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While I might not have picked the easiest spot for a rendezvous, if I was looking for a magical location, this one was hard to beat. There were Christmas decorations everywhere, thousands of twinkling lights, and huge mistletoe chandeliers suspended from the market’s arches, which quite a few couples were putting to good use.
I said ‘Excuse me’ more times than I could count, and inadvertently appeared in several tourist snaps as I made my way towards the giant Norwegian spruce. I peeled away from the surging crowd just once, lured by an intoxicating aroma of warmed wine and spices. On impulse, I bought a couple of mulled-wines-to-go from a vendor’s cart at the edge of the market. Two hot drinks and high-heeled boots on slippery cobbles is a dangerous combination, but somehow I made it to the base of the Christmas tree without mishap.
I was early, and while I hadn’t exactly rushed through the interview, I certainly hadn’t lingered after it was done. I only hoped, when I played it back on my phone, that no one would realise that for once my mind hadn’t been entirely on my work.
A clock chimed the quarter hour, and the excitement I’d been trying so hard to suppress fizzed in my veins. In less than fifteen minutes I would see Finn again, and my emotions kept swinging like a pendulum between being nowhere near ready for this to so eager it was frankly embarrassing. For so long I’d wondered if I’d simply imagined the strength of the connection between us before he’d left for Australia. It would be good to finally find out – one way or the other – if it really had been all in my head.
As much as I’d tried to tell myself this wasn’t an actual date, my actions kept betraying me. In my bathroom that morning I’d reached for the ridiculously expensive shower gel, the one I kept for special occasions, rather than the supermarket cheapie I usually used. I’d skipped straight past my normal workday clothes and pulled a dress from my wardrobe that hugged the bits of me I liked and was kind to those I didn’t. My hair had behaved perfectly, my make-up was subtle but flattering. I was ready for this.
Except when I finally spotted Finn weaving his way through the crowds towards me, with a smile that whipped my breath away, I realised I was nowhere near ready. I was lost, even before his first hello.
‘Snap!’ he said, his eyes crinkling warmly at the edges as he held up two styrofoam cups of mulled wine. There were too many hot drinks and no free hands to allow us to hug, which took away the awkward ‘should we or shouldn’t we’ dilemma. Instead, Finn bent his head to graze my cheek with a fly-by kiss.
‘Shall we get out of this throng?’ he suggested, taking the cups from my hands and balancing them effortlessly on top of his own.
‘Old skills,’ he said with a smile, noticing my impressed expression.
‘Do you ever miss the coffee shop?’ I asked, which seemed a safer way of asking if he missed living in the UK – or anyone he might have left behind there.
‘I miss seeing people every day,’ Finn said thoughtfully. ‘Writing a novel is a pretty solitary way of earning a living.’
We just happened to be walking past a bookshop at that moment, with a window display featuring his latest.
‘You seem to be doing very well at it. I really loved this book, by the way,’ I said.
‘You must have stayed up all night reading it.’
I shook my head. ‘No. I managed to get hold of a proof copy a few months ago.’ Finn smiled. I was giving myself away with every sentence that came out of my mouth, and I didn’t even care.
Somehow, without dropping our drinks, Finn had managed to loop an arm around my shoulders, protecting me from the crowd that we now appeared to be walking against. He steered us towards the edge of the piazza and set the four cups on a low wall. He prised the lid off two of them and passed one to me.
‘Cheers,’ he said, bumping his cup gently against mine. ‘To old friends and second chances.’ I looked up at him. His toast was confusing. We weren’t really old friends, just two people whose lives had briefly collided. Was this his way of saying he wanted to keep things purely platonic? I couldn’t tell, so I ignored the first part of his toast and focused instead on the words I preferred.
‘To second chances,’ I said softly.
*
The restaurant was amazing. Set on the twenty-eighth floor of a top London hotel, it overlooked Hyde Park – and the Queen’s back garden, or so it cheekily claimed. The cuisine had won numerous awards, but to be honest the food could have tasted like cardboard and I’d still have said it was the best meal I’d ever had. Part of that was due to the spectacular view from the window beside my chair, from where the city looked like a tray of sparkling gems set out beneath us. The other reason this night would live on as one of my favourite memories ever was down to the man sitting across the table from me.
After finishing our mulled wine at Covent Garden, I would happily have walked the three miles to the restaurant. But a few intrepid flakes of snow had begun to fall, and so too had the temperature.
‘I’m still acclimatising to the change from blistering Aussie summer to snowy UK winter. Shall we get a cab?’
Before hailing one, Finn took our two unopened drinks and placed them on the pavement beside a homeless man and his dog. ‘Try and get yourself somewhere warm for the night, mate,’ he said, his words so quiet they were practically swallowed by the city’s soundtrack. I suspected I wasn’t supposed to have heard them or seen him pressing something into the man’s hand before ruffling the dog’s head and straightening up.
Finn closed the distance between us and held out his hand to me. I’d never felt more sure that I was doing the right thing as I placed my own within it.
He flagged down a taxi with the ease of a city dweller and gave the driver our destination, adding a request that we drive ‘via the Mall’. ‘It’s a more scenic route,’ he explained as he joined me on the cab’s bench seat, ‘and I’ve really missed London these past few years.’
Just London?I really wanted to ask.
It was easy to fill the fifteen-minute cab journey with talk of Finn’s life in Sydney, but the burning question of when he was going back sat on the tip of my tongue and never managed to make it past my lips.
‘There’s something very special about London, particularly at this time of year,’ Finn said, although his eyes were on my face rather than the capital’s distinctive landmarks flashing past the window. ‘But nothing comes close to the feeling of driving over Sydney Harbour Bridge at sunset or sipping a cold one beside the Opera House.’
‘It sounds like you can’t wait to get back,’ I said, trying to sound chipper.
The cab grew darker as we passed beneath Admiralty Arch, making it impossible to see his eyes, which was frustrating, because we’d unexpectedly reached an important point in the conversation.
