Page 60 of If We Were Young

“Angela again?”

“Maybe.” I shifted forward. Why did the table seem so big? Like an ocean. “Why didn’t you kiss me?”

He still held my hand, still ran his middle finger along my lifeline like an old habit he couldn’t break.

Actually, I didn’t want to hear his answer. I shifted my hand and grabbed at the nearest fork, harpooning it into the giant share plate of noodles. I shovelled some into my mouth and then groaned as I began to chew.

Matthew arched an eyebrow, his smile slow and so sexy. “Good?”

“God, yeah,” I mumbled around the mouthful.

“Worth waiting for fifteen years for?”

His gaze levelled directly, and it ate into me a layer at a time. What was he saying? Asking? “Yes.” I took another mouthful to detract from the flush on my cheeks and he laughed, leaning across the table with his long arm and brushing his finger across my chin, wiping at some sauce.

“In that case I’m going in.”

“You should.” Another mouthful, another moan.

I’d slipped into wanton noodle eater mode. I didn’t care. It could have been the Sake, but I became warm and loose, like a stiff hinge that’d been given some oil.

I watched as Matthew lifted his chopsticks to his mouth and slurped some noodles in between those luscious lips he owned. I warmed even more at his own groan.

He chewed, watching me, his eyes bright. “Definitely worth the wait.” The way he said it, that black ink in his gaze. He wasn’t talking about noodles.

I put my fork down, my appetite vanishing.

Around us the air crackled with possibility.

Was this something?

Were we turning it into something over a plate of noodles?

Was it nothing? Just two old friends out for dinner. Was I reading into everything all wrong, again?

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words just evaporated. All the words. Not just, why? How? But all words I’d ever known.

It was the Ronnie curse.

I flinched a bit as he reached for my hand. “I thought I understood your silences. I respected them as your quirk. It’s only now I realise that I heard the wrong things in them.”

I nodded. Still no words.

“You let other people talk for you, tell you the right thing to do and then you try to please them.”

“I don’t.”

He lifted an eyebrow and put down his chopsticks. The waiter stared at the giant mound of food still sitting in the middle of the table and I tried not to feel guilty.

“Who suggested you move in with your mother after Paul died?”

Having Matthew say Paul’s name like that rang with a jarring note. It made it intimate, made my marriage exposed. His unspoken question ran towards me like fingers of a river reaching the sea. Why? When? Why? To save myself, I spun it around.

“What happened with Julie?” I wanted to stab myself in the eye, even speaking her name out loud. It was the most hated of names, up there with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, except Julie was worse.

It was her.

The shadow.