“Thanks. She’s the best, keeps me warm in—AAAAH! Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . oops.” My phone went flying and when I picked it up from the floor, I could see why she’d dropped it.
I felt panicked. “It was on a beach. Everyone tans topless in Europe. It’s not like I—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“I want to explain it to you, though. They’re friends. We were on holiday. It’s just a—”
“Seriously, you don’t have to explain it to me. You are a grown man who happens to have a photo of two gorgeous, half-naked women on your phone. Really, it’s all cool.”
“They’re not that gorgeous,” I said.
“What?” She looked at me with a shocked expression. “Seriously? If you don’t consider that gorgeous, then I don’t know who you’ve been with since me. Because one looks like Cindy Crawford and the other looks like Claudia bloody Schiffer. It’s like a nineties supermodel revival. God, I would love to look like them. Not to mention those breasts. I’d take one third of them, please.”
I almost opened my mouth and said that they didn’t hold a candle to her, but didn’t. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was perfect, exactly how she was. She had this sense of comfort and confidence in her own skin that was ridiculously hot. The way she tied her hair back messily, didn’t care that she had a smudge on her cheek and no make-up on. This grown-up version of her had settled into her own skin and owned it.Fucking hell, it was hot.So hot that if I carried on looking at her, I was going to have a problem here.
I quickly looked out the window again when I realized I’d been staring at her hands, watching her fingers tap away nervously on the armrest as the plane began a descent that was a little bumpy.
“So, is that all you wanted to know?” I said in an attempt to distract her. “Just if I owned a llama? Seems like a pretty random thing to ask after thirteen years.” Ash was silent, then her fingers stopped their nervous tapping and she turned to face me.
“What happened with your dad, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Well, he decided he was sick of us, so took up with his dental hygienist—how’s that for a cliché?—married her and has two more children now.”
“What? He’s remarried?”
“I know, crazy.”
“And you have half-siblings?”
“Half-brothers, apparently. I’ve never met them. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to my dad in nine years.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. That’s . . .” She paused for a while and then started nodding. “I get it. Why you changed your name. Does he still speak to Alissa?”
I shook my head sadly.
“But she was such a daddy’s girl.”
“He sent her a birthday card one year, and then never again.”
“Shit! What an asshole!” She sounded truly angry and indignant, and for a moment, it felt just like old times—when I was angry at the people who made her angry and vice versa. This little team of two against the world.
“Alissa just got engaged. Can you believe my little sister is going to get married? And she’s immigrated to Iceland of all places. Her fiancé is Icelandic.”
“I can’t believe that. In my mind she’s still nine.”
“Nope, twenty-two and doing a masters in geothermal engineering in Iceland! Who would have thought, right?”
“Twenty-two is quite young to get engaged.”
I paused. Swallowed hard. “We spoke about getting engaged at nineteen.”
Her face immediately reddened. “What did we know at nineteen?”
“Maybe it’s considered young, but when you know, you know, right?” I held her gaze meaningfully and she reciprocated for a few moments, but then looked down and tapped her fingers on the arm rest again.
“I don’t think anyone can everjust know. I suppose at the time we think we mightknow, but actually we don’t. And then some time passes and you look back on it all and you wonder how you ever thought youknewin the first place.”
I leaned across the space between us and spoke up as the engines grew louder during our descent. “I knew. And once upon a time, you knew too.”
