The Story of Us

by Dani Atkins

  I winced inwardly. I should have asked about his book, his favourite food, or how much he made in the last tax year! Anything would have been preferable to prying shamelessly into his personal life. Jack smiled at my cringing discomfort and there was a mischievous glint in his eye.

  ‘Well there’s Fletch, my Labrador, he’s kinda special, getting a little wobbly on his back legs now, but he’s twelve so it’s to be expected. And then of course, there’s a couple of horses who—’

  I balled up a serviette and threw it at him.

  ‘Okay. Okay I get it. I’m being nosy and intrusive. I’m sorry. Forget I asked.’

  He bent to pick up the cloth, but there was no censure in his eyes as they met mine. ‘There have been a few women in my past,’ he admitted, ‘but no one I regret having let get away.’

  There was an open honesty in his words and face, and I was totally unprepared for it, and for the fleeting twinge of envy I found myself feeling for the nameless women who had passed in and out of his life.

  ‘You’ve never thought about remarrying?’

  ‘No, never. I no longer believe in marriage,’ Jack said firmly, and there was a discernible tightness in his voice, which I regretted causing.

  ‘What? Like it’s a myth, or something?’ I joked.

  The tightness dissolved as his low rumble of laughter filled the room. ‘You’re funny,’ he complimented, and something inside me swelled at his appreciation.

  ‘I’m here all week.’

  He took another sip from the bottle in his hand before continuing, ‘I’ve gone down the marriage road once; I don’t see myself doing it again.’

  ‘Been there, done that?’

  ‘Got the T-shirt,’ he completed. There was a rueful look on his face. ‘It didn’t fit.’

  Well. There was no room for ambiguity on that one. I gathered up our dirty plates and went to rinse them at the sink, unsure why his words had affected me. This man, with his damaged past, wasn’t mine to cure or save – that would be someone else’s responsibility. For some reason the realisation made me sad.

  ‘Now, I’ve got one for you. Why relieved?’

  It took me a moment to realise he was picking up the threads of our earlier conversation. ‘You’ve waited three hours to ask that?’

  ‘I’m a patient man, I don’t believe in rushing things. I like to take my time.’

  My pulse quickened a little at his unintentional double entendre and the ridiculous way I’d misinterpreted his words. I looked up to answer him and saw an amused glint in his eye, and suddenly knew better. Words were his tools, and he knew exactly what he was doing with them.

  ‘Well?’ he prompted.

  ‘Things moved too quickly with Richard and me. And that wasn’t just his doing, it was both of us.’ At least I was honest enough to admit that. ‘When I came home we fell right back into our relationship as though the years apart had never been. And that was wrong, because we weren’t the same two people we’d been before. We went from nought to sixty in a matter of weeks.’

  I looked up to see if I was boring him, but Jack just nodded, encouraging me to continue. ‘Richard proposed at Christmas, in front of our families, down on one knee… the whole thing. It was completely unexpected and romantic and I just got swept along with it all.’ My voice was so weighed down with regret it dropped almost to a whisper. ‘But it was too soon. I just wasn’t sure.’

  I snapped my lips shut as though I’d said something shameful. It was the first time I’d voiced that private thought out loud. At the time I’d been swept along by friends and family who were so delighted we were engaged that I’d had no room, no space, no chance to say ‘Can’t we just think about this for a little longer?’

  ‘You can’t get married to please your family or friends,’ Jack declared knowingly, and somehow I could tell that once more our past histories were crossing and merging.

  ‘I know that.’

  We were both quiet for a moment, the room feeling suddenly overcrowded now that both Richard and Sheridan had dropped in uninvited.

  ‘Enough of this,’ Jack announced. ‘I’m meant to be cheering you up, not getting us both crying into our beer. How about a movie? There’s a stack of DVDs in the other room. Why don’t you pick something out for us to watch, and I’ll light a fire.’

  He hadn’t been kidding when he said he was a fan of old movies. There had to be over two hundred in the box he passed me. I could spend the rest of the evening just trying to choose. I kneeled on the floor with the box before me, while Jack laid kindling and logs in the fire basket.

  ‘I can’t pick. What would you like?’ I asked, glad his back was to me because my attention had been split between the box of films and the interesting way his muscles moved beneath the thin material of his T-shirt.

  ‘Anything. You decide. Or just do a lucky dip.’

  I did as instructed. ‘Charade,’ I declared, holding up the thin plastic case for his approval.

  ‘A European woman who falls for a mysterious American. Interesting choice.’

  I got up from my knees and passed him the box with the picture of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant on the cover. ‘I haven’t seen this in ages, and I adore her voice.’

  He slid the disc into the player, before turning back to face me. ‘I prefer yours.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so decided not to say anything at all. Jack sat down at one end of the two-seater settee, stretching out his impossibly long legs in front of him. The seat was easily wide enough to accommodate us both, yet I hesitated and turned to a solitary armchair beside the crackling fire.

  He patted the vacant cushion on the settee beside him in invitation. ‘Come and sit here.’

  I don’t normally respond well to being told what to do. I have a stubborn streak in me that’s a mile wide. I like to be in charge, I like to make my own decisions. Jack looked up from the comfortable cushions; his expression revealed he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  I sat down beside him.

  There are worse things than falling asleep in someone’s house when you’ve been invited round for dinner, and one of them is to do so with your head resting in your host’s crotch. Unfortunately, I did both.

  I was dreaming. We were in France, in the gîte near the old farmhouse, and my mother was anxious to go and paint, but I kept insisting that first she should brush my hair for school. It was the usual crazy kind of dream, the type that makes absolutely no sense.

  One minute we’d been watching Cary and Audrey chasing around Paris, trying not to fall in love or get themselves killed, then the warmth of the fire, the beers from dinner, or just the fact that I hadn’t slept properly since I-don’t-know-when, overcame me. I didn’t wake with a start, quite the opposite. My eyes opened gradually, focusing on a curious metal shape directly in front of my face. I blinked slowly, baffled as to what it was and what it was doing on my pillow. The pillow, which incidentally felt weirdly contoured and not terribly comfortable. The metal shape confused me: it was like one of those magazine puzzles of an everyday object photographed from a weird angle. From where I was lying it looked just like the pull tag on a zip.

  Sleep left me in an instant as I bolted upright from his lap, smacking him painfully in the jaw with the back of my head. Several swear words filled the air (I’m not sure who they came from), and we were both still rubbing our individual areas of impact as I scrambled to my knees.

  ‘Oh God, Jack, I’m sorry,’ I said, truly mortified.

  ‘For what? Using my lap as a pillow, or for trying to break my jaw?’

  He stopped rubbing the injured area, and there was indeed a large red mark where my head had connected with his face.

  ‘I must have nodded off,’ I said, which was hardly an Einstein-worthy observation. I looked over at the television and saw only a blizzard of white grainy snow. ‘The film’s finished?’

  ‘Nearly two hours ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

  ‘Well, to
begin with I thought you were just… getting comfortable…’

  The flush started at my chin and didn’t stop until it had reached my hairline. ‘Then, when I realised you’d actually gone to sleep, it seemed a shame to disturb you. You looked like you needed the rest.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I repeated.

  He reached over and patted my shoulder in a friendly chummy fashion, not in the way you’d expect a man would do to a woman who, only minutes earlier, had had her face buried in his groin.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  I glanced at my watch and saw it was after midnight. ‘It’s so late. I should go.’

  ‘Not without a coffee first,’ Jack said. ‘I want to be sure you’re wide awake before you get behind the wheel of your car.’

  He left me to prepare the caffeine fix, and I sank back down on the settee, still cringing inwardly when I thought of how I’d snuggled up so intimately against him while I slept. I ran my fingers across the cheek which had nestled against him, and could feel the grooved indent from the seamed fly on his jeans. Rubbing furiously at the creases, I went to check out the damage in an oak-edged mirror hanging on the wall. My face definitely looked squishy from where I’d been lying, and my hair on that side was messed up and a little tangled. Strangely, on the other side of my head, the long auburn strands were perfectly straight and tidy, pushed back from my face and lying without a lock out of place behind my ear, almost as though they’d been smoothed and stroked into position.

  The caffeine did the trick, although I swallowed it fast enough to burn my throat as it went down. Jack had wanted to follow behind me in his car to make sure I got home safely, but I insisted that it really wasn’t necessary.

  ‘You’ve drunk more beer than I have. You shouldn’t be driving at all,’ I told him, as I slid my arms into the sleeves of the jacket he was holding out for me. He reached behind my neck to free my hair from the collar, his fingers scraping along the sensitive skin.

  ‘I think a guy my size can manage three beers and not pass out drunk on a settee,’ he teased.

  ‘I wasn’t drunk, I was asleep,’ I protested, as he fell into step beside me on the short walk down his drive. I pulled the keys from my bag as we drew to a stop beside my car. The night was bright and starry and so quiet that I could hear the faint sound of the sea slapping against the rocks on the beach.

  We faced each other in the darkness, both looking strangely awkward and uncertain as to how the evening should end. I made the first move by reaching up and resting my hands on his shoulders and lightly touching my lips to his cheek. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’ I said, pulling away, ‘I really feel much better now.’

  He smiled gently and then reached for my hands in the darkness, startling me. I held my breath, as a thousand butterflies took up residency in my stomach. His eyes flickered as he looked at me and there was clearly something on his mind.

  ‘Emma… I wanted to say…’ His voice tailed off, but his face revealed more than he realised. His warring thoughts were plainly visible, I saw them clearly; I also saw the precise moment when he changed his mind completely about whatever he intended to say.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted. Jack paused, and I knew without a single doubt that this had not been his original question.

  ‘Are you free on Friday afternoon?’

  I was desperate to say, ‘No. Not that question. Ask me the other one, the one you’ve just rejected.’ But of course, I couldn’t.

  ‘Possibly, why?’

  ‘I want to take another look at that lake before I leave and I probably wouldn’t be able to find it without you.’ As there was a state-of-the-art satnav sitting in his hire car, we both knew that wasn’t entirely true. ‘We could always get something to eat afterward; I think I saw a restaurant not far from there last time. If you want to… of course.’ He sounded strangely nervous and unsure of himself. ‘Will Monique give you the afternoon off?’

  Of all the things I was unsure of in my life at that time – and there were plenty of them – that at least was easy to answer. ‘Absolutely,’ I confirmed. In fact, if she knew who I was going with, she’d probably offer to pick up the tab at the restaurant.

  Jack opened my car door and delivered three parting instructions: ‘Drive safely and get some proper sleep, and make up with Caroline,’ he said, as I slid into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up from your house at around four on Friday.’

  ‘It’s a date,’ I confirmed, and then panicked in case he thought that’s what I believed it was. ‘I mean… it’s not a date… that’s just a figure of speech… I mean—’

  ‘Goodnight, Emma,’ he said softly, closing my car door.

  It was hard to tell in the dark, but as I reversed out of his drive, I was pretty sure he was smiling.

  CHAPTER 10

  The shop was unusually busy on Monday and by the end of the day there was a dull nagging pain at the base of my spine and I was tired and irritable. As I pulled on to our drive I was looking forward to the prospect of a quick dinner and a very long soak in a deep bubble bath. Only I couldn’t get my car in its usual space, because that spot was occupied by the last thing I wanted (or expected) to see there. Richard’s car. ‘What the hell,’ I muttered, as I pulled up alongside it and glanced within. Empty. So he was already inside.

  A fleeting movement at the window caught my eye, which meant someone had heard me pull up. No chance now to make a hasty retreat and drive the streets aimlessly until he’d gone, which had been my gut reaction.

  I should have been expecting this, I thought, sitting in my car and quietly fuming. It was almost inevitable, given how my parents had reacted to the news of our break-up. I’d put off telling them for days, but once I knew our broken engagement was public knowledge, I’d had no choice but to sit them down one night after our evening meal and effectively break my mother’s heart. To watch her face crumple as I explained as slowly and patiently as I could that Richard and I had decided we would no longer be getting married, was every bit as terrible as I thought it was going to be.

  ‘We’ve decided that perhaps we may have rushed into things a little,’ I’d said gently, wondering if the lie sounded as false to them as it did to me.

  My father, sitting on the settee beside my shocked and dismayed mother, hadn’t accepted such a vague explanation. ‘But you’ve known Richard for twenty-five years, how is that rushing?’

  Thanks for that, Dad. I had reached over to take hold of my mother’s hand, wondering if this was how torn and desperate parents must feel when they tell their children that they’re getting divorced. My mum certainly looked as bereft as a child on hearing that her world was about to be torn apart.

  ‘I think we may have rushed into the engagement,’ I clarified. ‘We really hadn’t been back together long enough to make that kind of decision. I think we’ve both changed a lot while we’ve been apart. We aren’t the same people we were when we were teenagers.’

  My mother had nodded mutely back at me, which might have meant that she understood, except her eyes were confused and awash with tears.

  ‘When you really love each other, then how long you’ve been together isn’t the issue. Your mother and I got engaged after only three months.’

  Again, Dad, thank you.

  ‘Maybe you’ll change your mind?’ my mum had asked in a tragically hopeful voice.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mum.’

  ‘Everyone has the odd tiff,’ she had said, as though enlightening me to a world I might never have glimpsed before. ‘It’s probably just a little touch of cold feet. That’ll be what it is.’

  Cold feet. Cold heart. Cold everything, actually, Mum.

  My father hadn’t bought the version of the truth which I had so carefully rehearsed, but at least he had enough good sense not to pressure me further.

  ‘I had an outfit and a hat, and everything,’ my mum said sorrowfully. ‘You two are just so perfect together. Eve
ryone says so.’

  I couldn’t hold it together for much longer, and thankfully we were almost done. And then came my father’s parting question: ‘Emma, does this decision have anything at all to do with Amy?’

  I saw a racing kaleidoscope in my head: the shattered windscreen, Amy’s terrible injuries and then her body entwined in hot and sweaty passion with Richard’s. ‘No. Not really,’ I had lied, then escaped to the privacy of my room before I lost it completely.

  When I dropped my bag and jacket on the hall table, I could hear the sound of voices coming from the dining room. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the gold-framed wall mirror, and was surprised at how normal I looked. There should have been steam coming out of my ears, because I was definitely only a few degrees from boiling point.

  ‘There she is,’ cried my mum delightedly as I opened the door, and three faces turned in my direction. Two of them were smiling, but the third looked guarded and wary, with very good reason. The table was set for four, and there were covered serving dishes and a steaming casserole at its centre. Richard was occupying the chair he usually claimed during the numerous meals he’d shared with us over the years. He had a glass of lager half-raised to his mouth, and eyed me cautiously over its rim. With admirable restraint I resisted the urge to rip it from his hand, or tip it all over him, although both ideas had merit.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  I saw my mother give a nervous swallow, and my father laid his hand comfortingly on her shoulder. ‘Nothing’s “going on” here.’ His voice was placating. ‘We’re just having dinner, that’s all.’

  I turned to stare meaningfully at Richard, just in case they hadn’t noticed that someone who definitely didn’t live here had joined our table. My mum shifted uncomfortably in her chair, but this time it was my ex-fiancé who reached across the table to reassuringly squeeze her hand. Terrific. Between them, they had now made me the bad guy.

  ‘It’s okay, Frances, Emma’s just surprised to see me here, that’s all.’