Second Chance by Jane Green Read Free Book Online

Cross, Holly and Tom didn’t move. Holly felt as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment, and in a flash of light she knew what everyone was talking about. She understood about boys. She understood about love. And by the end of the night she knew that Tom Fitzgerald was her soulmate.
    When Tom asked for her phone number, she thought she would burst with happiness. He phoned the next day, and they talked for an hour and a half. An hour and a half! She gleefully reported every sentence of their conversation to Olivia, who felt slightly left out and didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about. And so Holly turned to Saffron, and soon Holly andSaffron were sitting on the phone every night talking about either Tom or his best friend, Paul, whom Saffron conveniently fancied.
    It didn’t strike Holly as odd that Tom and she never kissed. She knew it was only a matter of time. What they did was talk. And laugh. They, and soon a large group of them, would go out every weekend. Saturday afternoons they would jump on a train and go out to the country. Someone’s parent would drop them off at the theatre. They’d meet up at the park and just sit on the swings for hours, a curious mix of adult and child, trying to act older than their years, yet still young enough to shriek with laughter as they squeezed down a slide designed for those far smaller and younger.
    Soon, Holly’s crush on Tom dissipated. Daniel joined the group – taller, louder, funnier than Tom – and within weeks Holly and Daniel were propped up against every available wall, snogging for hours. Holly, lying between Daniel’s legs on a sofa at someone’s party on a Saturday night, felt so grown-up, so sophisticated.
    Tom became her best friend. When Daniel dumped Holly for Lisa, one of the bitchier girls in her class, Tom was the one who comforted Holly, confessing that he had fancied Holly when they first met but that now he was glad they were just friends, especially since he’d recently started going out with Isabelle.
    And of course Holly, who had got over Tom completely, found herself developing a major crush on him again. Except by the time he and Isabelle split up, she found herself going out with Dom Parks, and she and Tom drifted apart for a while – he and Dom Parksmixing in totally different crowds. By the time Holly and Tom rediscovered their friendship, A levels were looming and they both knew one another far too well for there to be anything between them other than friendship.
    Olivia was a slow starter. She was more interested in animals than boys, but eventually, in the fifth form, as they were preparing for their O levels, she developed a crush on her maths tutor. Ben was a first-year student at UCL, only three years older than Olivia, but a maths genius whose mother was a friend of Olivia’s mother, hence the tutoring arrangement that Olivia was initially furious about.
    Furious until Ben walked in. Quiet. Studious. Gentle. Olivia finally realized what everyone else had been talking about, and for the next two years she carried the weight of her crush in her heart, fantasizing about Ben turning to her over the calculator and admitting he’d fallen in love with her, dreaming of the day when Ben would see her as someone other than his little O level maths student.
    The day finally came in the upper sixth. She had passed her maths O level with a B and had run out of excuses to see Ben. Her mother mentioned one day that she had to go over to see Ben’s mother and that he was down from uni, and Olivia jumped in the car, desperate to show him how grown-up she was, how much she had changed, and how perfect she would be for him.
    And he noticed. Noticed that this was a young woman standing awkwardly in the hallway of his houseand not the child he had last seen two years previously. He noticed and he liked, and when they went into the den to chat about school and university he was surprised at how easy she was to talk to, how