No. I really didn’t. Jonah’s hat looked as though he’d found it in a puddle. The brown wool was so matted it looked stiff as cardboard. The logo on the front might have been a wolf, once.
I shrugged, mumbling something about how I liked wolves. Not entirely untrue, since I’d been looking into those amber eyes.
‘It’s a jackal,’ Jonah said, meeting my glance with that blank expression that gave nothing away.
‘Oh, okay! Cool.’ I pulled the pot of sauce sachets towards me and started examining them as if suddenly fascinated by the ingredients of tomato ketchup. ‘I mean, jackals are awesome, too.’
‘Do you remember that book you had about the wolf, Libby?’ Mum said, grabbing the topic with both hands. ‘You were scared stiff of it! We always had to readWinnie the Poohafterwards or you’d be too afraid to sleep. Then, when that boy in your class – the one who said you were smelly – brought a toy wolf in…’
And off she went with another attempt to make Jonah feel less crap about himself by showing how embarrassingly imperfect we were – or, more to the point,Iwas.
I looked at the floor, the table, my sister rolling her eyes in sympathy. Every time my gaze darted back to Jonah, his eyes remained unwaveringly on mine.
I somehow ended up sitting next to Jonah in the cinema. He was at the end of the row, and Nicky was on the other side of me, my parents next to her.
That was fine, of course. Yes, he made me nervous and I had no idea what he was thinking – especially when it came to me – but all I had to do was sit and stare at a screen for two hours.
Except that wasn’t all I had to do. There was popcorn to eat – suddenly the noisiest, most undignified snack on the planet. Nicky put her giant slushie in the shared armrest holder on my side, so I had an agonising wait to see which side Jonah used for his and whether or not I’d have to hold my freezing-cold cup. I tried to keep innocuously still, right in the centre of the seat, but pins and needles meant I was forced to wiggle my leg, every movement magnified. Even breathing felt heightened around Jonah.
Then, about forty-five minutes into the film…
Something warm brushed against my arm.
Every nerve alert, body frozen still, I slid my eyes through the darkness to find him slouched low in his chair, his elbow jutting so far across the armrest that it now stuck out onto my seat, hence it bumping into me.
While I held my breath in the darkness, he gave a subtle stretch, his head moving closer until it reached the tiny gap between our seats, a significant portion of his forearm coming to rest against mine.
He’d taken his jacket and sweatshirt off, for quite possibly the first time ever, so the skin now touching mine was bare.
Could he feel every hair on my arm standing up through my thin cardigan?
For the next few minutes of the film, it was all I could do to keep my lungs moving.
Slowly, slowly, his arm relaxed into mine.
Needless to say, not a single muscle in my body was relaxed.
At some point, in a moment of madness, I sat forwards, took off my cardigan and then slid down to Jonah’s level in the seat, trying to feign innocence as I angled my body towards his and carefully positioned my now equally bare arm on the armrest.
Immediately, not even bothering to be subtle, he moved his arm next to it.
Our little fingers were touching.
Our heads were about two inches apart.
It was the most thrilling, intimate moment of my life so far.
I could only pray that no one asked me anything about the film, because I didn’t take in a single second of it from that point on.
When the credits rolled and the lights came up, Jonah sat up, tugged his hoodie on, collected his rubbish and walked out without a second glance. He offered to ride in the back row of the car on the way home – we had three rows of seats for the times we fostered two children at once – and disappeared into his bedroom as soon as we got there.
12
NOW
Fridays were my official day off. Nicky’s comments about taking care of myself still lingering in my head, I’d had every intention of trying a run once I’d dropped the kids at school, but after falling asleep at five-thirty, I’d then snoozed the alarm one too many times and had an even more hectic morning than usual. Instead, I forced myself to walk a longer way home, adding maybe another kilometre to my journey.
It was a start, I tried to kid myself as I trudged along the footpath. I’d try running next week, when hopefully I’d had more sleep.
