Ten Years 3

Ten years.

Ten years ago, and somehow it feels like lifetimes ago. Or yesterday.

We'd been workmates. Despite - or perhaps because of - the age difference, we'd got along well. Similar humour, similar approach to work, to life in general. We graduated to socialising with a promise of him teaching me how to play pool. We'd spend an evening a week knocking balls around a table, putting the world to rights. I used to wear low-cut tops just to watch him blush when I caught him looking.

It was cute. I think part of why we were friends was because we both knew how it felt to be the outsider. Neither of us were the cool kids. He was a little geeky, painfully shy, but sharper in wit and intelligence than anyone else I knew. He had a long term girlfriend, but was still agonisingly innocent - virginal at twenty-one. I wasn't sure what her issue was. He skirted the subject if I ever asked about her.

I was ten years older. I'd finished with a dead end marriage, moved back to the family home to live with my brother until I salvaged what was left of my pride and my life. There wasn't much; my ex had been an alcoholic and had ruined me financially. I was humiliated, hurt, and worse, everyone I knew thought I should have seen it coming. Well, almost everyone.

One night my brother held a party. I can't remember the reason - might have been a birthday for me, or for him, or maybe just a chance to sit around and drink, play music, watch stupid videos. He came over and a load of us had a laugh - all of us slightly awkward geeky types, lubricated with the social oil of alcohol. I can't remember if we went to bed before or after everyone else - I think after. I can remember offering the sofa; having just moved back, I slept on a double mattress on the floor in an as-yet-undecorated bedroom, my charmer of an ex having filched or flogged my proper bed. For whatever reason, he declined, and I laughed and rummaged for rarely-used pyjama shorts in an effort to remain decent. No reason why mates shouldn't sleep in the same room, right, I told myself. I really didn't succeed at fooling myself, despite the alcohol. I don't think I'd even had that much, but everything I remember from thereon is recalled through that haze of lowered inhibitions, the filter of "it'll be okay" giving me a get-out clause. The get-out-of-jail card of "whoops, too much beer".

I know. I know I shouldn't have even let it get that far. That absolute searing, though... a sensation behind my breastbone, as if my heart had swelled outside the confines of my body and was about to hit the damn ceiling. There was kissing. The kind of breath-stealing, sparks-flying, needy kissing that the average person gets to experience only a few times in life. I can remember my mouth saying no, no... we should not be doing this, we mustn't, saying the words and betraying them all at once. And I can remember the pulse of him under my palm.

We didn't.

Restraint, guilt, common fucking decency got the better of both of us. Good. That's how it should be. We didn't talk about it. And eventually, I moved away.

I'd found someone I wanted to be with. Upped sticks, quit my job, loaded a van and relocated my entire life three hours away. I built a new life miles away, only returning home occasionally to visit family. After losing my father, even those visits dwindled, and the family home became my brother's house. He and his wife made it their own. I had nothing there anymore; my childhood home town held nothing for me anymore.

I saw his posts on social media. Missed him, but squashed the feeling down hard. I couldn't afford for it all to distract me from my new life, my new relationship. We didn't talk. Years passed.

Ten years. Ten years since that one night, that easy friendship I'd so casually ruined. Ten years between us - me now, over forty, heavier, saner. Him? I didn't know. Until a message popped up, and we started to talk.

He'd turned thirty. The girlfriend he'd planned a life with, bought a house, planned a wedding - she'd gone. I didn't ask, sensing his sadness under the throwaway comments. His humour, blacker perhaps. Burned blacker in a fire of years and experiences. Ten years under the bridge, ten years of sand through my fingers. Our former colleagues all gone, bar the hardcore peculiar few. Our lives utterly changed - nothing dramatic or sudden, just worn to a different shape like beach cobbles.

I feel like two people. I know the grown-up, common sense way to behave. I know what I should do.

But I've never forgotten the fire under my fingertips, the spark in his eyes, the sad shy ache from that night that we left unspoken all this time.