The Art of Keeping Faith by Anna Bloom Read Free Book Online Page B

heading for the exit and the cool autumnal air outside. Striding across campus, I head toward the willow tree by the lake; the tree which I like to call ‘mine’ when Ben is kissing me against it and I have my legs clamped around his waist. Not when I feel like something very bad might be about to happen.
    Three minutes later he is in front of me, lighting a cigarette to mirror my own action. I take a deep, long drag on mine while I wait for him to say something. The unsettling knot of apprehension in my stomach starts to grow at an alarming rate as I feel his fingers link with my own.
    “Lilah, look at me.” His voice is low and close by my ear.
    I open my eyes and stare into the blues.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t come home.” He takes a drag of his smoke and the blues watch me intently.
    “That’s okay,” I say. I have a feeling that is the least of my worries.
    “No. I am sorry. I know it must have annoyed you.”
    “Ben, it does not matter. You are a grown man; you can do what you want.”
    His brow creases as the blues continue to scan my face looking for something. “That’s a ridiculous thing to say and you know it.”
    I let a moment of silence pass before I speak again. “So what have you got to tell me?”
    “What?”
    “It’s all over your face, Ben. You have something to tell me, so just say it.”
    Silence .
    “Let me re-phrase that, what have you done?”
    “What?” His frown crinkles even more.
    “Or should I say, ‘Who?’“
    Oh, my God. I need to stop speaking!
    “What?” He looks pretty pissed now. “You think I cheated on you last night just because I didn’t come home?”
    I shrug and stub the ground with the toe of my trainer.
    “Lilah, I would never cheat on you. I can’t believe you would think that.”
    I still don’t have anything to say; his words are not dispersing the knot in my stomach.
    “Is this because of what your mum said the other day?”
    “No!”
    “Liar.” He mirrors my word of earlier and calls my bluff.
    We finish our cigarettes in deathly silence.
    “Sorry I accused you of doing something,” I say after a while, just for the sake of saying something.
    The blues stare at me long and hard without flinching. “Lilah, I would never intentionally hurt you.” The words hang unfinished between us.
    “But?” My voice hikes up a notch.
    He lets out a deep sigh and shoves his hands into his pockets. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he amends, staring at the pond in front of us.
    “But?” I prompt again.
    “I have a feeling I’m going to whether I intend to or not.”
    Oh God. He is going to break up with me because I am an irrational, control-freak girlfriend.
    “Say it, Ben.”
    He runs a hand through his hair and I can see the words battling to escape.
    I brace for impact. Three. Two. One.
    “I need to go.”
    “What? Now?”
    “No. I need to go back to the States. The record label is not very happy with us and we have been called back to L.A.”
    “What? Why?” This is so not what I was expecting.
    He lets out a humourless laugh. “Something to do with us not aggressively promoting the album enough.”
    “But you played that gig?”
    He lets out another short burst of laughter filled with something other than humour. “I don’t think that one gig is going to cut it.”
    “But what about that hard work you did over the summer so you could come home … ?” I falter at the end of my sentence.
    “It was not enough. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. I don’t think they are going to give me the chance to be a musician and a student.”
    “Oh.”
    Silence.
    Standing there under ‘our’ tree I contemplate him leaving again. I have lived through it once and then he came back and offered me a glimpse of something amazing. A future where we were together every day, where we ran out of socks together and went food shopping together and did, well everything together . “When?”
    “Next weekend.”
    “Oh.”
    Tears start to slide down my