Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [39]
She remembered him visiting, now that she concentrated – sitting on the edge of her bed, telling her about the pubs in Newquay and taking the rise out of her.
‘Come on, Nat,’ he wheedled now, and something in Natalie snapped.
‘No. Tom. No. What part of “no” is confusing you? I don’t want to do it. This is just some stupid game to you – I get that, okay – but I can’t get on a horse. And I won’t. Not for the game and not for you, and, most of all, not because I’ll be conquering some inner demon. I’m quite happy with my inner demon, thanks very much.’
She opened the car door before he had had the chance to say anything.
‘Tom, you’re my friend, not my therapist. At least, that’s what I thought.’ And got out. She didn’t exactly slam the door, but then again, she didn’t look back at him as she went in through her front door.
Tom sat there for a few minutes, feeling strangely embarrassed and a little too ashamed to get out and knock on her door. He’d been mean, he thought. He shouldn’t have suggested it. He hadn’t remembered, or maybe had never acknowledged, how much the accident had upset her, and he’d used what he knew about her as a cheap stunt.
Natalie had seemed tired today, strained, and he had made himself part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and that was so far away from what he had set out to do that he wanted to bang his head against the steering-wheel. What a prat! Serena would kill him.
Natalie didn’t get much further than the hall. She dropped, cross-legged, to the floor, and put her face in her hands. She would have liked to cry, but couldn’t. It was a bit like when you’ve had food-poisoning, and you keep retching long after your stomach is empty. She’d cried too much since Simon had left her. No more tears – that was what was written on the shampoo Bridget used on Christina. No more tears. That was what she had now. Bad day. That was all. You knew there would be bad days. At the beginning they were all bad. Then one or two okay ones surprised you, then a good one. And eventually, probably, hopefully, there would be more and more good ones, fewer and fewer bad, no more truly-dreadfuls. And then a bad day would surprise you and there would be no more. This one had been a bad day, that was all. Shitty, actually.
After about five minutes of sitting in the hallway, long enough for her knees to protest about being in the lotus position, Natalie raised her head and smoothed back her hair. Sometimes she missed being half of a couple. And sometimes she just missed him. The smell of him, the feel of him, the sound of him. So much.
Tom wasn’t supposed to make it worse. The whole point of Tom was to make it better. To make her better. And today that not being the case was the last straw on the camel’s back. It wasn’t about the sodding horse, not really. Although, actually, it had been mean of him. And she hoped he was sorry. It was about what he was supposed to be doing for her.
Even as she thought it she had a quick glimpse of how selfish it made her sound.
Then, Natalie remembered something. She had had a huge row with Simon once, a couple of years ago. He’d been working crazy hours, as he did, and Natalie had felt as though she hadn’t seen him for weeks. Not properly. She’d tried hard to get it right for him. To help. She’d even done his laundry. Cooked him stuff. Pinched herself properly awake when he came in at all hours of the night so that she could have a proper conversation with him, if that was what he wanted, or let him make love to her, if he preferred (although, if memory served, he mostly liked her to make love to him). And then he’d announced, the first free night he’d had in ages, that he’d been invited for dinner with some medical-school friends – people she didn’t know, he said, although she’d met them. Hadn’t liked them much. Cliquey. The kind of people