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I wondered whether to cut this short and fling myself straight into his arms. But Lesley had said I shouldn’t make it too easy for him. So I just raised my eyebrows and waited for more.
“I didn’t want to hurt you, please believe that,” he said, and he obviously meant it, his voice was so husky. “You looked so dreadfully sad and disappointed yesterday evening.”
“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” I said quietly. I thought I could be forgiven for that lie. No need to rub it in about all the tears I’d shed and my fervent wish to die of galloping consumption. “I was just … it rather hurt.…” (Okay, so that was the understatement of the century!) “It rather hurt to think you’d only been pretending all along, I mean the kisses, saying you loved me.…” I was getting embarrassed, so I stopped.
He looked, if possible, even more remorseful. “I promise you nothing like that will ever happen again.”
What exactly did he mean? I couldn’t quite make it out. “Well, now that I know, of course it wouldn’t work another time,” I said a bit more firmly. “And between you and me, it was a silly plan anyway. People in love aren’t influenced more easily than anyone else—far from it! With all those hormones churning around, you never know what they’ll do next.” I was living proof of that, after all.
“But people do things out of love that they wouldn’t do at all usually.” Gideon raised a hand as if to caress my cheek, and then he let it fall again. “If you’re in love, the other person suddenly seems more important than yourself.” If I hadn’t known better, I’d almost have thought he was about to burst into tears. “You make sacrifices … that’s probably what the count meant.”
“I don’t think the count has any idea what he’s talking about,” I said scornfully. “If you ask me, he’s not what you might call an expert on love, and as for his knowledge of the female mind, it’s … it’s pathetic!” Now kiss me; I want to know if stubble feels prickly.
A smile lit up Gideon’s face. “You could be right,” he said, taking a deep breath like when someone has had a heavy weight fall from his heart. “I’m glad we’ve cleared that up, anyway. We’ll always stay good friends, won’t we?”
What?
“Good friends?” he repeated, and suddenly my mouth felt dry. “Good friends who know they can trust and rely on each other,” he added. “It’s really important for you to trust me.”
It took a couple of seconds, but then it began to dawn on me that somewhere in this conversation, we’d branched off in different directions. What Gideon had been trying to say wasn’t “please forgive me, I love you,” but “let’s stay good friends.” And every idiot knows that those are two totally different things.
It meant that he hadn’t fallen in love with me.
It meant that Lesley and I had seen too many romantic films.
It meant …
“You bastard!” I cried. Fury, bright, hot fury was pouring through me so violently that it made my voice hoarse. “What a nerve! How dare you? One day you kiss me and say you’ve fallen in love with me; the next you say you’re sorry for telling such horrible lies—and then you want me to trust you?”
Now Gideon also realized that we’d been talking at cross purposes. The smile disappeared from his face. “Gwen—”
“Shall I tell you something? I regret every single tear I shed over you!” I was trying to shout at him, but I failed miserably. “And you needn’t imagine there were all that many of them!” I just about managed to croak.
“Gwen!” Gideon tried to take my hand. “Oh, God! I’m so sorry. I really didn’t want to … please!”
Please what? I stared angrily at him. Didn’t he notice that he was just making everything even worse? And did he think that pleading look in his eyes would change anything? I wanted to turn around, but Gideon had a firm grasp on my wrist.
“Gwen, listen to me. There are dangerous times ahead of us, and it’s important for the two of us to stand by each other. I … I really do like you very much, I want us to…”
He surely wasn’t going to say it again. Not that corny old bit about good friends. But he did exactly that.
“… be good friends. Don’t you see? Unless we can trust each other—”
I tore myself away from him. “As if I wanted to be friends with someone like you!” Now my voice was back, and it was so loud that it made the pigeons fly up from the roof. “You don’t have the faintest idea what friendship means!”
And suddenly it was dead easy. I tossed my hair back, turned on my heel, and swept away.
You’ve got to jump off cliffs—and build your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY
THREE
LET’S STAY FRIENDS—I mean, that really was the end!
“What do you bet a fairy dies every time someone says that anywhere in the world?” I asked. I’d locked myself into the ladies to call Lesley on my mobile, and I was doing my best not to scream, although only half an hour after my conversation with Gideon, that’s what I still felt like doing.
“He said he wants you to be friends,” Lesley corrected me. As usual, she’d noticed every word.
