Page 15 of One Night With You

I flip onto my side so I can see her. What man would have her in his bed and not relish every atom of her, drink down every last drop? Who could willingly make a woman feel this way? She’s the whole prize.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she jokes. ‘I’m literally still crying. This is so embarrassing.’

I reach out a hand and put it to her face, wiping away the tears that really are still there. She’s good-humoured, laughing at herself for being emotional, but I feel for her. I honestly do. Because I was with Millie for all that time – we even talked about getting married, having kids – and it was never like it’s just been with Ruby.

‘I mean, same,’ I say, eventually. Softly. ‘If that helps. That was …’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say. ‘If you didn’t wake everyone up, I think I certainly did. That thing you did with your back arched that way? And the speed? I thought my head was going to explode.’

She giggles. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘You’re teasing me.’

‘I’m not,’ I insist. ‘I’m deadly serious.’

She deposits a kiss onto my knuckles but doesn’t say anything else. A car starts up outside the house, the noise reverberating through the walls, the headlamps lighting us up. We’re still for so long I think she might have fallen asleep. But then, eventually, she says my name.

12

Ruby

‘Nic?’ I whisper again, staring at the ceiling. I can’t tell if he’s awake or not.

‘Mmmmm?’ he replies.

I can’t help myself. A man doesn’t treat a woman like he has just treated me without being one hundred per cent trustworthy. I couldsmellcolours. He held me like he was worried he might break me, but was so precise and unhurried with his hands … with his mouth … I don’t think I ever genuinely understood the big deal about sex until forty-five minutes ago. It was only supposed to be a hook-up, but is it crazy to say it felt more right with Nic than it ever has with anyone else? Ever?

And now the minutes are slipping away from me, the hours loaded against me. I’m leaving. The credits are about to roll on this life in London, and I’ve got to move and start anew. I’m petrified. I’m ready to admit that. I’ve been strong for Jackson, and for Candice, because I needed them to be strongfor me. But I don’t need to be strong for Nic, especially not now I’ve cried on him. It’s a sweet relief. And of course, he knows better than anyone what I’m about to embark on: I think about what we saw when we stalked him online, the stories he’s told tonight – I don’t understand how a person is supposed to build something new like he has. Is. He can tell me how moving on – literally and emotionally, yes, but physically, somewhere else – is supposed to go.

‘Your break-up,’ I prompt. ‘Was that her, or you?’

It’s been two years with Abe of highs that were so heady I could barely breathe – and lows so crushing I could hardly function. It’s been drama and chaos and only now, suddenly crystal clear in the arms of this stranger do I feel protected, like I can breathe. Nic is a safe port in the shitstorm I’ve weathered, and I’m not just saying that because he made me orgasm until I thought my legs were going to give out. Twice. Every piece of evidence I’ve got points to him being A Good Guy – and, crucially, he doesn’t even know he is one. He takes it for granted that all the other men out there operate with the same courtesy and kindness he does. I can tell even from a few hours with him. He’s a rare breed made rarer by the fact that he’s got no idea, and it’s knocked me sideways. What an unexpected turn of events.

‘Me,’ he replies, plainly, opening his eyes. ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier. It was proper devastating, breaking somebody else’s heart. Nobody tells you that. All the songs, they’re all about being dumped. Walking away is dead hard. Because you’re not supposed to feel sad when you’re the one who walked away, are you, because it was your choice. Except I didn’t feel like I had a choice. If I had stayed with her it wouldn’t have been fair. It would have been a lie. So I told her so.’

‘And that’s why you left Liverpool?’

‘Yes and no,’ he tells me.

He seems reluctant to talk about it.

‘I’m being too personal,’ I say, my heart sinking. I’m a magpie picking over the carcass of his experience for my own benefit, taking advantage of his gentleness because I need to feel better. ‘Sorry. You can go to sleep if you want. It’s all right.’

He scrunches up his nose.

‘I don’t want to be a boring bastard, that’s all,’ he says.

‘It’s the opposite of boring,’ I insist. ‘I’d like to hear it. It’s … helpful. Would you tell it to me? All of it?’

So he does. He’d been with Millie since he was a teenager. He’d done great at school and even better at university. He’d saved for a house deposit and bought his first home, a tiny little terrace, when he was only twenty-three. Work was great, family was great, from the outside it was perfect.

‘The whole path was laid out for me,’ he explains, and he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the ceiling too. It’s easier to say things to a ceiling than a person, sometimes – I understand that. ‘And I started to wake up feeling sick. I knew Millie was waiting for a proposal, and she’d always said she wanted to be a young mum. I knew her family, she knew mine, we had this whole routine: Monday night fajitas, Tuesday I’d play footy and come home late, Wednesday she’d be out with the girls, Thursday we’d watch a boxset and get a takeaway and Friday was date night in town. I’d go LARPing at the weekends and there’d be Sunday roast at either her parents’ or mine, and then that was it. We’d do it all again the week after, and the week after that, and it was fine, but it was also awful. I had this feeling niggling away at the back of my mind that I ignored for months, maybe even a year.Thinking about it, I might have always felt like that but I didn’t know it could feel any different. Like I was drowning. Like my lungs were filling with water, drip, drip, drip, a tiny bit at a time and suddenly I wasn’t so much sinking as sunk. Dying on the inside.’

He pauses, then, like he’s sorry he’s telling me so much.

‘Well. Not dying maybe,’ he corrects. ‘But it was what can be referred to as a Shite Time.’

‘I understand,’ I say, gently, wanting him to carry on. Hearing somebody talk about what scared them into something new doesn’t help, exactly, but it does make me feel less alone.

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