Page 54 of Friends with Benefits

My heart starts hammering in my chest for the wrong reason. My entire torso feels like it’s dropped to the floor.

‘Jess, stop overthinking. Do what feels right.’

Please. Please trust me.

‘I just… I can’t.’ She steps out of my hold. Whether it’s the loss of contact or that I’m topless in the breeze coming through the window, I’m suddenly cold. ‘What if…? I think… are you even drunk?’

Her question is like a thousand razor blades slicing my flesh at once.

‘Drunk?’

So, this is the same as normal to her? No. I won’t accept that. I know it’s more. I pray it’s more.

‘Well, are you? I mean, that’s the rule.’

The way she looks at her feet tells me she wasn’t thinking about the rules a moment ago.

She rubs a hand across her lips and steps past me, moving to the window, leaving me staring at nothing but a closed door.

Have you ever felt like you’re at a crossroads? Like the decision to turn left, or right, or to drive straight over could set your life on an entirely different course? You know each path could be dangerous. It could be the wrong way to go. But somehow, one of those roads speaks to you. It beckons you in and dares you to take it.

I could be taking the wrong road. I could be setting us both on a cataclysmic course.

But damn it, I’m doing it anyway.

I cross the room and step behind her as she looks out to sea. I press my chest to her back and rest my chin on her shoulder.

‘I’m not drunk, Jess. I’m as sober as I’ve ever been. And I’ve never been thinking more clearly than I am in this moment.’

I kiss her neck until she rolls her head back and covers my arms with her own.

It’s the slightest move of her head but it comes. She nods. I waste no time in taking her away from her thoughts. I turn her to me. She holds my face as she kisses me, agreeing to let me take her far away from this room, far away from her fears, if only for now.

15

JESS

When the airplane hit the tarmac at London Heathrow, the bounce of the wheels woke me from a deep sleep. It was a little more than two years ago and I can still remember standing on the top step of the plane, rain blowing against my face, the cold of England striking my body, which was more used to warm climates. I remember how I just stood there, still, looking at the gray sky, breathing in the less than fresh air, thinking how I immediately felt more at home here than I had in the last fifteen years.

I collected my backpack and, tired as I was from my night flight from Los Angeles, I rode the Tube as far west as I could go. Then I took another train over ground and then a bus. It’s remarkable, in some ways, that I even knew how to get there. In other ways, I could never have forgotten how to find my childhood home.

I hoisted my backpack on tighter and walked the few hundred meters to the street I grew up on. I had decided months before that I needed to come back. I had started to forget those magical days, the sights, the smells, the green of the trees that lined the street. I had sometimes thought about returning before and I suppose I was afraid that doing so would ruin the memories I had, which I held on a pedestal. That instead of seeing lush green and bright blue skies, instead of hearing the laughter of children playing in the street, I would see a damp, gray, lifeless street. More than that, I feared I wouldn’t see their faces any more. That the blush of my mum’s cheeks, the brightness of my dad’s eyes, would have been replaced by memories of him sick in his bedroom. That I would remember the day my mum and I moved out because she couldn’t bear to be where they had once been incredibly happy.

But I sat on the red brick wall of the front garden opposite my old home and looked at the once blue door, now white. And it came back. Tears filled my eyes as I saw my dad playing with me on the lawn. Despite the drizzling rain coming down on me, I could see the blue skies and I saw my mum bringing ice-lollies out to Dad and me because it was so hot.

I sat on the wall for hours, smiling, until an elderly lady came out of her house nearby. My eyes squinted as I took in her vaguely familiar face.

‘Can I help you, dear?’ she asked. She didn’t shoo me away or ask why someone who probably looked homeless was sitting on her wall.

‘Mrs Ashley?’ I asked.

She looked at me, scrutinizingly, the way I suspected I was looking at her. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t…’ Then she gasped. ‘Jessica?’

I nodded too quickly. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s Jess.’

She surprised me, wrapping her arms around me in a hug, and a bizarre sense of homeliness came over me as I breathed in her scent, still powdery like baby talc and floral perfume.

She invited me into her house and asked me my story as we drank tea and ate old English biscuits. We talked long into the afternoon, until her front door burst open and giggling voices came into the kitchen. Mrs Ashley’s grandchildren crashed into her stomach, the girl, then the boy.

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