Our lives would be totally different now, I want to say, but it sounds a bit too drama queen. Even if it is, in my opinion, true.
“I know. But I wasn’t right for a long time. And by the time I finally got my head together, you were in a relationship. You were happy. What was I going to do, disrupt that? Call up and say, You know how I broke your heart? Well, guess what, I have an explanation now. It was too late. I couldn’t expect you to forgive me.” Joe meets my eyes briefly, his face a little bleak. “Maybe sometimes in life you just miss your chance.”
“I wasn’t happy,” I say, my voice tiny. “I wasn’t.”
Joe is silent for a moment, as though digesting my words.
“You looked happy. You went out with that guy Dominic. And before that, you were with…” He hesitates, as though he can’t believe he’s saying the word. “Humph.”
“Don’t mention Humph.” I clap a mortified hand over my face. “Please don’t mention Humph. I’m so ashamed of that.”
“I’ll admit it was a surprise. Even Mum, who was firmly on your side, wavered a bit when she saw you with Humph at the carol service.” He pauses. “In that extraordinary fur hat. Calling him ‘darling.’？”
I peek out between my fingers, to see him give a sudden snort of mirth.
“Humph, darling,” he says, imitating me. “Humph, you’re an absolute scream.”
“Don’t!” I say, giggling in spite of myself.
“I didn’t think it was funny then, obviously,” says Joe. “But now…it is quite funny.”
I smile back at him, almost shyly. Can we still laugh? If we can, it feels like a small miracle.
“I’m sorry I behaved like that at the carol service.” I shake my head ruefully. “It was all an act. I wanted to show you what you were missing.” I pause, then add awkwardly, “Humph and I never…”
“Didn’t you?” says Joe after a pause.
“No.”
Somehow I need him to know this fact. But I can’t tell if it makes any difference to anything. Joe’s face is closed up, his eyes dark with thoughts I can’t read. The atmosphere is getting too intense, and I swivel away.
“Funny we should wind up here,” I say, scuffing the wooden floor with my foot. “The place where it ended.”
There’s silence, and I watch the dust motes floating in a shaft of sunshine. Then Joe replies in a low voice, “I don’t think of it like that. I think of it as the place where it began.”
His words take me by surprise. For years, I’ve only thought of this tree house as the backdrop to devastation, humiliation, weeping. But now my mind is leapfrogging back to a previous time. A sun-dappled, endless afternoon. Two teenagers, finding their way with each other for the first time. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the scratchy rug. The rough wooden floor. Joe’s body on mine, more hard and assured and insistent than I’d ever known it. Sensations which seemed both new and timeless. Pain and bliss.
I’d forgotten. No, I hadn’t forgotten, exactly. I’d chosen not to recall. But now…Slowly I turn back to look at Joe, my head tingling. The air is coming alive; I can feel it. A prickling atmosphere is growing between us. And to match it, my body is coming alive. I’m filled with a strong, pulsating hunger.
Is it just a nostalgic yearning for what we had then?
No. It’s not. It’s a hunger for now. Right now. A longing to reclaim his body, this place, this man.
Restlessly, I get to my feet, and Joe follows suit. I gaze past him, through the window, at the view which has been the same since before we were even born. Then, slowly, I turn back to face him.
“Maybe sometimes in life you get another chance,” I say, my voice barely a husk. “Maybe you can go back. Right back to…how it was in the beginning.”
Something shifts in Joe’s face. His gaze is pinned on mine now, dark and urgent, as though with a question. The same question I’m silently asking.
“I remember every moment of that day,” he says, his deep, gravelly voice mesmerizing me. “Don’t you? We were kissing, right here. And we both wanted it so badly, but we were kind of nervous, remember? Putting it off, almost. Then at last you said, ‘Is this the day?’ And I said, ‘Is it?’ Because I didn’t want to—” He breaks off, breathing hard. “And you said, ‘Yes.’ And that’s when we…”
He takes a step forward, his eyes never leaving mine.