Page 72 of Textbook Romance

‘So you left me?’ I say, a hand to my heart.

‘I am sorry, they also lured me with sweets.’

I shake my head as she smiles at me, the techno still ringing in our ears. This must be something if I still feel all these immense feelings for you amidst this absolute bedlam. The boys around her start to flee in different directions as I try to get close to her again. However, as I walk, my vest starts to glow again, and a little girl stands behind me.

‘I GOT THE PRETTY BOY! SUCK ON THAT, LOSER!’

FOURTEEN

Zoe

‘Hold up, let me take a picture,’ Jack tells me, holding his phone up at me in the street. What I want to say is please don’t put this online, but there’s still some residual joy in what I’ve achieved tonight. I’ve also had a drink so I might be slightly merry. I hold the gold plastic trophy to my face and pose, quite uncharacteristically. ‘Perfect,’ he says, looking at the picture on his phone. I peer over to have a look. I look less jubilant, less like a grown woman revelling quite embarrassingly in the fact that she came top of the leaderboard at Laser Tag. Was it a good evening? You know what, I think it was. You forget how little children are balls of energy, but also mildly hysterical, and it was fun to experience that madness for an evening, to see Jack’s nephews so very excited about their birthday. I only wish I could get that excited about a birthday again.

‘Your nephews are very sweet, by the way,’ I tell Jack as he walks next to me, tucking into a piece of cake wrapped in a paper napkin. It’s that time of night when the streets next to this shopping arcade have started to buzz with the activity of people on the search of a night out: restaurants filling up, people dashing up escalators towards cinemas. The party is now over, candles have been blown out, kids have been picked up by parents, and Barney and George have been wrestled into Dom’s car.

‘They are the best. Mad as a box of frogs but brilliant.’

There is something in how he talks about them with such love, how he embraces the energy and isn’t scared of it, that is endearing.

‘So tell me more about them. You moved in with them when they were…’

‘Four months.’

I am silent to hear that, mainly trying to process the fact that their mother would have died when her children were so young. I am imagining him just jumping into a house with two tiny babies and the maturity and heart that would have taken.

‘They were teeny tiny, like puppies. I could fit one in each arm,’ he tells me, acting it out.

‘Would you do it again?’ I reply.

‘Have a baby?’ Jack says, laughing. ‘Well, that’s quite a jump forward in our relationship but…’

I blush, realising what I’ve just said. ‘Christ, no. You know what I mean…’

‘Do I?’

‘Well, maybe this is as good a time as any to ask if you want your own kids,’ I ask boldly. I guess it’s important for clarity here given the different stages we are in our lives.

He shrugs. ‘I have no idea. If fatherhood crosses my path, then I would take that on, but there’s no plan.’

I nod. There is no plan. He says those words so easily. I remember being his age and my life was mapped out so certainly. I was pregnant with Lottie, a small house, the seeds of a career just blooming. But I guess plans don’t always have endings. Six months ago, would you have told me I’d be eating birthday cake on the high street with a man who isn’t my husband? Maybe not. Maybe I do just need to live in the moment like Jack does. He urges me to take a bite of cake from his slice and I smile. He does this so naturally and I’m quite taken with the familiarity of it, how he doesn’t care what people think, how I take a bite and he wipes some sprinkles off my lips.

‘So where to now?’ he asks.

‘Soft play?’ I ask.

‘How do you make that sound kinky?’

And we both laugh, his breath gently fogging the air, and I watch his profile, the angles of his jaw, the way he playfully pushes an elbow into me. ‘You want to sleep over tonight?’ I say, my voice a little shaky as I know exactly what that will mean, and he smiles to himself, almost looking a little smug that his Laser Tag seduction may have worked. It did. I won’t say that out loud.

‘And you’ve made that sound quite innocent,’ he mentions.

I don’t know how to tell him what I have planned will be anything but. I grin but my thoughts are suddenly interrupted by a voice.

‘Zoe?’

I don’t know where the voice comes from to start with, and I’m not sure why I recognise it, but I stop for a moment, Jack slowing down beside me, and I turn towards a pub we’ve just walked past. It’s a busy thoroughfare so I look around before my gaze stops at a group of people drinking outside, on one woman especially, her hand wrapped around a glass of red wine. I don’t quite know what to say. Liz. It’s Liz. She’s surrounded by a couple of friends who from the looks of their haughty gazes have been fed a different sort of narrative about who I may be. I stand there and let them stare me down, their eyes shifting between myself and Jack, wondering why I’m in trainers on a night out with a slight Laser Tag sweat moustache when they’re in a collective uniform of skinny jeans, heels and smart wool coats.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks me.

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