‘But you own the company.’
He shrugged again. ‘And your point?’ He shifted towards me, and although the engine had not been turned on, there was still plenty of light illuminating the car from the restaurant’s security lighting. Looking into his face, being aware of the intimate proximity inside the car’s confined interior, I forgot the point I was trying to make, if any. Hell, if he looked at me that way for a moment or two more, I was likely to forget my own name. I decided on a change of topic.
‘Cathy didn’t look too pleased that you’d offered me this lift.’
‘Cathy’ll get over it.’ OK, that was clearly another conversational no-no. However he didn’t drop that theme entirely.
‘Cathy and I… you knew about that, didn’t you… I mean before tonight?’
I gave a shrug that I hoped looked nonchalant.
‘Sure, Sarah mentioned it… in passing… ages ago.’
His voice suddenly dropped in tone, sounding less self-assured than he had all evening. There was an echo of the boy I had known so well.
‘And you were OK with that, were you?’
I may have hesitated for a second longer than I should have, before replying in a tone that was striving for breezy.
‘Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’
He straightened suddenly in his seat, flicked on the ignition and headlamps and with a briefly instructed ‘Fasten your seatbelt,’ reversed, at speed, out of the parking space. Clearly not the answer he had been hoping for, it would seem.
As we left the car park, he pointed the car in the direction of my hotel.
‘I’m staying at the—’
‘I know where you’re staying,’ he interrupted.
Oh, this was terrific. Now I had made him mad. At that moment I’d have given anything to have swapped this ride for the tattiest, smelliest cab that could be imagined. I sought for a topic that might be suitably innocuous to raise between us. But came up empty. There were too many landmines in our history to make chit-chat possible. In addition, the painkillers I’d taken for my headache had yet to kick in, so if we had to conduct the fifteen-minute journey in total silence, then so much the better.
I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
When we stopped at the first set of traffic lights which turned red as we approached, Matt caught me absently rubbing my fingers against the bridge of my nose to try to ease the pain.
‘You really do have a headache? It wasn’t just an excuse?’ I heard the doubt behind the question. It made me snappier than I should have been.
‘Yes, I really do.’
‘There’s a twenty-four-hour place up ahead, would you like to stop there and pick up something for it?’ The unexpected kindness took me by surprise.
‘No, it’s fine. I’ve got some pills.’ Not that they appeared to be working any more, I silently added.
Several more minutes passed and I thought we had probably escaped the awkwardness when he threw a live conversational grenade into the car.
‘Cathy and I… it’s not that serious, you know. More of a convenience thing… I just wanted you to know that.’
Too stunned for a moment to know how to respond, I eventually came up with: ‘I very much doubt that Cathy views it that way. Not from the look on her face as we left the table together. And why would you possibly imagine I needed this information?’
He sighed, and I could see he was struggling to pick the right words.
‘It’s been hard tonight, seeing you again. All of us together again.’
With one notable exception, but I let that pass. He gave a laugh that fell short of having any real humour in it.
‘It’s just that all night I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was sitting next to the wrong person.’
I didn’t know how to respond. Should I feel flattered by the compliment, or offended that he was declaring such feelings when he was still clearly in a long-term relationship with someone else?
‘Matt, I think you’re just getting caught up in the nostalgia of the reunion , or something. You’re confusing the past and present here in a pretty drastic way. We were just kids back then.’ My voice lowered and trembled slightly. ‘Something terrible happened and things changed. We changed.’
‘We’re not kids now,’ he vowed, and without warning, his hand left the steering wheel and reached over to cover mine on my lap. I jerked it back as though I’d been burnt.
‘No. Don’t do that. You’re with someone else, you’re not free…’ I carried on quickly when I saw he was about to offer something then, ‘… And even if you were, it wouldn’t be any different. I still feel the same way as I did when we split up.’