The Reunion

yet. Plenty of time.’
    ‘Oh yeah? Plenty of time for what exactly?’ He raised the eyebrow again. She giggled.
    ‘Again? Bit ambitious, aren’t you?’
    He jumped to his feet and was across the room in a second, grabbing her round the waist as she shrieked with laughter. ‘Oh, I’ll show you ambitious, babe,’ he said, kissing her neck, slipping his hand under her T-shirt. ‘I’ll show you.’
    They were just about dressed by the time Natalie arrived, at exactly eight-thirty. Nat was endearingly punctual, even for parties. Conor poured drinks while Jen gave her the tour, which took all of sixty seconds. The reason there were to be only fifteen people at their party was that you couldn’t actually fit more than fifteen people in the flat. In theory, it consisted of five rooms, a living room downstairs with a tiny galley kitchen off to one side, and the spare room on the other, the main bedroom upstairs, with an even tinier ensuite bathroom. It was three rooms really, neither the kitchen nor the bathroom were large enough to deserve the name, and the spare bedroom was actually no more than a box room. There was a small balcony at the back of the building, too, overlooking the gardens of the larger, grander apartments below, and beyond that, a line of trees at the edge of the common.
    ‘So, you’re not going to be doing a lot of cat-swinging, then?’ Nat asked Conor with a smile as she accepted the drink.
    ‘Not a lot, no. I said we should go for the place down the road with about double the square footage, but Ms Donleavy over there refused.’
    ‘Isn’t it great though?’ Jen asked Nat, beaming. ‘I know it’s tiny, but isn’t it just lovely? The view out back, and this building, the square…’ They’d rented about 350 square feet spread over two storeys at the top of a grand old Georgian terrace which extended all the way around three sides of a square, a private garden in its centre.
    ‘It’s not the kind of place we’d ever be able to afford under normal circumstances…’
    ‘Normal circumstances meaning being able to fit things like, I don’t know, furniture or appliances, into our home,’ Conor said with a grin. It was true, it was ridiculously cramped, but he didn’t care, he cared not one iota when he saw the look on Jen’s face as she talked about ‘our place’. Their place, the place they shared. The place they would cook and drink and plan holidays, the place they’d entertain their friends, the place they’d spend hours, days, whole weekends in bed together. If his sixteen-year-old self could see him now, he’d think he’d died and gone to heaven.
    By ten, everyone who was expected to attend had arrived, and although they had invited new friends from work and a couple of old friends from college, it ended up, as usual, with the six of them hanging out together, crammed like sardines out on the balcony, everyone talking at once.
    Lilah: ‘I love this job. I don’t care what anyone says, PR is fucking brilliant. Basically, I get to take people out to lunch a lot, or out for drinks a lot, I plan parties and get paid for it, and not only that but they give me things. Like, for free. Look!’ She held out her wrist; she was wearing some sort of garish beaded bracelet which Conor thought ought to cost no more than a fiver, but from the reactions of the girls (ooh-ing and ah-ing, asking, ‘Is that real?’) was clearly worth a good deal more.
    Andrew: ‘It is not a misogynist book! Yes, it’s challenging, transgressive even, but not simply misogynist. To say that is to miss the point.’
    Natalie (loudly): ‘What point am I missing? The point where it’s entertainment to torture women? That book is basically a 400-page catalogue of new and interesting ways to damage and degrade the female of the species. It’s…’
    Lilah (even louder): ‘Oh good God. I can’t believe you two are still bloody arguing about
American Psycho
. You read it, like, three years ago. Get over it.’
    Dan: ‘The bastards are going to kick me out. I know they bloody are. Bloody yuppie twat who owns the building wants to redevelop it. I’m going to be homeless in a few weeks and I only bloody just moved in.’
    ‘You could move in here,’ Conor said to him and everyone started laughing, except Jen, who gave him a sharp look. ‘Oh, I’m only joking,’ Conor said, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her closer to kiss her. The smell of her sent a jolt through him, direct to his