Never forget you, p.2
Never Forget You, page 2
Like I wanted to kiss him.
I swallowed. Did he know that? Could he tell? My pulse began to trot. Maybe I did need an EpiPen after all. ‘W-why?’
‘You’re part of my journey now, part of my memories of London. And I like to capture my memories on my travels, as many as possible: countries, places … people.’
I felt oddly flattered I might be part of that gallery. ‘Okay,’ I said slowly.
He got me to stand in the archway of the porch and asked me to rest a hand against the soft, pale stone. Moments before, he’d been smiling, full of easy bravado, but now he looked at me with a single-minded focus that made my heart stutter. Yet I didn’t go rigid, as I often did when someone yelled ‘cheese!’ in my direction. I felt completely at ease.
When he finished, he showed them to me. Who was this woman staring into the lens with such confidence? She was practically glowing. It made me wonder if that was what he had seen too when he’d pressed the shutter.
He began to collect his belongings, stuffing the camera into a padded bag full of lenses and other mysterious equipment. ‘That’s me done here now,’ he said. ‘I’m away to the next location.’
He was going? ‘Next location?’ I asked, keeping my tone light and airy, as if I wasn’t already considering turning into a stalker and ‘accidentally on purpose’ bumping into him there.
‘Yup,’ he said, as he collapsed the legs of his tripod. ‘I’m doing a series of photos around the theme “Secret London”. I’ve got a couple of ideas of places to go to, but after that I’m just going to wing it, see what I can find.’
His kit was now all stowed away, but he made no move to leave.
‘I … I might be able to help with that,’ I said, surprising myself with my boldness.
‘Funny you should mention that,’ he said, his expression becoming suddenly serious. ‘I was thinking it’s probably not wise for you to be alone just now.’
My eyes widened. ‘It isn’t?’
He shook his head. ‘There could be a delayed reaction to that sting. I think someone should probably keep an eye on you for … oh, at least an hour or so. And it just so happens there’s a great little café tucked away—’
‘Just around the corner,’ I finished for him, a smile breaking out on my face. ‘Déjà Vu. They do the best iced lattes this side of the river.’
He slung his camera bag over his shoulder and made a wide gesture with the other arm. ‘Please … lead the way.’
But, Lili … the little voice in my head warned. You haven’t—
Yes, I know, I whispered silently back as we made our way out of the garden. But the whole disaster of my life will still be there in an hour, won’t it? I’ll make a decision then.
Chapter Two
THE DAY WAS certainly not going the way I’d expected it to when I’d left the house that morning, ready to mope around London in an attempt to decide whether to chase my dreams or tell destiny to take a hike. But it seemed destiny had a trick up her sleeve, and it had come in the form of a rather tall Scottish man with a camera.
His name was Ben, and he was a travel photographer. We’d gone for a coffee, where he’d told me all about the few ideas he had for unusual places to visit in London, and I’d thrown a few suggestions into the mix. He’d told me his first stop was the Mithraeum, an underground Roman temple where they were supposed to have sacrificed bulls and all sorts of unmentionable stuff. I said I’d never been. He’d joked that if it was really creepy, he might need someone to hold his hand. I had volunteered. And that had been that.
And at some point during our perusal of the carefully lit ancient artefacts, we’d decided to spend the rest of the day together. Not by spoken agreement, just …
To be honest, I didn’t know how we’d done it. It was merely that we seemed to be in tune with one another, like we could communicate on a secret wavelength the rest of the world couldn’t tune into.
What was I doing? I wasn’t this girl – impulsive, impetuous, prone to dropping everything and just heading off somewhere at the drop of a hat. But, as I strolled the streets of London, my hand still joined with Ben the Photographer’s, I’d started to wonder if destiny knew what she was doing.
It wasn’t quite three, yet we’d been all over the city. After the temple, we’d gone to Leadenhall Market, where Ben had been entranced by the colourful Victorian cast iron and glass structure. Then he’d taken one of my suggestions, and we’d headed off to the conservatory at the Barbican. He’d snapped away when we got there, completely in his element, muttering between shots about the juxtaposition of delicate and exotic plants with the stark concrete of the Brutalist architecture. Then it had been the hidden tunnels of Piccadilly underground station, and now we were wandering through the narrow streets of Soho, still hand in hand, scouting for hidden sculptures on buildings.
Someone Ben had got chatting to while we’d toured the tunnels under Piccadilly had mentioned that an artist had placed stone noses all over the city in protest at the rise in use of CCTV cameras. While most had been removed, seven were still tucked away on various buildings in Soho and Covent Garden. It was a bit of a cult thing to try and find them all, apparently.
We’d already found numbers one to six, the last couple found in Dean Street, and then we turned into Meard Street in search of the final one. ‘There it is!’ Ben exclaimed almost immediately, pointing to a white plaster nose high up on the red-brick wall of a Georgian townhouse. He let go of my hand and pulled his camera out of his bag, then spent a good five minutes experimenting with different angles, crouching down low, looking at where the light was coming from and then working both with it and against it to see what produced the most interesting shot. I could have watched him work all day. When it came to creativity, he was unfettered, limitless.
During our conversations, I’d also revealed I was a creative sort of person, although music was my thing, not the visual arts. I didn’t know if that made it different. I couldn’t just create something in a perfectly captured moment and then email it to someone. For me to ‘create’ I had to be present, along with my violin. I always found it terrifying.
Besides, while Ben chose what to photograph, used his imagination to see things the way no one else saw them, I just played the notes someone else had written. It was hardly in the same league, even if one teacher had called me ‘prodigiously good’. That’s how I’d ended up spending the previous year at one of the most respected music schools in the country.
And it had been a year of utter hell.
But spending the day with Ben was making me see things in a different light. I wondered if I could learn from him, absorb some of his bravery, and if I could, maybe my second year at the London Conservatory could be different. If I decided to turn up for it, of course. I was still on the fence about that one, despite the deadline I’d imposed on myself that morning to stop avoiding the issue and choose one way or the other.
‘How do you know what angles to take the photographs from?’ I asked. ‘Can anyone learn?’
Ben turned and walked back to me. ‘It’s partly picking up the basics – lighting, composition, that sort of thing so, yes, I could teach you some of that, but the rest is just experimentation. You never know what’s going to work until you try it. And sometimes the picture is good, and sometimes it’s awful, but even if it is, I’ve learned something in the process.’
‘You’re not afraid to fail,’ I said, and it was more an observation than a question.
‘Not really. Like I said, sometimes I learn more through failing than getting things right.’ He let his camera drop and came and stood close to me. ‘Get your phone out, and I’ll give you some tips.’
When we finished our lesson, he took a few more shots of the nose on the wall then stowed his camera back in his rucksack. ‘That’s the last of them …’ He checked his watch. ‘Still time to fit a couple more things in before I have to head off to the airport. Something different.’
We listed off the things we’d already done that day. ‘No more gardens,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Got two of those already. Unless you can think of somewhere nearby with a maze. People love mazes, and they’re so interesting to photograph – all those clean shapes and lines.’
I shook my head. ‘Wish I did. There are a couple on the fringes of the city – a big one in Crystal Palace Park, but it’s hardly a secret, and another one in Bexleyheath, but both are a bit of a trek.’
‘Pity …’ We began to stroll in the direction of Covent Garden Market and Ben threaded his fingers through mine again, making my breath catch. He did it as if he almost hadn’t thought about it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Did you know there’s a secret to solving a maze?’
‘What? A particular maze?’ I asked.
‘Any maze.’
I gave him what I hoped was my best ‘don’t bullshit me’ look. ‘If you say so …’
He laughed. ‘No, really! Look, I’ll prove it to you.’
And that was how I found myself standing in front of the famous yew hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace about an hour later. ‘Go on, then, genius,’ I said, nodding to the wooden gate that marked the entrance. ‘How do we do this?’
He just grinned again. ‘Left or right? Pick one.’ I raised my eyebrows, not quite able to hide my smile. He was being so cocky. ‘Pick,’ he said, giving me a faux stern look that turned my insides to custard.
‘Okay … Right.’
‘Fine. I’ll take left. All we have to do is keep one hand – you right, me left – on the maze wall and follow it until we get to the centre.’
I laughed. ‘You’re kidding. It can’t be that easy.’
‘Wanna bet?’
‘Okay.’ I knew I was going to do it, and I knew I didn’t even care if I won the stupid bet or not. When had I last had fun like this? Pointless, purposeless wonderful fun? ‘What do I get if you’re wrong and I’m right?’
He grinned. ‘Loser buys the ice creams.’
Chapter Three
MY RIGHT HAND hovered lightly over the prickly, blunt-cut yew hedge as I jogged through the dirt paths of Hampton Court’s maze. It had seemed like a fun idea to have a race when Ben had suggested it, but then he’d shot off like a greyhound at the races, and I’d been left standing there on my own.
It couldn’t be as easy to find the centre as he’d said it would be. I’d be stuck in this stupid maze for hours, and where was the fun in that? We only had a short time until he needed to head off to the airport, and I didn’t want to spend those precious minutes apart.
I couldn’t believe I’d met someone like him. And by chance, too. Just because I’d had a random urge to escape the house to mope about my problems instead of doing it in my bedroom.
My first year at music school had been a disaster. I’d felt like a fish out of water from day one. What was a council house girl from Penge doing in a place like that? I thought I’d arrived at a place where talent was the only thing that mattered, that I’d finally be able to mix with ‘my people’, who understood and shared my love of music instead of bullying me for being ‘weird’ and ‘up myself’ because I loved to play the violin, but instead of reverse snobbery, I’d found actual snobbery. There had also been jealousy.
Like me, Charlie Banister, one my classmates, was from a less-than-privileged background, but instead of seeing this as a reason to support each other, he’d decided I was his direct competition and he’d taken every chance to cut me down, which only made my nerves worse. It was a horrible, vicious cycle, and my self-appointed nemesis was the eye of the hurricane. I’d barely made it through the end-of-term performance, and I’d been having nightmares about sitting in the violin section in a concert hall all summer.
Why couldn’t I be more like my sister? Tough, sensible, letting nothing faze her? She would have told Charlie Banister in no uncertain terms where he could insert his violin bow, and then wouldn’t have thought twice about him again.
I’d just about come to the decision that I was going to pull the plug, tell my parents the extra jobs they’d taken on since I was little to pay for my music education had been for nothing, but then Ben Robertson, Travel Photographer, had crashed into my life and turned everything upside down.
I had a crush on him as big as the London Eye. It really was quite sad. I ought to give myself a stern talking to. Because that’s what it was, right? A crush? It couldn’t be anything else. Not if he was jetting off this evening and didn’t even know when he might be back in the UK.
Just as I thought I would go round and round in the stupid maze forever, one green hedge blurring into the next, the space opened out in front of me, and I realised I was standing in the centre. It had worked! It really had worked.
And there was Ben, waiting for me, wearing a pleased-with-himself grin that should have been annoying but was actually just delicious. I wanted to kiss that smile away, I decided, and if I didn’t do it now, maybe I’d never get another chance, which would result in me kicking myself for all of eternity.
Time to take charge of your life, Lili, instead of cowering in the shadows. Time to leap on the opportunity of the moment.
‘I won. You’re buying the—’ he started to say, but I strode right up to him, slid my hands up his chest and into the hair at the back of his head, pulling him closer, and then stopped when I was half a millimetre away, giving him the opportunity to back out, but his arms came around my waist, pulling me closer.
At first, the kiss was light and soft, a ‘hello’ kiss, a ‘getting to know you’ kiss, feather-light touches that set nerve endings zinging, but then it changed gear, deepened, and the hunger became not just for his mouth on mine but for all of him. Not just the muscular arms that were clamped around me or the firm chest I was pressed up against, but him. Everything he was, inside and out.
When he finally dragged his lips from mine, we rested our foreheads together, eyes closed, our breathing shallow. ‘Wow,’ he whispered. ‘I’d been imagining doing that all day, but I must have a pretty poor imagination for things like that because … just … wow.’
I smiled gently, buoyed up by the fact I could make someone, make him, feel that way. ‘I think your imagination is just fine. It’s not that it’s … it’s …’ I hesitated, scared to let the words out. What if I was reading too much into this?
But Ben pulled back so he could see my whole face, one hand still cradling my neck, and finished my sentence for me. ‘It’s us.’
I nodded. ‘It is.’
We just stared at each other for a long moment, saying nothing but, at the same time, I felt as if I was spilling myself out before him, all the secret things no one knew about me, all the talent and potential and hope, but all the flaws too, all the things I never wanted anyone to see.
I lowered my lashes and looked away, afraid of what I was feeling. ‘Do you do this every time you visit a new city? Fly in, charm a local girl, then fly away again?’
For a few seconds, there was nothing but silence. ‘No,’ he said, sounding emphatic but also maybe a little offended.
I flicked a glance at him.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know this is different.’
I swallowed. There wasn’t really anything I could say in my defence. That was exactly what I’d been doing – ducking out, retreating to a place of safety before this feeling completely overwhelmed me and took my heart on the tidal wave that came with it.
‘Lili?’
I loved hearing him say my name. Well, my nickname. My younger sister hadn’t been able to say my full name when she was little, and that had been her best attempt. My parents had thought it was cute, and somehow it had stuck.
I slowly raised my eyes to meet his.
‘No, I don’t pick up random girls in foreign cities and spend the day with them. You’re the first, the only …’ He brushed my cheek with his thumb. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘Yes …’ I whispered back in between kisses. Even though it made sense to me that this charming man would have a woman in every port, I believed him. My heart was so full, I almost couldn’t bear it, but there was also a little rip down in one corner, one that was threatening to tear further as the minutes ticked past.
‘I’ll never forget today,’ I said softly. ‘I wish it didn’t have to end.’
His chest rose and fell heavily. ‘Me too.’
I pulled him to me and hugged him hard, attempting to hide the fact I felt perilously close to crying. I didn’t want to do that in front of him. However, when I spoke, I suspected the rasp in my tone gave me away. ‘When’s your flight?’
He checked the functional-looking chunky watch he wore on his wrist. ‘I ought to get going, well … now.’
But he didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he kissed me again. We wasted at least another ten minutes before making our way back to the exit, making only a few dead-end turns along the way.
When we got to the entrance, we found the gate padlocked. Thankfully, it only came up to my waist, so it was no obstacle for Ben’s long legs, and he clambered over first and held his arms out for me. Unfortunately, the hem of my dress got stuck on one of the pointed wooden struts, and I almost face-planted onto the tarmac on the other side of the gate, which resulted in us both giggling as Ben lifted me up and over and then placed me carefully on the ground.
‘I wish the gate had been bigger,’ I said, sighing. ‘Then we would have been locked in and you’d have no choice but to stay a little bit longer.’ I pulled a face, realising how selfish I was being. ‘Sorry … That would have meant you’d miss your flight, and I wouldn’t want that.’
Ben stared at me. ‘I would,’ he said, and then he dug into his jeans pocket, pulled out his phone and tapped away on it with fierce concentration.
‘Ben?’
‘I’m cancelling my flight,’ he said.
‘What? No!’ I reached out to try and pull his hand away from his phone screen, but he captured my fingers in his. ‘You said earlier that you’ve been planning this trip for a year! You can’t miss going to all those places, especially New Zealand, for me! It’s been your dream since … forever!’
