The Spark - Jules Wake Page 0,6

She was also doing an OU degree in psychology and liked to involve me in the theories she was learning about at any one time.

By contrast, my desk was super tidy, but I too could also lay my hand on anything within seconds.

My first task of the morning was to try and persuade a local headteacher to take on two new children that had recently arrived with us, although there was only one place at the school. It took umpteen phone calls and several emails liaising with the county admissions team, the head, and the social worker assigned to the case before I was finally able to push away my keyboard and put down the phone to pick up the black coffee that Holly had just brought me. As I took the first life-saving sip, the bing of my phone caught my attention, and my heart skidded to a halt before kicking off like a frolicking pony.

Hi Jess. Hope you haven’t troughed all those leftovers yet. Lovely to meet you at the weekend. Sam.

I picked up my phone and stared at the message. Conflicting emotions showered like meteorites: pleasure, regret, hope, guilt, annoyance. Chiefly annoyance, I realised. He had no business texting me.

‘Blimey. That’s a complicated look,’ said Holly. ‘Bad news? Good news? Indifferent news?’

‘The jury’s out,’ I said with a sigh, holding my phone in both hands. Why had he texted me? That said he wasn’t the man I thought he was. I should be pleased that it proved the point. ‘I met this guy. Sam.’

‘And that’s him. Don’t tell me, he’s given you the I-just-want-to-be-friends message.’

‘Sort of.’

Holly rolled her heavily kohl-lined eyes. ‘See, I should write the book.’

‘You’ll dislocate your eyeballs one of these days if you keep doing that.’

‘Whatever, sweet cheeks,’ she replied with irreverent disdain. ‘Are you going to text him back to tell him you weren’t interested in him anyway or just keep looking at your phone as if it’s got all the answers to the universe and everything?’

‘Forty-two,’ I said automatically, immediately thinking of mine and Sam’s silly conversation (if you haven’t read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which we both had, the answer is forty-two). I sighed and put my phone down. I should ignore it. He was out of bounds. And then two seconds later I picked it up again. The message was innocuous; he hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

‘Want me to text him for you? “Bog off, you bastard, and don’t darken my inbox again.”’ Holly waved her bright-blue-tipped hands at me, trying to get me to hand it over.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Oh Lord, you’ve gone all moony-eyed.’ Holly shuddered. ‘He’s not worth it. He’s a man, remember.’

I rubbed my hand over my face. ‘I don’t know what to do. The thing is, he’s really nice.’ And I was scared that if I responded to the text, we could end up having one of those text flirtations where things are said that shouldn’t be, especially when he had a girlfriend. There was a girl code. You don’t mess with another girl’s man. Another woman’s husband. The code was ingrained. I’d seen the damage done to my mother. It was unfair to cause that much pain to another person who was innocent and blameless. And that didn’t even begin to cover the additional casualties of any children involved.

‘Who? What? Where?’ asked Holly.

How could I possibly put into words that perfect storm of recognition between Sam and me? Every time I thought about it, saying we just clicked didn’t come anywhere close to covering it. Clicked sounded like a seatbelt slotting home, fingers snapping; it didn’t describe the feeling of completeness, the accompanying soar-away feeling as though I was taking flight, the magical, serendipitous sensation of being so in tune with another person, or the exchange of a smile because you didn’t need words.

Holly would laugh her cute little pop socks off.

Particularly as it’s all so unlike me. Seriously. I’m Miss Practical, a sensible, problem-solving kind of gal. This was not my style. I didn’t fall in love at the drop of a hat, or in this case the chink of a beer bottle against a Prosecco glass. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever really been in love.

I think, in the quiet moments, when I was completely honest with myself, I was a little bit scared of love. Perhaps frightened of what loving can do to someone when it all goes pear-shaped. My dad left my