Catching a glimpse of startled, deep hazel eyes and a look of horror as he realised what was about to happen, they both attempted to swerve. Too late.
The next thing Maggie knew she was flying through the air, her bike free-wheeling into the wrought iron railings, the spokes crumpling and crunching as they slammed into them. She clenched her eyes shut as the world turned upside down, and braced herself for a crash landing. It came, with a dull thud, her backside skidding along in a pool of frost and slush and her helmet bouncing off the floor in a way that made her go temporarily cross-eyed.
For a moment she was too stunned to move. She lay there, feeling the moisture creep through the many layers of her clothing, a slow, paralysing sog of freezing cold snow wrapping itself around all her limbs. If this was a cartoon, she thought, Tweety Bird would be flapping round my head right about now. Wearing ear-muffs.
She lay still for a few seconds, allowing the fog to clear, before blinking her eyes and cautiously running a mental and physical check on her battered body parts.
Legs: yep, still moving. Arms: definitely all right. Head? A bit jiggered around, but essentially okay. Probably no worse than usual, anyway. It was only a searing pain running from her coccyx that was giving her any trouble. She’d landed on her arse – which, thankfully, had enough padding on it to have saved her from anything more serious. Three cheers for fat-bottomed girls.
She looked up and around, saw other people making their way towards them. Saw the man – the stupid, stupid man, with the big hazel eyes and the inhuman ability to cycle at 700 miles per hour – lying spreadeagled a few feet away from her, his few tortured, jerky movements making an abstract art snow angel around his big, twisted body.
She crawled up onto her hands and knees, and inched in his direction, all the while yelling words of both anger and concern. He’d knocked her off her bike. He was an idiot, and deserved a good shouting at.
Her backpack had spilled open, and her precious edition of Alice in Wonderland was lying tattered and torn and dirty, soaking slush up into its beautiful illustrated pages. And her bum hurt. A lot. She felt like karate chopping him in the nether regions. Except…he seemed to be in a lot of pain. And that leg of his was kind of pointing the wrong way. And…shit, where was the phone? And why couldn’t she feel her fingers?
As she got close enough to see his face, she realised who he was. It was Him. The Hot Papa from the Park. The Man with the Tux. The Guy Who Made Christmas Jumpers Sexy. The gorgeous American hunk-a-rama who had accidentally tripped in and out of her life over the last few days.
She glanced around, saw his bike. The bike with the child seat fitted on the back. The bike that was crumpled and buckled and lying abandoned by the rear wall of Brasenose College.
“The baby!” she shouted in complete panic as she finally reached him. “Where’s the baby?”
The first time she’d seen him had been less dramatic, but in its own way just as memorable. She’d been with Ellen, in the park. Three days earlier.
“I think I might die of oestrogen poisoning if this carries on,” Ellen had said, looking on in disgust at the scene playing out in front of her.
“It’s like all these yummy mummies have died and gone to totty heaven. Not a single one of them is watching their kids – they could be smoking crack or eating dog poo for all they’d notice. They’re obviously all just thinking about shagging, and I now feel like I need to scrub my entire brain with bleach. I mean – come on, he’s wearing a Christmas jumper! Surely it’s in the feminist rule book that you should never kiss a man in a Christmas jumper? ”
It was the first day of December, and the temperatures had plummeted overnight, as though the weather gods had consulted a calendar and decided to up their game. Ellen’s invective was accompanied by a cloud of warm air gusting in front of her; and trainer clad feet kicked impatiently at the frost-rutted soil beneath the bench.
Her usually pretty face was twisted in contempt as she ranted, and she shook her head sadly as she unscrewed her water bottle. They’d just reached the end of a three-mile run around the park, and Ellen looked untouched by the effort apart from a slight flush to her cheeks, and a few auburn tendrils clinging to damp skin.
That, thought Maggie O’Donnell, was what happened when you were 18, and your body hadn’t yet been battered by life, childbirth, or too many nights in alone with Colin Farrell movies and a box of cream horns.
She herself had been battered aplenty by all three of those things, though at 34 she was still in pretty decent nick. Internally, at least. Not decent enough to have spare breath right at that moment, though. Instead, she attempted to smile at her irritatingly athletic daughter, sprawled on the bench next to her, and looked on at the playground panorama that had annoyed Ellen all the way into an anti-Vagina Monologue.
Maggie had to admit she was kind of right, even if she was being overly judgey. There was a man. A real life, honest-to-goodness man, invading the territory that usually belonged solely to the female of the species – at least on a week-day.
He wasn’t just any old man either. He wasn’t one of the harried stay-at-home dads who sometimes turned up, covered in pureed peas and scuttling from the nappy bag to the swings with as much joie de vivre as a hippo with a hernia.
No, this man was…well, frankly gorgeous. Tall – over the six foot mark anyway. Broad. Brawny. Dressed in cold-weather duds of Levis, a sweater – one with a giant snowman’s face on it – and an expensive looking navy blue gilet. Dark hair that was starting to curl and looked like it was usually kept shorter. Yep – she could definitely see why the other mums had started to melt into a collective puddle of hormones on the frost-tinged grass. He looked like he’d stepped out of a rom com about a talented yet tortured rugby player.
She took a long drink of her water, sucked in a restorative breath, and continued to eyeball him as subtly as she could. Not, it seemed, quite subtly enough.
“Mum!” Ellen exclaimed, turning her piercing green gaze towards her. “You’re doing it too! It’s revolting – get a grip of yourself, you’re behaving like you’ve never seen a man before!”
“Well, sweetheart, I’m not sure I’ve seen one quite like that for…well, ever. And you’ve obviously never watched Bridget Jones’s Diary – a man in a Christmas jumper can be a force for good in the world.”
Ellen snorted, staring at the sweater – and the man wearing it – in a highly unconvinced fashion.
“Anyway,” Maggie continued. “Give a girl a break. I’m only flesh and blood, you know. It’s not like you hit 30 and you stop noticing, as you’ll discover yourself some day. And he is…easy on the eye.”
As she said it, one of the besotted mums walked straight into the slide, she’d been staring so hard, clonking her head in pure Carry On style and blushing furiously. Maggie bit her lip to stop herself laughing out loud. There but for the grace of God go I, she thought.
“Stop staring!” said Ellen, not quite managing to keep the giggle out of her voice. “You’re not a girl…you’re an ancient old hag. You’re well past your sell-by date.”
“I am so not,” replied Maggie, tearing her eyes away from the sexy stranger. “I may possibly be slightly past my best before date, but that’s as far as I’ll concede.”
“What’s the bloody difference, Queen of Tesco?”
“Well, if you eat something that’s past it’s sell by date, it’s bad. Pretty bad. Like, potential food poisoning bad. Think granddad after that barbecue when he used up all the old chicken and took the radio into the loo