, aged eighteen, I’d found the person I wanted to spend my life with.

And yet, here we were.

‘It’s you and me, Neve, for ever.’ The words slid from his mouth into mine. They tasted so good, exactly what I wanted to hear.

‘For ever,’ I breathed back.