THE WILD ONE
He was wild, Billy Thompson. The sort of boy that made fathers scowl and mothers sigh with secret longing. My friends and I had admired him from a distance, safe in the knowledge we would never attract his attention. In our small market town, he was infamous: constantly up before the magistrate, his name in the paper for all to see; his motorbike roaring over the bridge eliciting disapproving tuts from the elderly and open awe from the young.
By the time I went off to uni, he had disappeared off the scene. There were rumours of prison, a girl he had met, a fatal accident . . .
“I’ve come back to look after my mum,” he told me now. “You’ve got to, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” I said, not wanting to admit that my own parents were looking after me right now.
I’d bumped into him in the pub beer garden. It was the same as it had been 20 years ago, when we clustered in here after our exams, the air heavy with the scent of roses cut through with my cloying scent, bought before my tastes got expensive. We were giddy with relief and uncertainty – none of us knew if the futures we had planned would come to fruition; if we’d done well enough to get into the university of our choice. I didn’t know then that I would ace it, go on to Cambridge, have a high-powered career as a tax lawyer. And then come back home with my tail between my legs, marriage failed thanks to brutal working hours – burnt out, broke, bewildered.
I didn’t expect him to recognise me, but his eyes had lit up and he’d bought me a pint of cider, sweet and deadly. “I was always too scared to talk to you,” he said. “I thought you’d think I was thick.” My eyes widened. “Of course I wouldn’t.” “I’ve never read a book.” His gaze held both pride and defiance.
“Books aren’t everything. I bet you’ve done loads more than I have.” This was true. What had I ever done, apart from study and work? And yes, taken glamorous holidays, but each resort had been a carbon copy of the one before.
“There’s a band on here tomorrow,” he said. “With a barbecue. If you fancy it.”
I looked down at the table. Once, this would have been a dream come true. A night out with Billy Thompson? But I was bruised, raw, wary. I had been warned, repeatedly, about a post-divorce rebound fling and how it would end in disaster. Would Billy take my already battered little heart
and pulverise it? Or would it do me good, to have something else to think about apart from the failure of my marriage?
I paused to take a sip of my drink. Here I was, being offered the one thing I had longed for that summer. A dragonfly shimmered in the air and I breathed in the roses and the sharpness of his sweat. Something flared up inside me, like the flame from his Zippo lighter. I could remember him once lighting a cigarette for me, holding it out to my roll-up while talking to someone else, not even looking in my direction. But he must have been aware of my need.
Just as he was now. I looked at him. His eyes were kind these days, not wicked.
He reached out a finger to touch my forearm and just for a moment, the world came to a pause and the dragonfly hovered between us, waiting for my answer.
Veronica Henry was a TV script writer before heading into the world of romantic fiction. She has written 25 novels. Her latest,
A Home From Home (Orion), is full of sunshine, cider and family secrets. Her Simple Thing is “getting into the sea as often as I can. I just bob about staring at the sky.”