Page 50 of The Lucky Escape

Patrick didn’t say anything to that, and neither did I. Bobby stood up, wobbling on his feet, and Patrick handed me his ginger beer so he could help.

‘Enjoy the music, won’t you? Maybe I’ll see you later on.’ He winked at me. ‘Might try and get you for a dance,’ he teased, and I smiled.

‘Deal,’ I told him. ‘See you later.’

We both watched him wobble away and, after he turned a corner and issued a wave, I said to Patrick without looking at him, ‘You okay?’

‘I think so,’ came his reply.

I knew not to push it.

23

Bobby was right: the town knew how to put on a show. The square had transformed right before our eyes, filled now with locals who’d come out to listen to band after band as they danced and waved at each other and switched partners easily because everyone knew who everyone else was.

Patrick got properly into it – you’d think he was drunk with the abandon he had on the dance floor. I mean, I hoped he wasn’t, since he was my ride home, but I loved seeing it. He reminded me of Yak Yak Patrick, jumping about and getting hot and sweaty and losing himself in the music.

‘Isn’t this fun?’ he shouted to me over a band covering Nineties indie songs as upbeat disco tracks. We were laughing and twirling and my hand was in his as he spun me around, and then my back was pressed up against his chest as he pulled me in close from behind. I looked up at him, and he looked down at me.

And then our lips were touching.

And we were kissing. Kissing, right there in the middle of the dance floor of the market square.

It was chaste, our lips pressed up against each other, slightly parted to leave room for more. Nothing mattered, and then everything did, and my whole body plugged into the mains supply of a thousand volts. Patrick and I were kissing!!!!

But then he smiled, and reactively I smiled, and before it could get deeper we shuffled away from each other and whatever had hooked me up to the mains dissipated as quickly as it had powered me up.

Bobby was beside us with his walking frame, and so we sort of danced around him for a bit, including him in what was happening, and Patrick started to do the robot, and I watched him take so much pleasure in making the old man laugh that my heart burst one thousand times over. And then it clicked that we’d had the chance to take our friendship to the next level and we hadn’t. We’d pulled away.

Patrick was my friend. And he was wounded from pain, and I was wounded from pain, and I wasn’t blind – I knew that for somebody he’d be an extraordinary partner. But we’d agreed that we weren’t that, that it wasn’t romantic. We’d got carried away, was all – the kiss hadn’t meant anything. I didn’t even know if you could call it a kiss. It had barely happened.

I wasn’t kissing somebody else on myhoneymoon.

It had just been the sun, and the stars, and the adventure. That was all.

Patrick was already spinning somebody else around, a twenty-something in a short dress that lifted up enough for me and everyone to see her pants underneath, and I told myself then, in that snapshot of time, that I could have been anybody as we’d danced, and that he could have been anyone too. It was just a thing that happened. We didn’t even have to talk about it – adults bump lips sometimes. It would have been childish to linger over it.

‘Mona Lisa!’ I cried at him, over the din of the music and merriment. I pointed to a shadowy corner near the café we’d eaten at before, and his eye followed my finger as he understood.

It was good to get away from the noise. It was as if the volume had been turned up on the speakers to twice what it was, and what had been spacious and open had shrunk in size. I couldn’t get enough oxygen to my lungs and, leaning against the wall, put my back to the cool brick and hands to my hot thighs.

‘Do you need to sit down?’

Patrick. He’d followed me.

I shook my head feebly. ‘No, no,’ I insisted. ‘I’m only catching my breath.’

‘I could do with that too.’

He rested against the wall alongside me, first at a normal distance and then he shuffled along to be closer.

‘You good?’ he asked, and I knew the unsaid part of the question was:with the kiss?

‘Oh for sure,’ I said. ‘That was a bizarre little moment there wasn’t it! Ha-ha.’ I wasn’t looking at him; we were both fixed on a point in the distance. ‘I lost myself for a second. Heady with the thrills of holiday! Let’s not even talk about it. Honestly.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘If that’s—’

‘Obviously it is! My old pal Pongy Paddy!’

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