Page 19 of When We Are Old

“Not your mother then?” His Scottish drawl made my insides steam until I pulled at the collar of my jumper again.

“She’s at bingo.”

“That’s convenient.”

“I’m worried about her.”

“She’s a grown woman.” I walked up the stairs to my room and kicked at the door, dragging my bag behind me. Matthew’s face had been guarded when I’d reclaimed ownership of my clothes in his shrine drawer. Even the thought of him folding my clothes in those big hands of his, in the hope I would come back, did strange pitter patter things to my heart.

This ride we were on was running at full pelt and liable to give me whiplash. It couldn’t possibly have just been days since he’d come back. Since I’d found him again.

I fell backwards onto my mattress, focusing on the seventies style swirls on the ceiling. “This is different isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Talking.”

There was a pause and a rustling round. “I think we are past talking.”

“Mm.”

“Spit it out.” He chuckled low and my ovaries twinged.

“Well. Hannah just said something.”

“Uh, huh?”

“We haven’t been on a date have we, Matthew? I mean, there we were standing on a train and declaring our undying love, and we haven’t even been to the cinema together.”

“Ah! That’s not true. We went to the cinema in the second year at uni.”

I sat up against the headboard trawling through my memories of 2004. “Did we?”

“Yes, I remember. You kept dropping popcorn down your top and I think you thought I didn’t see you fishing it out.”

The memory heaved its way back into my grey matter. “I’d forgotten,” I said. How could I have forgotten that? In the dark… the atmosphere tense… me just wishing he’d kiss me… which he never did until a week ago.

And kiss me he did. In a way that made it quite clear I’d always been doing it completely wrong.

“You had your hands down your bra and I had such a hard-on I thought my zip was going to bust.”

I burst out a laugh. “That’s dirty.”

“I can be very dirty.”

“Mm.” I replicated Hannah's slanted glare at the ceiling. “Is it wrong I hate the fact you might have been dirty with someone else? I know it’s stupid. I know you’ve been married and stuff, but…” Stuff is a wardrobe I’ve shut, locked, and pushed a chair against the handle in case things I don’t want to know come tumbling out.

“Ronnie. You’re over-thinking.”

He’s right. The claw of anxiety tightened up my throat.

A pause I didn’t want stretched between us. I wanted pauses and unsaid words to be a thing of the past.

“I realised Hannah didn’t know you had kids.”

“And?”

“She said so long as it wasn’t a baby she didn’t mind.”