The Reunion

leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the cheek, then hopped off the desk and walked away,
strutted
away, and left me there, speechless, breathless.’ He raised his wine glass, inclining his head a little. ‘And you would have thought that after all this time, after four years, I might have got used to it, but she can still do it. She can still leave me breathless.’
    Conor and Dan rolled their eyes exaggeratedly, they made fake gagging noises, but they raised their glasses too, they all did. ‘Andrew and Lilah,’ they chorused, and Natalie brushed the heel of her hand across her cheek bone.
    ‘Oh my God, you’re actually crying,’ Lilah was laughing at her. ‘You are the sappiest, sappiest…’ but she couldn’t finish her sentence because she was too busy kissing Natalie on the mouth.
    They were sitting around the dinner table in Andrew’s living room, which had recently become Andrew and Lilah’s living room, as her unpacked boxes strewn around the place testified. It was their moving-in-slash-fourth anniversary celebration, a lazy Sunday lunch on a dark and bone-chilling November day. They were already three and a half bottles of red down and they had no intention of stopping.
    ‘OK, Lilah’s turn,’ Conor said, topping up their glasses. ‘What are your earliest memories of the great man?’
    ‘Oh, God. I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘He was just this hot guy that Karen Samuels fancied and I couldn’t bear her, she was just so impossibly vain…’ There was uproarious laughter from Conor and Dan, which Lilah ignored: ‘And so I decided that I was going to thwart her.’ She smiled sweetly at Andrew over her glass. ‘And it was the best thwarting I ever did.’
    She leaned forward and gave him a kiss and Natalie got up to go to the loo because she felt as though she might start crying again.
    As she was washing her hands, she looked at herself in the mirror and noticed the flush in her cheeks, the pink stain of her lips, not just from the wine. It was one of those days, one of those rare moments when you’re not just happy, but you catch yourself feeling happy, when you acknowledge it, and she almost felt afraid, as though if she weren’t careful, her happiness might slip away from her. It was painful, too, an exquisite sort of agony, but she chose to ignore that, because admitting to it was dangerous, and in any case, what good could it do? There was a gulf, a yawning chasm, between what she wanted for herself and what she wanted for her closest friend, and it could not be bridged.
    Back in the living room, they’d cleared away the plates and Andrew was opening another bottle and Conor was telling the story of the first time he’d met Dan, at a party in the first year.
    ‘I’d gone into the kitchen to get drinks and I literally can’t have been more than three minutes, tops, and when I get back there he is, he’s moved in, he’s got Jen cornered, the bastard, I’m gone three minutes and he’s hitting on my girl, and she was enjoying it!’
    ‘I was not!’
    ‘You’re a liar, Jennifer, I remember it well, you were all enchanted with whatever patter he was giving you, you were twirling your hair around your finger, the way you do…’ Jen was laughing and blushing and Dan just shaking his head.
    ‘It’s all lies. It’s all lies,’ he was saying. ‘She was the one came on to me, wouldn’t leave me alone…’
    They pushed the dining-room table back against the wall and sat around the fake fire. Dan put on
Automatic for the People
and he grabbed Nat’s hand and pulled her closer to him on the sofa. Lilah was lying on the floor, her head in Andrew’s lap, asking to hear the Jen and Conor story again.
    ‘Go on, I love the Jen and Conor story.’
    So Jen told it, how the summer she turned sixteen she’d been sent to stay with her Aunt Ruth in Baltimore, West Cork and how, in her second week, she and her cousin, Kay, had dared each other to go skinny dipping in a sheltered little cove a mile or two from the town.
    ‘So we decided to have a race to this buoy which was, I don’t know, a hundred metres or so from the beach, and when we got there and turned around, we realised there were people on the beach. And it was like, the horror, the horror! We were just bobbing around out there, and Kay’s saying, don’t worry, they’re just going for a walk, they’ll be gone by the time we get back. So we swam back, slowly, slowly, and it was bloody freezing, I was