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He held something up and Cass saw her key fob dangling from his fingers. She stretched her hand towards it and he snatched his arm away, tucking the keys into his pocket.
Cass swallowed hard. The urge to charge at him, knock him off his feet and grab her keys wasn’t productive. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t work. ‘Can I have my car keys? Please.’
‘Yeah. In a minute.’ He turned and walked into the sitting room. It seemed she had a choice. Either thumb a lift or break into her own car and hotwire it.
Or she could follow Jack. She’d have to be insane to do that now. It was no particular comfort to know that she could remind herself afterwards that she’d known this was a bad idea and she’d done it anyway.
He was sitting in one of the armchairs, his dark eyes following her every move. Jack waved her towards the sofa and like an automaton, programmed to respond to his every command, she sat down.
‘I overreacted, Cass. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s okay. My car keys...’
‘In a minute. Hear me out first.’
‘It doesn’t really matter, Jack.’
‘It does to me. Look, it never much occurred to me to ask what went wrong with any of my relationships. It didn’t matter—they were never going to last and it was better just to paper over the cracks and part friends. I made that mistake with Sal too, and now I’ll never really know what was going on in her head when she left Ellie with me.’
‘This has got nothing to do with you and Sal. You can’t use me to put th
e past right.’
‘No. But I can learn from my mistakes.’
Cass sighed. ‘Look, the best thing we can do now is to forget about tonight and decide to go our separate ways. As friends...’
‘And friends don’t talk to each other?’ He let the thought sink in for a moment. ‘I know I was blunt, and I apologise for that. But I was just terrified of leaving anything to chance, giving history a chance to repeat itself. Surely you can understand that?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You want to say anything?’
‘I... No.’
He got suddenly to his feet, frustration leaking from every gesture. Cass thought he was going to throw her keys at her and storm out again, but he grabbed her arms, pulling her to her feet.
‘Damn, Cass.’ He was clearly in the grip of some powerful emotion that he was struggling to control. ‘We were going to sleep together. Is it so difficult to trust me?’
‘That’s just what I wanted to do, Jack. Trust you and sleep with you. Not have to go through some kind of soulless agreement. I’ve got enough memories of that to last a lifetime.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jack was clearly not about to give up.
‘I tried for a baby with my ex. Didn’t happen.’ The coldness she heard in her voice was her only defence. ‘He left me, and I don’t much blame him. All the charts and the dates, working out when we were supposed to have sex... It turned into a chore and I just used to close my eyes and get it over with. And then, afterwards, when I didn’t...’ She paused. ‘Well, when you stopped things and starting talking about...what we needed to do, it brought back bad memories. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want it to be like that with you.’
For a moment Jack seemed paralysed, shock registering on his face. Then he pulled her into a tight hug. ‘I’m so sorry, Cass.’
‘Don’t be.’ She held herself stiff and unyielding in his arms.
‘You want to argue about that as well?’
Suddenly all the fight went out of her. He must have felt it because he sat her back down on the sofa, his arms still around her.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Whatever you like.’ It didn’t much matter now.
‘Did you go to the doctor?’
