Matt casually wandered and weaved his way through the people, smiling at some, nodding at others, picking up a salmon topped hors d'oeuvres from a tray offered him by a young girl, probably the daughter of Malcolm, his new boss,  and accepting a glass of red wine from another tray, but inexorably making his way towards the kitchen. It was a fact that all good parties started and ended in the kitchen.

At forty-one years old, he had been lucky to get the job as a senior scientific researcher at a very prestigious biochemical company and with his first week behind him, and having met several new people, had accepted the invitation to the summer barbecue, though he hadn’t expected it to be so full of people and in such a grand house bordering the New Forest. He wasn’t sure whether the forest engulfed the house or the house accepted the forest as its friend. It was an idyllic setting.

A hand on his shoulder announced the arrival of his new colleague, Simon Montford. They greeted, chatted and Matt felt welcomed into the fold. He could see Malcolm out in the garden attending one of the many barbecues that were busily cooking all sorts of meat. This wasn’t a vegetarian gathering by any stretch of the imagination.

Matt was introduced to many new faces, all of whom wanted to know why he had decided to join Malcolm’s company, and all of whom wanted to know about his past. The questions were hurled at him. How old was he? Was he married? Did he have children? And finally, what would he be working on?

He found most of the questions only required a one-word answer. Forty-one just gone, divorced, no, sorry I can’t tell you – it’s a secret. And until he knew who he could talk to and what their relationship was with his new department, he thought it wise to just shut up. Everyone seemed to accept his answers without question.

He felt that a fair few of the women were being overly polite. He felt that they wanted to find out a lot more, dig deeper, especially when he announced he was divorced. One or two of them became extremely interested and he saw their eyes light up. Although they were somewhat younger than him, he still had a fit and energetic body, good looks and the salt and pepper hair that just made him look more charismatic.

He took his time but he finally made it outside, into the fresh air and he sucked in a lungful of the aroma of pine trees and marvelled at the beauty of the place. He eventually started chatting to Malcolm who was still working hard at one of the barbecues. He held a plate in his hand that was filled with a small amount of salad, tomatoes, coleslaw and a couple of buns waiting in line for a burger and perhaps some chicken and pork before making his way towards the sauces.

That’s when he first sighted her. At first, it was a double-take as she disappeared behind some people never to re-appear; mingling with friends, possibly family.

Matt thought nothing of it and proceeded to pour an unhealthy quantity of sweet chilli sauce and mayonnaise onto his burger. He found a seat next to Simon and his wife Melanie; their children wandered off and played together as children do and only re-appeared for more one-bite mouthfuls of food before running wild again.

Matt was quick to finish off the chicken and pork first, as they were always the first to go cold. After taking a big bite of his burger, Matt looked up and saw her again.

When he had first sighted her, he was unsure, but the more he looked, the more he became certain that it was indeed Sandra Beaubois: French father, British mother from Hampshire. He started watching her from a safe distance, or so he thought.

She was tall, almost as tall as him at just over five foot ten, she swayed elegantly as she weaved through the people, but she had always done that, ever since she was six. He remembered her with fondness, at how they used to play doctors and nurses at the age of nine or ten; the hospital was a makeshift tent in her parent’s garden. At the age of thirteen, they seemed almost inseparable. At the age of seventeen he had become intensely jealous of her friendship with David Davies, a Welsh boy that seemed out-of-place in rural Sussex; and more so at eighteen when his best friend Andreas and a few others in between vied for her charms.

At sixteen and a half, he remembered his first kiss. On her doorstep. They had wandered home from a long walk in the countryside and throughout the walk, he had wanted to tell her, wanted her to know, wanted to show his affection for her. But he was scared. Scared of the repercussions; the shame if she were to say no. Afraid that he would lose her. It was on her doorstep when she had already said goodbye and was about to turn away from him that he overcame the hoard of butterflies in the pit of his stomach and leaned in to kiss her. She hadn’t backed away. She hadn’t been upset and she hadn’t shouted at him to go away. No, she kissed him back. Their lips locked together. That tenderness now came flooding back to him.

Matt held his burger half-way to his mouth as those tender kisses caused such intense euphoria, as he watched her weave herself through the myriad of people, chatting, nodding, smiling, occasionally eating the bite-sized portions of food arranged on her plate as if they were a journey of some kind. A path that needed to be followed.

And then she was lost to his gaze. He continued eating. He turned to talk with Melanie but only briefly.

“Mathew Taylor? Is it you?” she had said.

The voice surrounded him, surrounded his senses, engulfed him. He broke off chatting to Melanie in mid-sentence to look over his shoulder. His actions slow, unbelieving that someone had mentioned his name. His safe distance completely eroded and reduced to three feet. There she stood, before him, looking down on him from a great height, Sandra Beaubois; it was her after all.

And at that moment, they knew, they both knew they were happy to see each other.

He feigned recognition at first, though he could not deny all those memories he had experienced in the fifteen minutes she had taken to close the distance between them.

“Sandra? Sandra Beaubois?” he had questioned.

She nodded. “The very same,” she replied as he stood up, and they had started chatting, and Simon and Melanie and the kids were all lost to the surrounding countryside; fading into the background, out of focus and out of mind for the time being. Malcolm and the whole entourage of people never existed. His smile had grown so wide and the questions from both of them came flooding out, each one forming a pool of words at their feet that got deeper and deeper as the conversation plodded onwards.

They eventually stopped themselves from talking; both of them unsure whether they had tired themselves out, or whether their word quota for the day had been used up, or whether they just ran themselves out of things to say. They welcomed the deep sighing breaths. Neither of them had eaten and the pile of words that ended up on the floor started to blow away in the breeze.

There was one moment, one hesitant moment when Sandra told Matt that she was married that his heart had momentarily stopped and his smile shortened and the light in his eyes glowed a little less brightly, but he had battled through that moment without as much as a blink of an eye. He thought she hadn’t noticed; that he was once more that bubbly, sprightly kid from way back when.

She had mentioned that kiss. It made him smile. It brought back more memories of the kind he was feeling only moments before she had turned up at his side.  It made him want to kiss her all over again. He did scan the surrounding people for someone looking in her direction, someone searching her out, a man staring at her, concerned for her welfare but waiting for his turn to apologise to the person he was talking to in order to make his way over to her. But there wasn’t one that he could see.

Up to that precise moment in time, they had never mentioned how they had split up, or how they had enjoyed themselves for eight, maybe nine months of the summer, how they had become almost alien to each other after he had pressed her to have sex with him and how she had tried to avoid those kinds of questions or advances. Her answers and actions bordered on her saving herself for when she was married, which only meant one thing to him, that one day they would be married. That day, of course, would never transpire and once they were in college their time together had been irrevocably reduced, firstly to seeing each other when the term had ended, then to the occasional phone calls and then to a yearly account of their lives which they sent to each other in Christmas cards. By the time they were twenty-six, they had failed to keep in touch.

“So, you’re married and do you have any kids?” He had asked. The brightness back in his eyes, the spring in his step, though not sure where all this stepping was taking him.

She shook her head and looked down to the floor. He could see that he had, perhaps, touched a nerve. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned the children word.

“Is your husband here?” he had asked, changing the subject quickly.

She looked up at him and smiled. “You’re a good hole digger, I’ll give you that,” she had replied, before popping a morsel of food into her mouth. Matt did the same, taking a bite out of his now cold burger and chewing on it as he nodded approvingly.

“There is no husband, no kids, biologically impossible for two women to have kids.” She had said matter-of-factly, tilting her head to one side while looking at him from under her eyebrows and then added. “She died over a year and a half ago. We were together for six, married for two.”

Matt’s mouth opened wide. He never bit the burger that was halfway towards it. “I’m sorry,” Matt had said, eventually. A feeling of sorrow engulfed him. “I didn’t – ”

“Well, I wouldn’t have known.” He said eventually.

Sandra nodded. Her memories filled the silence between them. It was true that she thought of Emily almost every day, she had never thought she would, at this moment of all moments in time, tell someone that she was married to another woman. Yes, loads of people knew, loads of people at this barbecue knew because they made no secret of it, but somehow, the thought of telling someone that had been so close, someone that was once so special in some distant far-off land, someone with whom she had shared intimate moments, seemed strange.

A memory of Emily popped into her head which caused Sandra to smile. Emily’s enthusiasm for life and her voluptuous curves filled her mind. It was the same memory that seemed to be her number one go-to memory of Emily. That time when they were on holiday in a cottage in Wales, the time when Emily had run upstairs into the bedroom and dropped her bags on the floor, stripped naked and came storming back downstairs and into the lounge, effervescing with enthusiasm and energy. She remembered her bursting through the door singing, “Take – me, I’m yours.”

The outburst had shocked Mrs Evans who had been standing there telling Sandra about the locks on the doors and how one door had to be opened first because otherwise the other would jam up. Sandra had witnessed, first hand, how Mrs Evans stopped mid-sentence, opened her mouth and had forgotten to close it again as she stared, goggle-eyed at Emily. Her gaze never wandered off Emily’s ample breasts as they wiggled and bounced in tune to her energetic outburst.

Emily was equally shocked by Mrs Evans’ presence, but Emily recovered much more quickly. Sandra remembered how she smiled, nodded at Mrs Evans and then slowly walked towards Sandra before shimmying up to her and putting her arm around her waist; a poor attempt to hide at least one of her breasts; her other hand thrust outward to Mrs Evans telling her how nice it was to meet her and how lovely the cottage was and how nice it must be to live in such a wonderful place.

Of course, Mrs Evans took her hand, nodded, and acknowledged her. Though, Sandra could tell that the woman was more than a little surprised at the way Emily had behaved and made her excuses to leave pretty sharply. The memory stopped as she realised where she was; standing in front of Matt. Smiling.

Sandra threaded her arm through his, “Come, let’s take a walk,” she had said, guiding him towards the wooded area to the back of the garden and then while bending towards Simon and Melanie, “I hope you don’t mind but I’m taking him from you, we’re old, old friends – since school.” She had told them, which seemed to make everything alright.

The memory of Emily usually went a lot further when Sandra was at home. It would come on sporadically, when she was cooking, watching TV, reading in bed or more often than not while watching other couples acting playfully while in the park together or while shopping or even eating out at restaurants; though she did little of that recently.

The memory always, always, ended up with her and Emily in bed together after they rushed upstairs in the cottage, with her sucking Emily’s nipples and pushing her breasts together to form, as she used to call them, mountains out of molehills. They were far from molehills anyway and Sandra wouldn’t have them any other way. She had loved sucking and suckling on her breasts and had often wondered what they would have been like if Emily had, miraculously, become pregnant. It was a fantasy of hers, to say the least. They were the reason she and Emily were together, the reason they had married, the reason she had been contented with her life and the reason she had lost her to cancer at the tender age of thirty-eight years of age. Of course, Emily’s very essence had an awful lot to do with it as well. She was always laughing, playful yet deviously so. She topped the charts in giving one hundred per cent and more to their relationship and Sandra had responded likewise. They never argued, well, except for how they squeezed the last remaining drops out of the toothpaste tube, but that was because of a sketch that they once saw on a TV show that had them rolling about in fits of laughter.

“So, tell me,” she had said to Matt while they deposited their plates of leftover food on the nearest unoccupied table, “what have you been up to in your life?”

Matt talked about a life of hard work in college and as a biochemist in later life. He skirted around the myriad of girlfriends he had had in University and his early twenties. He talked at length about his one failed relationship, and about how they were, at the end of ten wasted years, basically incompatible. It was strange, he told Sandra, but it was he that wanted kids and not her. She just wanted to spend all their money on holidays, everything they didn’t need for the house and home and how it was that everything she wanted out of her life, she got. The sex, he admitted, was more than adequate, but it was only a down payment for what he could provide for her. They divorced. It was an expensive divorce considering what little she brought to their overall happiness and relationship and one that he was never, ever, going to repeat.

Matt had paused at that point, hoping for Sandra to say a few words in support of his unfortunate married life but she just nodded. “It’s funny,” she had replied, “how you think your life will turn out and then when you look back – it’s different. Much different.” Her final words seemed distant.

Matt nodded and remembered, so vividly, how he thought his life would have turned out with Sandra.

“I’m sorry. So, very sorry, Matt.” She had said to him without any kind fo warning. As if she had known what was going through his head at that precise moment.

“What for?” he had asked, deflecting the blow.

They had threaded themselves between a couple of trees that led along a narrow, well-worn path covered in pine needles and cones. Sandra had snuggled into him a little and let out a big sigh.

“What for?” he had asked again.

“For pushing you away.” She had said, finally.

She proceeded to explain, though the explanation was long and involved and hurtful, in parts.  She explained how it scared her to realise how quickly their relationship had reached the requirement for sex to be involved. She was scared of them being an old couple before they had the chance to be young and free, she was scared of his need for her constant closeness, his clinginess, his need to be with her at all times of the day and most of all, she was scared of the direction that her very own thoughts were taking her. Those sly looks she got and gave to other girls in the school changing rooms after sports day. Those thoughts were the reason she became friendly with Melissa Burton and Melanie Bishop and had more or less stopped seeing her best friend Jenny Clifton in the process.

That was the reason why she had tried to dissuade Matt by getting pally with David Davies and Brian and Melvin Scott; though that had caused irreparable damage between the twin brothers as they vied for her charms. At one point, it seemed, they would never make up and would never talk to each other again.

Flirting with other boys was also an attempt to throw their schoolmates off the scent of her developing an unhealthy likeness for girls. At seventeen, she explained, she had become involved with Melissa Burton. Sandra shook her head remembering her. She stopped walking and turned to Matt to look him in the eye.

“Melissa Burton,” she had said, “was by far, the filthiest lesbian I had ever met.”

She threaded her arm through his once more and they moved on. Giggles erupted from her lips and Matt’s as they pondered Melissa Burton’s actions as a sex-crazed lesbian. This confession was the first time Matt had known about Sandra’s liking for women. It had come as a bit of a shock if he were to be honest, but he giggled nevertheless, pretending that he had known all along.

She told him about the one day that changed her mind about him; about boys in general. That day, she confessed, was the day she came home from school and decided that their relationship would have to end.

“Twenty-first of October, nineteen-seventy-nine at five-thirty-three in the afternoon.” He had told her.

Her mouth remained open mid-sentence as she had looked at him. A smile appeared on her face and a certain curiosity formed a spark behind her eyes. Sandra continued her story.

It was the day that Melissa, Melanie and her were the last to leave the changing rooms. She hadn’t been sure about either of them but she had been sure that they were different from all the other girls and she had been sure that she had wanted to know more about them. She had deliberately taken her time to undress and then wash her body, she had taken her time to dry it and had taken even longer drying her hair as she waited and waited for the changing room to empty. Melissa and Melanie were doing the same as her, but they had always done that so that they could be together. She told Matt that she had noticed the girls looking at each other and then at her. She had noticed them smile at each other. The kind of smile that people have only when they know they are going to misbehave. She had watched them as they circled her as she dried her hair in the towel; like a pack of hyenas, but with only two of them.

Melissa had approached her first with only her panties on which had made her stand up and move back towards the changing room lockers; clutching her towel as if it was going to protect her. Their eyes, she had said, were piercing and predative. She had said that while she had hung back to find out about the two girls, she had now become afraid. Scared at what they would do to her. It was Melissa that, once her back was against the lockers, had pushed her hand down her knickers to cup her sex. It was Melissa that pushed her lips against hers to kiss her and it was Melissa that fingered her so expertly she couldn’t tell whether to climax hard or hold back for more. It was Melanie though, that tongued her sex to her first explosive orgasm and one that she wasn’t expecting. On that fateful day, both girls had guided her back to the bench, had pushed her onto it and had opened her legs wide. It was then that Melanie had knelt between her thighs and buried her tongue in her sex and it was Melissa that scuttled her body over her head and had encouraged her to do the same to her. It was something she got a taste for and something she knew, as a teenager, she wouldn’t be able to give up so easily.

After that time with the two of them, I left thinking I was a lesbian. I was on pure adrenalin and so high I remember feeling that I would be unable to last the weekend without them. As it happened I didn’t.

Sandra had stopped talking but Matt was still listening intently. A hardness grew in his pants and it took all his mental capacity to make it go down. Not that he wanted it to. The story, had, in fact, riled him, that was before he got aroused by it. It had started him thinking that perhaps it wasn’t his fault after all and that perhaps he shouldn’t have held back so much with his explanations of his past life. Especially his past life with Bev, the girlfriend that liked to be fucked from behind while he pulled hard on her hair or Jessie, the girlfriend that used to tease him until he spanked her bottom only to find that she used to like it. They only parted when she bought him a cane as a Christmas present and had asked, no, begged, that he used it on her next time. It was the screaming and the tears that he didn’t particularly like. The spanking he could cope with. For his birthday, two months later she had bought him a paddle. Two months after that they were going their own way in life, though, he had kept the paddle.

“That was why, Matt.” She had told him, “that’s what changed me.”

Matt nodded. Sandra proceeded to tell him that she had to push him away because of his optimism that they would always be together, because she didn’t feel that way anymore and because he couldn’t or refused to see what was happening despite her dropping so many hints by dating the other boys. Those other boyfriends were of course just lip service to the society that they lived within.

By the end of her confession, she felt that she had come clean, she had told him, after all these years, why she did what she did. She glanced sideways at him and wondered whether her explanation was good enough, whether it had hurt him even more, whether it was acceptable to be selfish and whether he thought she did it for the right reasons. Even she didn’t know, anymore, whether she did anything for the right reasons but she knew it was selfish of her. And yet, was it selfish to deny her body the pleasures that Melanie and Melissa gave her all those years ago.

“Ces’t la vie,” he had said, shrugging his shoulders and tilting his head.

They had come out of the woods along the side of a lake that had the clearest, bluest waters in the whole wide world. They saw fish surfacing and watched, in silence, as the echoes of the fish’s existence tumbled towards them.

With his erection under full control, Matt opened his mouth. “Has it always been women, ever since – ” he hesitated while he looked up into the sky at a passing jet, so high that you would never know it was there if it wasn’t for the white streak trying to catch it up and failing.

“Ever since that time in school?” he had asked, getting the words out quickly in case they stuck in his throat.

“No,” she had responded. “There’s been a few men on the way, one in particular.”

Sandra had told Matt of her journey through life, the girlfriends at the start were new, different, fun and most of all, against all the rules that her parents had set down for her. Especially sleepover rules because they were none the wiser as to what went on in that room during sleepovers. In college, there were both men and women that had floated her boat for different reasons. There was even a stage where she worked as a waitress, of all things to do in life, and had made friends with certain couples that frequented dark and dingy clubs, but that was just for the exciting sex. Then she started to relate her story about Damon. A nice man, her age, a lawyer that had become a self-made millionaire in the matter of ten years since he left college. It was him, she said, that had introduced her to Emily, much to his disappointment in the end. Emily was his downfall, though, neither of them knew that at the time. Though Sandra admitted that she never fleeced him in the divorce courts, he would have probably have won anyway, but he did leave her well off.

“What brings you here?”  he had asked in a surprised tone of voice. It was a question that perhaps should have been asked at the very start of their conversation but one that had been missed off the list of important questions to ask.

“I’m Malcolm’s wife’s best friend,” she had said with a giggle in her voice.

Matt glanced at her rather too quickly. The questioning look and the raised eyebrow on his face said it all.

She looked him in the eyes, smiled and looked back towards the lake. “Unfortunately, not that type of friend, so you can put your imagination back in its box. Just because I like some women…”

“I like some women too…” he had replied, which had brought a welcome smile to their faces and laughter that filled the air around them. It was as if, at that moment, the awkwardness had been discarded. Thrown away.

“You know,” he had started to say, “when I saw you in the crowd of people, and knew it was you, two things happened: first, I couldn’t believe it was you and second, a strange thought entered my head. One that I hadn’t realised I had been having until then.” He had paused at that moment for quite some time. They had taken several steps along the path and had come to a bench by the side of the lake. They both sat down respectively leaving enough space between them.

Matt continued, quite out of the blue, “I don’t think I have ever stopped loving you, and I know, that on every anniversary of that fateful day in October, I have thought of what you may be doing? Who you may be with? And whether you were happy? And now – here you are.”

Sandra stared across the lake into the middle of nowhere, afraid to speak in case the moment would shatter her thoughts. It had brought a small tear to her eye. Her hand snaked across the bench until it touched his. Their fingers intertwined and they sat there, staring across the lake, together, in silence. She didn’t have the energy to tell him that she had also regretted her actions and that she too, had always thought of him and how she felt bad about what she had done to him. But that was only a recent feeling; within the last five years. It had been Emily that had forced Sandra to tell about her past relationships and her first love, only then, had she realised what had happened all those years ago and what an impact it had had on their future lives.

She knew he was waiting for a reply, and she knew that he would have to wait longer because at that moment her second most go-to memory of Emily punched its way through to her. The one that reminded her of how much happiness they had shared. The one that brought her joy just thinking about it, the one where she would have given anything at that moment to be somewhere else, with Emily, holding her, caressing her, teasing her and most of all, loving her. And then she realised that that love, that closeness, was waiting for her. Somewhere else. Somewhere indeterminable.

“Love is a funny thing,” she had said in that moment of contemplation. Her thoughts busied themselves on life’s meaning. You meet people, you fall in love with them, they leave you or they die, you miss them, you fall into despair, and then, perhaps one day, you meet them again or before that you meet someone else that suddenly becomes more important and that’s a measure of how much you loved the first person. That’s life. That’s love. That’s what happens to all of us.

“Yes.” He had replied. “Yes, it is.” As if answering all of her thoughts, all at once. All at the same time.

Matt shuffled his body, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, he delved inside to retrieve a piece of paper from what looked like a hidden compartment. He had looked at it, smiled and handed it to Sandra.

“Remember that?” he had asked.

She looked at it, a picture of her leaning out of her window at home, looking down at the cameraman, Matt, and she remembered. Her heart becoming heavy as she remembered.

“That was the last time I saw you smile at me,” he had said. “Before we split up. Officially split up that is.”

And he was right, it was that moment. But that wasn’t the reason Sandra remembered it so well. It was the night that she had invited Melanie for a sleepover, a night where there was no sleep for either of them, a night when they seemed to have their heads constantly between each others’ thighs. She remembered the night as a night of sexual debauchery. The following day, Matt had come round to her house and had knocked on the door. Her parents had been out shopping and had left the girls sleeping and Sandra was still in bed. Melanie was asleep on the floor.

She had remembered how she had looked out of the window, catching Matt’s eye as he was about to walk away from the house. How she had engaged him in conversation, how Melanie had crept up behind her and started to lick at both her holes, first her anus and then her pussy before inserting two fingers into her while kneeling on the floor, out of sight. She remembered how Melanie's finger fucked her to orgasm as she patchily spoke to Matt with a creaking and squeaking voice. She remembered how she had said goodbye to Matt and had told him that she would not be going out for a walk and that she had to stay indoors. She had watched him leave, head drooped low, clutching his camera. Then he had turned and took the picture she was now holding in her hand. The picture that captured the precise moment she had come on Melanie’s tongue and fingers. Sandra could almost see the fire in her own eyes from that parched paper copy. A moment that Matt would have known nothing about and mustn’t know.

But that wasn’t the reason she remembered that picture, or that moment so vividly. The real reason was that that moment was one of the moments she had spoken of when she explained to Emily about her first love. She had told her that, despite her orgasm, it was the moment her heart broke, because she had turned him away. After all, she had said to Emily, she could see the despair on his face, the rejection, the hurt that she had caused. It was the moment that her body had crashed through an orgasm and she uttered the silent words, I’m so sorry, to him, as she had watched him walk away. That smile wasn’t a smile, but it was a sad realisation that she had hurt him so badly. A desperate attempt at calling out to him to try and put things right.

Sandra nodded and handed the picture back to Matt. Matt looked intensely at the image. Sandra looked intensely at the image in Matt’s hand, watching it shake and then turned her gaze to stare, once more, across the lake.

And then ten minutes must have passed them by without either of them noticing the reeds swaying in the breeze, without noticing the bees and insects and the bright blue dragonflies that flitted past their eyes, without noticing the concentric circles that started from somewhere and ended up lapping at the shoreline close to their feet.

She could feel his gaze on the side of her cheek, warming it with his smile as he took the now yellowed photograph and replaced it in his wallet and then his wallet into his back pocket. She could feel him caressing her hand and she could feel him move – closer, until the side of his body touched hers, until his other hand took hers and held it tightly, until his arm wrapped around her shoulders; pulling her closer to him. Closer than she had ever been in a long while, to anyone. And that closeness filled her heart with joy and her head with memories. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes filled up but she never cried.

She let her head rest on his shoulder and let out a big sigh. “I’ve missed you, you know,” she had told him. Like they had always been friends like the last twenty-three years had never happened. It was as if, through all their relationships, all their fears, all their happiness, they had always met each other, on this bench, near this lake and cuddled and talked and helped to wash away the woes of life or celebrate its joys. Like they had never been apart. Like this was a normal occurrence.

Matt caressed her arm, allowing what little words that needed to be said, to be said. Now and then someone would say something and then they would be quiet for another five or ten minutes.

The breeze had died down, the water calmed, the sun reddened the sky and they could see their reflections looking back at them, studying them, asking questions of them, a reflection of two people that once shared a deep and meaningful connection, a reflection of their lives, past lives, present lives and who knows what other lives. A reflection of times gone by.

The sun forced its presence through what little space existed between the densely packed trees. Forcing its dying brightness and its shadows on the land, on the water and upon them.

“Shadows of the past,” he had said out loud.

And of course, they were, all shadows were of the past. They had happened behind them when they weren’t looking – or when they were looking somewhere else. Nature’s shadows. But then, what of those shadows. Those shadows that shrouded memories or those that lurked in the back of minds. Those were the shadows that had formed from the darkness, even on the brightest of days. Those were shadows that suppressed the thoughts that should have been given more time to mature before they were confined, hidden deep inside and killed off.

Matt let out a long sigh. “We had better be going back,” he had said.

Sandra nodded her agreement and then, as if it was an inspirational thought, a light bulb moment, added, “they’re all gonna ask questions, you know that, don’t you?”

“S’okay,” he had replied. “We’re just old friends – right!”

She didn’t know why, but at that moment, that moment when a wry smile burst upon her lips, that moment when their hands clasped together tightly and that moment when Sandra bit her lower lip as they stood to leave, a great calmness descended over her body.

A tear crept into her eyes. She clenched her mouth hard to supress the feeling of being terful. She remembered Emily's last words to her. "You find someone else, don't be alone. You're not made to be alone."