If I Never Met You: A Novel

“The Idiocy Hours are well under way.”

Laurie and Bharat were leaning against the bar on a leg stretch, and Bharat was looking around the room with a curl to his lip. The dance floor had appeared after a third of the tables were whisked out of sight, replaced by stretch of parquet floor, scattered with disco-ball fragments of light. “This’ll be a scene of horrifying carnage pretty soon. A few will have to be medevaced out by helicopter.”

Laurie laughed. Bharat strongly believed that anything that happened after 9:30 p.m. at the Christmas do was best heard about rather than participated in, and was preparing to make good his departure.

“Let me know if anything scintillating kicks off? Di’s had three Babychams, so she’ll not remember.”

Laurie faithfully promised Bharat she’d be his surveillance detail.

People were standing up now, ties loosened, bottles of beer in hand, covert snogging in the darker recesses of the room. The nighttime sky was visible through the vast stained-glass windows; and as she walked back to the table, Laurie thought about how she’d go home alone, but wasn’t really lonely anymore. Or if she was, it was only in passing, not as a constant state. Her powers were returning. She’d met Dan when she was eighteen, when she had the confidence to stride up to a bunch of lads in freshers’ week and tell them she’d sort the problem out. That girl wasn’t created by him, she existed already.

Dan had chosen a future without her, and as sad and harrowing and unexpected as that had been, now she got to choose a future for herself. It was exhilarating.

“Dance with me?” Jamie said, as she reached him, pushing his chair out and taking Laurie’s hand.

“Is this for their eyes?” Laurie said, behind the back of her hand, and gestured toward Misters Salter and Rowson. Rowson looked like an angry schoolmaster in a Dickens adaptation, wiry with a square set face, a thatch of brown hair that looked as if it was made from wire wool, beetling eyebrows, and black-rimmed glasses. “’Cos I think you’re all right, they’ve clocked us together.”

“No, it isn’t,” Jamie said, affronted. “Sometimes I think your opinion of me is as bad as everyone else’s at this company.”

Laurie exhaled and long-suffering-smiled and let herself be led on to the floor, feeling the many eyes following them.

Prince’s “Purple Rain” was starting.

“Are you good at slow dancing?” Laurie said with difficulty over the music. “I’m never quite sure what to do.”

“I think it works like this.”

Jamie put one arm around her waist and placed her hand on his shoulder. With their free hands, they held hands. The moment her fingers closed around his, she felt a jolt of something, an aliveness where she was acutely conscious of every point of contact between their bodies. His palm slipping toward her hip bone, the fabric of his shirt and his shoulder muscle underneath her fingertips. The light pressure of her corseted chest pressed against his—it was completely G-rated, family friendly, and yet somehow the sexiest thing Laurie had ever experienced.

She couldn’t look him in the eyes, and laid her head against his chest, breathing their closeness in. Laurie had been in proximity to Jamie numerous times, yet there was something in this moment, this sustained embrace, it forced her to face chemistry she’d been assiduously avoiding.

They were consciously creating the closing credits to their story, the one that started in a broken lift. How should it end? Should she turn her head upward, tilt it slightly, and finally kiss him, before the stage curtain fell?

But how would she know he had genuinely wanted to kiss her? Did she want someone to pretend to want to kiss her, however well he did it?

I only wanted to be some kind of friend

Even the song seemed to be speaking to them, a sense of something spinning off its axis, going awry. She couldn’t see Jamie’s face, or judge if he was feeling anything like what she felt.

When they broke apart at the end of the song, she looked up at him in wonder to see if his face held any clue, and he was looking back at her with a completely intent, lovestruck expression she knew she’d try to hold on to in her mind’s eye until her dying day. You didn’t get many of those looks in a lifetime.

“I need the loo,” she mumbled, breaking away before Jamie could say anything, picking her way through the increasing Christmas party carnage to the ladies’ room.

On her way, she passed Dan, who looked like the time on the caravan holiday when he’d found rat droppings in his Coco Pops box after eating them for four days.

“Hi!” Laurie said, and swept onward before he could reply.

Slow dancing with Jamie, and it hadn’t even occurred to her whether Dan was witnessing it.

What would success feel like to you? She could finally answer that: self-respect.

It felt like not caring anymore.

She washed her hands in cold water and looked at her face in the mirror and tried to make sense of why three minutes of clinging to Jamie Carter like a koala had left her in this state. Alcohol, Prince, him looking great in a black suit, these were factors. They didn’t add up to the full answer. She balled a paper towel in her hands.

A toilet flushed and Megan came out of a cubicle, looking as dumbstruck to see Laurie as Laurie was to see her. She stood perfectly still for a second.

The only noise was the burble of the music beyond a thick wall and the dripping of a tap.

“I didn’t think I’d ever be this person,” Megan said eventually.

“Neither did I,” Laurie said. “And I didn’t have a choice about it.”

She threw the paper towel into the bin, and left Megan standing there.

When she returned to the main hall, she could see Jamie at a distance, chatting with a good-looking girl from another table, and wanted to wolf howl with possessiveness. She felt a wash of confusion, yearning, and rivalry.

He thought he was falling for Eve, but no one would hold him back for long, would they? He was no doubt constitutionally incapable of monogamy.

Laurie wouldn’t do this, she refused to do this. She wouldn’t break her own heart in the style of a raving idiot. Jamie Carter was sold as seen, she had no cause to criticize him for being who he was, and she was glad of that. She wanted to keep liking him.

She backed out of the door and through an anteroom and she was in blessed fresh air, albeit blessed fresh air that was going to feel Arctic within seconds.

“Hello, again,” said a friendly giant in a kilt.

“Hello, Angus from Experian,” Laurie said.

“Hello, Laurie the lawyer. What are you doing out here?”

“It got too much. Briefly.”

“I know what you mean. The lass I was seeing until November is tonguing Duncan from Complaints. I wonder if he’ll listen to my complaint. How about you? What got too much?”

“Ah, tricky. My ex of eighteen years is here with his pregnant girlfriend. Always going to be challenging.”

“Whoa,” Angus said. “That’s some deep water. You’re single?”

“Single,” Laurie said. It now felt natural to say it. Even positive.

“That won’t last long. You’re crazy pretty,” Angus said. “You look like that girl out of that soap opera.”

“Angela Griffin,” Laurie supplied.

“Oh my . . . ! How on earth did you get there that quick?”

Laurie laughed. “Because when you’re half black, black-ish, everyone has the same five reference points for you. I’m collecting them. I’ve had Missandei from Game of Thrones and Marsha Hunt already this year. What’s funny is, none of them look remotely like each other.”

“Shit, sorry,” Angus said, and she winced: he was obviously a benevolent character.

“No, no, I’m flattered!”

“Better than who I get. Alex Salmond, usually.”

Laurie hooted. “Not true.” She paused. “Singlehood. I’m quite nervous about the idea of being with someone new.”

“It’ll be grand. Like riding a bicycle.”

He had a friendly face, a kind face. Was Jamie going to go home with that girl?

“You’re so pretty,” Angus repeated.

“Thanks.”

Angus leaned down and put his mouth on hers, and Laurie only processed she was about to be kissed, once the kiss had begun. She responded at a delay, feeling as if she was standing outside herself and observing what it was like with someone unfamiliar, who moved their mouth differently. It was neither unpleasant nor that great, she decided. One milestone passed though. The first kiss after Dan.

A coughing, right by them, and they moved apart. Jamie was watching them, holding Laurie’s coat.

“Shall I get you your taxi? Looks like you’ve had enough,” Jamie said, and with his tone of voice, Angus said, “Right ho,” and made himself very scarce, very fast.

Jamie whisked Laurie around the corner, propelling rather than holding her, and when he was sure they were alone, said: “What the actual fuck? Remember the whole thing about no cheating during our dating? It being a humiliation for the other person? And the Christmas party being kind of important?”

He looked utterly furious and Laurie found herself stuttering apologies.

“Seriously, outside the Christmas party? Are you for fucking real?”

“Sorry,” Laurie said hanging her head like a naughty schoolgirl. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t think.”

Jamie stared at her, as much it seemed in disbelief as fury.

“Thank God it was only me who saw, I guess. And I don’t matter.”

“Well. Neither do I.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re drunk,” Jamie said, but she wasn’t, and he knew she wasn’t, and it was merely a welcome way out for both of them.