The Spark: the unmissable new love story from the author of The Sight Of You by Holly Miller

Author:Holly Miller [Miller, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2024-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29.

Then

‘Where would you like to go most in the world?’ Jamie asked me one night, after getting off the phone to his dad. It was the January of our second year at uni. Chris had just booked a cruise, fourteen days in the Caribbean with Debra and her mother. He’d invited Jamie too, but Jamie had had to remind him it would be his final year of undergraduate study that winter, that he couldn’t possibly take two weeks off to lie on a pool deck and drink piña coladas in thirty-degree heat. It amused me, overhearing him making the trip of a lifetime sound frivolous, like something he couldn’t possibly spare the time to indulge. I knew his dad would have hated that.

I lay back against Jamie’s chest, enjoying feeling secure in his arms. We were in bed, listening to Ellie Goulding. His hair was damp from the shower, the linger of mint bodywash still on his skin.

I felt so loved, in that moment. Cared for. Safe.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, in answer to his question.

‘Well, where’s your favourite place you’ve been?’

‘I quite liked Devon.’

He nudged me playfully. ‘I meant abroad.’

‘I’ve never been abroad.’

Next to me, I felt him draw away. ‘Shut up.’

‘You know this. When have I ever been abroad?’

A couple of moments passed. ‘Oh,’ he said slowly. ‘Right. Okay.’

I shrugged. ‘Anyway, I don’t have a passport.’

‘You don’t have a passport,’ he repeated, like I’d just confessed I couldn’t read, or didn’t have a legal name.

‘Nope,’ I said, bristling defensively, trying not to think about what his father would say, if he knew. You need to be with a girl who’s well-travelled, Jamie. How can someone have a broad perspective on life if they’ve never even left England?

The more I’d come to know about Jamie’s dad, the more I wanted to avoid him. I’d started to have doubts about exactly the type of man he was. Was he, for example, one of those dads who delighted in doing slightly perverse, alarm-bell things like taking his son to strip clubs, or setting him up with the daughters of family friends? I imagined him grilling Jamie about me, probably in one of those pubs with stags’ heads all over the walls, demanding to know – again – why he’d insisted on committing so young.

I had no evidence for any of this, of course. But I distrusted him deeply, and found that hard to hide. So whenever Jamie mentioned him, I would change the subject. And every time he went to visit him – which he’d done a few times recently, spending several weekends in Putney in the four months or so since his internship had ended – I’d started to feel not disappointment, but relief, that we’d both begun to assume he would make each trip alone.

‘Don’t you want to?’ Jamie said now.

‘Don’t I want to what?’

‘Go abroad.’

‘I can’t afford it.’

‘Forget the money.’

‘Only people with money say, Forget the money.’

‘I mean, theoretically. If you had the money, would you go?’

On holiday with you? In a heartbeat.

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