I bit at my lip. I hated that Chris had treated her like that. That he hadn’t appreciated her for who she was. She’d lost so much to those assholes, and how she was still so bright was beyond me.
“Phil,” she said more softly, reaching for my hand, and I happily let her take it. “You’ve known me for most of our lives. If you erased everything you knew about me from the last three years, and this were a real first date, where would you have taken me?”
“Definitely not here,” I admitted easily.
“Where then?”
I barely had to think about it at all, because I’d spent a summer five years ago figuring out the answer to that question. And I did know Amy. She was funny and showy and competitive, and she was always up for anything. I loved all those things about her.
“Honestly?” I asked, and she nodded encouragingly. “Chippy and bowling.”
Amy squeezed my hand so hard in response I had to yank it away.
“Now that’s more like it. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We walked nearly half a mile along the river to get to the bowling alley, stopping when we were almost there to buy paper parcels full of food: large cod and chips for me, and a jumbo battered sausage and chips for her. Not everything from Manchester could be discounted, apparently, as Amy ordered gravy to go with her chips.
We smuggled the food into the bowling alley, though smuggled was probably a strong word given that the entire business seemed to be staffed by pimply fifteen-year-olds who couldn’t have cared less what we brought in. Hell, I’d worked there myself as a kid for one very smelly summer.
We ordered a whole pitcher of some disgusting blue cocktail, and I let Amy refill my glass when it was empty, trusting that Anil and Ethel would be fine. Amy was catching a lift home with Jack later from mine, and I noticed that she practically chugged the first drink, needing a refill almost instantly.
We got very, very tipsy over the course of the first game, which I won by just a few points. During the second game, we played where we took turns copying each other’s “trick shots”, though that was probably an overly generous way of describing the increasingly creative ways we managed to score zero points. Amy nearly wet herself when I decided to spin the ball like I’d once seen in an old Disney Channel film, and I asked her “Areyou ready for spin time?” before chucking the ball directly in the gutter. Amy technically won that game, though it felt like blind luck more than anything, and I took a selfie of us in front of the score table on the screen, Amy holding her ball up like a trophy. I only noticed later that I wasn’t even looking at the camera, but at Amy herself.
As we walked back to mine, we kept bumping into each other as if magnetised, which was probably from the blue pitcher more than anything else. At one point Amy rebounded off me so hard that she almost ended up in the road, so I insisted that she walk on the inside. And if my hands lingered on her waist a little too long as I moved her around me, that was probably just the blue pitcher, too.
Amy insisted on walking me to the door despite the fact that Jack was parked across the street, scrolling on his phone.
“Lore drop,” she said as we got to the front door, and I fumbled with my keys. “Sometimes I let you win when we play games because it makes you so happy.”
I scoffed. “As if I didn’t just let you win that last game.”
“You absolutely did not!” she said, shoving me just hard enough that I took a step back. When I came forward again, I may have overcompensated with a little step forward, bringing me just a tiny bit closer to her.
We were both quiet for a moment, and I wondered if, like me, she didn’t want the date to end. Or maybe she was hoping for a specific ending– was that wishful thinking on my part?
But the booze I could still taste was too reminiscent of the last time I’d thought she might want me to kiss her, so I changed course in my mind.
“Is this okay?” I asked. “Are you getting what you want from this?”
She seemed to really think about her answer.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said, but again she didn’t sound so confident. I wondered where all her bravado and certainty had gone. Maybe, like me, she’d just gotten more jaded as she’d gotten older. Less certain. “Things are going well with Dad, anyway.”
“That’s good,” I said, and I was happy that things were going the way she wanted, even if I didn’t fully get it.
“But I guess time will tell,” she added. “What about you? Are you getting what you want?”
I had to actively remind myself of the reasons I’d had for wanting to do this. Reasons other than just wanting to be around her. Wanting nights like this. Wanting to make things up to her for how badly I’d fumbled it five years ago.
“Yeah, everyone’s been off my back,” I said. “But like you said, I guess time will tell.”
Time will tell an awful lot, I thought. Like if this was all a terribly misguided idea to begin with. But even if I didn’t get what I wanted from it, as long as she did, it wasn’t a waste of time. Not to me.
“Well, we’ve got plenty of it,” she said. And she was right; we still had exactly twelve weeks until our new expiry date: the fantasy ball. “You think you have it in you?”
The answer came easily. “Definitely.”
I looked at her for another long moment and admitted to myself that I couldn’t prolong this tipsy proximity any longer. My two options were to kiss her or say goodbye. And as tempting as the first option was, as much as it felt like fighting gravity not to lean in and find out if she tasted like those damned blue cocktails, I wasn’t quite ready to crash and burn. And plus, Jack wasright there. Sure, he’d seen us kiss once before already, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to let it happen again on purpose.
