Kath gave Kev a winning smile. She’d been sleeping in the guest room at home for a week now. ‘He’s not wrong there. Now that you’ve all seen me sweat just a few buckets as I’ve been put through my paces, tomorrow our Kev will begin two months of being put through his paces by the various Commonwealth teams here in the UK. Tomorrow? We’ll see what Kev got up to over the weekend in Blackpool. Who knew it would be volleyball and not dancing that got him back to our old stomping ground?’ She reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. He didn’t respond.
She’d already seen some of the VT. It had been ruddy hilarious. Kev out in a windstorm on the beach in Blackpool being absolutely slaughtered by a pair of Amazonian goddesses from Northumberland.
‘Ho, ho! Yes. What a laugh. And what will you be offering our viewers over the next few weeks, Kath? More “lightbulb moments”?’
Kev had been quite derisive about her ‘light a bulb with a bicycle’ fundraising segment. She’d put her foot down though. Literally and figuratively. Viewers were viewers. They needed to see what was happening. They needed to know not only how much money was coming in, but what it was going to do. Plus, Halfords had taken out a string of advertisements to run through the latter half of the show. *Boom!*
‘Well, Kev. As you know, our crews will be decamping from the studio up to Hadrian’s Wall in just two months’ time. Before then, I’ll be meeting with a few of the lads and lasses from Team GB’s cycling teams—’
Kev’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. She’d seen his Commonwealth Games and raised him.
‘—Also, the team here at Brand New Day thought it would be fun to do a few features on some of the folk game enough to come along on the trip of a LifeTime as well as visit some of the people LifeTime helps. With any luck … we’ll reach that goal of one hundred thousand pounds in no time. A snip to Comic Relief’s millions, but as they say …’ she patted her non-existent back pocket, ‘… every little helps.’
Kev laughed. ‘Oh, Kath. I love your positivity.’
No he didn’t. He belittled it. Said she was naive and didn’t understand how the real world worked. She knew she lived a privileged life, but she was pretty sure that the fact that she still knew the price of a pint of milk kept her a splash more down to earth than a man who lavished gold flake face cream on his mug every night.
‘Thanks, love. It’s always so reassuring to know you have my back.’ She stiffened at his touch.
‘Forever and always.’
They each turned to separate cameras for the sign-off then went to their dressing rooms alone.
‘Sorry?’ Kath swept the towel Fola handed her across her face.
‘I have an idea for your show, Katherine.’
Sigh. How did he make her name sound like poetry?
Fola took her towel, then directed her to a mat he’d just laid out in front of the mirrors she’d grown to cherish instead of resent. He held up a finger, then unfurled a fresh towel on it.
‘Fola!’ She laughed. ‘You make me feel like the queen herself!’
‘But you are a queen,’ Fola said completely straight faced. ‘Just as I am a king.’
‘Does that make us a couple then?’ She met his eyes, felt a flash of something utterly primal, then instantly looked away. How foolish she was being. He was a vital, thirty-something man of the world. With a girlfriend. He had his whole life in front of him.
She was a middle-aged, married, Northern, lite morning television show host who agreed to let her husband throw cream pies at her.
Fola would never fall for a woman like her. He taught sport to inner-city children who might otherwise be chalked up to the ever-increasing knife crime statistics. She’d not noticed her brother was so mired in depression (and whiskey) his liver had stopped functioning.
He was humming with life.
She was a woman whose flirtation skills had rusted back in the early 1980s when Kev had taken her under his wing at the Starlight Dance and Cocktail Lounge just off the main drag of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach.
‘Did your mother not raise you to think of yourself as a queen, Katherine?’
She laughed. It didn’t tinkle with joy. ‘No, I’m afraid my mother raised me to get a job, pay for my own dance lessons and move out as soon as possible.’
Fola looked genuinely aggrieved by this, head shaking as he indicated she should lie down so he could help her stretch out. She dutifully lay down, knees up, one ankle crossed over a knee as he knelt before her. ‘My mother raised me to think of myself as king. Not because of wealth or power or arrogance. She had none of those. No. She raised me to think of myself as a king, because she believed everyone should think of themselves as master of their own destiny. In charge of their own life. Their own future.’
Having a man kneel in front of her, stretching out her glutes and hamstrings, as he told her why he thought of himself as a king was quickly becoming one of the most powerful moments Kath had ever experienced.
‘That sounds like wise counsel.’
‘She is very wise, my mother. Strong enough to be kind. Strong enough to let go.’
‘Of what?’
‘Pride.’ He leant against her leg, his scent flooding round her like a soft breeze carrying wafts of warm bread in its wake. A personal trainer shouldn’t smell of carbs, but by god his aroma made her hungry.
He released the pressure then leant back on his heels while she switched her feet around.
Pride, eh?
Was it pride or love that was motivating her to do this
