Page 52 of The Reunion

But Ashleigh laughs, and it’s a full, warm sound that makes me lean in a little closer as she tosses her head in disbelief, and grins at me like it’s the greatest joke she’s ever heard. The scepticism is rooted deep in her pale blue eyes, one eyebrow arching upwards. Her lips pull wide across her cheeks and I glance, again, at that lipstick smudge.

‘You didn’t flirt with me.’

‘I absolutely did. I flirted with everybody.’

‘Yeah, because you were a notorious flirt. It was practically hardwired into your DNA. I remember you flirting with Mrs Macarthur when you forgot your maths homework, one time. But you didn’t flirt with me.’

‘I told you how cute you looked that time on non-uniform day, when you wore that blue T-shirt.’ It was the same colour as her eyes. The first time I noticed her eyes at all, actually.

‘You also told me I was flat-chested, had a bony arse, looked – and I quote you directly here – like a sickly Victorian ghost child. Not even just a sick child, a sick ghost child.’

‘I mean.’ I don’t remember that time specifically, but I don’t doubt that I would’ve said it. I rub the back of my neck and give her a self-effacing smile I’m not sure she can even make out in the darkness. ‘You’re pretty bloody pale, Ashleigh.’

She rolls her eyes, but her smile creeps back out again.

‘And you did have a really bony arse. I swear I got a bruise that time you fell on me in the common room.’

‘Hilarious. Look, tell yourself what you want about … whatever you think you remember about school, but I can categorically tell you, you never flirted with me. You used to take the piss’ – yup, called it – ‘and you know how I know that? Because of that one time I heard your mates dare you to kiss me at the leavers’ party, and you said you wouldn’t even want to hold my hand if I was the last girl in the world, and couldn’t even be interested in me if you were so shitfaced you forgot your own name and I threw myself at you. You called me “decidedly unfuckable”.’

‘What—?’ I cut off as the memory of that hits with vivid clarity, playing out in my mind like a scene from a movie. I haven’t thought twice about that since it happened, but her words bring it back like it was just yesterday. Ashleigh gives me a triumphant look, so confident she’s just proved me wrong, but I’m too busy trying to formulate a response that the expression doesn’t bug me the way it usually would.

Finally, I manage, ‘Yeah, of course I said that! What did you expect me to say? You wouldn’t have wanted me to come up and snog you on our last night out with everybody after results. Or ever, actually, let’s face it. And I didn’t even fancy you to want to snog you, either.’

‘You didn’t just not fancy me. You didn’t even want to kiss me for a dare, and I’ll remind you that you ran a lap stark bollock naked around the rugby pitch one lunchtime because some of the lads egged you on, and you didn’t even think twice about it.’

My mouth falls open and my eyebrows scrunch together as I try to figure out how we’re seeing this so differently. The rest of our interactions at school, I can maybe understand, but this one seemed so cut and dried, I don’t know how she’s not getting it. My hands gesture awkwardly, stiffly, between us, palm up.

‘Weirdly enough, Ash, I didn’t want to snog you when I knew you weren’t going to be into it, whatever the boys had to say about it, even for a laugh. So, yeah, I said I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole or whatever, because then they dropped it. They’d have just kept on about it all night otherwise, and that would’ve annoyed the both of us. Plus, I really fancied Thea at the time and she’d just broken things off with Shaun’s mate, so I was planning to finally get a kiss off her at the leavers’ party, and if I’d been off snogging you instead, I don’t think she would’ve appreciated that too much.’

The smug, exasperated look finally slides off Ashleigh’s face, replaced by something slack as she digests that.

Her voice is quiet and all she has to say is, ‘Oh.’

Yeah, oh. God. This girl.

‘I know you’re kind of up your own arse sometimes – bony as it is – but you do realise I’m not a complete dick, don’t you?’

The face she pulls this time is on instinct, I know, because it’s the same withering look I remember so well from school, but even that vanishes quickly, into something that seems to say, I’m starting to.

Better late than never, I guess.

I don’t know when it started to matter so much to me that Ashleigh see me, but … She always has, in her own annoying, holier-than-thou way. That laser focus of hers cut right through me when I played up to my own act in school and even if everybody else thought I was always so upbeat and untouchable, she didn’t.

It’d just be nice if she’d see that wasn’t always an act, I think.

Not so I could finally win her over and revel in the victory of saying, after all this time, even Ashleigh Easton isn’t immune to the infamous Lawal charm, but just … because.

But, at the same time, this is us, and I can’t help but slip into old habits as I smirk at her.

I brace a hand against the doorframe above her head, so that when I shift closer, I’m leaning over her, despite the fact she’s almost of a height with me in those heels, and she has to move back into the door again and tilt her head to look at me properly.

‘Don’t tell me you were upset because I didn’t kiss you that night.’

She scoffs, but won’t quite meet my eye. I’ve cast her in shadow too much to tell if she’s blushing, but I’m not curious enough to move away. She doesn’t shove me aside, either.

‘No.’

She sounds pretty sure about that.

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