Page 1 of The Spark

Chapter 1.

Then

He felt as strongly as I did. Looking back, that was always the best part. With Jamie, it was never one-sided. He loved me in a way that felt like we’d been matched by the universe, the chemistry from colliding stars.

We’d met at high school. A spark straight away, even though we weren’t yet teenagers. We lived two streets apart, though we may as well have been under one roof. We walked to school side by side, pretended to study together at night, learnt to love music in his bedroom, one earphone each. He taught me how to play cards and flirt. I liked to make him laugh till he had to leave the room. We were each other’s oxygen, inseparable to the point that teachers commented. His parents thought it was adorable. My mother declared us insufferable.

We kissed for the first time on my fifteenth birthday – back row of the cinema, mouths hot and hesitant and shy. Exactly two years after that, we slept together – though everyone already assumed we’d long since done the deed. That had made it even better, because the holding out was a secret we shared. Twenty-four months of snatched glances and sweet anticipation, squeezed hands and whispered compliments.

The moment itself, in the firm familiarity of Jamie’s bed and his arms, was exactly how I’d imagined. The months of longing made everything magical. Meaningful and assured, my heart turning to helium.

In our sixth-form yearbook, we were named Couple most likely to get married. We got a lot of stick for that, but we didn’t care.

The day of our A-level results, Jamie, Lara and I took a bottle of cava to the riverside in the shadows of the Tudor buildings backing onto Elm Hill.

Finding a sun-worn patch of grass, we lifted our faces to the hot blue sky. Above our heads, doves sailed serenely between the pantiled roofs. Down on the river, people were messing about in hired punts. We could hear the splash of struck water, the occasional blurt of a disgruntled goose.

Next to me, Jamie reached for my hand. My mind galloped, the stress of results day finally starting to ebb away. Our future was a gift I’d been waiting for for years, and now it was here, moments from being unwrapped.

Lara popped the cava cork. My best friend, my fiercest ally. I’d known her since day one of primary school. ‘Freedom,’ she declared, then passed the bottle to me.

‘Freedom.’ I drank, the bubbles tart on my tongue, before handing it to Jamie.

‘Four A-stars.’ Lara looked at Jamie. ‘Cheers for showing us all up.’

He snapped the head off a daisy and flicked it at her.

Lara had spent the past few years rebelling hard and barely studying. But she’d done better than me and only marginally worse than Jamie. She was just naturally bright like that.

‘Your mum and dad will be so proud,’ I said to Jamie.

Jamie could have done anything, gone anywhere. We all knew it. He’d wanted to be an architect since he was old enough to ask where buildings came from.

He groaned. ‘They still want to take me out for dinner tonight.’

‘Just you?’ Lara said. ‘Not Neve too?’

I shot Lara a look. ‘You should go,’ I told him.

He shook his head, lay back on the grass. ‘They’ll only lecture me.’

About how you’re ruining your life, staying here with me.

Jamie’s father had made his fortune in real estate six years earlier, and now he had money to lavish on his sons, and grand ambitions for Jamie, his youngest. Russell Group university, exotic travel, well-connected friends and acquaintances, members’ clubs. First-class and five-star everything. Essentially, Jamie was destined to become a clone of Harry, his older brother.

‘I’m not going to dinner with them,’ Jamie said, rolling towards me, fixing me with his lodestone eyes. No-one could spellbind me with their gaze the way Jamie could.

Lara tilted her head. ‘I think you’re the only person I know who’s more stubborn than me.’

I wasn’t sure I agreed. Jamie was principled, not stubborn – though I knew Lara would say there wasn’t a difference.

We passed the cava bottle between us, getting steadily tipsier as the grass drank in damp and the sky grew dark. We made the short walk into the city centre, dumping the empty bottle in a bin. I wished, afterwards, that we hadn’t thrown it away.

The three of us stayed out till the early hours, moving from bar to bar. Jamie’s hand was around my waist the whole night. Our phones ran out of battery. Lara left us to go to a party with a boy she’d just met. Eventually, as dawn spilled like milk over the church spires and rooftops, Jamie and I found ourselves kissing against the bowed wall of an alleyway. The prospect of our future burned in my mind like the rising sun. We stumbled the two miles back to his mum and dad’s house, anaesthetised by booze.

We wobbled upstairs to his bedroom. Shared a pint of water, kissed, had sex with our clothes still on. We gasped each other’s names again and again as the bed rocked and squeaked beneath us.

Twice, I saw the light go on in the hallway. Heard the creak of a floorboard, then muffled voices.

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