One Summer Night At the Ritz by Jenny Oliver

can’t keep going because you’re distracting me.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘Do you want me to stop?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    Will smiled. He sat forward from where he’d been lounging back and then seemed to pause for a moment as if thinking about what he was going to do. She was expecting him to kiss her. He turned so he was facing her, reached his hand up and stroked down the side of her face so she could feel the warm skin of his palm against her cheek. She was definitely expecting him to kiss her. His hand snaked round her back and she could feel the pressure of it through her jumper. He lowered his head and she angled hers up ready to be kissed. She hadn’t forgotten. But instead of the press of his lips, she felt the touch of his forehead on hers. Could hear him take in a breath and looked up to see his eyes shut for a second. She wondered if she should wait. If the kiss was coming next. But instead he stayed like that for a moment longer then drew her body round with his hand so she wasn’t sitting upright but was nestled in the crook of his arm, the angle making her have to tuck her legs up onto the sofa, her head resting on his chest so she could hear the thrum of his heart. She could feel the deep shudder of his breath as he leant back, tightened his arm around her and, after a couple of seconds, he said, ‘Carry on. Tell me about this unpredictable life.’
    She didn’t really know what was going on. She felt confused and disappointed but, at the same time, strangely relieved. She shut her eyes and could smell the orange blossom scent of the shower gel, could feel the softness of the robe under her hand where it rested on his stomach and could sense the bareness of his chest just above her head.
    If she didn’t talk, the fear was that this moment might end.
    So she told him. And realised as she did that she had spoken so rarely about her life that it was like talking about someone else: This person, Jane, she did all this stuff. She used to sit with her mum in her workshop while she hand-printed the most glorious fabrics, her face set in a concentration that took her far from reality, where she wouldn’t speak or listen, got furious with an interruption, so this Jane learnt to sit in the corner in silence and wait. Wait for the rare, glorious good days of adventure. Then came school and the desire for normality. The desire to hide her life. The fear that her mum would remember to pick her up, the embarrassment of seeing her standing at the gates dressed in all her patterns and kaftans with wild eyes and crazy hair. This Jane would go home to cut the cloth and mix the dye. Every night, every morning. Then, older still, she was no longer fielding phone calls from school about missed days and her lack of packed lunch but irate designers waiting on their commissions while her mum refused to get out of bed. And soon she was going to the workshop herself, finishing fabrics that had only been half started. Would try and navigate the design from scraps of paper and piles of sketches. She would tie it all up and cycle it to whoever’s studio it was, their faces surprised to see this tall, skinny young girl rather than her mother. And her mother never seemed to question where the piece she had started ended up. Never seemed to know she hadn’t finished it. Was just relieved that it was done. Then soon it was this Jane creating the designs herself, assuming the identity of her mother who was getting too dark, her world too black, to do them herself. And people were commenting on the freshness of the work, the beauty of it, and this Jane started to feel pride in her creations, wanted to break out from her assumed identity and learn to be better.
    So this person, this Jane, went to college for a year to take her now-proficient printing skills and turn them commercial, so she might be able to move them maybe from their one-roomed boat to a new home where she might have a bed. She came back every weekend