Page 53 of One Night With You

‘The world is your oyster.’

‘A flippant term for a very real fact,’ she bats back.

‘I admire your vision,’ I tell her. ‘I think we have the same ambition.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, chewing on her lip once more. ‘I think I’d have to agree with that. We do.’

‘A nice thing to know,’ I say, teasingly.

She mockingly rolls her eyes. ‘What am I supposed to say to that?’ She giggles.

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I tell her. ‘Making you laugh is enough for me.’

‘You’re terrible,’ she says.

‘Luckily you’re no better,’ I tell her, and she lobs a Percy Pig at me.

25

Ruby

I get to learn a lot about him in these two hours. There’s nowhere to be, and as the scenery changes it’s rife for idle chit-chat.

‘Do you still do the live action role-play?’ I say, trying to steer us onto less flirtatious ground. I remember his LARPing from the photo we’d seen of him before we met. ‘You used to do it loads in Liverpool, didn’t you?’

He considers the question. ‘You know …’ he said. ‘This is the longest I’ve gone without LARPing since I was a teenager. I love it, but I suppose I’ve just been doing other things.’

‘Playing tourist?’

‘Is that a guess, or a cyber-stalk again?’

‘No comment.’

‘I’ve looked at your page sometimes too. And I follow the Find JP’s Girl account.’

My heart soared when he first followed the account. I’m touched that he’d take an interest.

‘I’d imagine film-making taps into the same feeling I get from LARPing, now that I think about it.’

‘How so?’

‘You know, getting to try on another character for size, using a story to learn about yourself …’

‘I’d never even heard of it before. It does seem pretty cool. There’s something about finding an interest or a passion and really going for it, isn’t there? The difference between, I don’t know, going to a football match once in a while and plastering your bedroom in team colours, researching the formations, following the transfers or whatever.’

‘Listen to you, it’s like tuning in toMatch of the Day!’

‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘We can’t all be Alan Shearer.’

‘To be fair,’ he replies, ‘I played a bit of footie before I moved, but it wasn’t exactly a passion. It was just what everyone else did and it kept me busy. I’d prefer to lift weights or listen to a podcast on a treadmill to keep fit.’

‘Which you obviously do.’ I grin.

‘I try to keep in shape, yes,’ he says, flexing an arm like Johnny Bravo.

It killed me, having to walk away from him last night. He keeps looking at me now, and he thinks he’s being stealthy and that I haven’t noticed, but I have. I mean, I lookawful.I feel like I’ve not slept in a decade and I’m really mad at myself for not taking off my make-up last night, and for not washing my face this morning. Candice was gone when I woke up, and so I hit snooze more times than I should have, leaping out of bed at the last moment. I didn’t expect to run into anyone, but of course the laws of the universe dictate that whenever you look like you’ve been dug up from a grave youhaveto bump into everyone you know. I don’t normallyhave trouble getting up, but I felt heavy and sluggish today. I guess I’m a bit sad, really. Candice and I have fallen out before – we’ve had silly disagreements and big screaming fights, but they didn’t feel like this. The energy to this one is different. It’s more … sinister.

When I was waiting for the tube, she messaged me: a great big wall of text that was so long it came through as an attachment. It said all this stuff about how she was upset with me for disappearing on her outside with Nic. She said how it was great that I was pursuing my master’s, but that I’d left them all behind and I wasn’t allowed to be cross that she was making new friends or that she’d saved her time off for them instead of me. There wasn’t any warmth to it all, and I felt sick the whole way to the train station, reading it and rereading it. It’s left me feeling really delicate, and when I saw Nic across the departure hall at Euston I almost didn’t say hello. I thought the second I had to speak I might cry, and I knew he’d be able to tell because he’s good like that. He’s a good man. His kindness is humbling.

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