Still Me

He was mere inches from me. I had a sudden sensory memory of burying my face in his neck a week previously.

‘You’re going pink, Louisa Clark.’

‘That’s because you’re extremely close to me.’

‘I do that to you?’ His voice dropped, his eyebrow lifted. He took a step closer, then put his hands on the worktop, at either side of my hips.

‘Apparently,’ I said, but it came out as almost a cough. And then he dropped his lips to mine and kissed me. He kissed me and I leant back against the kitchen units and closed my eyes, absorbing the mint taste of his mouth, the slightly strange feel of his body against mine, the unfamiliar hands closing over my own. I wondered if this was what it would have been like to kiss Will before his accident. And then I thought that I would never kiss Sam again. And then I thought that it was probably quite bad form to think about kissing other men when you had a perfectly nice one kissing you at that very moment. And I pulled my head back a little, and he stopped and looked into my eyes, trying to gauge what it meant.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s – it’s just all kind of soon. I really like you but –’

‘But you only just broke up with the other guy.’

‘Sam.’

‘Who is clearly an idiot. And not good enough for you.’

‘Josh …’

He let his forehead tip forward so that it rested against mine. I didn’t let go of his hand.

‘It just all feels a bit complicated still. I’m sorry.’

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. ‘Would you tell me if I was wasting my time?’ he said.

‘You’re not wasting your time. It’s just … it was barely two weeks ago.’

‘There’s a lot that’s happened in those two weeks.’

‘Well, then, who knows where we’ll be in another two weeks?’

‘You said “we”.’

‘I suppose I did.’

He nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer. ‘You know,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘I have a feeling about us, Louisa Clark. And I’m never wrong about these things.’

And then, before I could respond, he let go of my hand and walked over to the cupboards, opening and closing them in search of plates. When he turned round, his smile was brilliant. ‘Shall we eat?’

I learnt a lot about Josh that evening. I learnt about his Boston upbringing, the baseball career his half-Irish businessman father had made him give up because he felt that sport would not secure a long-lasting income. His mother, unusually among her peers, was an attorney who had held on to her job throughout his childhood and, in their retirement years, both his parents were adjusting to being in the house together. It was, apparently, driving them completely nuts. ‘We’re a family of doers, you know? So Dad has already taken on some executive role at the golf club and Mom is mentoring kids at the local high school. Anything so they don’t have to sit there looking at each other.’ He had two brothers, both older, one who ran a Mercedes dealership just outside Weymouth, Massachusetts, and another who was an accountant, like my sister. They were a close family, and competitive, and he had hated his brothers with the impotent fury of a tortured youngest sibling until they left home, after which he found he missed them with a gnawing and unexpected pain. ‘Mom says it was because I lost my yardstick, the thing I judged everything by.’

Both brothers were now married and settled with two kids apiece. The family converged for holidays and every summer rented the same house in Nantucket. In his teens he had resented it, but now it was a week he looked forward to more each year.

‘It’s great. The kids and the hanging out and the boat … You should come,’ he said, casually helping himself to more char siu bau. He talked without self-consciousness, a man used to things working out the way he wanted them to.

‘To a family thing? I thought men in New York were all about casual dating.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve done all that. And, besides, I’m not from New York.’

He was a man who seemingly threw himself at everything. He worked a million hours a week, was hungry for promotion, and went to the gym before six a.m. He played baseball with the office team, and was thinking about volunteering to mentor at a local high school, like his mother did, but was worried that his work schedule meant he couldn’t commit to a regular time. He was shot through with the American dream, like a stick of rock – you worked hard, you succeeded and then you gave back. I tried not to keep drawing comparisons with Will. I listened to him and felt half admiring, half exhausted.

He drew a picture of his future in the air between us – an apartment in the Village, maybe a weekend place in the Hamptons if he could get his bonuses to the right level. He wanted a boat. He wanted kids. He wanted to retire early. He wanted to make a million dollars before he was thirty. He punctuated much of this talk with the waving of chopsticks and the phrase ‘You should come!’ or ‘You’d love it!’ and I was partly flattered, but mostly grateful that this implied he wasn’t offended by my earlier reticence.

He left at ten thirty, since he planned to get up at five, and we stood in the hallway by the front door, with Dean Martin on guard a few feet away.

‘So, are we going to be able to squeeze in lunch? What with the whole dog-and-hospital thing?’

‘We could perhaps see each other one evening?’

‘ “We could perhaps see each other one evening,” ’ he mimicked softly. ‘I love your English accent.’

‘I haven’t got an accent,’ I said. ‘You have.’

‘And you make me laugh. Not many girls make me laugh.’

‘Ah. Then you’ve just not met the right girls.’

‘Oh, I think I have.’ He stopped talking then, and looked up at the heavens, as if he were trying to prevent himself doing something. And then he smiled, as if acknowledging the slight ridiculousness of two adults nearing their thirties trying not to kiss in a doorway. And it was the smile that did it for me.

I reached up and touched the back of his neck, very lightly. And then I went up on tiptoe and kissed him. I told myself there was no point in dwelling on something that was gone. I told myself two weeks was certainly long enough to make a decision, especially when you had barely seen that other person for months beforehand and had pretty much been single anyway. I told myself I had to move on.

Josh didn’t hesitate. He kissed me back, his hands sliding slowly up my spine, manoeuvring me against the wall, so that I was pinned, pleasurably, against him. He kissed me and I made myself stop thinking and just give in to sensation, his unfamiliar body, narrower and slightly harder than the one I had known, the intensity of his mouth on mine. This handsome American. We were both a little dazed when we came up for air.

‘If I don’t go now …’ he said, stepping back, and blinked hard, raising his hand to the back of his neck.

I grinned. I suspected my lipstick was halfway across my face. ‘You have an early start. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ I opened the door and, with a last kiss on my cheek, he stepped out into the main corridor.

When I closed it, Dean Martin was still staring at me. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What? I’m single.’

He lowered his head in disgust, turned, and pottered towards the kitchen.