‘Give up on the chance of anyone getting close to you after being scalded one time.’
‘I think my fiancé dying did a lot more than just scald me, Jacob,’ I snapped. ‘It fucking destroyed me, burnt everything to the ground until there was nothing left.’ The deluge of emotions I’d been holding in these past few weeks were teetering on my lashes, threatening to overflow at any moment.
‘I know it did,’ he said softly, wheeling closer until our knees were touching. A shadow passed across his face that made me instantly regret my outburst. Sometimes I forgot that I wasn’t the only one who’d lost Joe, that I didn’t have a monopoly on grief. ‘But Luca healed you in a way that none of us could this past year,’ Jacob continued, dropping his head until he caught my eye. ‘He brought you back to life, sparked something in you that had been snuffed out, and that’s been a beautiful thing to watch. Nothing has the power to hurt as much as loving someone, Jenny, but nothing heals quite like it either. I mean, Christ, I would have given up this whole dating game years ago otherwise.’
‘I’ve tried, Jacob. I’ve phoned, I’ve texted, I’ve emailed. I evenarranged for the restaurant we had our date at to send him a pizza with I’M SORRY written on it in tiny pieces of pepperoni. He returned it. Uneaten.’
‘Well, that’s just wasteful,’ Jacob tutted, horrified that anyone would turn down pizza. ‘It’s a good thing that the Jenny Thompson I know doesn’t give up easily, then,’ he said, holding my gaze challengingly.
My eyes narrowed. ‘Seriously? You’re really appealing to my competitive side right now?’
‘Is it working?’
‘Not even a little,’ I lied, pushing his chair back towards his desk.
A familiar wheezingahem ahembehind me made me close my eyes; this wassonot what I needed right now. I took a long, calming breath in for five seconds before spinning around in my chair, forcing my face into something vaguely resembling a smile.
‘All set for the concert tomorrow night, Jenny? Mrs Kingston and I are greatly looking forward to it,’ Derek bellowed, running his thumbs up and down the too-tight straps of his braces.
‘Yeah, about that. Something’s come up and I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it tomorrow,’ I lied, turning my bottom lip downwards in a fake picture of disappointment. Jacob’s brilliant white Veja came down purposefully on my own battered Converse. I ignored him.
‘What do you mean, you’re not going to make it?’ Derek huffed, beads of perspiration already gathering on his forehead. ‘I’ve reserved the front page for a write-up, Jenny, I don’t need you letting the side down.’
‘I’ve asked Sally to cover it for me,’ I said quickly, making a mental note to fire off an email to Sally ASAP as Jacob pressed down harder on my toe. Derek shook his head so fast he looked like he was malfunctioning, a strand of his greased-back hairbreaking free from its normally impenetrable Brylcreem shell.
‘No, that won’t work. That won’t work at all. Sally’s off work for the foreseeable – doctor signed her off withstress,’ he tutted, waggling his fingers in little air quotes as though mental health were a made-up concept. A dog-ate-my-homework-style excuse. ‘No, you’ll have to go, Jenny; the show must go on, as they say.’ He chortled, an awkward silence as he waited for one of us to commend him on his play on words. When we failed to oblige, he slicked the rogue strand of hair back against his head with the palm of his hand, clearing his throat loudly. ‘Yes, well, that’s settled then. I will see youboththere tomorrow. No excuses,’ he added firmly, when I opened my mouth to argue.
‘No excuses,’ Jacob mouthed silently at me as Derek waddled off to terrorise some other employee. I ripped a page out of my notebook, screwed it into a tiny ball and lobbed it at Jacob’s head.
‘It’s quite the turnout, isn’t it?’ Mum remarked, her eyes sparkling almost as much as her green sequin jumpsuit as we joined the queue of people snaking their way round the car park towards the community centre.
‘Mhmm,’ I managed, my voice shaky. My brain was incapable of forming words right now, of thinking about anything except Luca. What I’d say when I saw him. What he’d say when he saw me. Oh God, what if he didn’t say anything at all? Or worse, gave me a tight smile and a firm handshake as though I were just like everyone else here tonight? I stood on my tiptoes, bobbing this way and that to try and catch a glimpse of the front of the queue, but there were too many people, my view obstructed by the back of Terry’s head several inches above everyone else’s.
‘You all right?’ Jacob murmured next to me, hoisting his camera bag further up one shoulder as the queue inched forwards.
‘Fine,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. Jacob’s fingers found mine, giving them a squeeze that saidI’m here.I smiled at him, message gratefully received, albeit doing next to nothing to still my rapidly beating heart.
As soon as I saw him, it felt like someone had tied a ten-tonne weight around my heart and thrown it overboard, my fingers tightening so hard in Jacob’s that I heard him suck his breath in sharply between his teeth. There he was. Stood on the cracked top step of the community centre dressed all in black. Black shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal a hint of olive skin, black trousers, black hair in its normal unruly tangle that on anyone else would look scruffy but on him, looked just right. Perfect, in fact.
Luca’s eyes flickered down the line, a brief nod or smile for someone he recognised, before catching on mine. His smile dropped, like a storm cloud passing in front of the sun, and my chest stung in response. I watched as a thousand emotions passed across his face, rippling the muscles along his jawline. Surprise, as if he wasn’t 100% sure I would come tonight. Betrayal. Anger. Pain. That last one made me look down at my feet for a second, shame and regret flooding over me as I was hit with the memory of him stood in that doorway, the remnants of whatever had been between us lying broken at his feet. By the time I looked up again, Luca had turned sharply on his heel, muttering something in Ivan’s ear. Ivan’s eyes found me in the queue; he gave a brisk nod of understanding and then Luca was gone, ducking inside the hall just as we reached the stone steps.
‘Aha, the woman that made it all happen,’ Ivan announced grandly, holding both arms open wide and pulling me in for a hug.
‘Hardly,’ I mumbled into the bobbly knit of his cardigan, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
‘Luca just had to .?.?.’ Ivan threw his thumb vaguely overone shoulder, eyes rolling heavenward as though searching for a plausible end to that sentence. Clearly coming up short, he turned to greet my mum. ‘And this must be the infamous Ms Thompson?’
‘Oh gosh, what’s she been telling you?’ I heard Mum titter behind me as Jacob and I stepped inside.
‘I’m sorry, have we come to the right place?’ Jacob let out a low whistle, his head performing a slow one-eighty from shoulder to shoulder as he gawked at our surroundings. The hall was packed. Neat rows of mismatched chairs on either side of a makeshift aisle were already filling up, the air thick with a heady cocktail of one too many perfumes which, while a little overwhelming in such a small space, did a good job of hiding the damp smell. Rainbow-coloured bunting crisscrossed from one side of the hall to the other, the lights turned down low enough to reveal a canopy of a thousand glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the roof above us.
‘And they say you can’t polish a turd. Well, never have I seen a more beautiful, sparkly turd in all my life!’ Jacob declared, the shutter of his camera firing like a machine gun. He was right. It was beautiful.
‘And to think they want to close this place down,’ someone tutted to my right. I turned to see a woman with a 1960s hairdo that looked highly flammable and a practical button-down shirt dress. From the framed photograph on Derek’s desk, I recognised her to be his wife. Derek was stood beside her sporting the most hideous brown suit and yellow shirt combination that I had ever seen, clutching a paper plate piled high with beige food.
‘Yes, terrible. Truly terrible,’ he agreed, doing an uncanny impression of a turkey with the skin under his chin as he shook his head so vigorously that a bit of whatever he’d just stuffed into his mouth flew through the air, landing on the back of apoor unsuspecting passer-by. ‘When I heard that their funding had been cut, I told my team to drop everything. This was the number one priority.’Number one priority, my arse.
I pressed my lips tightly together as I pulled my notebook out of my bag, feeling a familiar jolt of electricity as I ran my fingers over the blank page. The thrill I always got whenever I started a new story, of not knowing where it might take me. But there was only one ending that I was interested in tonight.
