Press night guests were wafting in and out, some leaving the event for cigarette breaks, others clustering near the entrance to pose for pictures. Rachel tore her eyes away from an influencer couple hugging and kissing for a tabloid paparazzo. That was it, she decided. She couldn’t take any more.
She turned in the direction of Leicester Square station, then stopped before she took a single step. Tom was standing in front of her, dressed in his usual jeans, trainers and well-worn T-shirt. And he was carrying a huge, thin, rectangular thing. A last-minute addition for the exhibition? Maybe he’d had some printing emergency, and that was why he wasn’t all dressed up.
Rachel’s heart swelled at the sight of him – grew so big inside her chest she was scared it might crush her lungs. How could she ever have thought he was just her friend?
His grey-blue eyes were wide and wary.
‘Are you leaving?’ he asked.
‘I was. You weren’t there,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m glad I saw the show – it’s brilliant. You should be proud of it.I’mproud of it. But … I didn’t come to look at the photographs. I came to see you.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. I came to see you because … because I’ve been toostupidto see you.Sostupid, for so bloody long.’
Her eyes had filled with tears and her voice was wobbling in her throat. But if she didn’t say this now, she’d never forgive herself.
‘I love you, and not just as a friend. I think that, in some quiet corner of my head – no, myheart– you’ve been more than a friend to me for a really long time. I just couldn’t let myself admit it. I’d got so good at shoving my feelings away that I pushed this away too. Maybe I was scared – maybe I thought I’d lose you forever if you didn’t feel the same. But I can’t believe how blind I’ve been.’
Rachel looked at Tom, her eyes travelling from his blondish curls to his tightly folded arms, then back up to those thousand-coloured eyes and NHS-style specs. Her heart flip-flopped in her chest as she suddenly understood.
‘It’s like Clark Kent and Superman,’ she said.
Tom made a quizzical face.
‘They can’t occupy the same space,’ Rachel went on. ‘And I think … you being such an important friend to me, and me being in love with you – I couldn’t reconcile those things. Clark and Superman are never seen in a room together, are they?’ she said. ‘And yet it turns out …’
Tears spilled from her eyes as she said it out loud: ‘It turns out that they are, and always have been, one and the same person.’
‘Are you trying to tell me I’m your Superman?’ Tom asked. But he was smiling. Soft and gentle and smiling, with his kind eyes and his crooked smile and his dimpled bottom lip that, suddenly,powerfully, she wanted to kiss.
‘I think that’s stretching the metaphor a bit far, but I suppose so,’ Rachel said.
‘What about Jack?’
‘Ugh. Who? From the moment you fake-kissed me on my birthday, Jack may as well have disappeared … He’s back in Manchester now, thank God. For reasons I’ll bore you with another time, the senior management at R/C – and Mountaintop – thought it better that he return to his old job.’
‘I didn’t fake-kiss you,’ Tom said. Bright-pink blotches had appeared on his cheeks. ‘I kissed you because I was so incredibly exhausted with the effort ofnotkissing you. But the situation was all wrong, and I thoughtyouwere fake-kissing me.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Rachel said, shaking her head. ‘There was nothing fake about me trying to get you in a headlock after you stepped away from me … Much to my own surprise, I just really,reallywanted to snog you.’
Tom laughed and Rachel moved forward a couple of paces.
‘Do you still want to?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
She took his hand in hers and looked up at him with an answering grin. ‘Obviously.’
Then his arms were around her and they were crushed together, but his lips were so gentle on hers that it made her want to weep. She kissed him harder, pushing his mouth open with her lips.
She loved him, she loved him, she loved him.Ofcourseshe did.
‘You’re going to give me a heart attack and I haven’t even said my bit yet,’ Tom whispered when they broke apart. His head was still bent down, his forehead resting on hers.
‘Your bit?’
‘Yes.Mybit. I went to the Hope tonight, to find you. I figured you wouldn’t come here after I’d ignored you for three weeks – that I needed to make some sort of …gesture. To apologise for freezing you out when you’d tried to open up to me. Anna looked like she might actually murder me when she said they’d sent you here.’
Rachel laughed, then asked, ‘What sort of gesture?’
