Page 29 of The Friend Request

I told myself it was fine. He was being careful, that was all. The rule was the rule. In public, we were strangers, and Lisa’s kitchen counted as public because Lisa didn’t know. So I sat opposite him and smiled at Sam’s jokes, ate Hobnobs, and pretended I was just another person at the table. But under my skin, my blood was humming because he was there, right there, close enough to touch if I reached across the biscuit packet.

It was maybe an hour in when I saw it.

Lisa was talking to Sam about some film she’d watched, gesturing with a Hobnob, animated and loud in the way Lisa always was when she was enjoying herself. I was half listening, half watching Ross’s hands on the table – his fingers tracing a slow, absent circle on the wood – when something shifted under the table and Lisa’s sentence caught, just for a fraction of a second, a tiny hiccup in the flow of words that nobody would have noticed unless they were looking for it.

I was looking for it. I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe, or the low alert that had been running in the background since Ross walked through the door without warning me first.

I glanced down.

It was quick – barely a second – the tablecloth was in the way, and I couldn’t be sure of what I was seeing. But I swore Ross’s foot was resting against Lisa’s. Not the way feet collide under a crowded kitchen table. Deliberately. The side of his trainer pressed against the side of her sock, and neither of them moved away.

My blood went cold.

I lifted my head. Ross was watching Sam, nodding at something, expression completely neutral. Lisa was still talking, the Hobnob in her hand, her cheeks maybe slightly pink, but that could have been the warm kitchen. Neither of them looked at me. Neither of them looked at each other.

And just like that, the foot was gone. Ross shifted in his chair and reached for his Coke, and whatever I’d seen – or thought I’d seen – dissolved into four teenagers sitting around a table. I couldn’t tell whether it had been real or whether my brain had built it from nothing because I was so wired, so watchful, so desperate for every tiny detail of Ross’s body to mean something.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur. I laughed when people laughed. I finished my revision notes. I said goodbye to Ross and Sam at the door without touching him, without a glance, without anything, because that was the rule, and the rule was there for a reason, and I was a good secret-keeper, wasn’t I?

Lisa closed the door and turned to me.

‘Ross Mercer’s fit,’ she said. Grinning.

My stomach lurched. ‘Is he?’

‘Come on. You’ve got eyes.’

‘He’s all right,’ I said.

It came out raspy, and Lisa raised an eyebrow. Then she shrugged and went to put the kettle on, and the moment slid away from both of us.

I didn’t sleep that night.

I lay in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin and replayed it over and over – the foot, the hiccup, the pink in Lisa’s cheeks – trying to decide if I’d seen something real or invented something terrible. I had that sick, jittery feeling you get when you know something bad might be true but you haven’t proved it yet, so you can still choose not to believe it.

I chose not to believe it.

The next day, I rang Ross from the payphone at the end of my road, ten pence in the slot, heart thudding so hard I felt it in my jaw.

‘I need to ask you something,’ I said.

‘Go on then.’

‘Last night. At Lisa’s. Were you – was there something going on? Under the table. With your foot and hers.’

Silence. One second, two. Then he laughed a warm, slightly baffled laugh, the sound a person makes when someone has said something genuinely absurd.

‘What are you on about?’

‘I saw it, Ross.’

‘You saw what? My foot was under the table because that’s where feet go, Kim. I wasn’t playing bloody footsie with your mate, for God’s sake.’

‘It looked⁠—’

‘It looked like nothing, because it was nothing.’ His voice softened.

It sounded as though he shifted the phone against his ear, twinned with the rustle of fabric, and I could picture him so clearly – leaning on the wall in the hallway, one hand in his pocket, his dark hair falling forward.