Ten years between us

The plane hits the runway hard enough to make several people gasp.

My hand closes around the armrest as the wheels bounce once, twice, before finally settling with an unhappy screech. Somewhere behind me, a child begins to cry. The man across the aisle mutters something about budget airlines and grips the seat in front of him as though we might take off again without warning.

I stare through the window at the strip of sun-bleached tarmac and try to decide how I’m supposed to feel about this trip.

Excited, presumably. Mandy and John are getting married in fourteen days, at the end of what they have enthusiastically described as a destination wedding and everyone else has more accurately described as a two-week group holiday with formalwear.

I should be looking forward to late nights, too much wine and the kind of easy laughter that comes from knowing someone before adulthood turned everyone into carefully edited versions of themselves.

Unfortunately, life rarely works out the way you promise it will at seventeen. For all our declarations that we’d always stay close, the group had gradually split without any of us meaning it to. I kept in touch with Mandy and Leah, while John remained in my life largely because he and Mandy were impossible to separate. The boys kept in touch separately from the girls, and somewhere along the way, the easy familiarity we’d once taken for granted became something we had to make an effort to maintain.

It was almost as though everyone had chosen sides without realising there had ever been sides to choose.

The plane slows, and everyone reaches for their phones despite the illuminated sign telling us to stay seated. Messages appear on my screen in quick succession.

Mandy:LANDED???

Mandy:Tell me you are alive.

Mandy:John says stop messaging because the plane has literally only just landed.

Mandy:But he is not in charge of me yet.

I smile despite myself.

Me:Alive. Pilot appeared to have a personal issue with the runway, but otherwise fine.

Three dots appear almost immediately.

Mandy:Perfect. We’re waiting outside arrivals. John has made a sign.

My smile disappears.

Me:Please tell me you’re joking.

Mandy:I tried to stop him.

Me:You absolutely did not.

Mandy:No, but I thought about it.

The cabin doors open, releasing a burst of warm air that reaches us even through the narrow walkway. Around me, people surge into the aisle and wrestle bags from overhead lockers with the urgency of passengers fleeing a disaster.

I stay where I am, watching sunlight shimmer against the terminal windows. Beyond the runway, palm trees bend in a breeze I can’t feel from inside the plane.

It’s beautiful in the polished, unreal way holiday destinations always look when you first arrive.

Fourteen days.

I’ve survived difficult clients, impossible deadlines, a landlord who once tried to convince me that mould was a decorative feature and a thirty-six-hour journey home from Singapore after an airline cancelled my connecting flight.

I can survive fourteen days in a villa with people I used to know.

Even him.

My mind drifts, disobediently, towards a time when friendship had seemed uncomplicated.

We were thirteen when John first brought the group together, announcing that we were all going to sit under the oak tree at the edge of the school field because the usual benches had been claimed by Year Elevens who, according to John, “needed knocking down a peg.”

None of us had been brave enough to knock anyone down any pegs, so we’d eaten lunch under the tree instead.

Mandy complained about ants. Ben kicked a football into a teacher’s coffee. Leah spent the entire break insisting her cousin’s girlfriend’s sister had met Beyoncé in an airport.

And Alex sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched whenever he laughed.

Back then, it meant nothing.

Later, it meant everything.

I stand and pull my bag from beneath the seat before the memory can get any further.

The queue moves slowly through the narrow aisle. I keep my eyes on the exit, ignoring the familiar tightness gathering beneath my ribs.

I’ve known for three months that Alex would be here. Mandy told me over coffee, though she’d tried to make the information sound incidental.

Just so you know, John invited Alex. I know things got a bit weird between you two towards the end of school, but it’ll be nice to have everyone together again. I didn’t want you to arrive and be caught off guard.

She’d said it carefully, watching me over the rim of her cup, and for one terrible second I’d wondered if she knew.

Why would that bother me?I’d asked, aiming for mild confusion.

Mandy had shrugged.

No reason. Like I said, I know you two had a falling out during our last year. I thought it was better to put everything on the table now and give you the chance to back out, rather than spring it on you when you arrived.

Falling out.

That was one way to describe it.

Another would be that Alex had spent nearly a year kissing me in empty classrooms, pulling me behind the sports hall at lunch and whispering things into my hair that he would never once say where anyone else could hear him.

No one knew about us. That had been his condition from the beginning.

At sixteen, I had mistaken the secrecy for something romantic. Something that belonged only to us.

Six weeks into our final year, I finally understood what it really meant.

I remember the exact moment.

The corridor outside the sixth-form common room had been crowded, everyone gathered around after school, making plans for a party that weekend. I’d seen Alex at the other end and started towards him without thinking, the way you walk towards someone you love when you’ve temporarily forgotten you’re supposed to pretend you don’t.

His eyes met mine.

Then his friends appeared beside him, and something changed. A hesitation, perhaps. A shift in his expression that probably wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone else, but I knew him well enough to notice.

By the time I reached them, he was simply Alex again. My friend. Someone I’d known for years. Nothing in the way he spoke to me suggested there had ever been anything more.

I played along because that was what we did.

But something about that afternoon felt different. Maybe I was tired of pretending. Maybe I’d simply reached the point where all the small moments I’d been ignoring had become too difficult to explain away.

A few hours later, we were over.

The heat hits me properly when I step off the plane, bright and immediate. I slide my sunglasses on and follow the stream of passengers towards the terminal.

Alex Parker is someone I knew when I was seventeen.

That is all.

I have a flat I love, a career I built without anyone’s help and a life that contains very few dark school corridors.

I can be civil to him for two weeks.

By the time I make it through passport control, I almost believe myself.

My suitcase appears among the first few on the carousel, which feels like a reward for surviving the landing. I drag it towards the arrivals doors, catch my reflection in the darkened screen of my phone and feel immediately annoyed with myself for checking it.

My hair has survived the flight reasonably well. The linen jumpsuit I chose at five this morning is only mildly creased, and the gold hoops Mandy insisted were “very holiday Sarah” are still attached to both ears.

I look like myself.

A tired, slightly overheated version, but myself.

That should be enough.

The doors slide open, and John is impossible to miss.

He’s standing directly behind the barrier, holding a piece of white cardboard above his head. In thick black letters, it reads:

SARAH BENNETTINTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED FUGITIVE

A badly drawn photograph of my face has been taped underneath.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

His face splits into a grin. “Security! I’ve found her.”

Several people turn to look at me.

I consider walking back into the terminal and booking the next flight home.

Mandy launches herself around the barrier before I can act on the thought, colliding with me in a cloud of perfume and blonde hair, both arms wrapped around my shoulders.

“You’re here.”

“I’m reconsidering.”

“No, you’re not.” She squeezes tighter. “I’ve missed you.”

The last of my resistance softens. “I saw you three weeks ago.”

“That was wedding-planning Mandy. She’s not the same person.”

“You spent two hours showing me photographs of napkins.”

“They were different shades of ivory.”

“They were all white.”

She pulls back, looking at me with open disapproval. “This is why I need other friends here.”

John lowers the sign and comes around the barrier.

He looks almost exactly as he did at eighteen, only broader, with the beginnings of lines around his eyes and his dark curls cut shorter, though they still refuse to lie flat. He hugs me with one arm and takes my suitcase with the other.

“Good flight?”

“We landed eventually.”

“That’s generally the aim.”

Mandy is wearing a white sundress because apparently being a bride is now a full-time visual identity. John is in shorts and a faded navy T-shirt, sunglasses pushed onto the top of his head.

They look happy. Not performatively happy. Not wedding-photograph happy. The kind that has been built slowly, over years, out of small ordinary days.

It makes something warm settle in my chest.

“I still can’t believe you’re actually getting married,” I say.

Mandy beams. “Neither can John.”

“I can. I was there when I proposed.”

“You cried.”

“There was wind in my eye.”

“Both eyes?”

“It was an aggressive breeze.”

They start arguing about whether his proposal tears count as crying, and I follow them towards the exit, smiling in a way that feels easier than it did five minutes ago.

Perhaps the trip will be fine.

Perhaps I’ve spent the past three months worrying about a version of my life that no longer exists.

Outside, the afternoon is dazzling. Cars crawl along the pick-up lane while taxi drivers lean against open doors, calling to newly arrived passengers. Beyond the car park, the sky stretches blue and cloudless towards a line of distant hills.

“We hired two cars,” John says. “Most of us arrived this morning, but we’ve got another pickup.”

I slow slightly. “Who?”

Mandy becomes very interested in adjusting the strap of her handbag.

John points towards the doors behind me. “Alex’s flight landed about twenty minutes after yours.”

Of course it did. The universe has never understood subtlety.

My plan had been to spend the next fourteen days keeping a safe, civil distance from Alex Parker. I have been on the ground for less than an hour and am already failing spectacularly.

“Right,” I say.

One syllable. Calm. Neutral. Entirely unremarkable.

Mandy studies my face. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason.”

“You both need to stop asking me that.”

“We haven’t both asked,” John says.

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking about whether the car park ticket gives us fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“See?” I gesture at him. “Completely preoccupied.”

Mandy doesn’t look convinced, but she lets it go.

John loads my suitcase into the back of a large silver car while Mandy tells me about the villa.

Eight bedrooms. Three balconies. A swimming pool that, according to John, is “surprisingly deep” and, according to Mandy, should not be tested after drinking.

Everyone else is already there.

Ben came with his wife, whom I’ve never met, while Leah arrived from Dubai this morning and immediately sent me six messages, four photographs of the villa and a warning not to let Mandy assign me any additional wedding jobs.

Two of John’s university friends are joining us later in the week.

And Alex is about to walk through those doors.

I take a bottle of water from Mandy and twist the lid open, concentrating on the simple movement.

It’s been ten years.

Maybe he’s grown into a decent person.

Maybe he barely remembers what happened between us.

I can’t decide whether that would make things better or infinitely worse.

The arrivals doors slide open again.

A family emerges first, then an elderly couple pushing matching suitcases, then a group of men in golf shirts.

Then him.

I recognise Alex immediately.

I wish I didn’t.

His hair is shorter at the sides and slightly disordered on top, the way it used to get in the final ten minutes of a lesson when he’d stopped bothering to sit still. He wears a pale shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows and carries a black holdall over one shoulder.

He looks older.

Not dramatically. There are no sudden grey hairs to reassure me that time has punished him on my behalf.

His face has simply settled into itself, the sharpness of adolescence gone, replaced by something quieter. More controlled, perhaps, though I remember better than most how deceptive Alex’s composure can be.

He is still unfairly handsome. I note it the way you’d note bad weather, inconvenient, unwelcome, entirely out of my control. I refuse to think about it again.

Alex scans the crowd. His gaze finds John first, and he lifts a hand in greeting, his expression breaking into a smile.

Then he sees me, and his smile falters as if he’s seen a ghost.

I tell myself he must have known I’d be here. We were all invited. It isn’t exactly a surprise that I’m standing here. But perhaps, just like me, he’d convinced himself he had more time. A car journey. A few hours. Some mental preparation for seeing the person he’d spent years carefully keeping in the past.

For a moment, we lock eyes.

Everything around us seems to blur at the edges. The conversations, the music, the traffic noise around us, all of it fades into the background until there is only him standing across from me and me staring back.

He doesn’t look away. Something shifts across his face. Surprise first, followed by something I can’t read before he brings it under control.

And suddenly, despite the years between then and now, it feels as though we’re seventeen again, standing on the edge of something neither of us was brave enough to name.

John raises both arms. “Parker! Finally made it.”

And just like that, the moment, whatever that was, is gone.

He starts walking towards us, his eyes still fixed on me, and suddenly I’m far too aware of the fact that he’s getting closer.

Each step brings him closer until there are only a few feet between us.

“John.” He pulls him into a brief hug, then turns to Mandy. “Congratulations again.”

“Thank you.” Mandy kisses his cheek. “You made it.”

“Barely. There was a delay at Gatwick.”

His voice is deeper than I remember.

I hate that I notice.

Then there is no one left for him to greet.

His eyes return to mine.

They’re still the same grey-blue, darkening near the centre. I used to think I could read exactly what he was feeling just by looking at them.

I had been wrong about a lot of things at seventeen.

“Sarah,” he says.

“Alex.”

John looks between us. “This is strange, isn’t it? All of us being in the same place again.”

“You have no idea,” I say.

Alex says nothing.

For half a second, something crosses his face, there and gone before I can name it. Guilt, maybe. Or something close enough to it.

John doesn’t notice. He’s already turning back towards the car.

My eyes stay on Alex a moment longer than they should.

Mandy glances between us, but John is already reaching for Alex’s bag.

“Come on. We need to get moving before they charge me another twenty euros. Sarah’s in our car. Alex, you’re with us too.”

Naturally.

One villa. One rental car.

And the only person here who knows what really happened between Alex Parker and me is standing directly in front of me.

He holds my gaze for another second.

“You look...” He stops, as though catching the word before it escapes. “Fine,” he finishes instead. “You look fine.”

Ten years ago, those words would have consumed me. I would have searched his face for approval and reshaped myself around whatever I thought he wanted to see.

“So do you,” I say as I put my sunglasses back on.

I walk towards the car without waiting for his answer.

I make it three steps before I feel his gaze between my shoulder blades.

Ten years, and apparently my body still knows when Alex Parker is watching me.