Page 107 of Don't You Forget About Me

I prop my chin on my hand. He reaches up to get a bottle from a shelf and his t-shirt rides up, exposing several inches of abdomen. A considerate customer changes their mind about which gin they want, and he has to put it back and get another one down, and this time I see the muscles above his belt flex as he strains to grasp it. My own, less flat gut flexes in response.

Even the way he stands over the till does something to me, the tension in his shoulders, the loose way his body moves. Oh God, and look at the way he’s pushing his inky hair out of the light sweat on his brow … He glances over at me and I quickly move my eyes back to my phone.

He did suggest he might drink with me, right? My disappointment if he doesn’t will be considerable.

I adore Dev and yet I’m effusive with gratitude when he says apologetically that he would have a jar but Mo and the kids are over and he’s leaving early. Lucas waves away my offer to help with the clean-up. When the last punters clatter out of the door, it’s me, Lucas and Massive Attack on the speakers.Stand in front of you …

I shiver with anticipation.

‘Is that, this?’ he holds up a bottle of red, points at the label, points at the glass.

I nod. He walks over holding it, with a glass, and I sit rod-straight with contained tension. He sits opposite on the second shabby-chic easy armchair at my table, unscrews the cap, tops me up, pours his, and says:

‘So then, Georgina Horspool. This is highly preferable to us sitting in some hospital’s serious burns unit, eh?’

He picks up his glass and clinks it against mine, pulling a grimace.

‘Us.’ Is that significant? Wouldn’t it be more natural to say ‘you’?

I remember this precipice of excitement from long ago. Not knowing if he feels the way I feel, knowing I could fall from a huge height, if not. Even though you could be utterly destroyed by hitting the rocks below, there’s no feeling like it.

We talk easily, having enough in common now that it’s effortless. He tells me how he hated university too, didn’t want to do his business degree.

‘Dad wanted us to take over the family firm, end of story, no other ideas tolerated or indeed, funded. It was a glove-like fit for Dev, but … I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I didn’t want to run bars.’

‘What would you have liked to do?’

‘I quite fancied teaching, actually,’ Lucas says, batting his glass from one hand to the other.

‘I can see you as a teacher!’

‘Is that a jibe?’

‘No!’ I grin. I am incapable of objective judgement, but it feels like we’re flirting to me.

‘You could still retrain?’ I say.

‘Yeah, I could. But I’m quite long in the tooth to begin again now and I’m used to this income, so. Look, I didn’t say my problems were worthy of sympathy.’

He gives me a sly grin from under his brow and I think we’re definitely flirting, surely.

‘Are you loaded then?’ I ask, curious as to whether he’ll be honest.

‘Errrr. What’s the tactful response to that?’

‘Honesty.’

‘Yeah, I am. We are. The Faustian pact with my dad: do as I say, it’ll all be yours. He was quite the bully, to the point of not entirely respecting the law in his dealings with the fruitier side of Dublin nightlife. We cleaned all that up. I’m relieved he’s retired.’

‘How did you and Dev turn out so well?’ I say, unguardedly, and Lucas looks genuinely gratified.

‘That’d be my mum.’

I know glorying in wealth is unseemly and that Lucas isn’t more valuable as he’s worth a lot, on paper. I still allow myself a brief flight of fancy, imagining being his. The men I’ve dated have been fairly inert and hapless, borrowing off me before payday. Ugh, Georgina, no, stop this. You’re not an Austen heroine, make your own money. Think of your mum and Geoffrey.

We talk about Robin, and I tell Lucas my side of catching him in bed with Lou, and he boggles and guffaws and gasps in the right places and I see us bonding, from the outside, and quite like who I am, for a change. I might’ve dated an idiot but I can take it to the metaphorical Cash Converters and turn it into something of entertainment value.

Bottle gone, Lucas asks if I’ve tried a cherry liqueur they’ve been sent and we do sticky shots, smacking our lips together and debating whether it’s delicious or saccharine. The illuminated clock over the bar says half one. My mind is fuzzed by drink but I know a moment of reckoning is drawing near.

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