Page 51 of The Start of the Story
‘Ah, you’re right.’ The arms around me loosened. ‘Bad idea all round.’
But then I thought ‘new traditions’. I remembered how alone I was, that Elliot, loved though he’d been, wasn’t here. I thought of the silence and the cold of the long night and that I still hadn’t got a cat. I reached up, put my arms around Connor’s neck and stretched myself against him.
We kissed in the narrow confines of my staircase, me with my back against the wall and Connor with one hand in my hair and the other on the newel post to prevent him from falling upwards. His mouth felt strange and yet very comfortable, as though we’d kissed our way through many previous lives and this was just the first time for us in this life. Outside, through the living-room window, the moon peered in like a peeping Tom, bouncing off the snow and illuminating enough of the hallway to let highlights shine in Connor’s hair.
He was warm and tall and there was a lanky firmness to him that contrasted with my memories of Elliot’s gentler softness. The whole experience, this whole new body and smell and taste, was at once alien and familiar. But while my body was losing itself in the closeness and the comfort of kissing Connor, my mind would not shut up, and kept whispering to me that it was only a kiss, it didn’t have to mean anything. This didn’t have to go any further than a mutual admission of frailty and attraction. Elliot was still safe, hidden away in that corner of my memory, with our relationship still unique and protected.
Eventually gravity got the better of both of us and I toppled gently over onto the staircase, while Connor rotated around his hand on the post until he hung over the banister. It drew our lips apart and wrenched a gap between our bodies, which was just as well because my lungs needed some space to properly expand.
‘Well,’ I said. There wasn’t much else I could say.
Connor cleared his throat but didn’t speak.
Moonbeams crept around the lower stairs as though afraid to go any higher for fear of what they might see, and then we both spoke at once.
‘I can’t…’
‘It’s too soon for us to…’
We both stopped. We were looking at each other in the vaguely lit space as though neither of us had seen the other before, and we tried again.
‘I think we should…’
‘Let’s not rush…’
We stopped again, in a spirit of muted annoyance. Finally, and cautiously, in case he was going to do it again, I spoke.
‘Perhaps we need to think about this. I’m going to go to bed.’
When he was sure I’d finished speaking, Connor started. ‘You’re right. We need a bit of time here. This doesn’t have to be… a thing, Rowan. Let’s sleep on it. Er. Separately.’
I heeled my way up another stair and then turned so that I could clear the entire staircase in two bounds, then shut myself in the bathroom with my phone clutched so tightly in my fist that the light gleamed out from between my fingers in little ripples. I was breathing fast, and my cheeks, when I held the torch up to the mirror, were flushed with a mixture of excitement and stubble burn.
No, no, no, no, no. This can’t have happened. He’s not Elliot. And I can’t… It would be disloyal.
But Elliot has gone.
Connor is nice. And he kisses well. And he doesn’t try to make you go further faster than you want.
But he’s not Elliot.
ELLIOT ISN’T COMING BACK.
For the first time in all these years it hit me properly. As though I’d been sitting here enduring the passing time, knowing that Elliot was dead and gone but secretly waiting for him to come back to me. As though a tiny corner of my mind had been tapping its foot and keeping the faith with a secret knowledge: that Elliot couldn’t –wouldn’t– have left me, notreally. If I kept my life the way it had been and kept the cottage as he had known it, somehow I could call him back to me from the land of the dead.
Maybethatwas what was really behind my obsession with the Fairy Stane. Not that I wanted to keep those folk tales alive with the hint of mystery, and that whispered undertone ofnobody really knows what’s down there.Maybe I wanted to convince myself that Elliot hadn’t died in that hospital, that miserable Wednesday afternoon. In reality, he’d heard the fairy pipes playing and been summoned by the music to descend beneath the stone to the land of the fey, the world of the Little People. But if I held firm and truly loved him, I could bring him back into the land above, the human world.
Now, in this torchlit bathroom with my face glowing and my eyes bright, I felt the pull of the attraction to Connor and knew that I’d been lying to myself. Only very deep down, only in my imagination and those thoughts that allowed ‘what ifs’ to dwell in dark pools and secret groves, but I’d kept myself apart just in case Elliot came back.
But Elliot was never coming back.
21
I spent a very disturbed night, falling in and out of dreams that hinted at guilt and recovery, letting go and holding fast. The brightness of the moon didn’t help either, squinting between the curtains with its light enhanced by the glistening snow beneath it, so that the bedroom felt as though daylight were haunting the night.
I woke up late, disorientated, embarrassed and bleary, with my head still full of Connor and last night’s kiss.
I liked him. A few of the dreams had proved that, allusions of moist heat and another weight in the bed. There was still the matter of his being a historian and diametrically opposed to some of my beliefs, but I’d lived with him here long enough to know that he was reasonably house-trained and, unless that kiss had unleashed a foul-mouthed, slobbish boor that he’d been keeping well hidden, he was pleasant to have around. It didn’t have to be a ‘thing’, anyway, did it? Just a brief encounter. Something to take away the ghost of Elliot in a nice way. A gentle exorcism.
