Page 52 of One Night With You

‘I’d be less offended if you said that without sounding so surprised,’ I shoot back.

‘Fair comment, calmly administered.’ She nods, holding her hands up in surrender. ‘My apologies.’

‘Ha!’ I say. ‘“My apologies”? That’ssonot an apology.’

She narrows her eyes, and finally the train starts to pull out of the station. ‘I think you’ll find it is,’ she says. ‘It literally has the wordapologyin it.’

‘People only saymy apologieswhen they don’t really mean it. Normal people who are actually sorry sayI’m sorry.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘I’msorrythen!’ she intones, but she’s taking it in good humour. ‘Jeez.’

The light is more orange than it is yellow, shy in the sky and hiding through trees shedding the last of their amber and nectar-coloured leaves. It peeks through the gaps in between the buildings that start out high-rise and packed together, and slowly become more spaced out and eventually turn from flats to terraced houses and then sprawling plots of land.

‘I hate Euston station,’ I say, watching the world go by. ‘But I really love this stretch of railroad coming out of it. I love how you can see right into people’s gardens, and sometimes even right into their houses.’

She follows my eyes to where I’m looking and nods.

‘Yeah,’ she agrees. ‘I see what you mean. All those different lives playing out that otherwise we’d have no idea about.’

‘It sends my head into a spin,’ I say. ‘How can every single person on this earth have the starring role in their own life? How is it possible that every single person has – I don’t know – a breakfast routine and a birthday and plans for the weekend and unfulfilled aspirations?’

‘Hmm,’ she says, considering it. ‘Do you have those things?’

I look at her. ‘Well, yeah … That’s my point.’

‘What are they?’

‘Erm,’ I say, trying to remember what it is I’ve just listed. ‘Breakfast is a spinach and celery smoothie—’ She scrunches up her nose when I say that. ‘My birthday is in October, so I just turned thirty-one and celebrated at dodgeball, and my plans for the weekend are undecided because it’s stillthisweekend. Oh, and … unfulfilled aspirations? I don’t think so. Not anymore.’

‘Because of the move?’ she asks. She’s pulled out some lip balm from her bag and uses her pinkie finger to run some over her mouth, making her lips look plump and moist from across the table.

‘Did I not rub that all in?’ she asks, self-consciously putting a hand to her face again and looking at her reflection in the glass of the window when she spots me looking.

‘No, you did,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to … you know … look. At your mouth.’

She smiles with half her face in the way that I’m learning drives me up the wall with how seductive it is.

‘You were saying?’ she prompts, and I think about moving to her side of the table in our little configuration of four. I weigh it up: if I sat beside her I wouldn’t be able to look at her, but Iwouldbe able to touch her … In the end, I can’t find my nerve and stay where I am.

‘I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,’ I say, focusing on her question. ‘Leaving Liverpool was the best thing that ever happened to me, mostly because it didn’t happentome; I made it happen. If I hadn’t taken that leap then, yeah, I’d have unfulfilled aspirations.’

‘And what do you want your future to look like?’

‘We’re tackling the small stuff on these mutual hangovers and sleepless nights, are we?’

‘I’m curious!’ she says. ‘I like learning about you.’

Fuck. I wish I could record her saying that.I like learning about you.

‘I want my future to look like everyone wants their future to look like! Happy marriage, kids, nice house. Although, you know, that’s the long, long game. In ten years. Fifteen. For now, I’ve got everything I need, you know? I’m enjoyingliving.It’s harder than they make it sound but it’s worth it, to me. I’m happy.’

‘It shows,’ she says. ‘It’s very attractive.’

And there we are again, flirting like our lives depend on it.

‘And what do you dream for yourself?’ I ask her.

She mulls it over. ‘Not too much planning,’ she settles on. ‘All of this – on the course, I mean – is opening up thoughts and ideas and doors I didn’t even know were there. So I think I have to stay open, which I’ve not been very good at doing before.’

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