Second Love
Across the sweaty mass of faces in the club my eyes land on his.
My body stalls.
I haven’t seen him for a year, not since he broke my heart.
“Do you want to leave?” asks Lisa, reading what is written all over my face.
“No.” I want to look again at that face that was branded into my memory. That face I had studied for hours so I wouldn’t ever forget it. Hear his voice again. Look into those blue eyes again. His hair is cut differently, he never used to wear checked shirts.
“He’s coming over”, whispers Lisa.
We say hello. We deal with the niceties. He asks about my degree, I tell him about the first. He looks like a proud father, “I always knew you could,” he smiles, “I probably did you a favour by getting out of your life.”
“I’m getting married” he fires a bull’s eye into my heart.
Someone he hardly knew, only just met, on the other side of the world. “When you know, you just know,” he explains, dealing me the fatal blow whilst looking like the cat that got the cream.
“That’s exactly what I thought about him,” I wail later back at Lisa’s house as she puts her arm around my shoulders and tries to stroke away the pain.
