Chapter Five
October 2007
After watching the rugby training session, Lydia and Sally went into the city for some much needed recuperation. They’d worked hard on their assignments and this was the rest they needed before lectures were full on again tomorrow. They headed straight for a café, the first they saw with empty tables out front. Sally was a smoker, something Lydia had attempted to make her give up since they moved into the same house, but as with a lot of things, Sally used finals year as an excuse to keep as many of her comforts as close to her as she could.
Toasted sandwiches and cups of tea ordered, Sally took one last long drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke in the opposite direction and sat down. ‘When we’re workers, I’ll be relaxing at the Thermae Spa, not at the side of the street,’ she said. ‘I’ll be sipping champagne following a massage.’
‘They won’t let you in, you know,’ Lydia replied. ‘Not with that dirty smoking habit you have. Spas are for clean people.’
Sally flicked some sugar grains from the table at her friend. ‘I’ll give up, just not yet. Greg hates it too, he’s asked me to stop.’
‘I’m sure he has. He’s a fit rugby player.’
‘Talking of which…’
Their sandwiches and tea arrived, and as Lydia lifted her ham, cheese and tomato toastie to her mouth, she asked, ‘Talking of what?’
‘Fit rugby players.’
Lydia had wondered how long Sally could go without mentioning it. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you won’t have a fit rugby player boyfriend if you keep lying to him about quitting the fags.’
‘I know.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I wish I’d met him last year and then I may have been able to give up but I can’t, not with all this work and then exams.’
‘Excuses, excuses.’
‘You’re one to lecture me about excuses. What’s all this about not wanting distractions in your final year?’
They got on to talking about everything their course entailed this year, the options they could take, the assessments and assignments along the way.
‘My head’s spinning just thinking about it,’ said Sally but then her serious expression gave way to a smile as she looked past Lydia. She leaned across the table and whispered, ‘Looks like your man isn’t going to give up without a fight.’
‘What?’ Lydia wrestled with a scalding hot piece of tomato that slipped out from between the slices of bread, and as she put it in her mouth with a stringy piece of cheese, Theo pulled up a chair. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said between bites.
‘Never felt so special in my life,’ Theo told Sally, who of course thought the whole situation was amusing enough. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I saw you and told the guy waiting tables to deliver my coffee over here.’
‘You’re very pushy.’
‘Only when I want something really bad.’
Lydia said yes to the offer of a can of Coke when Sally took out her purse. She could do with one after the hot piece of tomato had stripped a layer of skin from the roof of her mouth.
‘Come on, Lydia, cut a guy some slack.’
‘How did you know my name?’ His look told her she was being pretty naive. ‘You asked Greg.’
‘Yeah, don’t really need to be a uni student to figure that one out.’
She looked around and saw Greg at a table on his own, texting someone on his phone, most likely Sally who was inside the café, telling her where he was sitting so he could leave Lydia and Theo to it.
‘You know,’ Theo began, ‘if you tried out for the cheerleading team, you could watch us all the time.’
She almost choked on her last mouthful when she laughed and when Sally returned to deliver her can of Coke, she took the merriment to mean she was happy to be left alone with this guy. ‘Oh please, I’m not shaking my pom-poms at anyone, least of all you.’
‘I don’t know…’ He looked her up and down. ‘You’d make a good cheerleader. You’ve got that exotic look going on, all tanned and long legs.’
She sipped from the straw, pushed into the open can of Coke, and then hooked her bag on her shoulder. ‘It’s time I left.’ She could easily relax by walking around the shops. She couldn’t afford to buy anything but window shopping would be enough of a break today.
His hand on her forearm persuaded her to sit down. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not a total sleaze. Honest. I just wanted to talk to you. My flirting skills are atrocious and I come across as a bit of a dickhead, I know.’
