Except wonder why we didn’t do this a long time ago.’ His hand trailed a long, languorous line down her face, down her throat, down and down. It would be so easy to let it continue its slow tortuous journey.
But his words reminded her of her vow. Her vow to try and help him. To make things right, somehow. She caught his wrist as it moved to her ribcage and held it. ‘What happened, Alex?’
He laughed low and soft. ‘Do you need me to explain it to you?’
She couldn’t help smiling in response but she clasped his wrist, her fingers stroking the tender skin on the inside. ‘Not tonight. Then.’
He froze. ‘Don’t, Flora.’
But she knew. If she didn’t ask him now he would never tell her. After all he had kept his secrets through the long, boozy university years, through long walks and bonfire heart-to-hearts. Through backpacking and narrow boats and noisy festivals. But tonight was different. Tonight there were no rules.
‘You came home from school,’ she remembered. ‘I had finished my GCSEs and you had done your AS Levels. I thought we would have another long summer together. But you were different. Quieter, more intense. More buttoned up. I had the most ginormous crush on you, which I tried to hide, of course. But that summer there were times when you looked at me as if...’ Her voice trailed off.
‘As if I felt the same way?’ he said softly.
‘We would be somewhere, just the two of us. On the roof talking, or lying on the grass, and I would look at you and it was as if time would stop.’ Their eyes would meet, her stomach would tighten in delicious anticipation and she would find it hard to get her breath. ‘And then nothing...’ She sighed. ‘I tried to kiss you that time. When we were watching that ridiculous horror film where all the teenagers died. I thought you would kiss me back but you didn’t. You looked so revolted...’ Her voice trailed away as she relived the utter humiliation, the heartbreak all over again.
He pulled his hand away from her gentle grasp, pushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had got together then. Do you think we’d be the friends we are now, our past relationship something to look back on nostalgically? Or maybe we would have ended badly and not speak at all. Or maybe we would have made it. Do you think that likely? How many people get together in their teens and make it all the way through college and university?’
‘Not many,’ she conceded. But they might have. If he’d wanted it.
‘You changed that year.’ He was still propped up on one arm, still looking down at her. She could smell the champagne on his breath, feel each rustle as he moved. ‘Boys watched you all the time—and I watched them watching you. But you didn’t even notice. I nearly made a move that New Year but I was away at school and we both had exams. So I told myself to wait. Wait till the summer.’
‘What changed?’ She hadn’t imagined it; he had felt it too.
‘My dad blamed me for my mother’s death.’ He said it so matter-of-factly that she could only lie there, blinking at the sudden change in conversation. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’
‘No.’ She moved away, just far enough to allow her to sit up, hugging her knees to her chest as she tried to make out his expression in the dim light from the fire. ‘I don’t understand. How? I mean, it was suicide, wasn’t it? Awful and tragic but nobody’s fault.’
‘He didn’t want children. All he wanted was her, just her. You know my father. He’s not the caring, sharing type. But she wanted a baby so much he gave in. He said it was the biggest mistake he ever made. That I was the biggest mistake... He was never really explicit but I think she suffered from fairly severe postnatal depression.’
A stab of sorrow ran her straight through as she pictured the lonely motherless little boy alone with an indifferent father. Allowed to grow up believing he was the cause of his mother’s death. ‘Oh, Alex. I’m so sorry.’
He shifted, sitting up beside her on the bed, leaning back against the pillows. ‘She hid it from him, from the doctors, from everyone. Until I was two. Then she just gave up. She left a note, saying what a terrible mother she was. That she couldn’t love me the way she was supposed to. That I would be better off without her...’
Flora touched his face. ‘That doesn’t make it your fault. You know that, right?’
‘My father thought so.’ His voice was bleak. ‘That’s when he began to work all hours, leaving me with a series of nannies, packing me off to boarding school as soon as he could. He told me it was a shame he had to wait until I was eight, that he would have sent me at five if he could have.’
Flora hadn’t thought it was possible to think any worse of Alex’s father. She had been spectacularly wrong. ‘He’s a vicious, nasty man. No wonder you came to live with us.’
He carried on as if she hadn’t interrupted. ‘He married again. I didn’t really see much of him then, or of that particular stepmother, but apparently she wanted kids, wanted me around more and so the marriage broke up. He blamed me for that as well. I guess it was easier than blaming himself. And then that year, when I was seventeen, he remarried again.’
‘Christa.’ Oh, Flora remembered Alex’s second stepmother with her habit of flirting with every male within a five-mile radius. She had made Flora, already self-conscious, feel so gauche, so huge like an oversized giant. ‘Horry had a real crush on her. Do you remember how she used to parade around in those teeny bikinis when we came over to swim?’ She laughed but he didn’t join in and her laughter trailed off awkwardly.
‘It was so nice at first to have someone care. Someone to bring me drinks, and praise me and take notice, as if I were part of a real family. It didn’t even occur to me that other people’s mums didn’t ask their teenaged sons to rub suntan oil onto their bare back or sunbathe topless in front of them.’
Flora’s stomach churned and she pressed her hand to her mouth. ‘Alex...’
‘She started to drop by my room for a chat when I was in bed. She’d stroke my hair and rub my shoulders.’ His voice cracked. ‘I was this big hormonal wreck. This woman, this beautiful, desirable woman, was touching me and I wanted her. I wanted her to keep touching me. But at the same time she revolted me, she was married to my father. And there was you...’
‘Me?’ Flora didn’t know at which point her eyes had filled with tears, hadn’t felt them roll down her face, it wasn’t until her voice broke on a sob that she realised she was crying. Crying for the little boy abandoned by his father, for the boy on the brink of adulthood betrayed by those he trusted to look after him.
‘I was falling in love with you that summer. But how could I touch you when at night...when I didn’t turn her away...when I lay there waiting and didn’t say no.’
‘You were a child!’
‘I was seventeen,’ he corrected her. ‘I knew what I was doing. I knew it was wrong—on every level. But I didn’t stop her. I let her in my room, I let her into my bed and in the end I didn’t just lie there...’
Flora swallowed, clutching her stomach, nausea rolling through her. That woman with her tinkling laugh and soft voice and Alex? And yet it all made a hideous kind of sense. How withdrawn he had become, the way he would look at her as if something was tearing him apart but Flora couldn’t reach him. The knowing smile Christa would wear, the
