Page 85 of If We Were Young

“Please?” His major chord rumbled into my heart. “I can’t bear not knowing.”

“I’m worried if I tell you, you will judge me.”

“I just told you that I wished I’d always said I loved you, even though it would have been wrong for me to do so.”

“But you never did. You were honourable, even as a teenager and a young man you were honourable.”

“Ronnie. I wasn’t. I’ve coveted you since the moment we met. You’ve been one of the few things I’ve ever wanted, and when I say wanted, I mean it in the basest of ways. Every damn bit of you. I’ve wanted it craved it, imagined it. Too much.”

I couldn’t take it. My palms slicked. My chest wrapped tight like ribbons on a present.

He was saying everything I’d ever wanted to hear. Right then in the dark, on a train to places I’d never been, he said the things I’d always wanted.

“My first date with Paul.” He tensed beside me and I lifted a hand and placed it on his cheek. “I was a mess. You broke my heart, and I was so cross. Cross that I’d allowed myself to feel all this stuff that seemed so one-sided once we were apart. Cross that I hadn’t been able to speak when I should have done. I blamed myself for the fact you turned on me that night in the club.” I gave a rueful laugh. “If I’d known it was bloody Angela, I could have done something about it. I thought I’d broken your trust with my inability to say what I wanted.”

“You’re talking now.”

I laughed and slid my hand along his face. “Not easily.” He didn’t flinch from the sweaty trail I left on his cheek.

“I thought it had all been in my head. I’d been stupidly in love with my best friend.” I heaved a breath. “So I went on the date with Paul. Ma introduced me, said he was a good guy. She’d been trying to get me out of my funk since I left uni.”

He nodded but remained silent.

“So, I went. And he was nothing like you. Blonde, kinda short. Nice. He was a nice guy.”

“You fell in love?” His hand smoothed my hair, his palm so big it fit half my head easily in his grasp.

“No. I told him about you. I told him how much you hurt me, how stupid I felt and that I didn’t know how to move on.”

Matthew’s breath fanned my face as he exhaled steadily.

“And he told me not to worry. That he’d make me forget and keep me distracted so I’d never think of you again.”

“And did he?”

“Yes and no.” I kept my eyes down. “He kept me distracted, the plans for the wedding just seemed to come out of nowhere and I figured, well…” My chest tightened, cranking tighter and tighter until I no longer wanted to breathe. “I figured, well, hell, who cares? He’s fun, and I don’t think I’m ever going to find someone who makes me feel the way Matthew does, so maybe this will do. Maybe this is good.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“Apart from at night when I dreamed of you… so many times. So many times, I’d wake up and not know where I was. I’d be half-tangled in the past with you. Normally the same dream over and over again.”

Matthew stayed still. His chest hardly moving.

“Then he died and broke his promise. As soon as he went all I could think of was you. Everyone kept tiptoeing around me, thinking I was grieving but I wasn’t. Well I was, but I wasn’t. I was grieving the ten years I’d accidentally lived a lie. A foolish promise to make me forget, but it never had.”

“Is that why you came to the reunion?”

“I needed to see you so I could tell myself to move on. I couldn’t allow myself to waste more of my life on something that had never been.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I put my finger on his lips.

“But really, I just needed to see you. Just one last time. Then I could carry on. Another fifteen years, another twenty, thirty, then it would be over.”

“What would?”