Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [102]
Even with the entire pharmacy’s sun protection slathered over him, Ed’s forearms and ears were going red. She’d take him into the shade in a minute, and pay an exorbitant amount for a plate of food, from which he would eat only the chips, then demand an ice-cream to assuage the hunger he would claim still to feel.
She loved him, though. The round baby-belly of him.
Bella and Patrick had gone to watch fishermen on the wharf. They didn’t like lying around. Bella couldn’t have been more like Patrick if she had been genetically his. Was that luck? Or had Patrick made her into his own?
They had been there for four days. She’d left her mobile in the glove compartment of her car, at the airport, so Alec couldn’t phone her or text, but he was in her mind all the time. They had a studio apartment – she and Patrick had a double bed in the back part, and the children slept in the front bit, on two sofas that were made up into beds every afternoon while they were on the beach. They were separated by a curtain, not a door. Each night, at around eleven, Ed had wandered in, bleary-eyed, demanding a wee, then climbed into Lucy’s bed instead of making the journey back to his half of the apartment. She had welcomed him, and lifted him to sleep between them. Her human shield. She was starting to panic. She didn’t know how to sleep with Patrick, after Alec, and it was getting worse, not better.
They were being very friendly. Patrick seemed relaxed, relieved. But it was still between them. They hadn’t made love since before Christmas. Almost six months.
Before that, they’d always had a good time in bed. Not spectacular, maybe, but nice. Patrick was a bit too gentle for her: he would do something, then stop and ask if she was enjoying it. She’d told him, years ago, emboldened by drink, that she wasn’t made of china, and that he could be a bit rougher, and he’d started that way – they’d laughed. Hadn’t he even carried her through to the bedroom over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift? But he’d still asked if it was okay. She’d sometimes thought, lying under him over the years, of what it might be like to be… just fucked, hard.
That was what Alec had done. His hands had held her hips and pulled her and placed her, and he’d lost himself in her to the point at which you knew he didn’t really care, for that one moment, how it was for her because it was bloody brilliant for him, and she’d loved that.
So maybe she and Alec were more compatible in bed than she and Patrick were. So what? Not for the first time she’d wondered what it was like between him and Marianne. What it had been like after Marianne had stopped her own affair and come home to him. Did he do it the same way? Did she feel the same to him? Whether he had made love to his wife since he had made love to her. She felt itchy, way, way under her skin – irritable and frustrated and sad. Serves you right, she spat to herself.
Bella appeared next to her. She kissed her mum’s tummy. ‘Hiya, lazybones.’
‘Hello, you. Had a nice walk with Dad?’
‘Yes. We saw lots of fish. Smelly!’ Bella held her nose, and waved her fingers under it.
Patrick was not long behind her.
‘Daddy says he’s taking you out tonight. He’s got a babysitter – that nice girl, Laura, who works at the kids’ club, the one Ed’s completely in love with. He says you might even eat one