by Paige Toon
We lay our picnic blanket out under the shade of the trees up by the Orchard – it’s too hot today to sit out in the sun, but I keep my floppy straw hat and sunglasses on to further muffle the light. There are a few other spectators watching nearby, and although a couple of people wave at Matilda, they don’t come over. I’m quite glad not to have to make small talk. Matilda and I sit and watch the first half without saying much, both lost in our own thoughts and headaches.
At half time, I become fidgety as the men start coming off the pitch. Archie reaches Matilda quickly and gives her a hug and a kiss, before breaking away to say hi to me.
For the first time, the sight of their easy, loving relationship makes me feel envious. I overhear them exchanging a few words about the church service, but get the feeling Matilda will go into more detail about it later when they’re alone.
‘Hello,’ Sonny says when he’s a few feet away.
I feel seasick as I smile up at him. It’s probably more of a grimace, to be fair. ‘Hi.’
‘Nice hat.’
‘Thanks.’
He drops to his side on the rug next to me and a tiny acrobat gets to work in my stomach, back-flipping this way and that and throwing in a couple of cartwheels while she’s at it.
Sonny gazes out across the meadow.
We haven’t kissed hello.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks, twiddling a blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Rough. You?’
‘Same.’
If that’s true, it’s impossible to tell, with his sun-kissed skin and brilliant blue eyes. Cricket whites really suit him. The way his biceps swell to fill out the capped sleeves of his polo shirt . . .
Someone pass me a fan.
‘Did you get back to sleep when you went home?’ I ask.
‘No.’ He’s still staring towards the river.
‘Thanks for looking out for me,’ I force myself to say.
He turns to face me, his expression oddly serious.
‘Water?’ Archie offers, making him jolt.
‘Thanks,’ Sonny grunts, sitting up and holding his hand out to catch a bottle.
When the boys have returned to the pitch, Matilda snaps. ‘What on earth is going on with you and Sonny? The tension between you two is insane! You like him, don’t you? He definitely likes you. I know I warned you off him, but I won’t give you hell if something has happened.’
‘Nothing’s happened,’ I reiterate when she pauses for breath.
‘Really? What is it, then? You do like him, don’t you? Don’t tell me that you don’t.’
‘I do,’ I confess.
She lets out a loud breath. ‘So what’s stopping you both? Is he still sworn off sex?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Talk about sweet torture. Aren’t you heading to Australia before his six months are up?’
‘Yep.’
‘Surely he’ll crack before then!’
I’m starting to think I’ll explode if he doesn’t.
*
The match is over and we’ve relocated to the riverside because the need to cool off has become even more critical than Archie and Matilda’s determination to consume a pub lunch. Some of the men have left, but others are swimming. Every time someone jumps in, I welcome the resulting splash.
Matilda is cross with me for ‘forgetting’ my swimming costume again, even though she reminded me before we left the cottage. She’s in the water, her arms looped around Archie’s slippery neck and her fingers tangled in his sodden hair.
I’m sitting on the bank with my feet dangling off the edge. The ground is rock hard beneath my bum – we haven’t had rain in ages and the earth has dried to a concrete-like consistency.
Sonny is nowhere to be seen. I watched him set off down-river, unable to pull my eyes away from his back and arm muscles rippling and flexing as he did a slow forward crawl.
I’m feeling hot and restless and annoyed. I hate that I can’t get into a swimming costume and I’m toying with the idea of going home and sulking there instead.
I should leave soon anyway. Bertie will be lonely. I didn’t dare bring her out in this heat.
Sonny reappears, eyeing me for a long moment before swimming over and pushing himself out on lean forearms. I watch, fixated, as water streams down his body, hugging the grooves of his muscles.
The temperature soars.
‘You not going in?’ he asks me, swooping down to pick up his white shirt and using it to haphazardly dry himself off. He’s wearing navy-blue swimming trunks.
‘No.’
Reaching into a rucksack, he pulls out a pale-blue T-shirt. His chest disappears beneath it. He looks at me, pushing his hand through his hair and setting it back off his forehead, before cocking his head towards the next field.
I accept the invitation, because I think that’s what it is, and get to my feet, following him to a patch of shade under a tree where we’re out of sight from the others.
He lies back and folds one arm behind his head.
‘Still feeling rough?’ he asks.
‘A bit. You?’
‘Mostly just tired.’
He gazes up at the leaves above our heads and the blue sky beyond. A moment later, his eyes close and he sighs.
His hair looks so soft and I wonder what it would be like to run my hand through it. His eyelashes are long and dark and they’re creating tiny fan-shapes where they fall closed against his cheeks. I want to trace a line along the edge of his nose and press my fingertip to the indent of his lips.
I want to lie down beside him. I want to feel his arm around my shoulders. I want to rest my hand on his stomach, underneath his T-shirt.
I want him.
‘What are you thinking?’ he murmurs, and now cobalt blue glints from a crack between his lashes.
I shrug dismissively and take off my hat, throwing it a few feet away and twirling my hair up into a bun to give myself some respite from the heat of it around my neck. I don’t have a hair tie with me, which is extremely vexing.
‘I’m thinking I’m hot and bothered,’ I mutter, letting my locks fall over my left shoulder.
Wordlessly, Sonny reaches up and takes off my sunglasses.
I jerk away slightly, but let him do it, squinting at him as he folds up the arms and places them on the grass beside his hip.
‘What are you thinking?’ I ask.
It’s a while before he answers. ‘I’m thinking about what you said to me last night.’
A flutter of panic goes through me. ‘Which part?’ I ask uneasily.
‘The bit about us “doing it”.’
My mouth forms an oh-shape, but no sound comes out.
‘I was very drunk,’ I say as insouciantly as I can once my vocal cords have obliged me. ‘You should probably forget it.’
‘You say that like it’s possible.’
I bite my lip, staring down at him, taking in his day-old stubble. ‘It’ll have to be if we’re going to stay friends.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘We’re not friends,’ he states darkly.
Eh? ‘Aren’t we?’
‘I don’t spend half of my waking minutes thinking about fucking my friends.’
I stiffen with shock. At the same time, goosebumps erupt all over my body, making each and every one of my hair follicles stand on end.
‘Sorry,’ he mutters, scrubbing his hand over his face. ‘Crude choice of words, but I can’t say the others without feeling like I’m going to throw up.’
‘What? Sex?’ I ask in a small, stunned voice.
He shakes his head, his lips pencil-thin. ‘Make—’ He waves his hand in the air.
‘Make love?’ I’m squirming.
He nods tautly. ‘Those were the words Glen used.’
Now I’m cold all over. That’s the name of the man who abused him?
He squeezes his eyes shut, inhaling deeply and exhaling heavily.
I am clueless as to which of these very big t
opics I should tackle first.
A bug lands in his hair, momentarily distracting me, and I instinctively reach forward and attempt to pincer it between my thumb and forefinger. His hand snags my wrist and his eyes spring open.
‘There’s a bug in your hair,’ I quickly explain, sounding idiotic, and he releases me, leaving searing heat circling my wrist as I finish what I started, plucking a greenfly from a caramel-blond strand.
He sighs again, lighter this time. ‘That feels nice,’ he murmurs.
I hesitate and then push my fingers through the roots of his hair. I was right with my assumption earlier: it is soft.
He makes a sound deep in his throat and I have an overwhelming urge to seek out the place where the sound came from and kiss it. The thought causes my fingers to stall and his eyes to open.
‘Are you okay?’ My head is still reeling from the two bombshells he’s dropped.
He reaches up and twirls a lock of my hair around his finger.
‘Last night you used the phrase “get it out of our systems”.’
I tense.
‘Is that what you want?’ he asks. ‘To have sex and move on, put this behind you?’ He lets go of my hair to indicate the two of us. His eye contact is steady on mine.
‘You know I don’t do relationships,’ I say awkwardly, turning away and pulling up a handful of grass.
‘We are in a relationship,’ he snaps, making me jump. He sits up with frustration and plants his palms on the ground behind him. ‘You know that, don’t you? This is the closest thing to a relationship I’ve ever had. The only thing that’s missing is the sex,’ he adds with exasperation.
I have no idea how my fuzzy head is expected to process all of this.
‘And you want to rectify that?’ I ask slowly. ‘You want us to have sex?’
‘Of course I do!’ He rakes his hand through his hair, agitatedly. ‘But I also don’t! There’s so much shit I still need to sort through. I’m scared of using you to dull the shame because then I might associate sex with you with sex with him. And then there’s you. And all of your shit to deal with that you refuse to talk about. And the thought that you could just fuck and forget and disappear and that I might never see you again . . . I’m not sure I’ve ever hated the idea of anything more.’
His eyes are blazing and I feel as though a tiny bomb has exploded in my core, detonating everything I thought I knew.
I stare at him breathlessly, wordlessly, and he sighs again and flops back down to the ground.
‘When was the last time you talked to someone about whatever it is that happened to you?’ he asks out of the blue. ‘I don’t mean Evelyn, I mean someone new.’
‘A few years ago. When I was at university.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Badly.’ My voice wavers. ‘I lived to regret it.’
‘That’s why you won’t confide in me?’
‘We’ve only known each other a few months. I promised myself I’d get to know people for a lot longer – years – before trusting anyone again.’
‘I trusted you,’ he says simply. ‘I’m not saying that to pressure you, but doesn’t it count for something? You really think I’ll let you down?’
I breathe in sharply, anguished.
‘Oh, Hannah,’ he whispers with what sounds a lot like despair. ‘Come here.’
He pulls me down to his chest and folds his arms around me, holding me close. My heart skips and skitters, my mind racing. There’s no way I’ll be able to relax into the hug so I lift myself up onto my forearms instead, bracing myself on either side of his head. He stares up at me. Then he takes my face in his hands and waits a moment, his eyes dark and unreadable. I don’t retreat – that’s the last thing I want to do – and he must see this as he pulls me down to him.
His lips are soft yet unyielding and when they part, mine instinctively follow suit, moving and sliding against his. Where our kiss in Amsterdam was frenetic and chaotic, this kiss is slow and deep, causing shivers to ripple down the length of my body in waves, crashing and waning, over and over. His tongue brushes against mine and I feel the action echo right down deep in my solar plexus and oh God . . . Have I ever wanted anyone more?
His hands are still clamped to my face so when he breaks our kiss there’s nothing I can do about it. His breath is hot against my mouth. He’s panting and out of control, yet somehow in control because he’s no longer kissing me.
‘Sonny . . .’ I will him to continue.
And then Matilda’s laughter carries across to us from the direction of the next field and he releases me completely. I scramble to a sitting position in time to see her round the corner with Archie, both fully dressed and ready to go.
‘You guys coming to the pub?’ Archie calls as Sonny abruptly stands up, the tips of his ears burning as he gathers his things together.
‘I’ve got to head off,’ he replies, passing me my sunglasses without looking at me.
My heart is still beating so fast I can feel it right up at the base of my throat. I take them from him shakily, my chest contracting as I put them on.
‘I should get back to Bertie,’ I manage to say, and then it occurs to me that maybe he intends to come to the cottage with me to finish what we started.
I hope I’m right.
But I’m wrong.
After a brusque goodbye to all three of us, he sets off at a stride towards Cambridge, not once looking back.
*
The next day, I open the door to Sonny and can tell immediately that he’s come from Evelyn’s. He looks both devastated and devastating with his now-two-day-old stubble and hair that’s craving to be mussed up. Resisting the urge to touch him, I step back, inviting him in.
He shakes his head and puts one hand up against the door-frame, resting his cheek against his knuckles. ‘I can’t stay,’ he murmurs. ‘I just wanted to say . . .’ His voice trails off and his jaw clenches, his resolve seeming to harden as his eyes cut away. ‘I’m not going to be around much over the coming weeks. School holidays kick off on Wednesday and I’ll be helping out with the kids more. I’ve got to get cracking with the charity shoots and I don’t have a lot of headspace right now – even less after yesterday,’ he adds grimly.
As he lists his excuses, my stomach sinks further and further until finally he gets to the crux of it: ‘I think we could do with a bit of space from each other.’
He meets my eyes and pain ghosts his features at the look on my face. When he next speaks, he’s gentler.
‘Obviously I’ll still see you around Archie and Matilda, but if you need me for anything else, if you want to talk,’ he adds with meaning, ‘call me.’
The message is clear: until I’m willing to roll up my shutters and let him in, he’s pulling his down.
Chapter 32
‘I don’t spend half of my waking minutes thinking about fucking my friends.’
Sonny’s words keep coming back to haunt me.
‘This is the closest thing to a relationship I’ve ever had.’
This is the closest thing to a relationship I’ve ever had too. That is blindingly obvious to me now.
And: ‘The thought that you could just fuck and forget and disappear and that I might never see you again . . . I’m not sure I’ve ever hated the idea of anything more.’
That’s the one that keeps repeating on an endless loop, more than any of the others.
Then there’s the kiss. Kisses. Plural. They’re even harder to forget.
At night they play over and over in my head, jolting me from sleep and keeping me awake for hours. I’m a mess at work, constantly struggling to concentrate. I keep wondering what Sonny is doing and where his head is at.
The days stretch into a week with no sign of him, and then a second week begins to tick by and it dawns on me that he’s probably moved his sessions with Evelyn to avoid us crossing paths.
Archie and Matilda are on holiday in the South of France and it’s almost August with eight weeks to go unt
il Charles returns. The thought makes me feel panicky and unhinged.
More than anything, I miss him. I can appreciate exactly what he meant when he said we were already in a relationship because I feel like he’s broken up with me.
There’s another one of his statements that I can’t get out of my mind, and on Friday, over a week and a half since we last saw each other, I’m sitting at the kitchen table and pondering it while unenthusiastically poking my fork around the plate of my sad little dinner-for-one.
‘I’m scared of using you to dull the shame because then I might associate sex with you with sex with him.’
A paedophile assaulted him when he was ten. I understand there must be a multitude of conflicting emotions abuse victims face, but why is he still feeling shame after all of these years? Hasn’t Evelyn helped him to see that it’s not his fault? It was never his fault?
I want to talk to him and ask him and be there for him, but he’s shut me out.
It is acutely frustrating and upsetting.
And then it occurs to me that this is what I’ve been doing to him all along: shutting him out.
I hear a car door slam out the back and jump to my feet, hurrying outside to catch Evelyn as she rolls down the driveway. She stops and puts the window down, looking troubled at the sight of me.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m confused,’ I blurt. ‘Tell me what to do.’
She regards me with compassion, I’m sure, but I register it as pity because I am pitiful.
‘Would you like to make an appointment?’ Her voice is gentle. ‘I might have a window for next week.’
‘Will you tell me what to do if I do?’ I ask desperately.
She smiles. ‘You know it doesn’t work like that.’
So I come right out and say it: ‘Sonny wants me to confide in him.’
A spark of something flashes across her face. ‘And what do you think about that?’ she asks carefully.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumble, losing my nerve. It’s late. I feel bad. I should let her get home.
‘What does Anna think?’ she asks, pulling the rug out from beneath me.
Ooh, that was a low blow . . .
‘I don’t know what she thinks!’ I snap. ‘Nothing’s clear. Everything’s cloudy.’
