Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [120]
‘I suppose you used it as justification. What’s good for the goose, and all that. You didn’t need to tell him, did you? It just gave you a licence to do whatever you wanted. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. You’re right, aren’t you?’
‘It wasn’t like that, Marianne.’
‘Spare me.’
‘I’ll stop seeing him, Marianne.’
Marianne shrugged. ‘No point now, Lucy. You’ve started. You can’t stop any of this.’
And then she walked out, back to her car, leaving the front door wide open, and drove off.
X is for X Marks the Spot
Sunday morning. A Sunday morning exactly as a Sunday morning should be. A Sunday morning after a Saturday night, spent laughing and loving, and after a long, deep sleep. And a Sunday morning where the bloke got up and made tea, and – was that the door she heard – went out and bought the Sunday papers, not just the Observer for the clever stuff but the News of the World, too, for the pictures, and came back and brought it to you in the big double bed that smelt of sex, where you lay, with the warm, soft breeze from the open window wafting over you. With chocolate croissants, even though he really hated crumbs in his bed, and hated melted chocolate on his sheets even more, but still brought it because he knew you liked it.
That was a Sunday morning.
Natalie stretched her arms above her head, then rolled back on to the cool side of the bed, pulling the duvet with her. Her body was luxuriantly tired. Later, she would go to the hospital and sit with her dad, and then, if her mother was there, she would take her home and sit with her, and open the post with her and help her go through things. Then she would come back here to Tom’s, strip off all her clothes again and climb naked into this bed for him to make love to her again.
That was all she wanted to do.
But first, she might… just… go back to sleep.
She could hear him, downstairs, listening to Radio 4, and putting tea things on a tray.
Sunday morning. A Sunday morning exactly as a Sunday morning should be. The woman he loved was asleep upstairs in his bed, recovering from a wanton night of passion. The face he had seen in a thousand different lights, over twenty years, was now the face he could close his eyes and remember making love to. And it was all he wanted to do. For ever.
Not that they’d had that conversation. Not yet. He’d held his breath, after Las Vegas. Waited for her to freak out. Waited for her to change her mind.
She hadn’t. He’d dropped her at home, her home, on the way back from the airport. She didn’t have any stuff, or anything, and they were both pretty knackered. And he’d waited some more.
And two days later she’d shown up at the office, with a Sainsbury’s bag of fresh pasta, pesto and raspberries, clean knickers in her handbag, and just come home with him. Just like that, like they’d always been that way. And that was Friday.
They hadn’t been out of the house until he’d gone for the papers just now. And he might not have gone then, if there hadn’t been suspect-looking skin on the milk. And if she hadn’t said she wanted chocolate croissants for breakfast.
They’d barely been out of bed. Barely got through the bowl of ravioli. They hadn’t even had any wine. When he told Rob about it – and he wouldn’t be going into huge detail – he would definitely have to say that she’d jumped on him. Not unlike a woman possessed. And certainly like a woman who hadn’t had a lot of sex in the last few months, and found, once he’d whetted her appetite, that she’d quite missed it. And that was a nice surprise. After all the love stuff. A bit of old-fashioned have-to-have-you-now-even-with-your-socks-on kind of thing. Very nice.
But now it was Sunday morning, and they still hadn’t really talked about it. He was afraid to, he knew that. Afraid of what this might mean to her, and how that might compare with what it meant to him. He wasn’t ready to hear anything other than total love. So he didn’t ask any questions that might provoke a different answer. He knew he was being an ostrich but, for now, he was a happy one.
So, he