Fractured(44)

‘Jimmy, I want to apologise to you for my behaviour the other day. My little outburst.’

He brushed the apology away with a careless hand, but I continued.

‘No, really. I know it all seems extremely… oh, I don’t know… unlikely… unbalanced … unbelievable…’

‘Pretty much any word starting with “un” then?’

I laughed. He had always been able to make me laugh.

‘It’s just that what I know to be completely and unequivocally true, keeps being proved to be false. It’s very unsettling.’

He took a long sip of his coffee before replying. ‘I’m sure it must be. And frustrating too.’

There was something in his voice, something I’d not heard from anyone else, and it made me drop the forkful of cake which was halfway to my mouth.

‘Do you believe me?’ I realised that in all my protestations, I had never asked that precise question of anyone.

His deep blue eyes held mine in a gaze that a person could drown in, if they weren’t careful.

‘I believe that you believe it, wholeheartedly and completely. And I can see what trying to convince the rest of us is doing to you.’ He was quiet for a moment and I almost spoke then – thank God I didn’t, or I would never have heard him finish in a whisper, ‘And it’s heartbreaking to see you like this.’

I hadn’t realised his words had made me cry until he lifted my face gently with his finger and dabbed at my eyes with the folded serviette. His voice was still soft and low. ‘And I’ve certainly never seen you cry this much, not even when you kept falling off your bike when you were about eight years old.’

I gave a rather unladylike sniff, but his words had done the trick, he’d made me smile.

‘Oh, I’ve certainly cried plenty in the last five years, more than you’ll ever know.’

‘What about?’

Here it was. The moment to either back right off or plunge in regardless.

‘About losing you. When you saved my life, and lost yours. You’ve no idea what that did to me. You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed you.’

And this was his chance to jump in with the head-injury-amnesia-soon-all-be-fixed platitude. But he did none of that. This was Jimmy; the boy who had loved me when we were children and the man he had now become. I could trust him with anything. I could trust him with the truth.

‘Tell me,’ he urged.

And so, in the dwindling afternoon light and by the flickering flames of the fire, I started at the beginning, from the night of the accident, and didn’t stop until I had reached the end.





8


We were the last two customers to leave the coffee shop. We realised we had overstayed our welcome when the owner had stopped being subtle about it and had swept the floor, upended the chairs on the vacant tables and switched off almost all the lights.

I apologised for keeping them, while Jimmy lifted my coat from the rack and held it out for me to slip on. He settled the jacket upon my shoulders, and somehow it just seemed natural for his arm to remain there as he guided me towards the door.

‘My car’s just around the corner, I’ll drop you back home before your father sends out a search party.’

The cold December air bit sharply against us in a gust of wind as we walked along the quiet streets, but I didn’t seem to feel the cold, not with his body walking in sync so closely beside mine. I knew I was in dangerous territory here. A door had opened sometime that afternoon and I’d walked blithely through it without a backward glance. But now I could see that before adding any further complications to the equation, I first needed to resolve the thousand or so unanswered questions that were standing in my way. Although, damn it, it felt so good, so right to be walking like this by Jimmy’s side. How could I not have seen this before?

The drive back to my house took only five minutes and when we pulled up to the kerb, I noticed the instant responding twitch of the curtain in the front room.

I gave a small laugh in disbelief.

‘Can you believe my dad is actually peeking out through the curtains to check up on me? This is just like being a teenager all over again.’

He ducked his head and leaned across me to view the front of my house through the passenger window. I caught the light fragrance of his aftershave, and the clean smell of shampoo, before he straightened back up. I breathed in the tantalising combination more deeply, as though to commit it to memory.

What was I doing here? I had no right to be thinking these thoughts. Jimmy and I had never been romantically involved, not once, not ever, for there had always been Matt. And there still was Matt, I had to remind myself. I wasn’t free to be thinking this way.