By the next night, both Amy’s and Keiron’s parents have arrived, Clara’s flapping around, and there’s a lot of people squealing some variation of ‘I can’t believe my little girl/baby boy is getting married tomorrow’, so Rohan and I have made ourselves scarce with the excuse of needing an early night.
‘Wanna watch something?’ I ask as I press the button to make the TV slide up out of the footboard.
He’s standing by the window looking out and he glances over his shoulder at me. ‘Yeah, why not.’
I flick channels as he perches awkwardly on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t make any attempt to get comfortable, but he must be cold because there are goose bumps on his arms. I pull the duvet back and pat the empty side of the bed.
‘You sure?’ he asks.
‘’Course. We are engaged, right?’
He grins, and his smile makes me forget everything else as he sits next to me and leans against the headboard, pulling the duvet over himself and getting comfortable. I settle back and try not to think about how nice it is just to sit in bed and watch something with someone. It drives home how lonely I am. Usually I watch TV and go on Twitter to talk about it afterwards. That little stream of tweets on my phone is a defence against how alone I feel when I watch something and there’s no one to turn to and discuss it afterwards.
‘Well, would you look at that,’ I say as I change channels yet again and the first notes of ‘The Hills Are Alive’ start to play as Julie Andrews twirls in a meadow on the screen. ‘You couldn’t make it up.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve put a DVD in there, haven’t you?’
‘Nope.’ I hand him the remote to prove it. ‘And it’s just starting too. You can’t say that’s not fate.’
He rolls his eyes but he’s smiling.
‘It’s a good film. It’s about a hardened, cynical, grieving man learning to open his heart and find love again.’
‘Or find free childcare for his brood of annoying brats.’
I laugh despite myself. ‘Go on. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.’
He pushes his bottom lip out but there’s joy in his eyes. ‘All right. But only because you’re my fiancée… and I kind of want to see why everyone loves this terrible film so much. This is why marriages fail, you know, because girls make boys watch movies about singing nuns. This is what “irreconcilable differences” means on the divorce papers.’
‘Why can’t you get that smile off your face then?’
He pulls the duvet over his head. ‘There. Gone.’
I pull it back down and he’s still grinning and it would be far too easy to lean over and kiss him, but I force myself to look away from his lips. I don’t have an excuse – we’re alone in our room, no one’s watching us now, so why would I kiss him? I don’t think agreeing to watch The Sound of Music with me is a good enough reason, even though I kind of wish it was.
***
I know he’s enjoying it because he’s got a soft smile on his face throughout the film, and he even manages to hum along to the better-known songs. We’ve both slumped down in the bed and have ended up leaning against each other, his cold feet tangled around my warm ones, our arms pressed together, his thumb absentmindedly brushing the back of my hand where it touches. And he nudges me excitedly with his elbow when Christopher Plummer sings ‘Edelweiss’. Rohan looks like a little boy on the last day of school before summer holidays, and it would be too easy to take his face in my hands and kiss him.
By the end, we’re leaning heavily on each other, his head on my upper arm and my head resting against his head. I feel a splash of wetness on my sleeve as the reprise of ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ comes on.
‘Are you crying?’ I ask in surprise.
‘No.’ He sniffles. He goes to pull away but I reach around and scrunch my hand in his hair, pulling his head back down so he’s leaning against my shoulder. It would be so easy to say something sarcastic, to poke fun at him in some way, but I can’t imagine Rohan ever openly letting himself get emotional in front of someone, and it feels significant somehow.
‘It’s all right, the ending gets me every time too.’ I card my fingers gently through his hair, and slip my other arm around his back, holding on to his waist, surprised that he lets me, surprised that he stays.
It feels like the spell will be broken if I speak, so we sit there in silence, and I stroke his hair, and he snuggles closer and his hand covers mine on his waist, and I’m so content that I lose track of time. I’d have no problem if he wanted to stay there all night.
‘So it was a good film?’ I ask as the end title screen comes up and the adverts suddenly start blaring out of the TV and I have to scramble for the remote to mute it, mostly disappointed because it’s made us both jump and the easy peacefulness of him leaning against me has gone.
‘It was a good film,’ he says quietly, his voice sounding thick and husky.
‘And it wasn’t too long?’
His eyes flick up to mine. ‘I don’t know. I got so comfy leaning on you that I lost all sense of time.’
I grin to myself.
‘Honestly, I’d watch it again from the beginning right now just so I didn’t have to move.’
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him he doesn’t have to. I wouldn’t mind if he stayed, if he slept next to me. But it feels like an invisible boundary that neither of us can cross. ‘You can admit to being wrong, you know. You can just say you enjoyed it and your irrational hate of nuns and singing children was misguided,’ I say instead.
‘All right,’ he says, pushing himself up and sitting back against the headboard, and the whole side of my body where he was lying instantly feels cold. ‘Singing nuns and children are better than the knees of bees. You were right, I was wrong.’
I do a fake gasp of shock. ‘I bet that’s a sentence that’s never come out of your mouth before.’
He laughs. ‘Maybe not, but you seem to be making me do a lot of things for the first time, Bon, and not all of them are too bad.’
I smile and he smiles and we’re just looking at each other and smiling and it’s so ridiculous to just sit here and smile at him, and the more I tell myself that, the more I smile. His hair is all smooshed up where he’s been leaning against me, his eyes are watery and bright, and his smile is like a sunflower finding the early autumn sun after a dreary summer.
If I thought I wanted to kiss him earlier, it’s magnified by about a million percent. But I don’t just want to kiss him. I mean, I want to kiss him and anything else it might lead to, but I can suddenly imagine spending many more nights like this, cuddled up together, watching TV or reading, and although I often daydream about that, I’m no longer picturing some faceless hypothetical man I might marry sometime in the future. I’m picturing him.
Rohan looks like he can tell exactly what I’m thinking.
His smile falters. ‘Okay. Night,’ he says reluctantly, hesitating before he shifts to the edge of the bed and gets up. I press the button to send the TV back into the footboard and watch him as he crosses the room and sits down on the sheet on the floor. He goes to lie down but he seems restless and unhappy.
‘You okay?’ I ask, absolutely certain he wouldn’t tell me if he wasn’t.
Instead of answering, he gets up and comes back over to the edge of the bed. His hand slides across my cheek and he bends down, pressing his lips against the side of my mouth. I’m so surprised that I barely have time to wonder if he missed my lips or if he wasn’t aiming for them. He goes to pull away but my hand shoots up of its own accord, my fingers twisting in his hair and holding him in place.
He rests his forehead against mine, so close that I can feel him smile. ‘Yeah,’ he says, answering the question I feel like I asked hours ago.
It makes me smile too and he presses his lips against the side of my mouth again for a long moment that’s nowhere near long enough.
‘Stay,’ I whisper.
He shakes his head and stands up, and my hand falls from his hair. I shouldn’t feel as bereft as I do.
‘You can sleep here too, Ro,’ I say as he goes back to the floor at the end of the bed. ‘You’re uncomfortable down there.’
‘I’m fine,’ he says.
He doesn’t say anything about the kiss and I don’t know what I expect him to say. Shoving our tongues down each other’s throats and having a full-on snogging session would’ve been less intimate than that. No one’s watching. There’s not even a vague excuse that someone might be watching. It was just him, kissing me. Wanting to kiss me. A peck that felt like it meant something.