The Reunion

to keep up the pretence, whether she’d see straight through it. So when she’d asked him that afternoon, ‘How’s the writing going?’ he’d answered, ‘Oh, yeah, not so bad,’ and then changed the subject. She’d given him a bit of a funny look then (or had he imagined her giving him a funny look?) because he never passed up an opportunity to talk about his writing, but she’d let it go.
    He wanted to talk to her about it because she’d become his sounding board for the screenplay. Somehow, he just couldn’t get the second part of the film (unrequited love) to gel with the first (a thinly fictionalised account of his childhood, his mother’s death from cancer when he was eight, his chaotic upbringing by a father who suffered from bipolar disorder). He was pretty sure it
could
work, only for some reason the tone of the first part jarred with the second.
    But he couldn’t trust himself to talk about the fake-Cara real-Jen girl without giving himself away. The conversation had long since moved away from work in any case, it had moved on from their friends and their plans for the summer and now it drifted into even trickier territory.
    She was talking to him about having problems with Conor, about the fight they’d had, and how she’d been feeling frustrated with him lately, how she felt as though everything was moving a little too quickly all of a sudden, how it scared her, how she felt as though she were losing control.
    It wasn’t the first time she’d complained to him about Conor, and he wished she wouldn’t. He didn’t want to hear it, because it made him hopeful, and it also made him wretched, because he loved Conor. He was the kind of friend who would walk across hot coals for him, for any of them.
    She shouldn’t be talking to him about Conor. Only, she
should
be talking to him about Conor, because he was her friend, and that’s what friends are for, isn’t it, to listen to you bitch and moan about your relationship when everything’s not going so well? She wasn’t to know how she made him feel. There was nothing between them, there never had been.
    Now, toes touching, there was literally nothing between them, no space, no distance: he could reach out, if he dared, and touch her face, run his thumb along her luscious lower lip, slip his hand around the back of her beautiful, long, ivory neck, pull her face towards his, kiss her.
    ‘Dan? Am I boring you?’
    ‘What? No! Sorry, I was just thinking, you know, that…’ He couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t kiss her. ‘I was thinking that maybe you need to cut him some slack.’
    She frowned at him; she had the most perfect frown. ‘I thought you’d be on my side, I know he drives you mental sometimes too.’
    ‘He does not!’ Dan lied with a laugh. ‘No, seriously, the thing is, you’ve got to think about how it is for him. He was the big man on campus, wasn’t he, at college? Him and Andrew, rugby team, student council, all that crap. For some people it can be a bit tricky to adjust to life after that, in the real world, when you’re nothing special any longer, not that I’m saying he’s nothing special…’
    ‘That’s what he keeps saying,’ Jen muttered, beautiful lower lip plumped out. ‘Adjustment year, blah blah. But that only makes me feel more anxious, as though I have just one year to adjust, and that year’s almost finished now. And I don’t feel adjusted yet! I don’t feel ready to go off travelling yet, I feel like I need to settle into normal, working life first. And as for marriage…’
    ‘He’s talking about marriage?’ Dan asked, and hoped that she couldn’t hear the note of despair in his voice.
    ‘Well, not dates or anything, but it’s… It’s what we’ve always thought, you know. It’s what we wanted.’
    Dan cursed himself for being such a coward, for not having the courage to ask: ‘What you wanted, or what you
want
?’ He knew the answer anyway, he knew she would marry Conor, he’d always known. Only, now, she was sitting opposite him, resting her chin on her knees, looking up at him, just a touch of blush in her cheeks and a smile on her lips and he didn’t know any longer, he didn’t know anything.
    ‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked her.
    ‘Nothing.’ She laughed (her laugh was like music, the soundtrack to the film he’d make, about the contours of her lips).
    ‘Go on.’
    She took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks out. ‘OK. This sounds ridiculous. And it’s