Just Last Night(104)

Fin bursts out laughing, one of his eye-creasing laughs that changes his whole face.

“I didn’t feel any horror at that idea, quite the opposite, but don’t you see how bad it would’ve been if I had? I bullied you into helping me search for my father in another country, I’d got you a hotel room. You’d been weeping, shortly before. Can you imagine, if anything had happened, what you might’ve wondered I’d been up to all along? Or the advantage you might feel I was taking in comforting you?”

“I never thought of that. I didn’t doubt your motives at all.”

“I know. I wanted it to stay that way.”

I smile, and marvel at how my opinion of Finlay Hart has undergone such a revolution. I would trust him with my life now. Which is just as well.

“Honesty, right, I’ll go first, then you can have a turn,” Fin says, and I brace. “I’m trying to reconcile all the following things. If I come in now, I think you know, I won’t want to leave again.”

I hard swallow.

“I want you to say you feel the same way, but I don’t want to hurt you: I have to get on a plane to America in a few days’ time, even though I don’t want to. I can’t stay here because my job isn’t here. I don’t want to tell you to come with me, even though I passionately want you to come with me, if that’s what you want. Tearing someone else’s life up by the roots like that isn’t fair. I don’t know how we make this work, but I don’t want to not try either. So yes, I want to meet Roger. But meeting Roger has a lot riding on it. Because if this is just going to be a very eventful few days, I feel like we both should agree to that. Not that it will make my leaving feel possible. OK. Now you.”

There’s a pause where I clear my throat and hope my voice works.

“Yeah, same,” I say, casually, and in the tension breaking we both laugh so much we have tears forming.

“I think . . .” I pause. “I think when you think of all the things we’ve both overcome, to be sitting here in this car together, having found each other. I don’t think we should let the distance between England and New York bother us. We’ll work out what happens next. We got here. We’re together. That’s what matters.”

Fin leans down and kisses me, and I twist around and put my fingers into his hair and kiss him back, soft then harder, feeling him respond.

“Might be easier if you undid your belt,” Finlay whispers, pointing at it, twisted across my chest like I’m in a child harness. I guffaw.

“Know when I knew that I loved you?” he says. “When I met you in the lobby to go to dinner. You were walking across the lobby, bandy-legged in those heels like a Gumby in Monty Python. It was like I could hear an orchestra, and all the stars came out.”

“Really?”

“Well, it was either that moment, or when you were bellowing you’d not even seen my pubic area on Leith quayside. I was very relieved about that, by the way.”

“Worst thing imaginable, for me to see you naked, then?”

“My personal Vietnam. Let’s never let that happen.”

I laugh and reach for the door handle.

“Why do I feel we understand each other so, so well, Evelyn? I’m meant to be the one who has answers for things like that,” Fin says, looking at me in some sort of awe. “It’s like my whole life was about traveling back to you.”

I’ve had time to think about this, lying awake in a cottage listening to rain on the roof. Thinking about how Finlay never abandoned me, whether it was on bike rides as children, or in hotel rooms as grown-ups.

“Because of the lesson we’ve taught each other,” I say.

“What is that?”

“Recovery.”





44


Three Months Later

The quizmaster’s booming voice cuts through the burble of chatter.

“In the BBC comedy series The Office, the Slough branch merges with a second branch of their paper merchant business. Where was that branch based? Where was that, branch based?”

Why do quizmasters always put the pause in a sentence in a really odd place?

“Reading,” Justin hisses, tapping a forefinger on the sheet.

“Ricky Gervais is from Reading, that’s why you think it’s Reading,” I hiss back.

“It’s not going to be a big city,” Ed whispers, fingers rifling in a bag of Frazzles. “It’s got to be Slough equivalent.”

He throws a Frazzle to Leonard who wakes up, eats it, and goes straight back to sleep.

“It’s where the John Travolta dancing guy comes from,” I whisper.

“Which was Reading,” Justin says.

“It’s not! Back me up, Francis.”

Francis nods. “Reading’s too big.”

“Thank you.”

“Also not funny enough, somehow.”

“Is Slough funny?” Justin sniffs.

“Intrinsically, yes,” Ed says. “Imagine Vic Reeves singing in melodramatic voice . . . the whore was from SLOUGH! Funny.”

“Swindon,” Finlay says.

We all look at him in surprise.

“You live in New York, you don’t know our trivia,” I say.

“It was on well before I left Britain, and we have the BBC over there.”