Page 3 of That Reunited Feeling

Why is my hatred of LA suddenly so important I have to say this many words about it?

“Thanks for sharing your completely unsolicited opinion.” She folds her arms. “Obviously I’ll change my mind instantly.” She puts a finger to her puckered lips as if thinking hard. “Oh. You know what? No, I won’t.”

Why are we even talking about this?

“How are you Maggie and Jim’s housekeeper?”

“Bumped into Maggie in the village. I needed work. And she offered me a job,” Hannah says as if of course that’s what happened.

“You just happened to be in Blythewell? The die-hard Boston city girl just happened to be hanging out in this sleepy little New Hampshire village?” My balls are starting to stick to my hand.

“You think I came up here deliberately to find them and hoodwink them into giving me a job? I didn’t even know they’d moved here till I saw Maggie in Jude’s plant shop.”

“Jude? Plant shop?” What are these words?

“My cousin, Jude, has a gardening and plant store in the village. I was staying with her and helping her out when Maggie came in. That’s when she offered me this job.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Jesus screaming hell, why didn’t Aunt Mags tell me?

“How would I know?” Hannah shrugs like it’s perfectly normal to stand chatting with your first love while he’s stark bollock naked on the landing of his aunt and uncle’s house more than a decade and a half after you last saw him. “I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known you were coming.”

“Why?” I can’t kid myself that doesn’t hurt a little. Why would she want to avoid me? Also, clearly I’m not the only one Maggie and Jim didn’t tell.

“Why?” She scans the ceiling in mock concentration. “I don’t know. Maybe because you said you were going to London for the summer…and now it’s fifteen years later.”

“Seventeen.” And like entering a time machine, I can see the face that’s looking at me now just as it was right before I left, with rivers of tears and black eyeliner streaming down its face, not the fury that’s behind its eyes now, blond hair shaved short on one side, chin-length on the other, not long and tied up in a ponytail as now.

She’s no less beautiful than she was then, just more tired, like she’s lived a whole life since I last saw her. The set of her jaw is no less determined, and the ability to speak her mind is obviously no less diminished.

“Yeah, seventeen,” she says. “More than half my life ago you just stopped replying to my emails.”

Oh, Christ. I can’t get into all this while jet-lagged, hungover, and naked.

I turn toward the door but stop halfway, realizing I’m about to moon her. “I’m going to get dressed. Then we can catch up after that.”

“Catch up?” she scoffs. “If you’d cared about catching up you wouldn’t have ghosted me in the first place.”

For all this to spew out in the first minute of setting eyes on me, it must have been floating pretty damn close to the surface this whole time.

The bit of hair that has a habit of annoyingly falling across my face is tickling my nose so much it needs a scratch, but I daren’t take a hand away from the master and his servants. Not least because the master has clearly noticed Hannah’s attractiveness and, unaware of the delicate nature of the situation, is doing his best to stand up.

“Ghost you? I didn’t?—”

“Sure you did. I was just a kid, totally in love with you, waiting for you to come back. And all I got was a message saying you weren’t. And a promise I could come visit. Then…” She widens her eyes and thrusts her face forward, making me recoil and bash the back of my head against the door. “Nothing.”

“Christ, I was a kid too, Hannah. A kid in London. Surrounded by new and…” I’m suddenly chilly. “Look, can we please talk about this when I’m dressed?”

She looks me up and down, from whatever state my hair is in to the tips of my bare toes, as if only just realizing I’m clothesless. “Why are you out here naked anyway?”

Oh, yeah. The shock of seeing the love of my life has made me forget what the hell I was doing.

Love of my life? Was she? We were teenagers. And my brain currently feels like a bag of overboiled cabbage. So maybe that’s not a correct assessment.

“I thought it was my bathroom.” I jerk my head to the frustratingly inaccessible room behind me, swinging my hair across the end of my nose, tickling it more. “Knocked over a glass of water. Need a cloth, or a towel, or something.”

Her eyes narrow and roll at the same time. “I’ll leave you to it.” She steps away toward the stairs. “Then you can let go of all that”—she nods toward my crotch—“and open the door.“

Thank Christ.

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