Always I Love You by Michelle Keill

Author:Michelle Keill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michelle Keill

7

I pressed my lips to his and my body opened like a flower. We shuffled away from the platform edge, blind to everything except each other. He pushed me up against the wall, his fingers in my hair. I clutched his collar and clawed at his neck.

He kissed me with a passion that was untethered and brand new, and it was the beginning of us – of the two of us. And the end of everything else.

The next train clattered into the station.

I forced myself to let go of him and pulled away to catch my breath.

‘Say it,’ I said.

His eyes opened slowly. His pupils were wide; he swayed as if he were drunk.

‘Say it,’ I said. ‘Please.’

He put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs on the pulse in my neck.

‘Je t’aime,’ he said.

At last, it meant everything.

Several more trains came and went. We let them leave without us, maintaining the pretence that there was nowhere else we were supposed to be, that there was no one waiting for us at home. We kissed as if we were the only ones, until our faces were sore, until our lips were bruised and our heads felt light and fuzzy.

‘What now?’ I asked him. ‘What should we do?’

We changed platforms, doubling up so that we weren’t just heading in the wrong direction, but on the wrong line too. We jumped on a train without checking where it was going, and stood facing each other as it hurtled into the tunnel, our noses touching.

The other passengers remembered us, and how infatuated we were. Franck spoke to as many of them as he could. He recorded their conversations – he was meticulous about documenting everything – and played them back to me even though I was adamant I didn’t want to hear.

‘It was obvious they were besotted with each other,’ one woman said. ‘She kept kissing him. And he was touching her the whole time. I assumed they were lovers. Or, maybe, on their first date.’

‘Which was it?’ Franck’s voice was insistent. He had no patience for ambiguity. ‘They can’t have been both things. Which seemed the most likely to you?’

‘I don’t know.’ The woman hesitated. ‘They seemed familiar with each other, but they had that look about them. You know, when you meet someone and there is that feeling of promise, of possibility?’

The recording ended there.

We stayed on the train until it reached the end of the line, and exited to streets that were unfamiliar, and unwelcoming. We wandered without direction, and turned onto a road where the roofs were different heights, the tiles a clash of shapes and colours, the walls covered in a mosaic of satellite dishes. It was like another world, but it was the only place we could be: far from our version of Paris – the make-believe, picture-book one. Far from Ludo.

We came to a hotel on a barren side street. The building was dilapidated and dirty. The curtains in the windows hung unevenly, and the garish

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