We’d had a quick debriefing before I’d come to wash my face about what the logistics of sleeping in a bed with someone you would very much like to lick every square inch of, but couldn’t out of respect for his grieving process. We’d agreed that there was no pressure from either side to do anything other than sleep. He didn’t want to be alone and, to be honest, neither did I. We were two fully grown adults. We were capable of sleeping next to each other without succumbing to hormones, like Ned and my mother seemed incapable of doing.
Three quiet raps came on the door and, without invitation from me, it fell open and Mum’s face poked through. Excluding the event that I hoped my mind would soon blank out and the following horrendously awkward dinner, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her. ‘Hey, Nelly,’ she said with a worried smile and slipped into the room.
I took a breath, wiped my face with a towel and made a concerted effort not to remember my own mother’s sex face.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said as she hugged me. ‘How come you didn’t tell me you were coming?’ I said. I almost added that she probably did it so that her and Ned could have a secret tryst before seeing me, but I let that particular comment die on my tongue.
‘I wanted to surprise you and surprise you I did, I suppose.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I flinched, shifting away from her a little, looking down at my feet and wondering how best to say what I wanted to say. ‘You’re not playing him around, are you, Mum?’
‘What do you mean, love?’ she asked, her flawless brow furrowing. She really was a beauty. Her usually pale as milk skin held a slight tan, obviously out of a bottle because her skin was impervious to tanning, and her piercing green eyes were a nice contrast against her honey blonde hair.
‘I know this is going to sound like I’m sad about my childhood or something – I’m not, I had a great childhood. But what I feel like I need to say is that, talking as someone who has fallen foul of thinking that you’ll stick around for them, I know what it feels like to watch you go, after convincing myself that you won’t leave again.’
I saw my words hurt her, but they were true and she needed to hear them. ‘Ned’s already had one woman string him along and break his heart, so if you’re going to be just like Connie, end it now.’
‘Honey, what happened between Ned and me—’ She stammered her way through the sentence.
I held up a hand. ‘I know Ned much better than you do. He’s a romantic. He cries at rom-coms and dreams of silver anniversaries. And I know you. You’re loving and kind, but everything comes second to work. Other than you, Ned is the only family I have and I won’t lose him over a relationship gone wrong.’ I stepped closer, placing my hand on her arm to lessen the harshness of my words. ‘Please, Mum. I can’t imagine my life without Ned. Don’t make me have to.’
She looked as if she might cry, raising her palm to press it against my face. ‘Of course, sweetie. But just so you know, you have never come second to anything, not since the moment I found out I was going to have you.’ She pulled me close and we both tried to disguise the fact that we shed a few tears. ‘You know,’ she said as we left the bathroom, ‘maybe it’s time to come home and settle down again.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ I scoffed, remembering the last few times she’d said this in passing, as if it meant nothing more than suggesting she’d pop out and buy some milk. She didn’t know how much it hurt when she then signed up for an eighteen-month assignment to China.
She shrugged her eyebrows and nodded. ‘Well, yeah.’
I shook my head and grimaced. ‘Ned. I just never thought he’d be your type.’
‘Me neither.’ She chuckled.
‘You know he has a strange affinity with Celine Dion and reads history magazines, right?’
‘I do.’
‘And that doesn’t put you off?’
‘Actually, quite the opposite.’
I shuddered and wished I’d never asked.
By the time I got back to my room, Charlie was already in bed and the sight of him there made my insides twist with excitement.
Everything that had happened between Charlie and me, thus far, had happened in such a baptism of fire that I no longer questioned the strength of my feelings towards him. You often hear about love forged in extreme circumstances and how it burns bright and fast, ending in just as much of a cataclysm as it started in. I hoped that we wouldn’t fall foul of that same affliction.
I slipped into the room, the tears from my conversation with my mother still moistening my lashes.
‘You all right?’ he asked, sitting up a little against the headboard.
‘Yeah.’ I nodded, shutting the door. I suddenly felt very awkward.
‘So,’ he said, looking down at his hands, which were clasped on his lap atop the duvet. ‘The ring that Joel dropped round. What’s the story?’
‘What makes you think there’s a story?’ I asked.
‘’Cause all the blood drained from yer face like yer’d seen a ghost the second you saw what it was.’
I sighed and sat down cross-legged on the bed facing him. I turned the ring around on my finger, remembering the market stall where I’d first seen it a month before it landed on my finger. ‘I always said, for the whole time that I was with Joel, that I didn’t want to get married. Something about the idea of it made me panic, like I was being trapped. So, I told him one day and it seemed like he was on the same page.’
I turned away from Charlie, looking down at the ring, the stone duller than it had once been. ‘One
