by Anna Bloom
“No clue. He has his finger in every pie around here.”
“Nice place to have fingers.”
“I’d rather have mine in you.”
I choked on a dribble of saliva as it slipped down my throat. “Matthew Carling!”
“What? I’m stating facts here.”
I waved my fingers at my face, a useless fan against the delicate heat of my desire.
“Bet you want me now.”
With a shake of my head I gripped the phone tighter. “I always want you.”
“Muuum, I can hear you!” Hannah’s shrill shout cut through the room and Matthew chuckled.
“I’ve gotta be honest, Ronnie. I have no idea what dating with children hanging around is like.”
“So you haven’t dated anyone since Julie?” I hesitated over her name, hating the way it stung like a droplet of acid on my tongue. The woman who’d had him all these years when I should have, sat right at the top of my hate list. Blocking her, I parked her up in the back of my head. She was his past now and him and I were cruising down that brand-new motorway leaving the wasteland of our old lives far behind.
“No.”
I leant up onto my elbows. That wasn’t a full answer.
“And you since Paul?”
“Uh, you know the answer to that.”
A satisfied silence stretched across the line. “True.”
“I really do need to go to sleep.” I clutched the phone tighter, almost melting it to my hand.
“So dating huh? Are we talking full board, wine and dine?”
“Is there anything less?”
“Not for you, no,” he paused. “I’ve got Ewan and Jack until Monday. What about next weekend? Are you free?”
“Define free?”
“Available for wine, dining and on-boarding.”
“Matthew.” I grinned though; a big, stupid, sloppy smile.
“I can’t help it. I crave you in ways you’d probably find deeply disturbing.”
I shivered at the low tumble of his words.
“I could maybe see if Ma could watch Hannah. Or Ange?”
“Best friends again yet?” He laughed, but the hard edge to his forced mirth couldn’t be ignored.
“No. I haven’t called her. But I do need to. I need to talk to her, she’s my best friend.”
He sighed. “I just don’t know if she’s ever had your best interests at heart.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned at my reflection on the pine dresser. “You mean about her always trying it on with you?” I whispered. “You should have told me.”
“Would you have believed me?”
“I don’t know.” That was the truth. Would I have? Did I find it hard to imagine now? Did it matter really in the grand scheme of things? Or was I just making excuses so I could still have my best friend?
“I bet you ring her before you go to sleep,” he said. Funny that he still knew me so well. But maybe not this time.
I felt stronger than I ever had before. The shackles of my anxiety were loosening, and I could stand a little straighter.
“Do you know what happened between Scott and Ange at the reunion?” Angela’s drunken revelations about the reunion she’d made me try to go to looped around my head. I began to see it as a web of lies. I’d run away, taken one look at Matthew and legged it like the chicken shit I was. But she’d given me the impression Matthew had been there, the life and soul of the party. Now I knew the truth, that Matthew hadn’t even gone. He’d left straight after I bolted. Instead, Ange had been with a married former friend of ours.
Married… surely she had more scruples than that?
Nerves ran down my spine, but I couldn’t figure out why.
Matthew barely disguised his tut. “No. But I would say it’s the same as always.”
“You should have told me, Matthew.”
“Why? So you could have hated me for making you choose between your two best friends? I would have hated that.”
I’d ring Ange in the morning, as not talking to her gnawed at my insides. “I need to sleep. I’ve got to open the office tomorrow.”
“Any chance you're going to make Fred redundant?”
“Why would I do that? He’s amazing.” I bit down on my lip to stop from giggling.
“Ronnie,” he warned.
“I mean, with those skinny jeans, and that young twenty-year-old body. Come on, what’s not to love?”
“Muuuuuum! You’re gross.”
I needed to reinforce the walls with soundproofing before Matthew came to stay.
I chuckled and Matthew joined in, but with only a fifty percent commitment to my lame arse joke.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m a jealous kind of guy.”
“You can only be jealous once we’ve been on a date.”
“Oh, is that a rule?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, in that case I plan to get very jealous very soon. You’d better warn Fred his days are numbered.” His voice lifted with a lilt of A-major chord.
“I will. Night, Matthew.”
“Night, Ronnie Roo.” I went to hang up. “Wait,” he called me back.
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
His words set me alight and turned me into a storm of ash and hope.
“And I love you.”
I hung up and then pulled the cover straight up over my body, not bothering to take my travelling clothes off. I needed to sleep because then I’d see Matthew again, and right now that was all that would keep me going until next weekend.
Fresh Paint
Matthew
“Oh my god.” I shut the freezer on the smell, trying to hold in my gag. Putrid acid stung my nostrils and I clasped a hand over my mouth. “Ugh, fuck.”
Some bastard had turned off the freezers but hadn’t taken the food out.
I staggered from the meat aisle and worked my way to the safer zone of the former bread aisle—although it wasn’t that safe. Some bagels were trying to mutate into burger buns, or the other way around.
I couldn’t blame them: the staff of Supersaver Foods. Hell, the electricity had probably been turned off. They’d lost their jobs. I’m thinking they didn’t give a shit about rotting meat.
Guilt weighed heavily on my chest and pushed down like a ten-tonne weight.
Matthew Carling, the life wrecker.
I knew that would be a title I’d carry with me to the grave.
First Julie, where I’d lived a lie.
Now I carried thousands of jobs lost on my shoulders.
The front door opened, and I turned to Mam shouldering her way through with shopping bags in each hand. “What the hell is that awful smell?” Shaking my head, I left the relative safety of the bread aisle and stepped over to help.
“The electric has been switched off.”
“Oh my god. Didn’t they empty the freezers?” Ma cast a critical glance at the shop she once used to co-own.
“Uh, no.” I think the noxious smell we both attempted to breathe through should have been answer enough.
Her face creased into a deep frown. “Matt, I really don’t know why you are doing this.”
“You know why,” I replied, my voice gruff and low.
“I brought you some breakfast.” Typical Mam, she never probed, never dug for information, but I knew she’d get it anyway. The woman was on level with spies—actually they could learn something from her.
“Well we can’t eat in here.” Not where we could barely breathe, let alone put food in our mouth.
Mam shook her head, her face crumpling a little as she looked at what was once Carling’s Savers but had since become a cheap budget frozen supermarket.
I wished I could see it with her eyes. Wished I didn’t just see my dad with his arms folded across his chest and a shadow of disappointment on his face.
“We could go to the park down the road, if you’ll be warm enough?”
Mam tutted. “Of course
I’ll be warm enough, I’m not a fecking doddering old lady.”
I snorted and grabbed my keys off of what was once a cash desk with a conveyer belt and till but was now an empty desk. “Did I even say that?”
“Your face did. You all think I’m ancient with one foot in the grave.”
“No one thinks that. Come on, let’s go eat and then I’ll have to come back and work out a plan.”
Ma shook her head, but bit back any deep insight she had into the moment and followed me to the door.
Of course in true Carling style, it wasn’t just Mam and me. No. Ryan arrived with his youngest, explaining that it was Lennie’s day at the salon, and he was on childcare duties.
“So when you have the kids you just turn up at Mam’s and hope she looks after you?” I shot Ryan a critical glance.
“She loves it.’ He threw a cheesy crisp into his mouth.
“Ryan, come on.”
“Matt!” Ma nudged me with her elbow as we all crammed onto one picnic bench—a bench not catering for large Scots.
“Sod off, Matty. It’s not like you don’t take the piss out of Mam. She’s been looking after your kids for weeks while you sorted out that shit shop.”
I kicked him in the shin with as much traction as I could manage in the limited space. “It’s not a shit shop.”
“You’re deluded. Have you seen the state of it?”
“Smelled the state of it,” Ma added, and after a pause, despite trying my hardest not to, I started to laugh.
“It smells like an abattoir right now.”
Ryan gagged into his sandwich. “How are you going to make money, Matt? Have you even thought about that?”
“I’m going to follow Ronnie’s branding advice. I think she’s onto a good thing with the organic greengrocer idea.”
“Yeah, but how are you going to fund it?” Typical Ryan. Always one to rain on anyone else's parade.
“Go to the bank. I’ve got some money from the divorce.” I didn’t meet their gazes. I didn’t want anyone to know how much money I’d received. I mean I had the house I could sell if needed, all wasn’t totally lost.
Both Mam and Ryan’s faces fell. Mam spoke. “What are you going to do with those kids, Matt? They're miserable.”
My heart plummeted. “I know.”
“Ronnie lives a long way away. How are you going to do this?”
I scrubbed at my face. “I don’t know.”
Ryan analysed me from under his thick eyebrows. “So, she’s the one, hey? The girl.”
My bite of sandwich got stuck in my throat. My heart swelled until I could barely breathe at the thought of Ronnie. Ronnie in my house, in the bedroom coloured just for her… in my bed.
Everything. She was everything.
I put down my sandwich. “For so long I thought I’d never see her again.” Ryan chuckled, but Mam brought him down with a smack around the back of the head.
“Did you really walk away from her because of Dad reading you the riot act?”
I glanced over to the gate that led back to the high street and the little shop Dad had been so proud of. “He didn’t read me the riot act, Ryan. He just told me I had to do the right thing. He made it clear the right thing was to not let Julie down. We’d been together for three years by that point.”
“Mate, what were you thinking?”
I stared at my half-eaten sandwich. “I don’t know.”
It seemed so silly now: all my fears, all the words I’d left unsaid. I wanted to take each and every one and paint them on a wall for all to see; every truth of my heart.
Lifting my head, I met Ryan’s gaze. “I was trying to be a good man, like Dad was.”
Mam chuckled. “Everyone is great in hindsight, boys. You’ve got to make sure you are great right now.”
Ryan got up from the bench and stretched, showing his toned stomach to the park from under his jumper. “I am already perfect, and I know it.”
Mam and I rolled our eyes.
“Time to go and be perfect at toddler group now.”
I laughed and poked him in the ribs. “You rock that toddler group.”
“Hey, I’m an equal parent. I’m not scared of my masculinity or femininity.” He turned to find Beth digging in a flower bed, turfing soil over her shoulder like a dog digging for a bone. “No! Beth! You’ll get all dirty, you’ll ruin your dress.”
I caught Ma’s gaze and we both pressed our lips together.
“Check you later. Thanks for the bacon sandwich, Mammy.”
Ryan picked up his giant backpack in one hand and then Beth around the middle in the other and strode out of the park. We both watched him go.
“How did you give birth to such an eijit?” I asked.
“How did I give birth to three of them? It’s the question of my life, Matt.”
I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Seriously, Matt, what are you doing with this shop? How are you going to make this thing work with Ronnie?” She softened her voice. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m so pleased you’ve found her, and that you’ve managed to create something amazing, but I’m worried for you. Worried for the boys, worried about Julie and what she might do. London is a long way away.”
I reached across the table and grabbed her hand, noticing for the first time the pale brown spots across her skin.
“Ma, this is a dream. I can’t believe she's mine.”
“How're you going to keep her, Matt? I’ve only met her once, but I’m sensing she has issues.”
“She suffers from social anxiety. I don’t think she’s ever dealt with it, not since we were kids.” I’d pondered this since she left last night. Why hadn’t she got help? I’d found her exactly the same as I’d left her all those years ago… Leaving her… the thought made me feel physically sick.
“Long distance isn’t going to work then is it? Not with you…”
“Mam. There is nothing wrong with me.” I snapped my teeth together.
She held her hands up. “Cool. Whatever you say.”
“Sorry.”
“No need.” She took a sip of her coffee. “What're we going to do with this shop then?”
“We?”
“Well, as you are lumbered with it, I think I should help.”
“I’m not lumbered with it, Mam. I’m trying to face my demons.”
“Matt.” Ma reached for my hand, but I shot her a wide smile. “Uh oh, what idea have you got cooking in that brain of yours?”
An overwhelming desire for Ronnie steadily lit a match inside my gut, burning with a heat I knew I wouldn’t be able to extinguish without seeing her again. Now she was finally mine, I wanted nothing less than seeing her every moment I could. Ronnie was mine, at last. “I think I might go to London.”
“Matt, is that going to help what you’ve got going on here?”
“No. But it means I’ll see Ronnie.”
“And you can’t wait until the weekend?”
I shook my head, my heart pumping now I’d had the idea. I could be there in a couple of hours. Be with her, touching her, kissing her, my fingers in her hair.
“Matt, I’m worried. This is a high. You know what comes next.”
“Mam, it’s a dream. A dream I don’t want to wake up from.”
She nodded and clasped my hand in hers, so tight it pinched my fingers together. “Talk to her. Tell her how you feel.”
I nodded, but I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to wake from this dream. This was Ronnie and me, and it was everything I’d ever wanted.
Less than an hour later, I settled back on seat 17B and closed my eyes. For the first time in a long time I lifted the lid on the past. I knew I could face it all if I could see her. She made everything better. With her I was Matthew and I was a new person. She could weave that magic now just like she always did.
“They should give you time slots in this library.”
She glanced up, her gaze grazing me as I peered over the study cubicle where she’d been holed up
for the last two hours. “It’s almost dark outside. I’m concerned you’ll need my personal escorting service again.”
“Escorting?” She bit on her lip, making it bloom with blood.
My choice of words made that delicious stain of strawberry spread across her creamy skin again.
“Oh, well hold on, what are we talking about here?” I held my palms towards her, which was the last thing I wanted to do. What I wanted was to pick her little dolly self up, sit in her chair, and then settle her back over my lap so I could lower her mouth to mine and kiss the fuck out of her.
The thoughts weren’t good. Weren’t productive to, well, existing.
“Angela wants to go to the student bar tonight.” My ears pricked up and a little stab of excitement settled in the pit of my stomach. It twisted a jolt of electricity through me. I’d been waiting days for her to mention going out.
If I wasn’t a two-timing arsehole, I would have said it myself, but it lessened my guilt if our time spent together appeared almost accidental.
It wasn’t. None of it was. It was me, seeking a high, but getting dangerously close to getting burned to my core.
“The bar? It’s karaoke.” I wiggled my brows at her, loving the way she glanced at my lips.
She groaned and it did things to my dick that shouldn’t be possible in a public place. She had no idea. In lessons, walking across campus, in the library. My desire ran on a constant state of alert.
“You’ll fall at my feet when you hear me sing.”
“You’ll be there?” She sat up a little straighter, eyes a little brighter.
“Of course. Tuesday is football team night.”
She nodded absently and began to slip away. “That’s why Ange wants to go.”
I leant over the wooden barrier, determined to keep her smiling. “How about she goes for the rest of the team and you just come for me?”
Oh, come on, Matthew. Dial it back, just a notch.
She gasped and at the base of her throat her pulse raced under her skin. “Maybe I should go home.”
“Veronica!” My fingers reached for her hair, tucking the strands of blonde around the curve of her ear. I’d been craving the touch for days. It ate away at me, hollowing me from the inside out. “I’m joking. Come along, and I promise to protect you. They are good guys.”
