Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [16]
‘I’m sorry I waited to tell you.’
‘Why did you?’ ‘I wanted to protect you, I suppose.’
‘I’m a grown woman, Patrick. I don’t need protecting.’ Her tone was harsher than she had meant it to be.
‘I suppose I thought I’d sort it out.’
‘Sort it out how? You’ve been made redundant. I had to be told.’
Patrick rubbed his eyes. It made him look tired. ‘I know. I need you not to be angry with me, Luce.’
She put her glass down and went to him. ‘I’m not angry, Patrick. How could you even think I would be? Of course I’m not angry. I love you.’ She was very aware that she had made herself say that because he needed to hear it, not because it was the overwhelming thought in her brain. She put her arms round him, and felt him relax against her.
He was suddenly close to tears. ‘I love you too.’
And then he was kissing her. It felt strange, after all these weeks. His hands pushed her sweater down over her shoulders and his fingers were fumbling with her bra. He was hard against her leg. He hadn’t touched her like that for so long that Lucy was almost instantly aroused. She pulled him into the living room and down on to the sofa. He threw her bra on to the floor, and sucked hungrily at her nipples. For a moment she put her hands in his hair and held his mouth there, feeling the pull. Then his hand was up her skirt, yanking at her tights, and his fingers were inside her and he knew how much she wanted him. She lifted her hips towards him, willing him to hurry.
And then he couldn’t. She felt him nudging himself against her, but he wasn’t stiff any more.
His head was buried in the side of her neck, and he kept thrusting, but it was pointless. Lucy ran her hands down his back to his buttocks, holding him still. ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was muffled.
‘Hey. Don’t be. Let me…’ She rolled him on to his side, shuffled down the sofa and took him, soft and small, into her mouth.
‘Don’t Lucy. Nothing’s going to happen, I don’t think.’
Lucy pushed her hair back from her face, and smiled at him. ‘Ah, well, too much wine at lunch, maybe.’
‘Are you all right?’ She wasn’t: she felt high and dry. For weeks she’d wanted this, and now he’d got her going, then stopped.
And later, in bed, when he’d rolled away from her and gone to sleep, and she put her hand under the duvet and touched herself, gently, so as not to wake him, it was Alec’s face she saw, and Alec’s fingers she imagined were stroking her.
And she and Patrick still hadn’t talked. And the New Year wasn’t new any more.
Tom
Tom pushed open the door with his back, balancing the three coffees one atop the other. It still gave him a thrill to see the logo on the wall outside. They’d had the office for about nine months, taken the lease when they realised they could make their idea work. He’d given up his job six months earlier and been working out of the living room at his flat, but this felt great. A dedicated space. Eight hundred square feet of it. With one of those water-coolers, and a very cool espresso-maker that had cost more than the conference table and chairs, since they had come from Ikea and it had come from Harrods. Rob was better at all that stuff than he was. He’d thought he was quite happy working from home. It was Rob who’d convinced him that they needed to take out a lease on this place, and Rob’s girlfriend Serena who’d kitted it out, and although it was a little spare for him, he could see, on the faces of the clients who came through the door, that it looked good.
They made a good team, the two of them. Three, if you counted Serena, who was omnipresent. Good job he loved her too or his nose might have been quite out of joint. A year ago he and Rob had been living a life of relative debauchery in the bachelor heaven that was their two-bedroom flat, running an increasingly successful website design agency from a corner of the living room that wasn’t given over to