Page 42 of The Trouble With Love

‘Fuck ’em.’ Aiden reached out a long arm and grabbed my shoulder. ‘You can’t go out in this, Holly. Listen to it.’

As though prompted the wind roared down the street like a teenage driver in a Porsche.

‘I have to.’

‘No, you don’t.’ The duvet was thrown back to reveal Aiden in all his naked glory. And he was quite glorious, although a little absence would have made my heart grow fonder, also my tender places a little less tender. ‘Come on.’

And Kai’s words echoed through my brain. Was this it? Was this what I had to look forward to for the next twenty-or-so years, until I found myself too old and tired to indulge in the sexual carnival tricks? Rampant guys wanting no connection other than the purely plugged-in kind? I tried to extricate myself gently. ‘Aid, all this. You and me. It can’t work, you know it can’t. We’re not compatible.’

‘Sure we are.’ He wouldn’t let go of me, kept trying to drag me back into the bed.

‘But what if . . . what if, for some reason, I can’t have sex? Like, say, if we have babies or something and I have to have a bit of time off?’ I pried his fingers off my arm.

‘Hey, that’d be no problem. After all, there’s always some chick up for a good time until you were ready for it again.’ He grabbed at me and managed to unbalance me backwards onto the bed. ‘How about I show you what I learned in Morocco? Or, tell you what, I could come with you, find out if this Kai is my cup of tea. No point in dragging the guy in if I don’t fancy him, is there?’

I thought of Kai, his desperate, broken look yesterday. Needing someone. And there I’d been, perpetually trying to seduce him into bed, wanting no more connection than the plugged-in kind. Stupid. Shallow. I closed my eyes slowly. ‘Aiden. What part of the word no is it that you don’t understand?’ When I opened my eyes I saw the handcuffs we’d let fall onto the floor again. I picked them up.

‘Oh yeah, you are such a tease.’ Aiden watched me fasten one around his wrist. ‘You want it as much as I do, don’t you?’

I snapped the other half of the cuffs onto the wrought iron headboard. ‘I don’t think there’s an untreated sex maniac anywhere who wants it as much as you do, Aiden,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re rational at the moment, and I really do have to go.’

He pulled against the cuffs but they were real and solid and so was the bed. ‘So, you’re gonna come back and do me, that right?’

I sighed. ‘I’ll see. The key is on my key ring, so don’t even bother ransacking the bedroom for it. I’ll let you out when I get home, don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you to starve to death or anything.’ I shoved a mid-sex snack of crisps that we’d left beside the bed and a glass of water over to him. ‘Now, behave yourself.’

I dressed in two pairs of woollen tights under jeans, three T-shirts, a sweater and my warm coat, plus wellies. Outside it was a little lighter but day was still struggling to dawn past a pus-yellow sky and the air was thick with wind. When I opened the front door it was instantly whipped out of my hand and slammed back against the wall, cracking the metal knob in two with the force of it.

The air stung like lemon juice. Snowflakes bit my skin and the wind made keeping my eyes open almost impossible. It was stepping out into sensory overload. My body was tugged and driven, this way and that, I could hardly draw breath and all the while the wind yelled and shrilled into my ears. It took me five minutes to get to my car, and it was only parked three yards from the doorstep.

A few hasty minutes scraping and shovelling and blowing on the keyhole, and I was in, where at least the wind and snow stopped hitting me. Instead, they hit the car, which zigzagged across carriageways, bouncing gently off the banked snow on either side and then swivelling around on the icy road surface until I was no longer sure whether I was driving in the right direction. The only fortunate thing was that there was hardly any other traffic. A couple of cautious tractors, front ends loaded with feed for distant sheep and cattle and a four by four with skis tied to a roof rack edged past my random trajectory; we all gave each other weak ‘are we stupid, or what?’ grins as we ricocheted by.

It took me an hour and a half to drive the ten miles and when I slowed down near the entrance to the wood I saw that one of the huge elms had blown down and the trackway was blocked to vehicles. But that was okay because the snow lay so deeply along the track that I didn’t think I would have been able to drive down it without hitting a gigantic rut and grounding completely. I steered the car to roughly where I imagined the kerb to be and touched the brake. A jarring skitter told me that the ABS was doing nothing to stop us and I jammed my foot down hard in a panic, causing the back end of the car to swivel around. The car rotated in its own length, shying the width of the road like a horse imagining something truly terrible in the opposite hedge, then hit something under the snow with a huge bang which threw me against the steering wheel hard enough to make me swear.

When I got out I could see the car listing dramatically to the left, the whole of the undercarriage buried in snow up to the hubcaps. By now I was half-blind with ice crusting on my eyelashes, and right this minute I didn’t care what was wrong with it. I was more concerned with getting to whoever needed my help.

I locked the Renault against car thieving yetis and battled my way into the wood. At least once I’d got under the trees the wind couldn’t get to me. It was too busy working the treetops, forcing the fingertips of branches to rake the sky and all the while sounding like an incoming tide. I plonked on through the snow, and even though I tried to avoid drifts, I only managed to avoid the obvious ones and kept dropping into patches which went up to my waist.

There was no sign of the Ginger Menace. I guess even psychos stayed at home in front of the fire on days like this. I dug my ungloved hands deeper into my pockets, hunched my shoulders and struggled on, sweating under my clothes even as any exposed bits of skin puckered and screamed against the cold. At last the Old Lodge came into view as a golden light streaming out across the snow from the kitchen window, a single plume of smoke rising from the chimney. There was a newly chopped pile of wood outside the door on top of which a robin perched. It looked like a jigsaw box lid.

The robin stared at me aggressively as I knocked. At first no one came, then, after I’d readdressed the door with extreme prejudice because I was bloody freezing, Kai appeared.

‘Holly?’

‘No, the fucking Christmas fairy,’ I stamped my numb feet. ‘Please let me in. The wind keeps trying to force snow up my nose. I’m going to be the first person to drown whilst standing chatting.’ And then I laughed a hollow little laugh.

‘All right, Missus Brittle.’ Kai stepped back and I almost fell with thankfulness into the warm hallway. ‘What’s up?’

‘Up?’

‘Yeah. Why are you here? It’s God-awful o’clock, Cerys isn’t even out of bed yet and your brother is watching CBBC.’

‘But you rang me.’ I peeled off my coat, sweater and the first of the T-shirt layers. ‘A couple of hours ago. At least, I thought it was you, the line was all weird and faint.’

Kai shook his head. ‘Like I said, Cerys is asleep and I’m fairly sure Nicholas’s been nowhere near the phone, not when The Sarah Jane Adventures omnibus has been running since six thirty. Unless Cerys has taken to sleep-phoning and, bearing in mind it takes her half an hour to get out of bed, I shouldn’t think so.’

‘But . . . I drove through this!’ I waved an arm at the window where the snow, illuminated black, was swirling past the window. ‘And now I’ve wrecked my car!’ A thin prick at the back of my eyes as shock tried to make itself felt past the chill factor.

‘Come and have some tea.’ Kai went through to the kitchen, but I diverted and popped my head around the living room door.

---