Page 168 of The Man Upstairs

We ate out in Worcester with Lola and Peter in celebration with whoops and cheers, and Mum and Tom came, too. And then, when the summer holidays were upon us, we went to Tenby and built sandcastles, with Julian tossing sand at me as he dug the moat.

We ate ice creams, and paddled in the sea with Lola and Peter, and after dinner, when they were off to bed for a kinky night in their hotel room, Julian and I set back off together, back to the beach.

We sat on the sand, and talked under the stars, and we began to make our plans.

Plans for our new life away from Crenham Drive…

“Where shall we go, then?” Julian asked me. “London? Tenby? Brighton? Manchester? Some tiny little village in the middle of nowhere in Wales?”

Julian had many suggestions, but I had only one answer.

“I want us to move to Oxford.”

“Oxford?!”

“Yes,” I said. “Oxford.”

“No,” Julian said. “Absolutely not. You’ll regret it when we’re there. That’s the last thing I’d want to put you through. Not in a million years.”

I wouldn’t regret it, though. Because just as he’d used the parallel of me not leaving him for the sake of my mother, there were some other parallels I could happily draw upon – and had done plenty of times in my mind.

I wouldn’t have left Julian for Mum, no, but I wouldn’t have left Crenham Drive, either. I wouldn’t have left her behind until she got the chance to see the truth for herself. About us. About him. About how great a person he was, and how much he adored me.

In Oxford,maybe, his family would see for themselves. A chance like that was worth taking. It had to be.

“We can’t move to Oxford,” he said, but I shook my head.

“Michael asked me to leave you and send you back home, but I won’t leave you, not for anything. But Iwillsend you home, like your family wanted. I’ll just be coming with you.”

“You’ve no idea what you’d be letting yourself in for.”

“I think I do, don’t you?” I managed to laugh, with the crash of the waves as a beautiful backdrop. “We’ve been through plenty of it in Crenham, haven’t we? And we made it through. We’ll make it through there as well. And if Michael does what I asked him to, what I begged him to… if he asks any of those girls for real, he’ll begin to see the truth. They all will…”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we keep waiting, until one day they see it for themselves. In us.” I nestled into his side as he stared at the waves. “Can we do it, then? Can we move to Oxford? You said you’d take me anywhere in the world I wanted to go.”

He chuckled, just a bit.

“I wasn’t imagining you’d say Oxford.”

“Will you take me there? Please? Can we get you home?”

He sighed and put his arm around me, kissing my head.

“Youare my home.”

“Yeah, I know.” I was grinning in the darkness. “I guess we’ll just be livingathome in Oxford though, won’t we?”

I soaked in another crash of the waves. I could practically hear his brain churning.

He sighed, and I grinned brighter. I knew him well enough to know the signs.

“Alright, then,” my boyfriend said. “Let’s do it. Let’s move to Oxford.”

I let out a squeal at that, and practically jumped on him, both of us a tumble of limbs on the sand.

I kissed him with sandy lips, and he grabbed me with sandy fingers, wrestling me to the ground underneath him, with my hands pinned over my head.