The Reunion

barbecue?’
    ‘Oh, God. That was nothing. Heat, tiredness.’ She wouldn’t look at him. Once again he felt that urge to grab her, to put his hand on her chin, to pull her face towards him. Instead, he put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, pulling away, ‘honestly.’ She flashed him a quick smile, polite, sterile. Empty.
    ‘Come on then,’ Conor called over to them. ‘Let’s see what this thing can do.’
    When they set off Dan found himself gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white.
    He relaxed a little as the journey went on. He and Conor talked about their plans for the summer. ‘Sorry you’re not going to make it to France,’ Conor said.
    ‘Yeah, I know. It’s a bugger, but it’s a good job, the internship. Plus I’m flat broke, I can’t afford to go away.’
    ‘You could come for a while, couldn’t you? Get away for a week or two?’
    ‘Well…’
    ‘Don’t bug him, Con,’ Jen said flatly. It was the first thing she’d said for the entire journey. ‘If he has to work, he has to work.’ She was pleased that he wasn’t coming. She was happy that she wouldn’t have to see him, to deal with him.
    ‘Shall we put some music on?’ Dan suggested to Conor. He didn’t want to talk any more. He didn’t want to hear her voice.
    He hadn’t felt like this before. For the past few months, all he’d felt for her was love, longing, then sadness. But now he was bloody furious. This was her fault. She made him feel like this. She made him want her. She came to him that night, she kissed him, she led him into that room and put her hands on him. And now she was just cutting him off. She took what she wanted, a little holiday from Conor, a little glimpse over the fence to see if the grass really was greener, and then she went back to her man, discarded him as though he were nothing. Conor put a CD on,
The Holy Bible
by the Manic Street Preachers. Dan turned it up to ten.

Chapter Forty-one

    HE’D BEEN LOOKING forward to this weekend. Four whole days off work, nothing to do but drink beer and go swimming and hang out with his best friends. And now here they were and everything just felt weird. Jen seemed withdrawn and a little sad, and Conor couldn’t fathom why. He just never knew any longer when she was going to be her old self, laughing at everything, laid back, relaxed, and when she was going to be tense and anxious. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Only today, of all days, seemed to be a tense and anxious day.
    And what, Conor wondered, was up with Dan? He was so touchy. That thing about driving the car, so obviously a joke, and he’d bitten Conor’s head off. And now he clearly didn’t want to talk. They hadn’t seen each other in weeks and yet the moment they were on the road he’d turned the music up so loud they could barely hear themselves think, let alone have a conversation.
    The whole thing was making him uneasy. The aggressive way that Dan was driving, slamming the car into gear, accelerating until he was a foot away from the car in front, Conor was almost tempted to ask him to slow down, but he didn’t want to seem like a wuss. It was, after all, a new car. Dan had the right to show off a little bit. He just needed to relax and enjoy it. He leaned back in his seat. Enjoy the ride, he thought to himself.
    It was a beautiful day, clear skies and warm sunshine, the weather forecast predicting one of the hottest weekends of the year. He could picture them all, messing around in the pool, music on, cold tins in hand, sausages on the barbecue, the girls in their bikinis… He thought for a moment about Jen in her bikini, wondering whether she’d brought the black one or that deep red one she bought last summer and just thinking about it brought a smile to his face. He turned to look at her and as he did he noticed that Dan was looking in his rear-view mirror, and he didn’t seem to be looking at the traffic. He was looking at Jen, and just for a fraction of a second, before she turned her head, Conor could have sworn that she was looking right back at Dan. Then her eyes moved to Conor’s face and she smiled at him, her face flushed.
    Conor turned the music down a little. Dan glanced at him for a second but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t imagining things. Something was up. What, for example, was going on just before they got into the car? He couldn’t be absolutely sure, because he was busy checking out the car itself, but he could have