Even when I wasn’t looking at him, I knew where Luca was at all times. Could feel his presence as he moved about the hall, smiling and mingling with everyone but me. His lashes splayed across his cheeks, his eyes catching mine over the shoulder of a woman in a cherry-red kimono, as if he could feel it too. This maddening, undeniable pull between us, as though both our hearts were tied to either end of a fishing line. A frown burrowed itself into his forehead and he looked away again.
‘So stubborn,’ I muttered angrily to myself, cursing Luca’s refusal to meet me halfway.
‘Sounds like someone else I know.’ Jacob lifted his camera away from his face for a second to give me a knowing look.
I scowled at him, clicking the top of my pen up and down, up and down, as I watched the kimono-wearing woman turn and hurry over to where two young boys were passing a can of Coke back and forth between them with the saucer-eyed, lip-licking look of two children who’d already consumed far too much sugar.
‘Well, go on then,’ Jacob urged, giving me a firm shove in the square of my back that sent me stumbling forwards. Luca’s jaw tensed as he saw me approaching, turning in a wild, desperate circle before tagging onto a group of people to his right.
‘So sorry to interrupt, but do you mind if I borrow this one for a second?’ My hand clamped down on Luca’s forearm, his whole body going rigid at my touch.
‘I’m actually in the middle of something,’ Luca said tightly, still refusing to address me directly. The woman to his left peered up at him, with clearly no idea who he was.
‘Just one second,’ I repeated, teeth clenched as I dragged him away from the group, heart pounding from the effort. Or maybe it was the feeling of his skin against mine. Warm and smooth and oh so familiar.
‘What?’ he said briskly, snatching his arm free.
‘I thought we should talk.’
‘About what?’
I sighed. So, he was playing the let’s-pretend-it-never-happened card. Fair enough. My own version was so dog-eared and tattered from overuse that it was barely discernible these days.
‘About us.’
‘Us?’
It was said quickly, but I still felt the kick. The mocking undertone that kids used to tease their friends who still believed in Father Christmas. A man in a pink shirt walked past, clapping Luca on the back in greeting. Luca’s face broke into a smile, that gorgeous, crooked smile that still turned my insides to liquid, the one I used to be able to draw from him so easily. God, what I’d give for him to smile at me like that again. But it vanished as soon as the man went to find his seat, his face hardening when he turned back to me.
‘Yes, you and me,’ I pressed gently.
Luca sighed. ‘There is no you and me, Jenny. There never was. I realise that now.’
‘That’s just not true.’ I took a small step forward, my hand reaching for his arm, but he recoiled, colliding with a chair in his haste to keep that physical boundary between us. My hand dropped uselessly by my side, the ache that had taken root since I saw Luca stood in the hospital doorway, fingersclenched around that cellophane-wrapped bouquet, burying an inch deeper into my chest. ‘I was going to tell you Luca, truly Iwas.’
‘No, you weren’t.’ He shook his head with the pained conviction of someone who’d been here before. Who’d lived through it once and vowed to never do so again. The unspoken comparison to Rachel made me wince.
‘I wanted to. I just .?.?.’ My voice trailed off, a fierce, desperate need to correct this misplaced belief he had about himself suddenly more important than finishing that sentence. ‘It was never a question of you not being enough, Luca. You are enough, I want you to know that. Ineedyou to know that.’
Luca scoffed, scuffing his shoe against the floor. ‘Could have fooled me.’
He turned to leave but I grabbed his hand, afraid of what it might mean to watch him walk away from this thing we’d both been cradling so carefully between us. This maddening, beautiful, petrifying thing, which I realised in that moment I didn’t want to end.
‘Luca,please,’ I begged, my grip tightening around his wrist. I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person so much when they were standing right in front of you. But this hard-faced, stony-eyed man looking back at me was not the Luca that I knew. I missed that Luca. The one who annoyed me at least fifteen times a day. Who used to smile whenever he saw me, his eyes sparking with something hot and fiery. The one I could feel slipping away from me.
‘I can’t do this again, Jenny,’ he hissed fiercely, his eyes like two flames when they finally met mine. Two dwindling flames on the verge of being snuffed out. ‘I can’t open my heart to someone, trust them with the deepest, darkest parts of myself, only to learn that their heart belongs to someone else.’ His voice was frayed, painful. A bitter cocktail of regret and guilt burnt theback of my throat as I watched Luca’s fingers rake his hair back from his face. God, that beautiful, perfect face. It looked broken, hardened in places it shouldn’t be. ‘I have to protect myself, Jenny, and I’m not about to stand here and beg you to pick me, because that’s not fair. To you. To me. To any of us.’
My stomach bottomed out, anger pumping red hot through my veins. Anger at everyone that had ever left him. Anger at anyone who’d made him feel like he wasn’t good enough. Myself included. I wanted to tell him that he was worthy and deserving and that I for one couldn’t imagine my life without him. But when I opened my mouth, no sound came out. Luca nodded, my silence all the confirmation he needed. I watched him walk away, his stride quick and decisive. A jolt went through me when he didn’t turn back, my fingers outstretched as if trying to delay the moment of separation for as long as possible. I felt it then. My heart cracking and something inside of me unexpectedly shattering. Even though I thought there was nothing left to break.
‘One. Two. One. Two. Testing. One, two, three.’ Ivan’s heavy breathing echoed down the microphone he was holding in one hand, the other shoved deep into the pocket of his cardigan of choice for the evening. Black with tiny gold stars scattered down the back.
‘Ladies and gentleman, if you could please take your seats, the show will begin in five minutes.’
Fresh tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them away. I walked quickly over to the empty seat on the end of the row beside Mum, trying to ignore the searing pain in my heart. The very thing I’d been trying to avoid by keeping Luca at arm’s length, and yet here I was, aching in places I’d forgotten even existed.
‘All OK, love?’ Mum’s tone was purposefully light in a way that told me she knew everything was categoricallynotOK.
‘Fine,’ I whispered, digging my fingernails into the soft fleshof my palms in a bid to feel something, anything but the crippling pain in my chest. An old wound ripping open at the seams. I could feel Mum’s eyes on me as I stared into space, unable to do anything but keep looking at the damp patch on the floor.
