by Cathy Bussey
‘Pretty well,’ Faith said. ‘Not at first, but all things considered, we’re OK. Which is kind of the problem,’ she admitted. ‘Because it’s reminding me of all the things I liked about him in the first place, and now I no longer think him a heartless faithless bastard, it’s quite hard not to —’
‘Not to think about what might have been?’
Faith nodded.
‘Do you still have feelings for him?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ Faith said. ‘It’s all been very emotional and confusing but there does seem to still be a bit of a spark. On my part, anyway.’
‘The spark that wasn’t there with Rob?’
‘The very same.’
‘And now you want to re-enact your sweaty night of teenage passion?’
Faith snorted. ‘There are definitely some sweaty teenage feelings going on here, yes. But it’s not just that. It’s more that he was such a big part of my life, way before anything happened. And then the spark happened and he was already pretty much my favourite person in the whole world. It was all so perfect — I thought afterwards, it was just too good to be true. And now it turns out he didn’t cheat on me,’ she sighed. ‘I have a horrible feeling that I basically threw away the best thing that ever happened to me for no reason whatsoever.’
‘That,’ Sara said philosophically, ‘is a gigantic kick in the balls.’
‘If I had balls,’ Faith agreed and they giggled. ‘It certainly puts a different perspective on things and now I keep getting all these reminders of Rik and me, all the fun we used to have, how close we were,’ she sighed. ‘I missed him, and I missed it around here, and I missed me, the way I used to be, before my parents nearly got divorced and Rik broke my heart. I was so happy. I knew myself, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I thought I would probably do most of it with Rik because we were so —’ she tailed off again, too sad to continue.
‘What are you going to do about it then? Have you told him any of this?’
Faith shook her head emphatically. ‘No, and don’t you go blabbing either. He’s with Lucinda, as we both know only too well. Bitch,’ she said enviously.
‘Bitch,’ Sara agreed happily. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep it to myself.’
‘I have a horrible feeling the more time I spend with Rik this summer, the harder it’s going to get.’
‘Don’t hang around with him then.’
‘Not sure I can do that,’ Faith admitted. ‘I just need to let the spark bit go and concentrate on being friends.’
‘It’ll fade,’ Sara said. ‘Just think about it as a silly crush. Focus on the things you don’t like about Rik and avert your eyes during any future tops-off zones.’
‘There aren’t many things I don’t like about Rik,’ Faith protested. ‘Top on or off.’
Sara smiled. ‘You’ll find some, I’m sure. Nobody’s perfect. Focus on the flaws and find yourself somebody else to re-enact your crazy teenage memories with. An actual teenager, if needs be. There’s enough of them floating around.’
‘Not sure I’m prepared to stoop that low,’ Faith said.
‘It’d be like being in a timewarp,’ Sara said.
‘It already is,’ Faith said grimly.
Chapter 13
Lucinda was conspicuously absent on Wednesday morning and as soon as Faith took up her position in the garden Rik appeared, bouncing on his feet and clearly very excited about something.
I hope he’s glad because she’s pushed off, Faith thought cattily. I know I am.
‘What are you all hyped up about?’ she asked.
‘Paul has given us all tomorrow off,’ Rik announced. ‘Something about an order of slabs not arriving in time.’ He giggled. ‘I think one of the teenagers put in a prank call to the supplier to get a break from him.’
Faith sniggered. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he said. ‘He’s got a traffic cone in the back of one of his trucks and I wouldn’t put it past him to make me wear it as a dunce’s hat if I did mess with his schedule. He is not amused. Anyway, we can’t do much until they arrive on Friday and he doesn’t want to pay them all to stand around smoking fags so that means I get the day off too and although I really should catch up on work, instead I’m going to check out a mountain biking place not far from here. A friend of mine — of Jason’s, actually — has just taken it over.’
‘Oh that sounds fun,’ Faith sighed enviously. ‘I haven’t ridden any trails in years.’
‘Come with me,’ Rik said. ‘Let’s go and get lost and muddy and pretend we’re teenagers again.’
‘I’m not sure Paul would like that.’
‘He won’t mind,’ Rik said. ‘You’re making great progress.’ He cast his eye over the ruins of the garden and paused. ‘Or something. Plus technically he’s working for me and Minel, not that he’d see it that way, but I don’t mind pulling rank on him just this once.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asked, thinking there was probably nothing in this world she’d rather do than spend the day getting lost and muddy with Rik. Other than actually relive their teenage years, of course. Even so, it was a close second. ‘I’m pretty out of practice.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Rik said. ‘It’s like riding a bike.’
They left early the next morning, loading both bikes into the back of the reluctant Land Rover. Rik had to shout over the roar of the engine as Faith pushed the protesting car down the motorway. ‘How long have you had this car?’
‘Since just before I left home,’ she yelled back.
‘You’re not tempted to swap it for something a bit more —’ Rik lurched and grabbed the door handle as the car bounced merrily over a crack in the road. ‘A bit more roadworthy?’
‘It’s perfectly roadworthy,’ Faith insisted. The Land Rover let out a dissenting whine and she gunned the engine irritably. ‘Drives just fine.’
He looked around at the battered interior. ‘I suppose it has a rustic sort of charm.’
‘The guy I bought it off,’ Faith said airily, or as airily as she could manage given that she was shouting at the top of her lungs, ‘said it was practically a magnet for girls. That was actually his nickname for it,’ she giggled, ‘the magnet.’
‘Does it have the same effect on men?’ Rik asked.
She shook her head. ‘It didn’t on Rob. He hated it. He was a bit of a car nut,’ she elaborated. ‘Used to read dreadful magazines full of borderline pornographic images of girls draped over gas-guzzling supercars. He flatly refused to get into this. We used to have to take his car everywhere.’ Every weekend, when they used to spend endless hours on motorways, driving to visit his equally car-obsessed friends. She felt a wave of relief that at least that wasn’t her life any more.
Rik reached up to hold the handle above the window and Faith found her eyes riveted to the outline of the muscles in his arm. She forced her gaze back to the road. It’s going to be a long summer, she chided herself, if you carry on swooning over him every time he so much as moves. And you might as well get into practice getting a grip right now before you have to watch him getting all hot and sweaty and excited on his bike.
‘Does Lucinda ride bikes too?’ she asked, hoping she didn’t sound like she was fishing.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not her thing. She thinks it’s dangerous.’
‘Rob did too,’ Faith said. ‘Every time there was a news story about a cyclist getting hit by a car he’d send it to me. He used to nag me worse than my mother. I got so fed up it was actually easier just to stop,’ she said ruefully. ‘Hence me being out of practice.’
‘Didn’t you miss it?’ Rik asked.
She nodded. ‘So much.’
‘If I have to go a week or two without getting out I swear it affects my mood,’ Rik said. ‘I get much more irritated about little things that wouldn’t normally bother me.’
Like the fact that Lucinda is a gigantic bitch, Faith thought hopefully. ‘I do too,’ she said. ‘Rob was starting t
o regret his insistence that I stop, because he certainly found me harder to live with.’ She sighed. ‘I felt like I spent all my time looking out of windows. On the train on the way to work, sitting in my office, on the train home then in our flat, which didn’t have a garden, or in the car, driving somewhere,’ she scowled irritably. ‘It reminded me of when I was at school, and I just used to stare out of the classroom window wishing I was on the other side of it.’
‘You aren’t the indoor type,’ Rik agreed. ‘Do you really think you’ll go back to all that?’
‘Well, I won’t go back to Rob, obviously,’ Faith said. ‘But I have to pay the bills somehow. And right now, when I have no relationship and no home to speak of and absolutely nothing to my name other than this car,’ she patted the steering wheel affectionately, ‘my bike and a couple of boxes of clothes — doesn’t feel like the right time to quit my job and go back to college and start all over again.’
‘What better time?’ Rik countered. ‘What do you have to lose?’
She couldn’t really think of an answer, and fortunately the car provided a distraction in the form of a sudden lunge to the left. Faith grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and wrestled the vehicle back under control, feeling a great deal of resistance. ‘I think I’ve blown a tire,’ she said apologetically.
‘Roadworthy indeed,’ Rik sighed. ‘You’d better pull over.’
She pulled on to the hard shoulder and Rik leaped out of the car next to her. ‘I can do it,’ she insisted but the mechanic must have tightened the wheel nuts with hydraulics last time she’d had the car serviced, because no matter how much she heaved against the wrench, she couldn’t budge them an inch.
‘Give it to me,’ Rik said exasperatedly. She handed him the wrench and tried not to stare as he made short work of taking the wheel off, then passed him the spare wheel, which she’d removed from the underside of the Land Rover.
‘Thanks,’ she said as he put it on and handed the wrench back to her.
‘Nine years later,’ Rik said wryly, ‘and I’m still fixing your punctures for you.’
‘I could have done it myself,’ she protested.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ He smiled at her and she felt a pang of something very bittersweet. There are few things in this world, she thought, as romantic as somebody fixing your punctures for you. ‘Come on, get back in. It should get us the rest of the way in one piece.’
Once they had turned off the motorway and hit the smaller country lanes, the Land Rover, content to be back in its rightful domain, settled right down and Faith admired the rolling hills beyond the gardens and houses they were passing. ‘Nice part of the world,’ she said wistfully.
‘Very,’ Rik said. ‘Simon — Jason’s mate — grew up round here. He used to ride this place as a kid and basically became an accountant with the sole ambition of making enough money to buy it.’
‘Good for him,’ Faith said. ‘Following through on his dreams like that.’
Simon, who was blonde and well-built and distinctly attractive — if you liked that sort of thing, Faith thought absently — greeted Rik warmly and his blue eyes lit up when he saw Faith. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve traded Lucinda in for a more outdoorsy model?’ he asked, eyeing her khaki shorts and faded black vest.
Rik laughed. ‘This is Faith,’ he said. ‘She’s an old friend.’
‘Not that old.’
‘Older than me,’ Rik pointed out.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Negligibly.’
‘How come it’s negligibly now, but when we were teenagers it was “significantly”?’
‘It reduces with time,’ she said. ‘By the time I hit thirty we’ll actually be the same age.’
‘So have you guys come to ride, or just flirt?’ Simon cut in. He grinned knowingly and looked at her with more interest. ‘Sure Rik hasn’t traded Lucinda for you?’
‘We’re women, not cars,’ Faith said loftily. ‘Also you must have met Lucinda — therefore you can’t possibly think I could hold a candle to her.’ You can thank me later, Rik, she thought. I took one for the team there, pointing out how much more attractive than me Lucinda is.
Simon ran his eyes over her very brazenly and she shuffled uncomfortably, not enjoying the scrutiny. ‘I don’t know,’ he mused. ‘I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself if I were you.’
‘Rik,’ Faith said, ‘shall we go?’
He started and looked guilty. Oh god, she thought, was he actually comparing me to Lucinda?
Simon pulled out a map and began explaining the layout. Faith tried and failed to pay attention, and as she snuck a glance at Rik she noticed he looked equally distracted.
‘So,’ he said as they left the tiny ramshackle hut that served as an office building and surveyed the landscape liberally peppered with woodland. ‘Where first?’
‘Let’s just have a look around, shall we?’ she suggested, and put on her helmet. She followed him down a long, wide gravel track, avoiding potholes and pulling her bike up underneath her over the occasional ledge. Oh this is fun, she thought, feeling the wind in her face and bending her knees automatically as she landed the final jump.
Rik pulled out the map Simon had given him and studied it for a moment. ‘Looks like there’s some good stuff in there,’ he said, gesturing to a copse to their right.
Simon had worked hard, Faith realised as they entered the copse via a steep descent, made bumpy and challenging by gnarled tree-roots. They crossed a narrow wooden bridge, which rattled and shook beneath their wheels, then plunged into the cool dimness of the copse. The track twisted and turned, through steep curved ascents and sweeping downhill sections more twisted tree-roots, the odd jump and more of those wooden bridges.
At the centre was a wonderfully bumpy, arched bridge that sloped off to one side, and she hurtled down it and yanked her bike around to the right, following a section marked out with the slender trunks of fallen silver birch, and back up to the top of the copse to begin the circuit again.
Rik was right, she thought. She hadn’t forgotten a thing, her balance was as honed as ever and she felt as attuned to her bike as if it were a living being, shifting her weight with the trails, using her knees as suspension and automatically pitching herself to the back of her saddle down the bumpy descents.
And there was something else she hadn’t forgotten either. She felt as attuned to Rik as if they had last ridden together just yesterday. They took it in turns to lead the way and set the pace and they rode for hours, occasionally pausing to discuss the next section or obstacle, but mainly there was no need for any verbal communication. He’s got a lot better, she thought. He’s not as silly and reckless as he used to be, he doesn’t get so bent out of shape and he makes it all look effortless.
‘I think there’s a trail here,’ he called to her after a while, as they climbed up a steep grassy bank that ran next to what she had assumed was a stream. He paused, and looked at the map. ‘It’s marked out.’
Faith squinted through the trees. It was a stream, a very narrow rocky one and it looked all but impassable. The entrance was practically a sheer drop. She eyed it dubiously. ‘I can’t ride that.’
‘Yes you can.’ Rik went ahead of her and she watched as he went down the bank sideways, then dropped his bike straight into the stream. It was all rock, and from here she could see it got even narrower towards the centre and had several terrifying-looking ledges to negotiate.
‘Come on,’ Rik yelled.
Cursing, Faith slammed her heels down, pitched her weight as far back as she could and gritted her teeth.
She dropped into the stream with an emphatic splash and muddy water immediately soaked her to the top of her calves. The first part of the stream was bumpy but wide, but it soon became so narrow she couldn’t really see how she could get her bike through it. If I’m going to die, she thought, I might as well enjoy it. She released her vice-like grip on her brakes and let the bike do the hard work for her, feeling the suspension and the grippy tyres abso
rbing some, but not nearly enough, of the bone-crunching impact of the many drops. The trail widened fractionally, then there was another series of almighty drops, each one shaking her to the core as she landed and soaking her with fresh backspray. Her bike lurched and juddered and she gripped the handlebars so hard her knuckles had turned white, but by the time she cannoned down to the bottom and out into an unexpectedly deep pool of muddy water, she could feel the blood roaring around her head and she was grinning from ear to ear.
‘Jesus,’ she gasped as she rolled to a halt next to Rik. ‘I need to ride that with stabilisers.’
‘That was harder than I thought it would be,’ he conceded, looking a little taken aback. ‘Good fun though.’
‘The best,’ she agreed enthusiastically. ‘Shall we do it again?’
‘Oh god yes. I had forgotten,’ Rik said suddenly, ‘how well you ride.’
Faith blushed beneath the mud splattered across her cheeks. ‘Thanks.’
‘I always thought so,’ he said. ‘You’re seriously fast, and your handling is still better than mine. And you’re fearless.’ He was looking at her with something approaching awe.
‘Not so fearless today,’ she said ruefully.
‘Even more so,’ he countered. ‘If you haven’t ridden much in a while.’
Simon looked surprised when they finally rolled back to the office hut, giggling and sweating and plastered with mud. ‘I thought you guys must have left hours ago,’ he said. ‘I was just about to lock up.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ Faith said. ‘We’d have been stuck out there all night.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a shame,’ Simon said archly.
Faith was grateful she was already beet-red from all the exertion. I might not look sexy, she thought wryly, but at least nobody can see me blushing yet again.
She took off her helmet and shook out her black curls, which were soaked with sweat.