Читать книгу The Pieces of You and Me - Rachel Burton - Страница 19

Even though in the end she hadn’t believed him, it had always been Jess. From the day he asked her to marry him in the school playground he knew. Admittedly, he didn’t really know what it was that he knew when he was six, but it was a feeling; a sense of the way things were meant to be. Even years later, after he’d left her standing at the departure gate at Heathrow airport, he had still known. None of the women he’d tried to lose himself in at Harvard could compare, not even Camilla – especially not Camilla. He’d always wanted them to be Jess and they never could be. He’d stopped dating completely in the end.

He could clearly remember the day he first realised his feelings for Jess had slipped from best friends to something more, something much more. It was the Christmas holidays before their GCSEs. Something about Jess had changed that winter; it felt as though she was sliding away from him. She was starting to have a life that he wasn’t a part of and she talked about the parties she had been to and the boys Gemma and Caitlin had giggled over, the boys they had kissed.

‘Did you kiss anyone?’ he’d asked, unable to hide the jealousy from his voice.

She’d shaken her head. ‘Not this time,’ she’d said with a grin.

He had wanted to kiss her then, but he hadn’t had the courage to do anything except think about what that would be like and it had taken him until the following summer to admit what was happening – that they couldn’t just be friends anymore.

He’d always thought he’d asked her too soon, that she hadn’t been ready for a relationship when she was sixteen. But she had known as well as he had that they had both reached the point of no turning back.

Over the last week, since seeing Jess again, Rupert had had to stop himself from tracking her down. He knew Gemma worked at Kew. It would be easy enough to call her, to find out where Jess was, what her phone number was. Gemma had seemed quite keen to push the two of them back together, had even told him Jess was single. What harm could there be in asking Jess if she wanted to meet for a coffee next time he was in London?

But he had pushed her before, when they were sixteen, and again, when they were twenty-one, when they were both lost in the grief of losing Jess’s father. He didn’t want to be that person again and Jess had made no move to get in touch with him. He tried to remind himself that walking away from her outside her hotel had been the right thing to do.

When the thick gold-embossed envelope appeared in his pigeonhole at work it had felt like a lifeline. Gemma had invited him to her wedding after all. He had thought she’d been joking when she mentioned it in the pub. He hadn’t needed to call her in the end because Gemma had given him a second chance. He knew this would be the last chance he would get. It was now or never.