He kissed her.
‘Do you miss the rock star boyfriend, then?’ he asked, his eyes suddenly darkening.
‘Oh, Jase.’ She sighed, leaving the exhalation as a placeholder for the answer she couldn’t quite formulate.
‘You do?’
‘I missed him while I was with him,’ she said.
‘Eh?’ His screwed-up forehead made her smile.
‘I mean . . . even while we were still together, I started missing what we’d had. Because he changed. We had five glorious, gorgeous years, and then it all began to fall apart. Not the career – both our careers were rocketing to the stars by then. But little things – too subtle to notice at first.’
‘So your first time was good, then?’
‘It was OK.’ Jenna shook her head at Jason’s insistence on ke
eping the conversation on its original rails. ‘It wasn’t the divine rapture I expected, but it was probably better than a lot of first times. And the times after that were better. Better and better.’
‘I don’t really want to know about that,’ said Jason, a tad sourly.
Jenna hummed a few bars of ‘Jealous Guy’, and he held her closer.
‘Yeah, I am a bit jealous, so what? It’s natural. He had you for years and years and he was an ungrateful bastard. I wish I’d been around then, that’s all.’
‘I wish you had. Although it might have been a bit complicated. But then, so was everything. I suppose what’s making me feel a bit blue is the idea that perhaps even those first five lovely years weren’t as good as I thought they were.’
‘No?’
‘I was carried along on this amazing electric current of love and lust and success and stardom. It was so exciting, neither of us stopped to draw breath. We were so in love with the idea of us that we never really examined the reality. Do you see what I mean?’
‘In love with love? Mia and I were a bit like that. Like she wanted everything to be romantic all the time. It was exhausting. But when I wanted some real love from her – some support, some understanding – she went all quiet on me.’
‘Yes, sort of like that, I guess. And with us, it was all magnified by the media coverage. So much “golden couple of rock” stuff. You really wanted to believe the hype. It became internalised. Deano and I were tied together by all sorts of things, but love was only one of them. Perhaps only a small one. We were playing a part, as well as having a relationship.’
‘Pressure,’ said Jason.
‘Yes, and I think Deano felt it more keenly than me, because he’s more naturally selfish. I’m not trying to be horrible, by the way. It’s just the way he is. I think it started to feel like a prison to him, and he wanted to break free. Even though he still cared for me, in his way.’
‘In his way?’
‘Yeah, well, like I just said, he was selfish. I got glandular fever when I was twenty-one and, instead of staying with me, he went off to holiday on some Hollywood actor’s private yacht for a month while I was in hospital trying not to succumb to liver failure.’
‘What a tosser.’
‘Yes, but I really didn’t see it that way at the time. I chose not to. I was upset, of course, but I told myself that he was doing it for his career. Networking. And that hanging around a hospital in London wasn’t going to achieve anything for us.’
‘Jen. Fucking hell. I’d have stayed with you.’
‘Would you?’
‘Of course. What do you take me for?’
She nestled her head deeper into the crook of his arm.
‘A keeper,’ she said.
‘Didn’t you think you deserved better?’