Hidden Reunion

We’d found one another quite by chance one night on the Internet, on one of those friends’ reunion sites. Had it been 30 years since we’d last seen each other? We’d been chatting every night for a month and were hiding a dark secret we’d planned our own hidden reunion.
Nervously I boarded the plane at the airport. Were we mad? I was anyway! I’d changed and I was sure he had too. We were no longer the kids from high school in Belfast. I’d gone to teacher training college in Belfast and remained in Ireland but he’d lived in England for years. I was divorced, a single mother and he was a married man with two young daughters.
It was a short flight to Edinburgh and I’d brought a book to read. I read none of it. My mind kept drifting off, just like the grey clouds, I could see floating by the window of the aircraft.
“Just drop me off at the next cloud!” I thought as nerves jittered throughout my entire body. I closed my eyes.
I floated through the clouds to 1972, Wednesday afternoon. Hockey practice had just finished and I was standing along Belfast Lough’s shore. A sixteen-year-old boy, in a black school blazer stood beside me. A tall young man, head and shoulders above me, blonde haired, blue eyed.
A bus approached, to take us home, he to his stop, me to mine. We climbed on board holding hands and talking as teenagers do. Living in troubled times, through bombings and unrest, we were united by romance in a world of paramilitaries. His area was alien to me, what they’d now call a ghetto. He was calm and angelic unlike his surroundings and I felt safe protected by him. The bus stopped. He waved goodbye and walked away into the ghetto where he lived, with its burned out cars, slogans on the walls and painted kerbstones. I never saw him again. I was the loser.
My teenage memories were interrupted by the captain’s voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing at Edinburgh airport, please ensure your seatbelts are secure.”
I put on my seatbelt. The plane landed. I checked my lipstick and my make-up.
“God, I look old! Will he recognise me? Will I recognise him?”
My heart was thumping. Time passes but memories never fade, they are stored away in deep water until something disturbs them and pulls them in like a fisherman with his catch. Before I knew it I was that lovesick teenager again. My head was in a spin.
I walked down the steps off the plane and into the arrival lounge. I looked around. There he was, the teenage boy from Belfast. Broader now: with a few lines and receding hair but I recognised him. I couldn’t have changed that much because he recognised me too. We hugged and then as if time had stood still without speaking, we took each other’s hand and made our way to his car.
On the journey to the hotel I felt comfortable with him. We talked about our families, the past and our friends. He drove with his eyes ahead, continued to smile and occasionally glanced sideways at me.
We arrived at the hotel and made our way to the room, a double with a makeshift single bed added. Had he always been such a gentleman? I felt really nervous but excited as I sat on the bed, he on a chair. We drank one glass of wine followed by another and another.
That frosty but heated November weekend was more than I had ever expected. Saying goodbye at the airport to fly back to Belfast was an unhappy time for both of us. As the plane landed reality and guilt hit me hard. We could never meet like this again. I knew I could never be the other woman in a love triangle.