LITMIR.BIZ

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making it clear what I want and actually turning into a living, breathing fireball of oestrogen. He knows it’s down to him now to decide when he’s ‘ready’, and all the signs are pointing to the fact that today is the day.

      It would explain the wine – we hardly ever drink, can often go weeks without a drop – but it would make perfect sense for Harry to want to treat me to a nice bottle of wine tonight. One last night of getting tipsy together, before going upstairs to… create a new life.

      I’m grinning from ear to ear as I burst into the house and sling my handbag down. Harry is in the kitchen leaning against the worktop, watching the door, and when he sees me he also breaks into a huge smile. Wow, when he looks this happy he’s really sexy. How could I have forgotten that?

      Had I forgotten it?

      ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ He beams at me, and comes over to give me a big kiss. ‘You took ages.’

      ‘I missed the train by fourteen seconds, and there was a replacement bus service.’ My transport issues already feel like they happened a thousand years ago. ‘Get that wine open then.’

      Harry gives me a cheeky look out of the corner of his eye as he turns to uncork the wine, as if to say ‘all good things come to those who wait’, or something equally corny and innuendo-laden. I know him so well he doesn’t have to say it. I know what he’s thinking.

      ‘So, you’re probably wondering what I want to talk to you about?’ Harry twinkles at me, handing me a large glass of red then turning back to pour his own.

      ‘Actually, I—’

      ‘You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately,’ Harry continues regardless, pausing only to chink his glass against mine with a self-satisfied smile, then take a slurp. ‘Since that money came in from old Aunt Mabel, it’s really helped me re-evaluate things.’

      ‘Yes…’ I breathe, gazing up at him. I can hardly bear it any longer.

      ‘We’re not getting any younger, we’re doing okay financially, and I´ve realised life is just too short not to strive for your dreams.’

      ‘Yes, oh, Harry…’ This is the part where he grabs me by the waist, lifts me effortlessly and carries me into the bedroom, growling sexily in my ear, ‘Let’s make a baby.’

      ‘So…’ Harry puts his glass of wine down purposefully on the kitchen side, obviously gearing up for his grand finale…

      ‘…I think we should take some time out and go to South America.’

      ***

      At university, society was divided into two groups: those who had taken a ‘gap year’ in a far-off country, and those who were left at the gate by their mum on the first day of term, contemplating life alone for the first time. I fell into the latter category.

      Members of the Gap Year Gang were easily recognisable: a colourful chakra pendant, the flash of a Mayan symbol tattooed on an arm, or the swing of a hand-woven alpaca wool handbag gave them away.

      Not to mention their subtle air of intellectual superiority. After all, these were people who had seen the world.

      The rest of us wore clothes from Primark and felt homesick and lost for the whole first term. At least.

      Until then, travelling hadn’t really appealed to me; maybe because I’d always known it wasn’t an option. Mum could only just afford for me to go to university, so I could hardly ask her to help me fund a voyage of self-discovery and intellectual growth in some distant land.

      Only when confronted with the Gap Year Gang in all their exotic glory did I start to feel like I might be missing out on something.

      Their stories of hitchhiking across South East Asia or getting wasted and waking up on a beach in Bali, or escaping an armed robbery on a night bus to Cape Town, fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure.

      Compared to them I felt inexperienced and twee. I once asked a girl in my law and social change seminar where she got her lovely woven bag from as I fancied buying one. She looked me in the eye and said witheringly, ‘Thailand.’

      Harry, of course, was in a category all of his own. He had enjoyed his first gap year (inter-railing in Europe) so much that he decided to take another one (hiking and backpacking across South America), then another half-one after that (six months fruit-picking on a working holiday visa in Australia). When he finally made it to university, aged twenty-two, he pretty much got straight off a plane from Sydney and strolled into his first art history lecture, both on the same morning. He was the eldest in each of his classes by several years and was revered among the Gap Year Gang as some kind of prophet, the Wise Man of Travellers or similar nonsense.

      We couldn’t have been more different, and I could barely believe it when he asked me out.

      Although we were studying for different degrees, both Harry and I took an extra module of Spanish language. I did it because I’d read on careers websites that having a second language would give a law graduate a competitive edge in the careers market. I think Harry did it just because he could.

      It was hard not to notice him in the classroom, partly due to his tall, blond handsomeness and tendency to turn up to lectures in tatty leather flip-flops, regardless of the weather conditions – but also because he already spoke excellent Spanish. Needless to say, a product of seven months spent meandering around Latin America.

      There’s nothing more attractive than real talent or skill. I could overlook Harry’s unusual dress sense and messy hair – this man spoke Spanish like a native. He might not always have bothered with correct grammar, but he could make the perfect, tongue-rolling ‘rrrrrr’ sound. It was sexy. Infuriating as well, of course, as he just rocked up to our first class and started chatting away at the speed of a Mexican football commentator. Meanwhile I clawed my way up to his level through three years of hard study and sticking vocabulary post-its all over the house, much to my flatmates’ annoyance.

      But it was still sexy.

      I spent the first year of university lusting after him discreetly from a few rows back, and impatiently plodding through the week until our Friday afternoon Spanish lecture. I don’t think we exchanged a single word in all that time, even though there were only ten people in the class, so he must have at least known my name.

      Then one day Harry sidled up to me in the Student Union bar, set his beer down on the table in front of me, and asked what I was doing that night.

      From then on, it was a whirlwind. Harry himself was a whirlwind. When we graduated, he took me to Rome. I never admitted to him it was the first time I had ever left the UK.

      I also never got round to telling him he was my first proper boyfriend. I hadn’t been the most popular girl at school, nor the most unpopular, I had just kept myself to myself. A few boys had asked me out, but they always seemed so immature and boring. I was happier studying, going to the cinema with my friends and working at the café round the corner to help out my mum with the bills. I’d never seen any point in having a boyfriend until Harry.

      As our university days passed, I got to know the man behind the traveller’s legend. To my surprise, and – if I’m honest – slight dismay, Harry was actually from a middle-class, prosperous family. Their renovated oast house in Kent was worlds apart from Mum’s little terraced property in the part of Essex that gives the whole county its reputation.

      His family were very refined. My first dinner at his parents’ house was like that scene from Titanic where Leo sits down at the table and has no idea which set of cutlery to use first. Ashamed, I found myself wishing my mum spoke Italian or my dad could discuss my university essays with me, like Harry’s parents. In fact, I would have been happy for my dad to want to discuss anything with me, but that´s another story.

      It was Harry’s parents who generously gave us half the deposit for the house, and I still remember with a pang that Dad didn’t even come with us on the morning we collected the keys.

      ‘You

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