Chapter 26: Moving On

The one thing I knew I would miss about living on campus was a cooked breakfast every morning. I think Imogen must have felt the same way because, on the first morning of the final term of our first year, she got up early to prepare a Full English for herself and her three new housemates.

But as she sat down to eat it with me, and a bleary-eyed Mark and Vanessa, she immediately declared she wasn’t going to do it again—it was just too much work first thing in the morning.

Imogen and I had a ten o’clock lecture that first day and left the house at half nine, not knowing quite how long the walk to the lecture hall would be. Our route took us through a small shopping area with a mini-supermarket that also housed the local post office, a pub which I knew we might end up spending the odd evening enjoying, a hairdresser, a take-away chippy and café.

I stopped to read the menu outside the café.

“They do a Full English,” I said to Imogen. “Reasonable price too. About the same as on campus.”

“Well, we haven’t got time now, but maybe we could try it tomorrow.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing.”

Imogen smiled. “Great minds really do think alike.”

We laughed and continued on our way.

It took us fifteen minutes from our front door to the lecture hall, which I suggested meant we could have an extra fifteen minutes in bed next time.

“Or an extra cup of coffee if that café is any good,” said Imogen. I really liked the way that girl’s mind worked sometimes.

The next morning, Imogen, Mark and I tried out the café. Vanessa opted to stay in bed since she didn’t have a lecture until the afternoon. And, I have to say, it was a wise move to try the breakfast there. It was fabulous—even better than the ones on campus. It very quickly became our regular place—not just for breakfast, but for lunch as well.

That first morning we were served by a striking young woman—blonde-haired, blue-eyed and not lacking in the breast department. I fully expected to hear a certain voice telling me how she was just my type, but funnily enough, I didn’t. Thinking about it, I hadn’t heard a peep from that voice since my visit to Clarissa’s grave.

I’m not sure this girl was just my type though. My type was usually at least slightly friendly and typically had fantastic smiles. And in the first month or so of our patronage of Jak’s I don’t think I saw this girl smile once. In fact, she seemed like a right miserable cow.

She was, it turned out, the daughter of Jak’s owners, Terry and Jacqueline Thomas. Jacqueline (or Jak for short) usually served us at lunchtime, and we built up a friendly relationship with her. They were from Yorkshire originally but had moved south for Terry’s career. A career that was cut short when the firm he worked for went under during the financial crisis of 2008. Rather than try and find another job in the same industry—which would have been difficult, to say the least—he and Jak decided to use what little redundancy money they had been given and their savings to move to Westmouth and buy this cafe. That explained why Marie, the girl who served us in the mornings, could be so miserable. She had been moved away from her friends twice now, once when the family moved from Yorkshire and again when they moved to Westmouth. Jak spent one quiet lunchtime telling me and Imogen how Marie had failed her A-levels that past summer due to what she called boyfriend issues. Marie had spent a couple of months moping until her parents put her to work in the cafe part-time on condition that she attended Westmouth College in the afternoons and evenings to retake her exams. Her ambition was to be an accountant, but there weren’t any firms that would take her on as a trainee without A-levels as a minimum requirement.

I told Jak that I’d have a word with a lawyer I knew (that would be Will) to see if he had any connections that might help. I didn’t expect he would, but you never knew.

“Why would you do that?” Imogen asked as we walked to our next lecture following that lunchtime heart to heart with Jak.

I shrugged. “I like Jak. She’s nice.”

“Well, yeah, but Marie is a miserable bitch. She never even says Hello and we’ve been in there pretty much every day since—”

“So? Be honest, could you put on a fake smile and be nice to strangers after everything she’s been through?”

“Paul! You don’t even know what she’s been through.”

I shrugged again. “Whatever it was, it made her fail her exams.”

“Or maybe she just didn’t study hard enough, did you think of that?”

“Jak said—”

“Jak’s her mother. She’s biased. If she was such a model pupil who just had a hard time, why isn’t she still at the same school to do her re-sits? Why did she have to go to the college, huh?”

I shrugged again but didn’t answer, my usual signal to end the conversation.

Term rolled on and the second-semester exams loomed. But their arrival also signalled the end of the academic year, which meant the long (and hopefully hot) summer holidays. I’d be staying in my new Westmouth home rather than go back to Vicky’s for the summer. Imogen was going home for a couple of weeks to see her family, then coming back because Will had agreed to not only give me some work experience at his firm but Imogen as well. Mark was also sticking around because he’d found a summer job at the caravan park on the beach to the east of Westmouth Bay. It was almost like we were becoming a family. We even talked about booking a holiday to one of the Balearic or Greek islands towards the end of the summer. All in all, my life was beginning to look somewhat settled, for the next couple of years at least. I had two more years of university left and my living arrangements sorted for both and while I didn’t have a firm offer of a training contract when I graduated, it certainly seemed to me that Will had one ready and waiting if I wanted it.

There was only one area of my life that wasn’t settled. And I didn’t see any hope of it being so any time soon.

Vanessa and I had continued our not-relationship in the same way we had ever since that fateful trip to London, with one exception. It was becoming harder and harder to resist spending the night in the same bed (and all that that entailed) since we started living in the same house.

I hadn’t had sex since I had my little loss of sanity that night in The Union and if I’m honest, I was starting to miss it. But I was also dreading it ever happening. I’ve already said that I hadn’t heard a peep out of the voice in my head since my visit to Clarissa’s grave, but then, I hadn’t really been in the kind of situation when she was usually at her most vocal—just about to get laid.

She would always egg me on beforehand and then there was always the dream afterwards. The voice had stopped. The dreams had stopped. And I couldn’t help but think that it was because I was now in a situation that meant there was no prospect of me having sex any time soon.

Because let’s face it, Vanessa and I weren’t going to be having sex. Sure, we got hot and heavy a few times and there’d been times when she’d had this look in her eye ... But we always backed off. We always went to sleep in separate beds even though it was getting harder and harder to do that.

We’d agreed right at the start that sex wasn’t going to be a part of our relationship. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, and we weren’t going to have sex. I needed to prove to myself I was capable of a relationship that didn’t just involve sex and she ... Well, that last time she’d had sex was when Steve was blackmailing her. And he’d been able to blackmail her because of all she’d been forced to do when she was at school.

So sex wasn’t high on her list of priorities either.

Or so I thought.

It was Sunday night, the night before the first day of exams. Imogen and I had two, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Mark just had one in the afternoon. Vanessa didn’t have one until Tuesday. Aside from our regular Sunday lunch in the pub by Jak’s, all four of us had spent all day with our noses buried in course books or lecture notes. At six, we all agreed to watch a movie on the massive television I’d installed in the lounge and then have an early night.

So at just after nine, I lay in my bed, picked up my e-reader and settled down to get through a couple of chapters of something pretty mindless before trying to get a decent night’s kip so I’d be fresh for the morning’s session.

But after just a couple of sentences, there was a quiet knock on my door.

“Hello?” I called.

The door pushed open slowly and Vanessa popped her head through the gap. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Have you got ... I mean ... Can we talk?”

I propped myself up higher in bed, lifted the duvet and patted the bed beside me. “Sure. What’s up?”

She smiled then entered the room and walked slowly over to my bed. I’d gotten so used to seeing her in her nightdress by now—usually in the morning before she took shower—that I’d never really noticed quite how provocative it was. A slinky red number (although she also had black, white and blue versions), it was not quite short enough to be indecent, but only just. It was trimmed with lace at the hem and on the (low cut) neckline and held up by a couple of spaghetti straps.