Page 60 of The Trouble With Love

‘Sorry?’

Now he spun round, head tilted as though his world view needed adjustment. ‘You and Nicholas. You need to forgive him for not being the perfect big brother, Holly.’

I found I was dragging at the bedcover, pulling it across my nakedness. Putting back that barrier that I’d kidded myself had come down. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You need to think about it.’ Kai spoke gently, although his voice was still uneven. ‘I can’t make you see, Holly. I’m not in the right place myself to be dictating how anyone’s life goes. And besides . . .’ Again, that breaking note, ‘I’m not really the person to talk about forgiveness, am I?’ A quick, mood-changing flick of his head, a grin and he opened a drawer and threw me a shirt. ‘Here. Go prancing around the house in this. Although if Cerys asks for details, I hope you’ll have the decency to fudge over the anatomical stuff.’

Okay, I thought to myself, well, I’m right behind that emotional flip. ‘I’m not sure fudge will cover it. I might have to toffee as well, possibly chocolate coating and a layer of coconut too. It is pretty big.’

‘Hey, what’s your best friend like?’

I thought for a second, then threw a pillow at him.

Chapter Twenty-One

Okay. This is different now. You’re so close that I can almost touch you and I’m putting up all these walls to keep you away from me, but I’m still . . . God, I’m still writing these letters. So part of me wants you to know me and the other part . . . the other part is fucking terrified. But now it’s not just us that’s different, it’s my whole life. For the first time I’m making room in my heart for someone. Or, I’m trying to. ’Course, there’s part of me that’s saying this is stupid, I should keep her away — it’s all going to end the way it always has ended, tears, recriminations, me pouring all the pain into my job and my writing. Never standing still long enough to feel anything. But she . . .

The prospect of meeting you isn’t about you. It’s about me. I want to know you, or . . . I want to know who you are but really I want to know me. Where I came from, how I came to be. And I want it straight, no justifications, no excuses. No hiding. I just want to know. And then it’s over, this whole life I’ve built on sand, because I shall know. Whether I’m from doctor or digger stock. No more late-night fantasies. You’ll be tearing away the plaster that’s lain over an old, old wound, ripping it off and letting the air get to it, get to me, show me who I am. Then I can go on with life, I can start to settle.

And I want that. Holly is . . . for the first time, she’s the woman I want to be with. I don’t know how it happened, suddenly she was here, touching my heart. When she listened, just sat there and listened to me talk, about you, about the past . . . and she saw. She watched me open up for the first time in my life, talk about what all this meant to me — all the shit that I’ve kept hidden, kept away from the other women, the ones that just wanted the image . . . And it makes me cry, over and over again, the fact that I couldn’t live, couldn’t be who I was, because I had to protect myself from their pity. Had to be in control of it all. Never let anyone in, never let anyone see that at the heart of me was this big, empty nothingness, because how could I know what lay inside me, when I didn’t even know who I was?

Now I’m ready to share myself with someone else. But first I have to understand . . .

Chapter Twenty-Two

I stood on the edge of the field and watched Megan chasing after Rufus. He was treating it like a game, waiting for her and then dodging away just when she thought she’d got close enough to snap his lead on. ‘You could help, Holly,’ she said crossly, sprinting past me for the third time. ‘Head him off.’

‘Nicholas, head him off.’

‘She asked you. And anyway, it might wake Zac.’ He jiggled the buggy containing a sleeping baby.

‘I thought that was Freya?’ I looked at the bundle, double-wrapped against the chilly wind and wearing a pink knitted hat.

‘Cerys wants to avoid gender stereotyping. Don’t you?’ He called over his shoulder to Cerys, who was sitting gingerly on a bench, rocking a rainbow of blanket, bootees and mittens.

‘Yeah. Plus he’s been sick on everything else.’

I went and sat next to her, blatantly ignoring Megan’s increasingly desperate accelerations. ‘So, you’re off tomorrow.’

‘Mmm.’ Cerys wiped her face with a gloved hand. ‘I’m going to miss you. Please come and visit as soon as you can. I need to go now, I can’t stay forever, I’d cramp your style too much.’

‘What do you mean?’

A snotty giggle. ‘Oh come on. You and Kai carefully keeping your hands to yourselves. Half the time I needn’t be there when you come over, you spend the whole time looking at him like you want to eat him. I don’t know why you don’t just fuck it out of your systems.’ She winced. ‘Ow. It even hurts to mention sex. That can’t be right, surely.’

A quick, bright blush crept up my face. ‘I don’t, do I?’

She nodded. ‘Yep. What are you waiting for? Move in with him, Holly, he needs you. Well, he will when I’m gone; how are you at ironing?’

‘I don’t iron.’

‘Oh. Oh well, I’m sure you have other talents.’ Cerys nudged me. ‘Did he appreciate them the other day?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The blush had reached my hairline where it clashed almost audibly with my hair.

‘Holly, you came in to talk to me wearing Kai’s shirt and no bra. You’d either just got out of his bed or you’d decided to let your inner slut run free. And he was singing all morning and, while I don’t usually appreciate karaoke Muse, it was great to hear him so happy. But since then you’ve been all hands-off.’

Almost, I thought, and the blush deepened. ‘We want things to go slowly. Not to rush anything.’ And besides, collectively we had more issues than The Times.

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