by Holly Miller
“No,” he says again now, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Did you meet someone else?” I asked him this back then, of course. But maybe some things are easier to admit in retrospect.
He shakes his head. “I was single for two years after we split up.”
We’re still facing each other, so close our lips are almost touching, fingers gliding over skin. It’s as though we’re having the most intimate discussion of our lives, rather than getting stuck along a succession of conversational dead ends.
His forehead gathers into a frown. “Have you ever . . . had to walk away from something because you knew it was the right decision—even though it broke your heart?”
“No,” I say truthfully. It was you who broke my heart that day.
To my surprise, his eyes begin to brim with tears. I’ve barely had time to register them before they’re spilling down his cheeks, striking the pillow like raindrops.
Swearing softly, he sits up, then climbs out of bed and heads into the en suite. I sit up too, a little stunned. I’ve never seen Max properly cry before. Not even when he was facing me on that bridge in Norwich, rain-soaked and stricken, just before he walked away.
You were the one who left, Max. I thought it was what you wanted. How can you still be hurting this much?
I hear the splashing of water before, a minute or so later, he comes over to the bed again, seemingly now composed. He sits on the mattress next to me, takes my hand, works my fingers in his. “I know I owe you more than this, Luce, but . . . all I can tell you is that it felt like the right thing to do, back then.” He shakes his head. “That isn’t to say I don’t have massive regrets. I’ve spent so much time . . . thinking about where we might be now, if we hadn’t broken up.”
To hear him say all this now feels like watching a rocket soar into the sky, only to crash back down to earth moments later. Because while it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one with regrets, doesn’t that mean parting was pointless, if we’ve both been feeling this way?
I revisit my all-too-familiar fantasy of what Max and I would be doing now if he’d never ended it. We’d be living together in a beautiful flat—or maybe even a house. We’d have lots of friends, hundreds of shared experiences to cherish. We’d have seen the world, hosted the wedding of the century. We’d be cat people, definitely. And we’d be planning a family. A noisy, colorful tribe to fill our hearts with love all over again. My life would have taken an upward trajectory, rather than failing to ever really get started.
But worse than that, perhaps, is that I would undoubtedly have stayed at university for that final year, been awarded my degree. And then I would have moved to London with Max, found a proper job. By now, I’d be years into my career. I would never have gone to Australia, I wouldn’t have met Nate, and I wouldn’t have lost everything.
“Lucy?”
I shake my head. An unwelcome vision of Nate—his leering face—has lodged in my mind. “Sorry?”
“I was asking what you want,” Max says, gently.
“What I want?”
He nods. “I feel like enough time has passed to maybe . . . And I know I don’t deserve you, Lucy, but—”
My heart rushing forward, I lean over, smother his words with a kiss.
It doesn’t even occur to me to wonder why it would be important for time to have passed.
* * *
—
Max has to catch an early train to Leeds on Monday morning. He says he’ll be there until late Thursday, in meetings and on site visits to a high-end mixed-use development in the city center—the subject of a dispute his firm is working on, with millions at stake, apparently. But we arrange to meet on Friday night, as soon as he’s returned to London.
Back in Tooting, the house feels gloomy and lonely, rattling with street noise and the sound of intermittent gunfire from next-door’s TV. I quite like noise, normally—I find it comforting—but after a weekend cocooned in the smooth, gleaming sanctuary of Max’s flat, it’s easier to see this place for the unloved rental it is. Grimy corners and stark surfaces, peeling paint and zero water pressure, the faintest scent of damp.
I’m aching to talk to someone, but Jools and Sal are still on the night shift, and Reuben is at his girlfriend’s place in Leyton.
I make a cup of tea, head upstairs, check my phone. Just one message, from Max.
The best weekend ever. You’re amazing. Until Friday. xx
I call my sister. Predictably, she’s already in her office at work—she’s head of business development at a digital marketing agency—sipping a green juice, which I guess she’d call breakfast. She’s dressed for the warm weather in a cream blouse with capped sleeves, her bobbed blond hair immaculate as spun gold. My heart flexes when I see her, mostly because I know how much she’ll worry when she finds out why I’m calling.
“I’ve got something to tell you.”
She peers at the screen, like she’s searching for clues in the murky backdrop of my bedroom. “What? What is it? Is everything okay?”
I release a breath. The reassuring little speech I’ve prepared vanishes from my head completely. “I’m . . . Me and Max . . .”
Her face tightens. “You and Max what?”
“I think . . . we’re going to give it another shot.”
Her face crumples within a second. I hadn’t expected her reaction to be so immediate. “No, Luce. Please, not him.”
“Tash, it’s okay—”
“No, it’s not. It’s not okay.” For a moment, I think she’s about to start hyperventilating.
“He feels awful about how it ended, before.”
She shakes her head, like that’s irrelevant. I watch her try to compose herself. “I just think you could do . . . so much better. There must be so many good guys out there. Why don’t you wait until you start work, see if there’s anyone nice at your new place?”
“Because,” I say weakly, “it’s Max. He was always my one that got away. The person I was meant to be with. You know?”
“Except he wasn’t, was he?” she says, her voice softening slightly like she’s breaking bad news. “You split up, and then didn’t speak for nearly a decade.”
“But now . . . we’ve found each other again.”
It feels weird to be discussing Max like this. We’ve rarely done so in the intervening years—Tash never forgave him for what he did to me, plus he was evidently long gone. There never seemed to be very much point in talking about him.
“Lucy,” Tash says, her voice more urgent now, “it’s just nostalgia. You know that, don’t you?”
“Or maybe he’s my soulmate.” I decide against mentioning what my horoscope said the day I bumped into Max, since I’m pretty sure that would be enough to tip her over the edge completely.
Tash’s forehead pinches together. “You know, I was reading this article the other day about how people think they’ve met their soulmate when it’s actually . . . just lust. That all the fireworks and the love at first sight is just a bunch of chemicals shooting around. That it’s the slow-burn connections that mean the most.” The way she says this implies she suspects Max and I would be at the lighter-fuel end of the emotional depth spectrum.
“What about Mum and Dad? They’re definitely soulmates. Or you and Simon.”
She pauses for a moment, staring at the screen like she no longer recognizes the person looking back at her. “I just don’t want you to get hurt again, Lucy,” she says, eventually, like she knows she’s losing the argument—and almost, by extension, me. “After you broke up, when you came back from traveling, you were like . . . a different person.”
She assumes Max did that to me, but I don’t tell her it was actually nothing to do with Max—or at least, a lot less to do with him than she thinks. I never confided in her about what happened in Australia. And so much time has passed now, I doubt I eve
r will.
Back then, she used to say I’d forgotten how to take risks, be spontaneous. Well, what is agreeing to see Max again if not a risk, proof I’ve rediscovered my sense of adventure?
“Please, please just promise me you’ll think about this, before rushing into anything,” Tash says.
It’s a bit late for that now, I think. But her heart looks almost as if it’s breaking, so I nod, tell her yes. “He’s away with work this week. I promise I’ll think it through properly before the weekend.”
I know what she’s thinking: Max went on holiday for a fortnight, and now he’s “away with work” for a week? She probably suspects he ran off with someone else back then. If nothing else, I know she thinks I’m making a big mistake.
* * *
—
But how can that be true, when being with Max never felt anything but right?
By the time Christmas rolled around at the end of our first term at uni, we’d been friends for three months. Friends who flirted a lot, whom everyone assumed were already together. Who messaged all day then decamped to each other’s rooms at night. Who met for coffee on campus, sat together in the pub, saved seats for each other in the cinema.
I’m still surprised we held back from taking it further for so long: we were both single, frequently uninhibited by booze, fully intimate with the details of each other’s lives. But Max said afterward he was afraid of messing up our friendship, and I was probably too filled with self-doubt to make the first move. After all, this was Max—so popular on campus, so handsome, the kind of guy people gravitated toward—and I’d never even had a boyfriend before, not a serious one.
I knew he’d had a girlfriend back home in Cambridge. They’d broken up over the summer—she was staying on there, to go to actual Cambridge University. I’d stalked her a bit on social media, which didn’t help my confidence issues—she was gorgeous in a sunny, carefree way that made me convinced Max would be compelled to seek her out again at some point.
So three months passed, and then it was December and I was packing to go home to Shoreley at the same time that Max was due to catch the bus back to Cambridge.
He walked into my room early afternoon on our last day on campus, holding up a hoodie. His hair was damp, and he smelled faintly of that herby shower gel all the guys I knew seemed to like, so I assumed he’d just been for a run.
“Found this under my bed,” he said.
“You star.” I smiled. “I’ve been looking for that.”
He hesitated then, seeming disoriented suddenly, which was very unlike Max. He always knew what to say, was never lost for words. His success in the law student mooting competitions was testament to that.
Appearing to recover, he smiled, continued to hover by my bed. It was stripped bare, the sheets in a bin bag ready to be shoved straight into my parents’ washing machine back in Shoreley. “Hey, I bumped into Anna at the canteen earlier. Finally got the balls to tell her my name isn’t Matt.”
I smiled. One of Max’s tutors, who’d been getting his name wrong all term—even though she was reportedly already convinced he had the potential to be a top barrister. “Was she embarrassed?”
“Yeah. So much so, she bought me a mince pie and a coffee.”
“Worth it, then.”
“Ha,” he said, because it was a running joke between us that the canteen coffee was little more than tepid, discolored water. And then, suddenly, “You should come to Cambridge.”
“Sorry?” I lowered the T-shirt I’d been folding.
“Come to Cambridge. Stay for a bit. Feels weird I won’t see you for three weeks.”
I nodded. “I know. I’ll miss you.”
He looked down at the floor. “I nicked something earlier, too. From the canteen.”
“Did you?” I was confused for a moment. What did he mean? Max was far too honest to steal.
He nodded, then reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced a sprig of green plastic, slightly bent.
Mistletoe.
A smile spread through me, and my heart started to spin, instantly out of control on an axis I didn’t know it had.
Max lifted the mistletoe with one hand, his other arm behind his back, gray eyes steady against mine. “I needed an excuse, Luce. To do something I’ve been wanting to do since we met.”
My blood got hot then and my heart became wild, every part of me rushing with wanting. And so I stepped forward, put my lips to his, and then we were kissing, hard and warm and fast, Max’s arm firm across my shoulders as the gap between us closed. And soon the mistletoe was somewhere on the carpet, kicked under the bed as we toppled onto it.
Somewhere along the corridor, someone was playing Christmas music, a jingling tambourine-heavy melody. Doors were squeaking and banging, there were footsteps and voices, laughter and whooping, the ever-present scent of browning toast in the air. We were surrounded by people, and yet—just as I had felt on our very first night in halls—their presence only seemed to heighten the privacy between us, hidden away behind my closed door.
I wanted to sleep with him. It didn’t seem to matter that this was our first kiss, let alone anything else. I knew Max and I had something special, even though we hadn’t explored what that was yet. I felt a future with him. I sensed it. Some inexplicable knowing that we were destined for each other.
“Lucy,” he breathed, as we began to tug at each other’s clothes, “have you . . . Have you . . . ?”
“No,” I breathed back. “But it’s okay. I want to.”
“Are you sure? Because it’s fine if . . .” The words were muffled, but I knew he meant them.
“Yes,” I gasped, kissing him harder, more insistently. I didn’t even care that I was wearing my scruffiest jeans, and a T-shirt so old the logo had faded right off it, or that I was completely free of makeup. I could only think of Max—the deep press of his kiss, the damp warmth of his newly clean skin. “Yes, I’m sure.”
So Max was my first, on that bright, chilly December afternoon in my university bedroom. And it was nothing like the way my sister or friends had described it—not awkward, or painful, or just a little bit lacking. It was full-hearted and special, tender and memorable. Everything I’d hoped it would be.
Seven
Stay
It’s early evening, and I’m on one of the sofas in Tash and Simon’s living room. Dylan’s curled up in an armchair with Tash’s iPad, already bathed and in his pajamas. He’s supposed to be playing a times-table app, but I know he’s really watching kids unwrap pricey toys on YouTube. He announced he wanted to make his own videos last week, and my heart kind of broke for him, because I know that deep down, he doesn’t understand why other boys get to play with all these awesome toys on tap, and he doesn’t. Tash and Simon might be well off, but Dylan’s never spoiled.
Tash and Simon have cracked open a bottle of wine from their basement—or as I like to think of it, lower-ground floor, given the basement is roughly the size of your average bungalow. I’m trying out a margarita made with nonalcoholic spirits: I was skeptical at first, but Tash is one of those people for whom my not drinking is a bigger deal than it is for me, who feels guilty about drinking herself unless I’ve got a nonalcoholic alternative in my hand. So I let her faff about with limes and ice and agave syrup, and the result is actually not bad.
It’s been a peach-warm afternoon, and the brocade curtains are still parted at the French windows, which are open to entice a breeze. The sound of bleating lambs drifts through the gap. Beyond the boundary of the vast lawned garden, the landscape undulates, giving way to a tapestry of fields and hedgerows that leads, eventually, all the way to the sea.
“So, we read your pages,” Tash says, tucking her feet up beneath her on the other sofa.
Tash and Simon have been pestering me to let them have a sneak peek of my novel, so a couple of days ago, I e-mailed Tash the
first ten pages or so for them both to read. And then, before I could change my mind, I e-mailed the same to Caleb, with a note that said, One condition: you can’t say it’s good if you think it’s terrible x.
He e-mailed back within thirty seconds. Pretty sure that’s not going to happen. But of course—I promise x.
“So . . . what did you think?” I ask Tash, tentatively.
“We thought it was lovely,” she says brightly, like she’s reporting back on a wedding that secretly bored her stiff.
Next to her, Simon nods with an enthusiasm that hints at rehearsal. “Really, really good.”
Simon’s what I guess you might describe as classically handsome. He keeps his dark hair short—it’s little more than a neat shadow, really—and there’s a crisp line of stubble along his jaw. He’s a mortgage broker, which seems to involve a lot of golfing and attending a never-ending series of niche midweek awards dos.
Dylan clambers down from his armchair and runs up to Simon with the iPad, bellowing something incoherent about a scooter.
“Okay,” I say, uncertainly. “Anything more specific than ‘lovely’ and ‘really good’?”
“Atmospheric,” Simon declares triumphantly, after a pause, in the manner of a game show contestant having a brainwave. He holds open his arms, letting Dylan climb onto his lap.
“Come on,” I say, impatiently. “What did you really think?”
Tash sips her wine. “I think your writing is great. Seriously.”
“But . . . ?”
She hesitates. “I suppose I was a bit surprised you’d set it in the twenties.”
“Why?”
A light shrug. “I don’t know. I guess because you’d said it was loosely based on Mum and Dad. So maybe I was just expecting it to be a modern-day thing.”