Page 91 of Between Us

‘I’m not ready to get married yet, Grace. I’ve not sown enough wild oats,’ Roisin said, as she knew Grace did ‘bawdy’.

‘Oh! Heavens above!’ she shrieked.

‘She thinks I’m joking,’ Roisin said to Imogen, who also screeched.

‘You are the funniest, Sheena,’ Imogen said. ‘I always say that to Mum.’

Grace and Imogen were exactly the kind of people to produce a nickname for you out of nowhere and apply it liberally.

They moved on to circulate, and half an hour later, Roisin glanced over and saw Imogen almost bent double with laughter at something Matt had said. She straightened up, putthe back of her hand to her mouth and the other on the small of his back, and Roisin felt a sharp stab of an unexpected, unnamed emotion.

She looked at Matt, and he saw her. His eyes travelled down to her dress, and suddenly it felt two sizes tighter and considerably more revealing than it had done before.

Terence tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Have you seen that fat cat? I’m due to clock off but some American tourists want a photo with it. They seem to think it’s a celebrity, God help us. Has Elvis left the building? He’s a candidate for dying in the same way, that’s for sure.’

‘Meatball was under that picnic table last I saw,’ Roisin said, pointing. ‘Want me to retrieve him?’

‘Much obliged.’

Terence liked cats even less than her mum.

Imogen grabbed Roisin as she passed her on the way into the pub, halfway through her mission.

‘Heading off now – wonderful day, thank you! We MUST go for some bubbles back in Manchester soon, give me some dates.’ Then, leaning in, she said, ‘Can you do me a favour and forward your pal Matt’s number? He’s cute as hell, isn’t he?’

‘Hah, sure,’ Roisin smiled, over Meatball’s bulk, knowing full well that Imogen only spontaneously craved Proseccos with raspberries in order to pump her for information about McKenzie.

‘Thank you!’ Imogen said, making a heart shape with her hands, fingertips pressed together, which almost made Roisin change her mind.

56

As darkness fell, she went to find Matt.

‘OK, wasn’t it?’ he said to her, arms folded, surveying the thinning hordes with satisfaction. ‘We made a metric ton for the charity, way beyond the target, and your mum is calling her takings a ‘gold rush’. That’s good fêteing.’

Roisin slung her arm around his waist. ‘OK? Utterly amazing.Look what you did.You are a prince among men. You have shifted the paradigm.’

Whether Lorraine maintained the momentum Matt had found was yet to be seen, but he’d forever proven it could be done. He’d lifted a sixteen-year-old curse.

‘Glad to have helped,’ Matt said. ‘It’s given me an inner glow.’

‘Hope that’s not Terry’s burger relish. I saw Del Monte fruit cocktail going into it.’

She and Matt laughed like Beavis and Butthead. Roisin saw a sixty-something woman seated at a picnic table shoot them both an adoring look, obviously taking them for a couple.

Roisin beamed back. Matt saw the woman too, and glanced appraisingly at Roisin.

In a split second, she became acutely self-conscious. Her arm, chucked around Matt’s middle, demonstrating how easy she was with him, was suddenly heavy as lead. She could sense every inch of her limb making contact with his midriff, feel the heat of his skin through his shirt. What had been so thoughtlessly done was charged with electricity.

Was her arm even positioned normally? Roisin couldn’t tell. She was as stiff-jointed as a shop mannequin. Someone else had cranked her elbow hinge, curled her fingers, and she could only maintain the pose.

Matt put his hand over hers and moved her arm down to her side, and her breathing stopped. A clear indication that Roisin had overstepped, and that he felt awkward too. But … he didn’t let go of her hand? They stood looking out over the garden, their palms clasped together.

In a little invisible game of raising the stakes, Roisin adjusted her hand inside his grip, interlocking their fingers. Matt responded by squeezing her hand. She squeezed back.What was going on?She felt incredible tension in parts of her body that were not her hand.

Lorraine burst into the garden, ringing the bell for last orders like a town crier, and she and Matt sprang apart like foxes who’d had water thrown over them.

Roisin obsessed about the surreptitious handholding, and what it meant, for the rest of the shift. Probably nothing; she was out of practice at courting rituals.

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