After Forever Ends, стр. 95
“Lucy,” I said, “I’d love your help! Carolena won’t eat eggs. She’ll have porridge and bacon, right, Caro?” My daughter nodded, “And Nigel likes his toast dry. No butter for Nigel, never, not on a thing or he goes mental. Just a little jam on his, if you please, right, Nige?” Nigel gave me the thumbs up, “Other than that, he’s got the Dickinson stomach and a taste for everything, just cut it up so he can eat it. He goes too fast and chokes. And Nattie,” Natalie looked up at me and smiled slyly, hiding a piece of toast that she had sneaked from her daddy’s plate under the table, I put my finger over my lips as if to promise I’d never tell, “Nattie likes everything. Just give her a little of it all chopped up and she’ll be happy.”
Lucy nodded, but she was still lost. She tripped over Duncan as she crossed the room.
“Where’s my toast?” Alexander demanded, dramatically looking about the table. He stood up and checked his seat, “Where’s it gone?” Nattie giggled wildly, “You have it!” He cried, “You stole my toast!” He pulled her up out of her chair on to his lap and kissed her neck so that she squealed, “I’ll have you for breakfast!” He pulled her plate over, “Sit with me, Muffin, and let Lucy have your chair.”
Oliver and I exchanged glances. There had been no reason to move Nattie. There would have been an empty seat on the other side of the table. “I think Alexander’s back to his tricks,” Oliver mumbled to me under his breath over the stove. I nodded in agreement.
Ollie and Alex went to help Edmond with a plumbing issue later that morning. Lucy, the children and I had lunch outside and waited for the twins to come home. Then Oliver and I went through our evening routine of bathing the children and getting them into bed. We did this without Alexander or Lucy, who took a long walk and then were discovered sitting side by side on the rocks by the pond having a private chat. Oliver and I kept our distance, but we checked every once in a while to see how the situation was progressing.
“Nothing! He’s not even holding her hand!” I whispered around nine o’clock as we poked our heads through the trees.
“What? That’s not the Alexander I know! He was doing so well!” Oliver strained to see through the foliage. “What the bloody hell is his problem? Is he that out of practice?”
“What about my sister with her forty-five year old? You’d think she’d know how to take control of a situation! Look at her sitting there like she’s twelve years old and on her first date!”
“Christ, what’s taking him so long?”
“Don’t ask me! He’d have had her flat on her back by now a few years ago!” We watched Lucy put her hand on his shoulder and leave it there. She scooted just a little closer, “Look at her! She’s begging for it!”
“He’ll be at it soon enough.”
“Let’s hope one of them does something at least before everybody goes grey!”
Lucy looked over her shoulder in our direction and we both ducked back under cover. We hurried to the house giggling.
At eleven o’clock that evening, Nigel woke up wanting a drink. Oliver told me he was going to go check on Alex and Lucy again. After about two minutes, he came into the house and closed the door, “What time did you say they’d be snogging by tonight, Darling?”
“They are not!”
“They are!” He grinned and slapped his hands together, “It’s disgusting, really!”
“Oh, yay!” I clapped my hands. “How disgusting is it?”
“Well, they’re not nude or anything, but they’re snogging right good.” He plopped down on the couch beside me and took my hand, “She’s sitting on his lap facing him with her arms and legs around him. It’s sickening!” He pretended to shiver, “A couple of tramps! Makes me want to vomit!”
“Oh, good for them!”
“I say!” He gave me a thoughtful glance, “The winds are changing in the wood, Love. Let’s hope this is what’s supposed to happen.”
“That Melissa hurt him badly,” I pulled my knees to my chest, “Rotten stinking old tuna fish sandwich, she is, even if she was sick in the head. Lucy wouldn’t do that to him. She’s waited to too long to be able to love him fully. It’s been against the rules until now.”
Oliver nodded, “That she has. He didn’t think of her as more than a child, but when Caro was born he said to me, he said, ‘Oliver, I should have married that Cotton girl’. I swear he did.”
“You never told me that.”
“Well, Love, I was a little distracted with you and the baby.”
“Hmm. Well, don’t let it happen again.”
“I promise. The next time we have a baby I will pay more attention to what is happening with the other people around us.”
“Right!” I put my head on his shoulder, “Well, we can’t make them fall in love. It has to happen on its own.”
He looked very serious for a moment, “My brother and your sister. Is that twincest?”
“Can’t be. They’re not biologically or legally related. And neither you nor I are involved with either of them, so, no.”
“Thank God! …well, would you look at that?”
“What?”
“On the television, Love. It’s Alexander’s green tie. He’s been looking for it all over.”
“I hate that tie. It’s awful. I’ve thought about hiding it on him myself.”
“Yeah, but your sister’s favourite colour is green, is it not?”
I thought for a second. “Yes, it is.”
“There’s magic here in the wood,” Oliver nodded, saying this as if it were something new, “I swear there is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The happy news about having our dear Lucy in the wood was that she decided that Glasgow was crap and she abandoned it to reignite a life in Wales. She got a job working at a realtor's office in Newtown and bought herself a truck so she could navigate the wood, even though Alexander took her to work most mornings. Alexander, in fact, took her most places most of the time. The two had embarked on a new direction in their relationship that included hand holding, snogging, snuggling, dates, family outings, sniggering and meaningful whispers. It was everything eleven year old Lucy would have wished for. However, six months after she arrived, the adult Lucy was still sleeping on the sofa and getting frustrated with it as well.
“It’s not about the sex,” She told me one evening in private, “It’s about the fact that he only lets me get so close. He throws up boundaries and road blocks as we go along. He’s hot and he’s cold. I never know which it’s going to be. I’m so bleeding confused my head hurts!”
I told Oliver what she‘d said one morning when it was just he and I straightening up the front room, “What’s with that? Why isn’t she upstairs with your brother by now?”
“Because,” Oliver puffed a pillow and set it on a chair, “My brother is in love with her.”
“So tell me again why she’s not in his room?”
Oliver sighed. “Oh, Silly Silvia. Think about it. My brother’s in love with her. Don’t you know what that means?”
“It means he should be putting her in his bed by now. He‘s put enough women into his bed he didn‘t love, why not try something new and make it meaningful?”
Oliver laughed, “No, Love. It means that he’s scared shitless.”
“Of Lucy?”
“Yes, of Lucy! And of having his heart broken again,” He looked at me and immediately understood that I didn't, “Think about it. He’s got her here with him all the time. They adore each other, yeah?. Always have. She loves his children and they love her. It’s perfect, isn’t it? It’s a fantasy, yeah? Too right to be true and it came too easily. He didn‘t even have to win her over, it was built in that they were both emotionally involved. So what happens if he actually makes it real? What happen if he takes her upstairs? What if in the end he winds up hurting her? Or, worse yet for him, what happens to him if she decides she doesn’t love him the way she’s always thought she does and runs away like Melissa did?”
“That’s barking! She wouldn’t!”