The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  Ellen swiped him lightly, skimming the top of his head with the flat of her hand.

  “Mum, do you remember when you, me, and Dad went sailing in that really flat place—what was it called?”

  “The Norfolk Broads.” Ellen smiled; Charlie was talking about a holiday that Nick had taken them on a little over two years earlier. He’d developed a brief but passionate interest in sailing and had even owned a share in a boat for a little while. That summer he’d taken them down to see it, full of enthusiasm for the outdoor life, the fresh air and the wind in his hair.

  Charlie chuckled. “And Dad got really, really seasick and in the end you and me did all the sailing. He went actually green—do you remember?”

  Ellen nodded, thinking of that flat Norfolk horizon, the endless expanse of sky that made her feel breathless just to think of it, all that space.

  “We had a laugh then, didn’t we? You and me?” Charlie asked.

  Ellen nodded. “We had the best time.”

  “And we will do stuff like that again, won’t we? We won’t always just be here in this house missing Dad, because sometimes when I think like that and feel like that—that’s when I worry. I worry that I won’t ever be able to live just like a normal person again. In case I shouldn’t, in case it’s wrong. Like it might not be allowed.”

  Ellen felt the muscles in her gut clench. Had she done this to him? Had her descent into grief dragged him down with her so deeply that he was afraid he might never resurface again?

  “Of course it’s allowed, sweetheart—more than that, that’s the way it should be. Especially for you, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  “So do you, though,” Charlie reminded her.

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” Ellen said thoughtfully. Until recently, the concept had been an unbearable prospect, but now—now it wasn’t such a terrifying idea.

  “So then you have to start feeling better and maybe you and me could do something like go sailing. I think we’d have fun,” Charlie said, his tone hopeful.

  “And if I start to feel better, do you think that you can, too?” she asked.

  Charlie’s smile faded, his shoulders hunching, his body almost halving in size as he absorbed the question. “Sometimes, like at school or when I’m playing the DS or watching telly, I feel all right, I feel normal, and then something will make me remember and…” He shook his head, unable to complete the sentence. “Sometimes I feel a bit better.”

  “I think that’s what it’s like,” Ellen said. “I think sometimes you feel better and sometimes you don’t, and that as the days pass, the times when you feel better get longer and the times when you don’t get shorter. And I think that it is okay, it’s okay to feel better. Dad would want you to be happy, Charlie. He’d want that more than anything in the world.”

  “He’d want you to be happy, too,” Charlie told her.

  “I know,” Ellen said simply. “Well, let’s give it a go for him then, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Charlie nodded. “But you will tell everybody about the chair?”

  “I will.”

  Charlie leaned into Ellen as she put her arms around him, resting his head on her shoulder for a second before pulling away and picking up his headphones.

  “I know there’s no school in the morning,” Ellen told him. “But I still want this off by eleven.”

  But Charlie’s eyes had already fixed on the screen.

  Exhausted, Ellen lay on her bed, closing her eyes and finally letting the tensions of the day drain out of her. The events of the day—her conversation with Charlie, the mess on the kitchen floor—gradually faded and she found herself thinking of Matt and the sensation of his thumb tracing her cheek. Letting her weary mind drift anywhere it chose, Ellen imagined how it would have felt if that thumb had journeyed farther, running down her neck and brushing lazily over the tops of her breasts.

  As Ellen drifted off into her fantasy she saw herself as Eliza Sinclair, her body transforming into the impossibly perfect ideal that was Eliza’s, and Matt as the captain, unable to take his eyes off her, his desire for her tangible in the air that crackled between them as they stood alone in a… in a hay barn, Ellen decided.

  “I love you,” Captain Matt whispered, taking a step closer to her so that she could feel his hot breath grazing her earlobe. “Oh, Ellen, I love you.”

  “And I you,” Ellen whispered back, allowing one lily-white hand to flutter to rest on his manly chest and then boldly travel lower, where no maiden should ever venture.

  “I long for you,” Matt groaned, clasping her hand and clutching it to him.

  “Then take me, for I am yours, my love,” Ellen said breathlessly, finding herself an expert seductress.

  In seconds Ellen found that her thin white cotton gown had been ripped from her body, and her perfect breasts were being crushed against Matt’s firm body as his hands and kisses consumed her in a burning sea of fire that she delighted in drowning in.

  Hours had passed when Ellen woke to find herself still fully dressed, tangled in her bedsheets, and suddenly wide awake. She looked at the bedside clock and sighed, pushing herself out of bed, peeling off her clothes and changing into a pair of Nick’s pajamas, a bright red cotton with green trim that she’d bought him one Christmas as a joke and that he had never worn. Still, Ellen liked the feel of them, hugging the outsized shirt around her body. It was guilt that was keeping her awake, she realized. Fantasizing about another man—worse still, a real-life man—as if Nick had never existed, as if he hadn’t been her lover, the love of her life. As if sordid fantasies could ever replace what they had once had.

  Feeling the same sort of lurching horror as a drunk who has awakened to remember exactly what horrors happened the night before, Ellen took herself downstairs to drink tea and sort herself out. She paused at Charlie’s room, pushing open the door to see the TV still flickering, despite her command, tuned to some music channel that he seemed permanently glued to, and her son sprawled facedown on the bed, his covers kicked to the floor. Treading carefully to avoid damaging any of the various possessions that he preferred to keep on the floor, Ellen swept up the duvet and laid it over Charlie’s prone form.

  “What the…?” he questioned sulkily in his sleep.

  “It’s just me, darling,” Ellen whispered, and within seconds Charlie was lost again in the deep sleep that seemed to overwhelm him these days. She stood for a few seconds outside Charlie’s room and listened. Faint music and the sound of hushed female laughter drifted down the stairwell. Matt must have brought his blond associate editor home, she thought. While Ellen had been imagining them rolling about in a pile of hay, he’d been plying this girl with drinks and charming her with the sweet smile that he’d treated Ellen to earlier. And as this unknown woman had come back with him on their first date, he must have done a pretty good job.

  Ellen shook her head, the tender soles of her feet jolted by the cool kitchen tiles. This day, a day of things happening, had gone to her head. For a moment she’d forgotten who she was and what she was here for. She was Nick’s wife and Charlie’s mother and she was here to do the best for her son that she could. While that included the guilty pleasure of working for Allegra Howard, it did not include wasting hours of her life dreaming about a man who’d never look at her in a million years. Her fantasies were far from harmless if they took her mind off the things that mattered.

  She’d made herself a strong cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table staring at Nick’s chair, wishing she could will him into existence just by thinking of him.

  Ellen jumped when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Hoping it was Charlie coming down for a drink of water, she went to the kitchen door and opened it a crack. It was Matt and his associate editor. She had her coat on, and he had… well, nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Ellen stifled a gasp, clasping her hand over her mouth.

  “I can’t believe you’re kicking me out!” the girl giggled, swinging her arm around Matt’s neck to steady h
erself as she stumbled, clearly the worse for wear. “Not after what we just did!”

  “I know, and I don’t want to,” Matt purred. “It’s just the landlady—she’s old school, you know. A bit of a dragon. I’m risking getting evicted, bringing you back here at all, but you’re so gorgeous that I was powerless to resist.”

  The girl giggled again and tightened her hold on him so that their lips met, and she kissed him, swaying gently from side to side like a willow bending in the wind as they embraced. As they kissed, Matt’s hand departed from her waist and headed for the door latch; he opened it a crack and maneuvered the girl into the gap.

  “Good night,” he whispered.

  “You’ll call me?” the girl asked.

  “But of course.” Matt nodded.

  “Promise?” There was a hint of desperation in her voice.

  “For sure,” Matt said as he shut the door on her. He stood there for a moment, his hand on the latch, as if he suspected that she might come back. And then, horrified, Ellen watched him rub his hands through his hair and over his face and head straight for the kitchen.

  Panicking, she shut the kitchen door and ran to the back door, instinctively planning to escape into the garden, but then thinking better of it she ran first to the pantry and then to the fridge, as if she might climb into it. She was still flapping when Matt flicked on the unforgiving spotlight, illuminating the kitchen and catching Ellen red-handed and barefoot in Nick’s pajamas.

  “Oh shit!” Matt yelped. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  “I’m sorry, I was just up when I heard your… friend leaving. I didn’t want you to think I was eavesdropping.”

  “No worries,” Matt said cheerfully, and then he frowned. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “No,” Ellen said. “Well, a bit. Okay, I heard everything.”

  “Oh no,” Matt groaned. “Listen, that bit I said about the landlady being a dragon, you know I was only saying that to get her to go, don’t you? I don’t think you’re a dragon. All that stuff I said earlier—that’s what I really think about you.”

  “Honestly, it’s none of my business,” Ellen said, pausing, confused and unsure of exactly what she wanted to say or how. She had known that Matt worked for what was called a lads’ mag, and that he wrote about women all the time, but the man she’d met and just begun to get to know over the last few days hadn’t seemed the sort who would meet a girl down at the pub and then bring her back to bed on the very same night. She had foolishly forgotten that he was virtually a stranger, had let her silly imagination run away with her and ended up feeling disappointed in him, even though she didn’t have a right to be. Not in his choice of sexual partners, anyway. “Actually, Matt, it is my business a bit—we talked about Charlie, remember? About him being at an impressionable age—and I know I said it’s fine for you to bring people back, and it is. But will it always be like that—some girl that you’ve just picked up? Because if it is, then you need to be a lot more discreet. What if Charlie had come down for a drink just then?”

  “Shit, I’m an arsehole. I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I just didn’t think. I mean, I seriously didn’t think.” He shook his head, clutching his towel for dear life. “Next time I’ll go to her place.”

  “So you liked her then?” Ellen asked.

  Matt looked confused. “Oh no, not her place. I mean the next girl’s place, whoever she might be. Next time I’ll go there.”

  Not sure how to react, Ellen reached for her cup of tea. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “I suppose you want to know why I got her to go,” Matt said, stopping her with the question.

  Ellen wavered. She’d never been around a man like Matt before, a bona fide ladies’ man, and she did sort of want to know. But she did also have to get up in a few hours and she had just recently, only minutes ago in fact, banned herself from having anything to do with Matt that wasn’t essential. The last time she had “seen” him, he had been standing naked in front of her with an erection that would have rivaled that of any of Allegra’s well-proportioned heroes, on the brink of flinging her into a pile of straw and penetrating her very soul with his thunderous passion. Under those circumstances, Ellen felt that standing in her kitchen alone with him while he wore nothing more than a towel at past three in the morning did not qualify as essential. Particularly as he was clearly the sort of man who would not shy away from a casual sexual encounter.

  “Not especially, not unless you want to tell me?” Ellen waited, trying to picture how old and how prim she must look standing there in Nick’s pajamas.

  Matt took a pint of milk out of the fridge and drank directly from it, sitting down in her chair, the towel folding between his legs, barely maintaining his modesty.

  “Too easy,” Matt said.

  “What, she was?” Ellen asked, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  “All of it was. I met her in the elevator at the office. I’m on the fifth floor and she’s on the fourth. I asked her if she fancied a drink on the third and she agreed and made plans with me by the time she got out. That should have been a sign, you know. Girls who are too eager, you’ve got to watch them. But she’s got great legs and a really nice set of… eyes. And men are shallow. I am shallow. So I turn up at the pub, a bit late, and she’s there, wearing this dress that’s cut up to here and down to here.” Matt chopped the flat of his hand first against the top of his thigh and then just below his nipples.

  “I bet that really showed off her eyes,” Ellen said, smiling at the surprise on Matt’s face at her joke.

  “It did.” He nodded. “All the blokes were looking at her and I liked being the one she was with. And she was a laugh. Then two gin and tonics down and she’s all over me, hands everywhere, wants to come back to my place.”

  “Sounds awful,” Ellen said dryly. “How on earth did you cope?”

  “It was a struggle.” Matt’s smile was rueful.

  “Which is why you exercised your free will and said, ‘No, thank you very much, young lady,’” Ellen observed, hating how much she sounded like his sensible maiden aunt.

  “I know. I know that’s what I should have done. But she’s a woman, a hot woman, and she wanted to go to bed with me. Like I said, I’m shallow.”

  “Was it worth it, the sex?” Ellen found herself asking as she edged closer to the table and sat down.

  “It was fine,” Matt said. “It was nice, but the second it was over I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I wanted her to go. So I invented the whole dragon-landlady thing, sorry.”

  “I don’t think it’s me you should be apologizing to,” Ellen said, sounding much primmer and older than she wanted to. “I mean you must have made the poor girl feel as if you were really interested in her, you must have made her feel that it was okay to come back to bed with you.”

  Matt scrutinized her long enough to make her break eye contact with him.

  “Do you think I’m a shit?” Matt asked.

  Ellen shrugged, suddenly feeling overwhelmed with fatique. She wasn’t sure if she was expected to work with Allegra on Saturdays, but she would definitely have to get up to make her breakfast.

  “I expect that when the poor girl wakes up in the morning she’ll feel foolish and vulnerable and she’ll think that you’re a shit.” Ellen yawned. “But at least you’re honest. You don’t dress up how you feel or think about things, you more sort of sling on a towel and lounge around half naked.”

  “Oh shit.” Matt looked down at himself as if he had just remembered what he was not wearing. “Shit. I’ve been here—what, five days? And I’ve pissed off your son, called you a dragon, and made an idiot of myself. Am I evicted?”

  Ellen smiled at him, glad to see him like this, young, brash, half drunk, half naked, and awkward. The real Matt, as disarming and handsome as he might be, was nothing like the captain in her dreams. Perhaps avoiding him was the wrong thing to do after all; the better she got to know him, the less he would embody that perfect hero in
her head.

  “Good night, Matt,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

  “Night, Ellen, and…” Matt paused, suddenly bashful. “I’m glad you were up. It’s not often you meet a woman you can talk to.”

  “Unlike the ones you can have sex with,” Ellen replied. “They’re a dime a dozen.”

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  Don’t you reckon, heh?” Pete chuckled into his third lunchtime pint, which seemed to be reflected quite graphically by the rising tide of red that crept over his jowls and toward the tips of his ears with each swig of beer. “Heh? Matt?”

  Matt looked up from his own untouched beer and realized that he hadn’t been listening to a word that Pete had said since they’d sat down at the table. This was his third week at Bang It! and he was halfway through his probation. His first two columns had gone down well with Dan and, best of all, with the readers; he’d had quite a lot of actual letters, which was rare in the Bang It! office, which usually got Suze to make them up in her lunch hour. Dan was pleased with him, but the more he worked for Pete, the more he realized that half his job, at least, was comprised of babysitting his boss and keeping him at least vaguely on track. Nobody had said it out loud, of course, but the fact was that Pete was an alcoholic with a fondness for the odd line of midmorning coke. Matt had no idea how Pete kept his job, but he did, and he got the distinct feeling that as the rookie in the pack it was his duty to help him keep it. Still, the more he saw of Pete, who was permanently messed up—and even Dan, whose good looks and vigor were already being blurred by a lifestyle that would eventually kill off the best of them—the more Matt secretly wondered if this was his dream job after all. Was this really what he’d been hoping for all those years back, when he’d first tried his hand at journalism? A job that meant he woke up every morning with a hangover, that was giving him a worrying laissez-faire attitude toward naked breasts, and where the pinnacle of creative brilliance that was required of him was to think up ten different ways to write “blow job.” He was sure he’d had other aspirations as a kid, when a report on the news at ten from a massacre in India had brought him to tears and inspired him to want to do what that reporter had done, bring the really important news home to people in a way that made it seem personal, that made it matter. Somehow, life had brought him here, an expert babe-hound, living the bachelor life surrounded by women. It had to be his dream job, how could it not be? Even if his drunken boss did somewhat take the edge off.