‘Kiss me, Lance. Kiss me...’
‘You can’t stop there!’ Vanessa wailed when Angie suddenly fell silent. By this time they’d reached the block of units in North Sydney where they lived, parked in the underground garage and were making their way up the internal staircase to their neat little second floor unit.
‘What happened?’ she persisted.
Once she recovered her composure, Angie smiled wryly at Vanessa’s enthusiasm for her story. Underneath her hard-boiled exterior, she was a romantic—like most females.
‘Nothing much. He kissed me, just once. It was quite brief, really.’
‘It couldn’t have been that brief if you still remember it. And if it’s totally turned you off all other men ever since.’
‘I didn’t say I was totally turned off other men,’ Angie explained. ‘It’s just that I’ve been waiting for their kisses to do for me what Lance’s kiss did. I guess it’s a matter of a standard of chemistry never being reached again.’
‘So what was so special about the way this Lance kissed?’
‘I don’t think there was anything really special about his technique. I think it was the way the kiss made me feel that was so special.’
‘And how did it make you feel?’
Angie stopped at their door, her heart squeezing tight again at the memory. She inserted the key in the lock but didn’t turn it, her hand freezing as the words were wrenched from deep within her. ‘Like the world had tipped on its axis,’ she choked out. ‘Like I’d died and gone to heaven...’
It was crazy, but even after all these years she could still remember the feel of his steely arms winding tight around her, the heady, intoxicating effect of his lips possessing hers, the blindingly electric shock that had charged along her veins when his tongue had momentarily dipped past her eagerly parted lips.
But it was what he’d said to her afterwards which had caused the lasting damage.
‘I’ll write,’ he had said thickly, when he’d put her from him. ‘And when you’re old enough, we’ll be together properly. I promise...’
Perhaps he’d almost meant it at the time. She could give him the benefit of the doubt after all these years. But that didn’t change the inevitable outcome of his thoughtless arrogance in making a promise he must have suspected he would not keep, in condemning her to years of hopeless longing. In a way, that kiss had ruined her life.
‘Wow, Angie! You really were in love with him, weren’t you? So what became of him? Where is he now?’
Angie snapped back to reality, firmly pushing the still upsetting memories of Lance to the back of her mind. ‘Happily married to a very rich, very beautiful woman,’ she said with seeming calm. ‘They live in Melbourne.’
‘What did the poem say? Can you remember?’
Of course she could remember. Every heartbreaking, humiliating word.
‘Not really,’ she hedged. ‘It was just a lot of sentimental twaddle, much better forgotten.’ Which was true.
‘I presume he didn’t keep in contact after he left,’ Vanessa said drily. ‘No letters or anything.’
Angie threw her a cynical look as she turned the key and pushed open the door. ‘Only a polite note to my parents, thanking them for having him to stay.’
‘Bastard. There again, Angie, it was only to be expected. He was way out of your league.’
Five minutes later both girls were sitting at the small kitchen table, sipping a reviving cup of coffee. Angie was off in another world—worrying about Debbie—when Vanessa returned to the subject of Lance.
‘Did you see him again after that summer?’
‘Yes. A few times.’
‘No kidding. Where? When?’
‘The first time was a few months later at his and Bud’s graduation ceremony. The whole family travelled down to Sydney to celebrate the occasion.’
‘And?’
‘He was polite to me, but distant. And of course there was this very sexy-looking redhead hanging off his arm all the time.’
‘You must have been awfully upset.’
‘Crushed. I’d still been making excuses for him in my mind, telling myself that he was like so many males when it came to writing letters. I thought once we saw each other again everything would be all right. He would see I was quickly growing up— having turned a whole sixteen by then. He would tell me he was still waiting for me.’