Page 99 of Never Forget You
Ben stopped breathing.
He turned and found the subject of the photo standing no more than a couple of feet from him. ‘You’re … You’re here.’
She laughed and nodded again. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you remember me?’
‘I remember meeting you in London, spending a wonderful time together before we said goodbye, but those are the last and only memories I have of you.’ She stared at him for a moment, eyes full of regret. ‘Sorry, Ben. I don’t remember travelling from here to London and beyond. That’s all still lost.’
‘But … What …? How …?’
‘Why am I here?’ she finished for him, then looked around. ‘It’s quite crowded in here. Is there somewhere else we can talk? You look like you could do with some fresh air.’
He nodded and led her through the crowd to the back of the gallery and stepped into the passageway, but it was dingy and damp there, so he kept going towards the loch, to the railings outside his cottages. Not many people used this as a shortcut.
‘The first reason I’m here is that I needed to see you to say thank you for everything you did to get me home again. I … became aware … that you were having this exhibition, that you’d be here on opening night, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity.’
He could still hardly believe she was standing there. ‘You didn’t have to come five hundred miles to say thank you. You could have done it over the phone.’
‘I know.’ She smiled that smile at him again, the one that made him think of loosely packed snowballs, ruined castles, their two foreheads pressing together as they sheltered from falling flakes of ice. ‘But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to see if you’d like to go out to dinner with me … Or stay in. I didn’t know it last time I saw you, but I’m a shockingly good cook.’ She raised her eyebrows, waiting for his answer.
All her words were making sense to him – he could understand them on a linguistic level – but at the same time, he had absolutely no idea what was going on. ‘You want to go on a date with me?’
Her head bobbed up and down and she started to look a little less confident. ‘Yes … If you want to?’
The rush of emotion he felt almost propelled him towards her, but he held back. ‘I do. More than anything. But what is this – just a dinner and then goodbye again?’ As tempting as it was, he wasn’t sure he could handle that.
‘I have no idea.’
‘But you live in London,’ he said. ‘And I live here. How on earth is this going to work?’
She shrugged and looked helplessly at him, then let out a soft laugh. ‘To be honest, Ben. I have no idea what I’m doing here. I have absolutely no idea how all of this can work. But I do know one thing …’ She stepped closer and took hold of one of his hands. ‘I don’t want to be the pathetic, timid creature I was before I came here last time. I don’t want to be hiding, too scared to live in case I make another mistake. I want to be the version of myself I saw in those videos when I was with you. Do you think we could get to know each other? Again?’
He brought his other hand to wrap around hers, as he looked down at her, held it tightly. ‘I can’t think of anything I want more.’
And then she rose onto her tiptoes, and pressed her lips against his, just the way she had before they’d been separated at the castle. His arms came around her and he drew her close, deepening the kiss the way he’d wanted to but had never had the chance. This time there was nothing to stop them. No phantom groom, no burly security guard.
It was only when they broke apart again he spotted two spectators at his bedroom window. Norina smiled and Willow was making him fervent ‘thumbs up’ signs, which only made him snort, and then Lili turned around and spotted them as well.
‘Sorry,’ she said, looking a little guilty. ‘I needed help with travel and a place to stay, so I might have roped them in and sworn them to secrecy.’ She blew Willow a kiss, which Willow caught and slapped onto her own cheek before pretending to faint, which only made them both laugh again. Giving him a wink, Norina closed the blind and their audience was gone.
She reached for the delicate silver chain around her neck and pulled her bee pendant free from under the neck of her chunky-knit jumper. ‘This has been my lucky charm for years, even when I didn’t realise it was.’ She gave him a lop-sided smile. ‘I mean, I know we’re about five hundred miles away from where we’d originally planned to meet, and well over five years late, but I suppose you could say it worked.’
‘I suppose you could.’
She sighed. ‘I wish I could remember the time I spent here and travelling with you. It bugs me that I can’t. I mean, I’ve seen the pictures, watched the videos, but it’s not the same.’
‘No,’ he said, brushing the hair from her face and taking in every last detail, imprinting this moment on his own memory so firmly it would never be lost. ‘But maybe it doesn’t matter, because we can make new ones. Together.’
