Page 80 of The Fallback

Rosie felt herself blush. She remembered how consuming it was when Connor turned his full attention on you. She chose to ignore the suggestion that using a dating app was a sign of desperation, or of her having lost the charm of her younger years.

‘Tell me about you?’ he continued, either not noticing or not caring about the effect he was having on her. ‘Still in academia? I saw you got your PhD. I was really proud of you when I heard.’

Rosie felt a ripple of pleasure thrill through her; had he been keeping tabs on her all these years? ‘I was one of the fastest in my year to graduate.’ There was just something about Connor that made her want to impress him.

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, ‘you were always the smartest girl I knew.’

They smiled at each other across the table, their eyes locked, Rosie's stomach doing cartwheels. She was back in her early twenties, thinking about those memories she had shared with Connor and everything that had happened to her since.

‘But now, my clever girl, I’m afraid I have to go.’ He drained his coffee cup.

‘You do?’ Rosie asked in confusion. She glanced at her watch and tried to ignore the uncomfortable sensation that she was being both brushed off and patronised at the same time. She wasn't sure she washisanything, yet. And the way he said ‘clever girl’ made her skin tingle, and not in the good way.

‘Yep. I’m on deadline. Need to get an interview done before I lose this contract.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Rosie tried to hide the disappointment in her voice. Was this a brush off? His way of saying ‘hi but bye’? He’d completed this walk down memory lane and it had not lived up to his expectations?

‘But…’ He leaned over the table and grabbed her hands. ‘Can I see you again?’

‘Oh!’

‘Only if you’resureyou’re single?’ he said teasingly.

‘Definitely single,’ she managed to say.

‘I’ll call you, ‘he said and stood up. He leaned down and brushed his lips against her cheek. Damn, he smelt good. Sort of woody but citrusy at the same time. And his lips on her cheek pushed all her negative thoughts to one side, causing instead a long-forgotten sensation in parts of her anatomy which she had begun to fear had gone into permanent hibernation.

He took one of her hands in his and looked down into her eyes. ‘It’s really great to see you, Rosie, it’s made me realise how much I’ve missed you, how much I’ve missed out on.’

Rosie tried to come up with a witty response, but she ended up sounding more like a frog in distress. Not that Connor seemed to notice.

‘I want to take you out, somewhere special. Would that be OK?’

She nodded, not trusting her voice to come out in a normal pitch. The last thing she wanted was to scare him off by sounding like a foghorn again.

He grinned, kissed her hand and then he was gone. Rosie looked around. No one else seemed to recognise the momentous occasion that had just occurred under their very noses. The barista looked as bored and disinterested in the path of true love as he had been half an hour ago. But Rosie tried not to care. Connor was back, he was just as she remembered him and he was definitely interested in her. Not that it had been a date, but it was the best non-date she had been on in a long time, and she still had a proper date with him to look forward to.

* * *

The next two days passed in a blur for Rosie. The press release had yet to be approved so she was still waiting for the go ahead from Rachel to send it. Which meant she could park that particular anxiety for the moment. She was busy in the lab, getting the assays done for BioChem. Nadia had offered to help, but Rosie knew she was busy herself, trying to get new funding in place for her projects. And anyway, Nadia had never had the steadiest hands when it came to pipettes, and Rosie didn't want to risk more muck-ups. Mitch still wasn’t talking to her, and Rosie had taken Jasmine’s advice and hadn’t tried to contact him again. She felt a dull ache when she thought about him so she tried not to, and for the most part it worked. And at least she now had Connor to take her mind off Mitch. So whenever her mind drifted to thoughts of him, she tried to think of Connor instead. If Mitch was going to ignore her then maybe she could do the same? Perhaps Connor was right, perhaps this was fate and this was how it was all meant to be.

And Connor hadn’t given her much chance not to be thinking of him; within an hour of leaving the coffee shop he had messaged telling her that his interview was a waste of time and that he wished he had stayed with her instead. Before she had had a chance to reply, he asked her if she was free in two nights’ time and when she told him she was he sent her reservation details at the Cafe Royal. Rosie smiled to herself when she saw the address; she remembered the conversation she and Connor had had before he left for America. He told her that when he came back he’d take her somewhere fancy with his first pay cheque, somewhere like the Cafe Royal. At least he’d kept his word, even if it was over a decade late.

He’d told her to meet him in the hotel bar at 7pm so Rosie found herself on Regent Street pushing through the tourists and the Christmas shoppers. It was bedlam; buses were backed up along Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, horns were blaring, pedestrians were spilling dangerously out into the street and oblivious tourists were causing chaos by stopping to take photos of the Christmas lights. So much for peace and goodwill, Rosie thought, as a man in a suit shouted angrily at a bunch of kids who had inadvertently tripped him up with their Hamleys bags.

Against all this, the Cafe Royal was a haven of contemporary class amongst the tourist attractions of central London. The Christmas festivities hadn’t yet infiltrated this achingly cool bar and Rosie was relieved to see that Connor was already there and waiting for her, leaning against the bar in the corner. As if he could sense her arrival, he looked up and grinned when he saw her, and Rosie felt her stomach swoop. After all these years, it was nice to experience it with someone other than Mitch.

She walked over and he wrapped his arm around her waist, bringing her up against him and kissing her on the lips. She felt lightheaded with anticipation of what the evening might bring.Thiswas the date she had been waiting for all these years, andthiswas the guy who was supposed to sweep her off her feet. She just knew it. And if the start of the evening was anything to go by then perhaps it would make up for the lost years and all that time they had spent apart.

Connor waved to the barman and turned to ask Rosie, ‘Would you like champagne?’

Rosie glanced around her, taking in the crystal chandeliers, the sparkling cocktail shakers and the whispered conversations of the other patrons and decided that yes, yes she would very much like champagne, thank you.

‘You look amazing,’ Connor said, looking Rosie up and down in such a way that made her feel that frankly it had been unnecessary to have spent so long deciding on what to wear. Most of her wardrobe lay discarded on the floor of her bedroom, but she had finally settled on skintight, jet-black jeans, stiletto boots and a floral blouse that she sometimes worried made her look like Henry VIII but tonight was obviously working for her, unless Connor had developed a Tudor fetish in the intervening years. She also congratulated herself on choosing good underwear, too. If Connor was looking at her like this now, who knew where the night might end? She enjoyed the fizzing sensation inside her and sipped her champagne.

‘So, the interview was a waste of time?’ she asked. ‘You’re not going to run out on me again?’

Connor took her hand. ‘I promise,’ he said, ‘I wish I hadn’t run out on you for America.’ He let his statement stand for a second. ‘And yes, the interview was a complete waste of time.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know why these people agree to be interviewed and then refuse to say anything.’

---