‘Meg?’
I inhale. There’s something about hearing him say my name that way that makes me do that. ‘Hi.’
He frowns. ‘What are you doing out here?’
I shrug. I’m not about to tell him I just had a fight with Dan.
He smiles again and I almost start to feel dizzy. ‘Long time no see,’ he says in that lazy, posh-boy drawl he’s still in the process of cultivating, copied from his upmarket circle of friends.
I nod. And then, because I really need to say something else, I croak out, ‘How are you?’
The smile becomes lopsided and I know he’s quietly laughing at me, that he knows he’s got me all off kilter and he likes it. It would have made the other twenty-one-year-old me angry, because I would have thought he was mocking me, but the real me knows that he’s actually pleased to see me. The real me knows that in just under a week he’s going to ask me to run away with him, and he’s going to mean every word. That’s not disdain I see glinting in his eyes but honest-to-goodness pleasure at seeing me again.
He reaches out his hand. ‘Let me walk you home. You know Catriona Webb was attacked out here a couple of months ago?’ He points to a spot only a couple of hundred feet away past the rose garden.
I hesitate. Something inside, some strange kind of instinct, tells me he’s dangerous. Oh, I don’t think he’d ever hurt me, not physically, anyway, but it suddenly occurs to me that this meeting never happened in my old life.
What if I should have been more careful up until now? What if, by not sticking to the same script, I’ve been changing things, causing the repercussions to ripple out like the waves from the swimming goose, until the life I once knew is pulled out of shape and made into something different? While I’d love some things to change, what if I never get home back to Sophie? What if Sophie never even exists?
But even after thinking all of this, I reach out and place my hand in Jude’s. He’s right. With a sexual predator on the loose – maybe someone from outside the college who slipped past the lax security, maybe someone lurking in our midst – I really shouldn’t be wandering around in the dark on my own.
We start walking towards the front gate in silence, but after a couple of minutes he says, ‘So where’s Dave?’
‘Dan,’ I reply, even though I suspect he got the name wrong on purpose.
‘Dan, then,’ he adds, and I hear the smile in his voice.
‘Party in Derwent. I got tired.’
‘And he let you wander out here alone? That’s not very gallant.’
No, it wasn’t, I think, for a moment conveniently forgetting that I’d made it my mission to push ever-affable Dan to his limit. ‘Where were you coming from?’ I ask Jude, so I don’t have to answer his question.
‘Went to hang out with a friend, then we headed down to the bar for a drink.’
I nod. Without any more details I know this ‘friend’ was a girl. I change the subject. ‘So what are you up to after exams?’
He chuckles. ‘You know me … I haven’t got a plan. Dom and I are going to bum around the South of France for a bit and then, well … we’ll just see what crops up.’
I sigh. Seeing as I know ‘bumming around’ leads Jude into a successful career somehow along the way, I feel jealous. I worked hard, but I never amounted to anything more than ‘ordinary’.
‘What about you?’
I sigh again. The twenty-one-year-old me might not have known what the future holds, but I do. In just a few short days my life will be set on a course to suburban mediocrity and simmering discontentment. ‘I’m going to run away with the circus,’ I say wearily.
Jude laughs. Not one of his slightly cynical huffs, but a proper loud one, as if what I said tickles him. ‘Never really thought of you as the running-away type,’ he says and there’s an added edge of velvet to his tone. In an instant, the air around us changes.
I stop, turn and look at him. I know I’m being stupid. I know I could be endangering everything by just being with him, let alone feeling … this … with him, but it’s like having an itch I’ve been trying not to scratch and on a reflex I’m reaching for it, taking my satisfaction in shredding what’s left of my resolve to pieces with my fingernails.
‘Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.’
He answers me with a smile. A wicked one. ‘You’ve changed.’
I stare him straight in the eyes. ‘Yes, I have.’
He glances towards Derwent Hall and then back to me again. The sounds of the party are drifting through the open common-room windows and across the lake. The geese pay no attention. It’s nothing they haven’t heard before. ‘Then Dave’s a very lucky man.’
I hold my breath and stare back at him. I feel as if my life is teetering on a fulcrum, that if I make one false movement it’ll tip. I know this moment is crucial but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.
All I know is that Dan is going to propose to me in four days and not even the tiniest part of me wants to say yes.
Becca finds me the next day in the canteen, while I’m buying a sad-looking tuna-and-sweetcorn baguette. I deliberately pretended to be asleep this morning, because I didn’t want to talk to her about last night. However, it appears that may not have been the best call, because my boyfriend clearly got to her first. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asks. ‘Dan told me you were a total bitch to him last night.’
I raise my eyebrows and turn to look at her. ‘He said that?’
‘Those weren’t his exact words. But I can read between the lines.’
She picks up a bottle of Appletiser and joins the queue. ’You need to apologise to him.’
Part of me wants to remind her what she said on the phone the night I told her Dan might be cheating on me, but I know that I can’t. She’ll think I’m crazy. I also know she’s right. This Dan has done nothing. If I filter out all the things he will do and will say, and look at the situation objectively, I can only come to one conclusion: I was a total bitch to him last night.
‘I know,’ I reply with a sigh.
After lunch I go in search of Dan. I find him at Al’s, nursing a cup of half-cold tea. I sit down opposite him. ‘Sorry,’ I say and he looks at me warily. ‘Put it down to hormones and the stress of looming exams.’
His jaw remains tight, but there’s a softening in his eyes. ‘We’re alright, then?’
I nod. As alright as we can be in this version of our life, I suppose.
He surprises me by half-standing, leaning across the table and planting a lingering kiss on my lips, right in front of Al and the rest of his motley customers, then he pulls away and looks at me seriously. ‘You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘I can hardly believe I’m the lucky man you picked. Always remember that. Always make me remember that.’
A lump forms in my throat and my eyes grow moist. All morning I’ve been imagining what it would be like to say yes to Jude, but now I don’t know what I want. Could I make Dan remember how he feels about me in this moment, even years from now when he really doesn’t want to? Our whole lives could be different if I could.
Three days. Two days. One.
My brain is counting down to the inevitable. I know it’s coming. Dan’s proposal. Even my fit of extreme bitchiness last week hasn’t seemed to have put him off. If anything, he’s trying