One Night Stand by Julie Cohen Page A

into a drizzle and the mud squished under my trainers. On this side it was all yellowing leaves and wilted last-summer’s nettles, though over the water, in the gardens, there were still some flowers, as if time passed more slowly over there.
     
    You wouldn’t want to swim across the Kennet in Reading; the bottom was likely to be littered with rusting shopping trolleys and rotting fast food. But I imagined what it would be like if I could swim across, and climb out on the other side, into the past. Into, for example, eight days ago, before June turned up at my house. When I knew who my parents were, when my house was my own, when my heroines were (as far as I knew) fictional, when, while most things about my life might be boring, they at least made sense.
     
    I kicked at a wet rope of nettles. I’d worshipped June. Had done all my life, even though I was also a bit frightened of her. I’d looked up to her like a little kid blinded by fairy dust, and did she care about me? No. Instead, she’d left me blithely behind, lied to me for twenty-five years, and only shown up to take over my house, sleep with my best friend, eat my cake, and generally make me feel like an old fuddy-duddy.
     
    And she’d taken my father away from me.
     
    Gentle Stanley Connor who let me knot his tie on Sundays, Stanley of the bedtime stories and the piggyback rides and the scratchy bedtime kisses.
     
    Suddenly I wasn’t only angry at June; I was furious at her. I wanted to wrap my hands around her swanlike neck. I wanted to drag her down to the Kennet and throw her in, watch her mascara run and her hair become straggles and let her get eaten by the shopping trolleys.
     
    I grabbed a fallen branch from the path and whacked it, as hard as I could, against a tree trunk. It was about the thickness of my wrist and it made a satisfying crack as it broke.
     
    ‘I hate you!’ I yelled. I hit the branch on the tree again and again till it was in little chunks all over the path, and then I looked up, panting, and saw a huddled fisherman two gardens down staring at me from underneath his waxed jacket hood. He quickly looked away when I met his eye.
     
    I hurried onward, over the concrete bridge where another stream emptied into the brook with a whirl of foam and crisp packets, out of the fisherman’s sight.
     
    Got to tell Hugh about acting crazy for a fisherman, I thought, and then I stopped again.
     
    I’d nearly been lusting after Hugh over a Mr Tasty’s lunch. What the hell was that all about?
     
    It wasn’t as if Hugh had changed. I saw him every day and I’d known for some time that he’d grown out of geekdom. He had loads of girlfriends. He’d always had those artist’s hands, that unique mouth, he’d always been tall.
     
    Yet it was as if there had been a missing jigsaw piece in my perception of him that only now was slotting into place, and I could understand that he was sexy.
     
    And now I was just going to have to forget about it. Who else in the world would eat lousy Thai food because I needed him to? Who else in the world knew the right questions to ask, the right things to say? Who else had that hug and that smell and made the best chocolate cake in the world?
     
    Hugh was the only important person in my life whose position hadn’t taken a seismic shift, the only constant.
     
    I couldn’t fancy him. And that was all there was to it.
     
    The drizzle deepened and turned back to rain. I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned around. I was cold, I was wet, I had a splinter in my hand, and I was suddenly remembering that if I really didn’t want to be like June, there was one more thing I had to find out.
     
     
    The house was quiet when I got in. I checked upstairs and saw that the door to the spare room was still closed.
     
    I felt hung over myself, though I’d barely touched alcohol since my vodka binge two and a half weeks earlier. I’d been feeling this way for a couple of days, and I’d been putting it