Free Invincible Summer by Alice Adams Page B

bear hug, quickly followed by Eva and Sylvie, who threw their arms around him too. The four of them stood like that for a long time in the square outside the church, huddled together with arms stretched to encompass as many of the others as possible, each of their bodies aching with tiredness and elation and relief and sadness that it was over.

Chapter 9
Bristol, June 2001
    B ENEDICT RUBBED A hand across his unshaven chin and cast a gloomy look around what he loosely referred to as his office. It was rather an aggrandising term for a cluttered desk in the corner of the basement of the Physics department. True, the basement was the right place to keep the experiments, what with its being easier to control light and temperature, but spending so much time down there was getting a bit much. Every time he left the building he would emerge squinting into the light, like coming out of a daytime showing at the cinema and with much the same feeling of discombobulation.
    In winter it hardly bothered him, but now that another summer had rolled around it was wearing a bit thin. At least he was about to have a break. He was mostly tying up loose ends now, archiving data and annotating his code for when he came back to finish writing up his thesis in autumn. The university would be dead over the summer and in a few weeks’ time he’d be off to Corfu for a lengthy holiday, more at the behest of his parents than through any great desire of his own. It would be pleasant enough, he supposed, so long as he manoeuvred himself into a room as far away as possible from his brother and Carla and their noisy new baby, but he was feeling restless and ready for a change.
    He’d moved back into the postgrad hall this year to avoid having to find another flatmate now that the old one had decamped to Fermilab to immerse himself in the heady world of high-energy particle physics, while Benedict had been left behind tinkering around in the dungeon and dining nightly on Pot Noodles in the shared kitchen that was barely more hygienic than the one in his undergraduate halls of residence had been.
    Doing a PhD forced you into a sort of extended adolescence, he thought ruefully. He was working at the cutting edge of particle physics, and yet there was just something uniquely infantilising about the student lifestyle. The email he had received that morning from Eva—an increasingly rare occurrence—had only served to underline this. The picture she painted was, as ever, very much one of bright lights, big city; big deals, big nights out. She mentioned Sylvie but not Lucien, making Benedict wonder whether she saw much of him these days. The email hadn’t really felt as though it was from his old friend. It contained none of the shared jokes they used to shoehorn into their messages to show that nothing had changed, that underneath it all they were still the same old Benedict and Eva. Of course, they had never really been Benedict and Eva, at least not in the way that he would have liked, and perhaps she really had changed. Certainly it sounded as though Eva was more excited by bonuses than bosons these days.
    There had been that moment, a few years ago, when he’d thought it might actually happen between them. She’d joined him in Corfu the summer they’d graduated, and over the course of a week she’d grown browner and more relaxed until the last day when they’d come in from the pool together and made to enter the house at the same time. They’d got sort of wedged in the doorway, he in shorts and she in a bathing suit, and though their bodies hadn’t actually been touching electricity had seemed to crackle and arc between them.
    Benedict shifted uncomfortably in his chair, relieving the pressure from the fly of his jeans. Just thinking about it gave him a combined flush of desire and humiliation even now. He should have just kissed her. This wasn’t a new thought; it was the same one he’d been having, oh, four or five times a day in the thousand