I remember it as a beautiful night...

Even though it was pissing it down. Hard.

The rain was bouncing off the pavement and pinging off the cars that were parked in the Grassmarket. I was soaked within seconds of getting out of the taxi but didn't care. I don't think I'd have been bothered at all if there was giant balls of burning rock falling from the sky, I was going to see Her.

A group of us had arranged to meet in the Black Bull, to celebrate a work colleague leaving to go touring around Europe for six months, and I had managed to persuade her to come along. She'd tried her level best to refuse as she knew that I was utterly, hopelessly and totally besotted with her. She'd told me "Things are complicated." the previous time we'd all been together in the pub after work and had asked me to drop it so that we could be friends without all the unnecessary implications of me declaring my undying love for her.

I stood outside the pub shielding a cigarette from the rain and pondered what to do. I knew if I had a couple of drinks I'd give in to my inner voice and would throw open my heart to her and risk upsetting her. Again. And I didn't want to upset her, I only ever wanted to make her happy.

The question spun around and around in my head. I ignored it, finished my cigarette and walked into the pub. My group of friends were all sat at a table just inside the doors and when I was spotted they all began to laugh at the sight of me wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans that were wet enough to wash an elephant.

She wasn't in the company and my heart sank quicker than the Titanic. Louise called out to me that there was a kitty behind the bar, that I should throw some cash into it, get a drink and join them. I took another cigarette out and lit it as I walked to the bar. The barmaid smiled at me and asked what I was having. I told her I'd have a large Scotch and lemonade and another one to keep it company, that the change from the £20 note was to go into the kitty for our table and that if she put ice in my drink I'd make sure she didn't get any tips from our table the rest of the time we were there.

The barmaid stared at me with barely hidden disgust and went to get my drinks. I leaned over the bar and grabbed a glass-cloth from behind the counter and began drying my hair with it. The barman on duty asked me what I thought I was doing and I asked him what he thought I was doing. "It looks like you're drying your hair with our glasses towel." He replied.
"Then why the fuck did you ask?" I replied and continued drying myself off.

A couple of seconds later the barmaid returned with my drinks and I sank one straight away. The other I carried over to the table and plonked it down on the table next to Louise. Louise leaned over to me and whispered into my ear, "She's coming."

"How do you know?" I asked.
"I spoke to her just before she left work." She replied.
"And what did she say?" I questioned.
"She said that she likes you Ross, but the timing is all wrong. She's got a boyfriend. They're having some problems at the moment and they want to try to work it out. You, my romantic little friend, are the proverbial spanner in the works." She said, with a look of caring on her face.
"When will she be here?" I asked.
"About fifteen minutes." Louise answered.
"I need another drink." I said, picking up my glass and draining it.

I returned to the table after draining two more large Scotch and lemonades while standing at the bar being stared at by the barman as though I'd told him I'd fucked his mother up the arse with an over sized dildo. I sat down next to Murray and told him I would be sad to see him go and apologised to him for pouring a five gallon drum of cold chipfat mixed with food coloring all over him earlier that day. He grinned the happy smile of someone who is already half drunk and surrounded by friends who have gathered to wish him well. "It's fine man, but you owe me a shirt." He said, laughing.

The door to the pub opened and I immediately turned to see if it was her. I saw a young couple walk in and watched with a sinking heart as the door closed behind them. Perhaps she had decided not to come and risk confusing herself more than she already was.

The door reached it's final resting place and settled shut. My eyes flicked to see Louise looking at me. She mouthed the word "Sorry." and smiled at me in sympathy. I flicked my eyebrows and hoped that Louise couldn't see the sadness in my eyes.

The door to the pub opened again and in walked a few more of the group that had said they would meet us in the Black Bull. Shilo announced her arrival by screaming in her Australian accent "Where's the fucking beer?" She sprang over to the table, lifted a pint off the table and took a large drink.

Graham began to protest that that was his pint but was rapidly quiet once again when Shilo told him to "Shut the fuck up you fucking poof, get yourself another one." She added "And get me another one while you're there." as an afterthought.

Kevin, Chris and about three or four others, whose names I've forgotten over time, said hello and sat down at the table. Graham was given instructions by Shilo to get everyone a drink from the kitty and he walked to the bar mumbling under his breath. "Jeez, that boy's fucking useless at work but he makes a good barmonkey." Shilo said, as she began laughing.

Half an hour later our table was filled with upwards of twentyfive people and the bar was filled with laughter, screams and streams of abuse from Shilo and I. Shilo was a great girl, as Australian as a Koala bear and as mouthy as an Aussie bricklayer, with a heart of gold. She and I instantly hit it off, when on her first day I'd jokingly asked if she fucked on first dates or did her Dad own a brewery, and we had been friends ever since.

In one of her quiet seconds, when she wasn't taking the piss out of someone, she asked me the question that she knew I was expecting from her. "Is she coming?" She posed. I told her that Louise had spoken to her just before work had finished and she had indicated that she was coming. I added that I didn't think she would come as it was all too complicated.

"You're a right Romeo ain't you Ross? You wanna do what us Aussies do, just tell her you wanna fuck her and forget about all that romance bullshit." Shilo said, but added an apology to me quietly so that no one would hear her admit to a soft side. I thanked her and told her if she didn't get me another drink I'd tell everyone what she had just said and would ruin her reputation. "Graham you soppy little cunt! Get the fucking round in!" She shouted and squeezed my shoulder.

Just as Graham returned with the final tray of drinks from the bar and sat down, she walked in. The table went silent, as every looked from me to her, and was only broken only by Shilo yelling at Graham to get her a drink or she'd rip his balls off.

She was standing just inside the door and looked, to me, as beautiful as anything I had ever seen in my life. Her shoulder length, raven black, hair hung in loose wet curls and water dripped from her lips as it slid down her face making it look like she was crying. Her deep brown eyes twinkled like a distant star gone supernova and her smile made my heart beat so loud that I was sure she could hear it over the general hubub of the pub.

She said hi to everyone around the table as she pulled off her wet jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. Her eyes met mine and I smiled. She smiled at me and took her seat, joining in the conversation that had continued after the silence had been broken by Shilo's outburst.

The night wore on and she and I had managed to go at least two hours without talking to each other directly. We'd talked to each other if it involved the general chatter but hadn't directly spoke. We'd smiled at each other, or, to be more precise I'd smiled at her and she had looked at me with her sparkling eyes like I was a lost puppy.

I was still powering down the Scotch and lemonades and everyone else was getting to the point where they would go from laughing to yelling at each other in genuine rage and then laughing again. Arguments sprang forth about trivial matters and each of us voiced our opinions, despite some of the looks we were getting from other people who had chosen to have a quiet beer in the same pub as us.

By this time Murray was totally out of his gourd. He'd gone from pints to Pernod and Coke to double Jack Daniels and ice. The rest of the table wasn't much better. Someone suggested we decant from the pub and head around the corner to a nightclub called The Mission. The general consensus was that as we were on a mission ourselves the club sounded ideal so we threw on our coats, yelled to the bar staff to keep the rest of the kitty, left the pub and walked around the corner.

As we walked She came over to me and took my arm. "Hello." She said in her sweet Irish lilt.
"Hello." I said, kissing her hand gently.
"How are ya?" She asked.
"I'm surprisingly good now I've got a hold of something solid, something real." I replied.
"Yer maun looks like he's having a nice time." She said, pointing out Murray who was being carried along the road by Shilo and Kevin.
"Well, we like to send friends away with happy memories when they leave the Zoo. Even if those memories are only revealed to them through people telling them what they did. It's kind of a tradition." I said.

We arrived at The Mission and were told by the bouncers that we weren't going to be allowed in tonight as there was too many of us and Murray was plastered. I asked if I could speak to the manager in the vain hope that he was gullible enough to fall for the old "I want to speak to the Organ Grinder and not his monkey" routine and was told by the bouncer that the manager wasn't in.

"Look mate," I said, stepping into the doorway to get out of the rain that was dripping off the gutters far above and whispered into his ear. "The almost upright coma victim has just found out that his old girlfriend was killed in a massive car accident and we've decided to try to get his mind of it for a while. I will personally be held responsible if anything happens with our party, my name is John Anderson and I'm the Manager of the Catering Department at Edinburgh Zoo."

He looked down at me, he was a good foot and a half taller than I was, and apologised but there was nothing he could do. I reached into my pocket and held out two complimentary tickets to the Zoo that I had been given and offered them to him. "That's about thirty quids worth of tickets there if you take your family for out for a day to the Zoo man. Deal?" I said.

He looked at the tickets in my hand, taking a second to decide that he may be able to score some serious brownie points from his other half with a day at the Zoo and took them from me.
"No trouble, OK?" He said.
"If there is man, you can not only go to the Zoo for a day out but you can personally punch my head in." I said, knowing that I could handle the unruly, yet highly friendly, mob of drunkards that was practically frothing at the mouth behind me.

We headed into the club and took over a raised seating area, thanks to the bouncer telling the people that were seated there that we were VIP's and they were to find somewhere else to sit.

The evening wore on and all around me my co-workers got increasingly drunk by sitting drinking, or increasingly dizzy from dancing to the hits and horrors of the DJ. As I'm not a dancer I sat and chatted with anyone who was in a conversational mood and kept an eye on Murray, who despite being absolutely out of his mind on drink, was still attempting to drink more.

As the music changed, from dancing around like a loon music to snuggling up with your chosen clinch, She came over and sat next to me. She placed her petite hand upon my leg and smiled at me. "Ross, I'm very very drunk." She said,
"I'm not. I'm sat here with enough Scotch in me to kill a donkey but I'm still sober." I said.
"How?" She asked.
"Because I've been trying not to tell you what you know I want to... If that makes sense. Call it sobriety through stress." I said, taking a large drink from one of the two glasses in front of me. The lemonade had been decreasing in the measure steadily all night and by this time I was practically drinking straight scotch, and yet I couldn't feel the burn of the scotch in my throat.

"I'm leaving tomorrow." She said, suddenly. "I'm going back to Ireland, I'm going to finish my uni course there and yer maun and I are going to try to patch things up." I knew what she meant, as she had poured her heart out to me a couple of weeks previously. I looked into those deep brown oceans that were her eyes and told her that she didn't have to go back. "Stay here." I said. "With me."

"I can't. He loves me." She said, her eyes filling with fluid as though she was on the brink of tears. "Do you love him?" I asked.
"Yes, I'm just not sure if I'm in love with him. She replied.
"If you're not sure then you aren't." I said, stating what I thought was the logical thing.

"It's not that simple Ross... I have feelings for you and I have feelings for him, I'm falling in love with you but him and I have a history that I can't just walk away from." She said. The music in the club was off of our register and we heard nothing but each others voices as normality continued all around, but somehow apart, from us.

We inhabited the same space on the earth as about a hundred other people but we were not sharing the same place in the universe as they were. We floated on a different plane. Time meant nothing to me in that moment, space was merely an idea. The planets still spun and the sun still burned somewhere in the solar system but it was as though these things were no longer real.

"Did you say you're falling in love with me?" I asked.
"Yes, and that's why I have to go. I owe him the chance." She replied.
"And if it doesn't work out? Will you come back?" I asked.
"Please don't ask me that." She said.
"Why?" I enquired.

She looked directly into my eyes and I saw deep into her soul. I sensed that her heart was being torn into millions of tiny pieces by the situation and my heart broke knowing that I was partly the cause of such heartache. Our lips moved towards each others and we kissed.

As her lips gently touched mine my heart stopped. Inside my heart I knew that I could love this woman for the rest of eternity and it still wouldn't be long enough. The walls of the club floated out of vision and stars began twinkling in the suddenly and secretly revealed sky above us. Time stood still.

In the space of a nanosecond I saw it all. I saw our life together flash before my eyes. I saw many years of a life I would never live on this existential plane, many days of sleeping late on Sundays and making love all day, many decades of watching our children grow up, many months of happiness huddled in each others arms, many scenes, scenarios and sunsets that we would share. Together.

The kiss ended, my heart started beating again and reality flooded back. The walls of the club melted back into view and the stars that previously shone so brightly disappeared to be replaced by the house lights. I looked around and saw that the club was almost empty. Murray was passed out on the seat opposite, Shilo and Kevin were holding each other up, Graham was attempting to chat up a female member of staff and I was sitting wondering what had happened.

Shilo screamed across the dance floor. "It's five thirty in the fucking morning. I need to go home, I'm working at eight... Jeez I'm fucked." She turned to Kevin and said "Take me home and fuck my brains out you big fucking stud." Kevin replied to this by shouting Taxi at the top of his lungs.

As Kevin and Shilo walked to the exit I turned and looked at Murray. "I guess we have the job of getting this animal home." I said. I pulled Murray out of the chair and hauled him as upright as possible. A difficult task given that it was like carrying a blow up sex doll filled with water.

We left the club in the early light of morning and flagged down a passing taxi. I heaved Murray into the back of the cab, held the door open for Her and sat down behind the driver. I told the driver where we were going explaining that we were dropping the drunk off first and then we were headed to the colonies just off of Slateford Road.

We dropped Murray off by placing him on the doorstep of his house and drove towards Slateford Road. In the back of the cab She and I cuddled into each other silently. I couldn't think of what to say and she, I think didn't know what to say that could make this all easier for either of us.

The taxi pulled up to the curb and we got out. I paid the taxi driver and turned to face Her. As I looked at this raven haired Irish beauty shivering in the chill of early morning I knew I would remember this moment until the day I died.

"Do you want to come up for a coffee?" She asked. "He'd like to meet you."
"Pardon me?" I asked.
"He knows that we were going out tonight, I told him." She said.
"Ohh God." I said, wondering if he had seen the taxi pulling up and was, at this moment, making his way down the stairs with a mind to kick the living shit out of me. I knew he was capable of physical violence. "Don't worry, he doesn't hit men. They have a tendency to hit back." She said, reading my thoughts.

"So why does he want to meet me? I'd punch him in the head before I shook hands with him." I said. She looked at me with sadness in her eyes and I apologised for my seemingly lack of feeling towards her fragile state. "It bothers me that he did what he did. I can't help it." I continued.

"I think he'd feel better if you did. He knows he went too far and thinks if he gets punished that it'll all be fine with us again. But it won't. It'll just give him an excuse to do it again." She said, as I watched the stair door just in case.

I looked deep into her eyes and told her the thing that I had wanted to tell her. "I love you more than any man has ever loved any woman. I'd die for you, I'd kill for you and I'd walk a million miles to get to you if you want me." Then I turned and walked away.

Even now I am reminded of Her. I catch a glimpse of a petite raven haired woman and my heart skips a beat as the feelings I had for her flash and flood back into my heart. The small voice in my head asks the question "Is that Her?" and is always disappointed.

To Claire.

To kiss your lips, so soft and sweet
To bow with penitence at your feet
worshiping you like a goddess,
I longed to feel your loving caress.

I wish I felt you touch my hair,
to reach for you and feel you there.
Your hand in mine, joined forever.
Through sunny days and stormy weather.