Prologue #2
‘Dominic Rock?’ I’m frowning in puzzlement.
Dominic Rock is the son of our neighbours, who are also close friends of my parents.
He was – is – one year older than me but when we were kids he was always a lot smaller than me – and nearly everyone else of our age – and therefore sarcastically nicknamed The Rock by pretty much our whole village.
He was also a boy of physical contradictions: blond hair but dark eyes and tanned skin; very good at football despite being so much shorter and skinnier than most other boys his age; fairly nerdy-looking but really naughty (in a cheeky way, never a mean way).
What he was not was a very attractive tall, dark, handsome man.
‘Erm, you’ve grown,’ I say, too mind-blown to find any proper conversation.
He laughs. Quite a lot. Possibly I overemphasised the grown. I laugh too, because his laugh is extremely infectious.
‘So have you,’ he says when he’s finished chuckling.
I smile at him. ‘Very true.’ I haven’t grown as much as he has, though. I mean I’m definitely still recognisably me.
‘So at the risk of sounding repetitive, what are you up to now?’ he asks.
‘Oh yes, I forgot you asked that. When was the last time we saw each other?’
‘I think just before you went to Italy. Your parents’ leaving party.’
My mum’s Italian, and when my brothers and I were little she used to say quite regularly that she’d like us all to live in Italy for a few years as a family.
My dad managed to get a work transfer to Milan when I was fourteen and we all moved over there, renting out our house here.
Mum’s from Sicily but has a lot of friends in Milan, and we all loved it there.
My older brother Vinny and I decided to go to uni in England, though (I think one of those grass-is-greener feelings), so Mum and Dad moved back here three years ago, a year after I left school and came back for uni, in time for my younger brother, Antonio, who’s four years younger than me, to start his GCSEs here.
I don’t remember Dominic being at that leaving party. But in those days he wasn’t particularly memorable. Now I imagine he gets remembered all the time.
‘Good memory. I did history at uni and have just started work as a teacher at a big comprehensive in London and I love it,’ I tell him. ‘What about you?’
‘I can imagine you being an amazing teacher,’ he tells me, which makes me smile. ‘I’m doing something much less inspiring. Law.’
‘Hey, no, that isn’t uninspiring,’ I say. ‘Everyone needs lawyers.’
He laughs and I laugh too, even though that definitely wasn’t funny. Apparently we’re easily amused by each other.
As we shuffle along with the others in the food queue, we begin to share anecdotes about work, and continue to find each other hilarious. It’s definitely not what we’re saying; it must be the way we’re saying it. And maybe the fact that certainly from my side I find him hugely attractive.
When someone shouts, ‘Fried onions?’ right in front of us, we both jump and blink.
Oh. We’re at the front of the queue and we have hot-dog-related decisions to make.
We both go for fried onions, ketchup and mustard.
‘Wow, we have very similar condiment tastes,’ Dominic observes.
‘We do,’ I agree, and obviously that makes us both laugh again. We are apparently extremely easily amused by now, and we’ve barely drunk anything.
We wander to a far corner of the garden and sit down on a bench to eat.
‘I love it here,’ I tell him. ‘So quiet, so many lovely trees. So very different from London. How often do you come back home now?’ I don’t even know where he lives, actually, but somehow I’m assuming London because I have this we-were-meant-to-meet feeling, like of course he lives near me and we’ll be able to see each other again.
And again. I feel… well, I feel as though I could genuinely be experiencing the beginnings of what is effectively love at first sight.
I mean, it obviously isn’t first sight, but it might as well be, in that I didn’t recognise him and I’ve never seen adult Dominic before.
He begins to speak and then, incredibly annoyingly, we’re interrupted by my brother Vinny, who plonks himself down between us, turning his head side to side to beam at us both.
Vinny, it turns out, does know that Dominic is the Dominic Rock from our childhood, because they’ve played village football together on and off over the years and meet at the pub sometimes.
I love Vinny. I really do. I mean, of course I do: he’s my brother.
But he isn’t just a regular brother; he’s a great brother.
Two years older than me, always kind, always funny, always supportive.
You couldn’t ask for better. So I properly love him.
What I could ask for, though, right now, is for him to be somewhere else.
But he isn’t. He’s here, sitting between me and the insanely hot adult Dominic, chatting away to us both about all sorts.
And that is a thing about Vinny. He’s never short of conversation.
Another thing is that he attracts groups of friends around him. Soon, others have joined us, pulling up chairs, or standing balancing their drinks and food awkwardly.
Noticing that, Vinny gets up to bring a couple of smallish wooden garden tables over to accommodate people’s plates and glasses, before reinserting himself between me and Dominic.
And before long, our corner of the garden is full of every single party guest under thirty.
And it’s fun, it really is; it’s just that I was very much enjoying talking alone to Dominic, and I might not get another chance to.
Although… never say never. I can’t help myself glancing in his direction quite often, especially when someone says something I find very funny, or odd, and – gratifyingly – every single time I glance at him he’s glancing at me at the exact same moment, so we share a lot of little smiles, like we have in-jokes just for us.
Which makes me almost wriggle with enjoyment when I think about it.
I also wonder occasionally what’s happening to me.
I don’t think I’ve ever before been this attracted to anyone straight off.
As the evening continues, people begin to move over towards the house, where the older generation have started dancing to the music that my mum has blaring out of a speaker linked to her phone. Her playlist is… eclectic. But a lot of fun.
I do, on almost all other occasions, love dancing, but right now I just want everyone else to go and dance while I stay here alone with Dominic, so that we can resume our conversation, but apparently that’s a no-goer, because people are pulling our hands to persuade us to stand up and join them.
Fortunately, the first song is Bryan Adams’s ‘Everything I Do (I Do It for You)’, and everyone starts doing exaggerated smoochy dancing, and it seems very natural for Dominic to bow very deeply and flourishingly in front of me and draw me into his arms.
We start off laughing and dancing as sillily as everyone else, but then, somehow, our swaying morphs into something more serious, and it’s like everyone else fades away.
And it turns out that this is just as good as sitting talking on the bench.
We’re still having a one-on-one conversation, it’s just that this time we’re using our bodies as language, rather than words.
The way he dances is kind of masterful (as in he is definitely leading me), but considerate (as in if I didn’t want to follow where he led he would immediately change direction).
I can’t help assuming that that’s the way he might be in a relationship.
We’re in tune with each other, our bodies naturally moving together, with no going in different directions or bumping into each other.
When I look up at him, he’s smiling down at me, and even though all I actually know about him – other than what he said when we were talking earlier – is years out of date, weirdly I feel as though I know him inside and out.
Encircled by his strong arms, I feel protected from the world (even though I don’t actually feel as though there’s anything I need to be protected from) and when I trip slightly on a clump of grass and hold on to his chest to support myself, it’s gorgeously hard and muscly and I feel in this moment that I’m the luckiest woman ever born.
It all feels perfect, and I love that we go from Bryan Adams straight to Whitney.
When the next ballad ends and the music switches to ‘Come On Eileen’, one of Mum and Dad’s all-time, get-everyone-on-the-dance-floor party favourites, I’m disappointed, but only for a few seconds, because when Dominic takes my hand and we start jumping up and down with everyone else it’s a lot of fun, and it still feels as though we’re perfectly in tune with each other.
We dance the night away in the middle of the lovely group of family and friends that Mum and Dad have assembled, both with all the others but also, delightfully, in our own little bubble.
When, in the early hours, people begin to peel away from the group and make their way home, Dominic looks at me with a question in his eyes, and I nod, not sure what his question is, but sure that my answer will be yes, and he tugs my hand and pulls me gently in the direction of some trees to the side of the house.