Page 7 of The First Time I Saw You
‘What?’ I ask, rearranging the yellow woolly hat that Ma sent me in my most recent parcel. ‘My mam bought it for me.’ She reaches for the edge and helps shift it into position and drops a kiss on to my nose. My hands twist her red scarf around her neck. ‘The forecast is sunny,’ I say, pulling up her collar, ‘but cold, so we need to wrap up warm, even if it means me wearing a hat the colour of baby poo.’ Her nose wrinkles in disgust.
I turn on my playlist – ‘Belters’, I call it: Guns N’ Roses, Whitesnake, Def Leppard, and sing along at the top of my voice even though she keeps putting her fingers in her ears.
The journey passes and I ignore the feeling in the pit of my stomach, the nagging that warns me of the pain to come, that I won’t be able to see her soon, that she will be gone and that I may never see her again. We haven’t talked about what will happen when the week is over, when she returns to that job that seems to mean so much. Instead, I watch her as much as I can, remember every smile that she gives me, and try my hardest to make her want to stay.
My playlist finishes and switches to my ‘Tunes’. She bursts out laughing when ‘You’re the One That I Want’ explodes from the speakers swiftly followed by ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’.
‘What?’ I ask. ‘You can’t tell me that you didn’t want to sing along.’ She rolls her eyes but her leg is bouncing up and down as ‘All That Jazz’ starts.
I pull into the car park and we climb out. Her cheeks are pink and the tip of her nose is red, and I find myself kissing the end of it.
‘It’s like kissing the tip of an ice cube,’ I say, my voice muffled. She’s always cold, I notice, and I add it to the list of things that I’m trying to store in my memory. Her hands sneak beneath my shirt and I shriek.
‘You scream like a girl,’ she whispers into my ear, slipping her hand in mine, leaning against me as we walk into the cinema.
I balance an overflowing box of popcorn against my chest as I fumble with the tickets. Sophie walks ahead into the small auditorium, which must only seat about sixty people, making her way towards the front, but I stop her.
‘We have to sit at the back.’ I nod with my head towards the back row.
‘But the seats in the middle are better.’ She frowns.
‘It’s not romantic to sit in the middle. We have to snog on the back seats.’ Two elderly women on the seats in front turn their heads to look in our direction. I grin at them and they chuckle back as Sophie hesitates, rolls her eyes and then follows me to the red-velvet covered seats.
I hateGone with the Wind, but I knew she would love it. I don’t watch the screen anyway; I watch her and I list the things I need to remember: her fingers can craft a sugar packet into a flower without her eyes leaving the screen; she always puts popcorn in her mouth one kernel at a time, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop; she crosses her right leg over her left and taps her foot twice before she settles; she always covers her mouth with her hand when she laughs so much that she snorts; she pulls at her earlobe when she’s thinking . . . and she sometimes looks at me like she’s afraid of me.
Chapter Seven
Sophie
Our hands swing in time to our steps, our fingers entwined as we walk around the edge of the lake. The trees are bowing majestically around it, their burnt oranges and reds reflecting perfectly in the water, like the poster-paint butterflies that I used to make as a child – blobs of autumn stretching out and folding into the water: a perfect print.
Nights spent in bed but without sleep, and my approaching departure, are making us both edgy. He stops walking as a russet leaf falls into my hair, his green eyes narrowing in concentration as he delicately plucks it from beneath my scarlet hat, his strong fingers opening my palm and placing the leaf inside, closing my hands gently around it.
‘To take with you,’ he says quietly, dancing around the subject of me leaving. I’ve been pushing it away, putting it in a locked cabinet, filing it away to be dealt with at a later date, but the drawer keeps sliding open: the woman in white, the woman in heels whose armour protects her from the girl she once was, keeps opening it. The time we are spending together is a fantasy; it isn’t real. My life in London is real. ‘Stay,’ he says, smiling at me and tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ears.
‘I can’t stay . . . my job—’
‘Ah yes. The job,’ he replies sadly. ‘Couldn’t you, you know, do that for another company?’
‘No,’ I say with finality. ‘I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am, Samuel.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t you feel that way about your job? You left home to work over here, didn’t you? To work in your, what do you call it? Emerald City?’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Can we not talk about work? I’m on holiday, remember?’ I turn to him and kiss him, looking deep into his eyes, trying to convey that the subject is too hard for me to talk about.
I’m lying on his bare chest as it rises up and down, the duvet pushed to the end of the bed, the curtains still open even though it’s dark outside.
‘You smell like strawberries,’ he says, kissing the top of my head. I look at my nails running through the dark hair on his chest; they’re stained pink beneath.
‘You should have let me finish getting dessert ready,’ I yawn. ‘The meringues will be all mushy.’
‘Mushy meringues are my favourite.’ He runs his fingers up and down my spine. ‘Soph . . . maybe, maybe I could come to London? Maybe I could get a job in the UK? I’ve got an interview next week for a promotion. I’m going to pitch an idea to the board next week, and if they like it, it could really get me noticed; if I left as head of IT I bet I could easily get a decent job over there.’
‘What’s your idea?’ My eyes begin to close, sleep deprivation catching up with me.
