Page 35 of The Friend Request

He’s here.

I see him before he sees me. Coming through the main doors, hands in his pockets, dark coat, that walk – unhurried, slightly loose, head turning as he scans the crowd. He looks different in daylight, in public, surrounded by people with shopping bags and pushchairs. Smaller, somehow. Less like a threat and more like a man in his late thirties who hasn’t slept well and doesn’t know what to do with his face.

Then he spots me.

His expression changes. Something shifts behind his eyes, a flicker of relief that makes my stomach clench because it’s so obviously genuine. He weaves through the crowd towards me, and as he gets close, he opens his arms, instinctively, the beginning of a hug that his body has decided on before his brain has caught up.

I step back.

One step. Small, firm, my heel hitting the tiled floor with a sound that gets lost in the noise around us. But he feels it. His arms drop. His face recalibrates – the relief collapsing into something uncertain, confused, and for a second he looks so wrong-footed that I almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

‘Kim—’

‘Not here,’ I say. ‘Come with me.’

I turn and move into the crowd before he can argue. I hear him follow – his footsteps falling into pace beside me, slightly too close, adjusting when I speed up – and we walk through the ground floor of Cabot Circus like two people who happen to be heading in the same direction, side by side but not together, not touching, separated by a hand’s width of charged air that neither of us acknowledges.

‘Can we find somewhere to sit down?’ he says after thirty seconds. ‘There’s a coffee place on the⁠—’

‘No.’

‘Kim, I can’t have a conversation while we’re⁠—’

‘We’re not having a conversation. We’re walking.’

He goes quiet. I keep moving – past the escalators, past the phone shop, past a group of teenage girls taking photos of each other outside a make-up counter. The noise swells and dips around us, a tide of voices and music and the squeak of trainers on polished floors, and I let it float over me because the noise is the point. The noise is the wall I’ve built between us, and as long as I stay inside it, I’m safe.

Ross tries again near the food court. ‘There are tables upstairs. Busy ones, right in the middle, people everywhere. Just let me buy you a coffee and we can⁠—’

‘I don’t want a coffee.’

‘Tea, then. Water. Anything. I just need five minutes where you’re not walking away from me.’

I stop. We’re near a railing overlooking the lower floor, crowds passing on both sides, a woman with a pushchair squeezing past us with a muttered sorry. Ross stops beside me, breathless, and I can see the effort he’s making to keep his voice level, his body relaxed, his face open.

‘Five minutes,’ he says. ‘That’s all. And then if you want to leave, I won’t follow you.’

I lean on the railing. My pulse is going too fast, and there’s a sour taste at the back of my tongue, metallic, like I’ve been sucking on a coin. People move past us in both directions – a man carrying three shopping bags, two boys in football shirts, a woman my age with a toddler on her hip – and none of them look at us because there’s nothing to see. Just two people standing by a railing in a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon.

‘You chased me,’ I say.

His face tightens. ‘I didn’t chase you.’

‘You ran after me in the dark. You tried to open my car door. You pressed your face against the glass.’

‘I was trying to talk to you.’

‘At half seven at night, on a dark lane, running? That’s not trying to talk to someone, Ross. That’s frightening someone. And you frightened me.’

He flinches, his jaw pulling to the left the way it used to when he was fifteen and someone said something he didn’t like. I remember that flinch. I committed it to memory along with everything else – the way he rubbed his earlobe when he was lying, the way he bounced his knee under desks, the way his voice dropped half a register when he was being serious – as though knowing someone’s physical habits was the same as knowing the person.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he says quietly. ‘I’d been trying to talk to you for days, and you weren’t answering. When I saw you leave the pub, I should have called out. I should have stayed back. I know that.’

‘You shouldn’t have been there at all.’

‘No. You’re right. I shouldn’t.’