Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (13 page)

“Is he what you really want, Nova?” Mal cut in.

Ah, so this was about whether Keith was right for me. He was older, but he was incredible to me. He told me all the time how much he adored me. We laughed a lot, we liked the same things. He listened to me—not when I talked about psychics and crystals and the like—but about everything else. And he was gorgeous. He had the presence of a statesman, the looks of a film star and the biggest heart. Yes, he was what I wanted. He made me smile. When I was alone, I could think of Keith and smile. And that’s why I knew I’d (mostly) grown out of my obsession with Mal. There was someone else on earth who could make me smile like Mal used to.

“I’d marry him tomorrow if he asked me,” I replied.

Mal inhaled deeply. Nodded. He exhaled just as deeply as he ran his hand through his hair, still nodding. “OK,” he said eventually. Smiling grimly but still nodding his head. “OK, that’s good enough for me.” His cloak of disgruntlement seemed to fall away and his face became the sunshine that I’d seen earlier in the Arrivals area. “You have my blessing, little one,” he said.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, sarcastically. Although it was. It’d
be difficult to date someone who Mal didn’t approve of. I’d do it, but it would feel as if I was cheating myself, lying to myself about whether I was truly in love with that person. “Just wait, I’m going to make sure that whoever you end up with thinks Hercules’ labors were nothing compared with the challenges I set her before she can get my approval. You watch, I’m going to make her go on a quest to find the Golden Fleece.”

I leave my clothes in a pile on the floor by the bed and don’t bother to wrap my hair or even put on my pajamas. It’s far too much effort to reach under my pillow for my nightclothes or my scarf.

Maybe I haven’t been thinking about Mal because I still miss him. After all, I’ve done that every day for the past eight years or so. Maybe it’s because Leo is missing him. Leo doesn’t know his dad, but that doesn’t mean he can’t miss him. Want to know what he’s like, who he is, how he fits into the huge jigsaw puzzle that is Leo’s life. Maybe, when Leo wakes up, I can talk to him about Mal. Maybe I can let him know without having to say the words that, if he could, his dad would love him very much. How could he not, when Leo is the best thing he’s ever done?

O
pen your eyes, Steph,” he says.

I do not want to open my eyes. I have only just fallen asleep, it seems, and I do not want to return to the place where I have recently left.

Angry Mal is there and I do not want to face him. It’s too much for a weekend, for the day after my tenth wedding anniversary. I want to stay here, half asleep, half awake, completely nowhere all at once.

Here, I don’t dream like I do when I’m asleep, and I don’t fret like I do when I’m completely awake.

Last night, surprisingly, he’d come to bed at the same time as me. But unlike usual, when we’d chat about what we’d do the next day, he’d stripped off his clothes in silence with his back to me, standing on his side of the bed, dropping each item on the floor as he exposed his strong body. Each muscle long and toned, smooth and sleek under his pale-cream skin.

I’d watched him strip down to nothing and then slide under the covers as though I wasn’t there. “Goodnight,” he’d mumbled, before turning to face the window.

I’d undressed in the silence, placing my dress and bra and knickers into the laundry basket straightaway. I’d tried, I’d really tried, I’d even pulled aside the sheets on my side of the bed—but I couldn’t. I had to go over to Mal’s side of the bed and pick
up his clothes. There was no way I could leave his pile of things lying on the floor. It made the room look untidy. And if the room was untidy, it made
everything
feel untidy. It didn’t take much to make things tidy, it took a lot less to let things slide. If you controlled your surroundings, made sure everything was perfect, bad things were less likely to happen to you. If you didn’t let things slide, things didn’t fall apart. And if things did start to crumble, they would soon be fixed because chaos wouldn’t last long in the presence of perfect order.

I picked up Mal’s clothes, but he really did know better—dropping them on the floor was obviously a way of getting at me. Yes, maybe he hadn’t consciously done it to needle me, maybe he just couldn’t be bothered walking to the laundry basket, which was on the other side of the room, but we’d been together long enough for him to know it would be like an elbow in the ribs to me.

As I crossed the carpet, I stopped, brought his bundle of clothes to my nose, inhaled. Mal, the essence of him, filled my senses. He was one of my favorite smells. Clean like rosemary, soothing like thyme, spicy like cinnamon, undercut with a sharp tanginess like oranges. Without really thinking, I dropped the jacket and trousers into the basket, then buttoned on his dark cream shirt over my naked body. It was one of his more expensive shirts, its cotton was thick and the fabric tightly woven, the stitching durable, and it smelled of him. I wanted—
needed
—to go to sleep with the smell of him on me, pretending he was there with me. Pretending that he had been inside me and was now lying curled up beside me. Pretending we hadn’t both forgotten our wedding anniversary, pretending I hadn’t seen this played out many, many times before—that this wasn’t the first step on the road to divorce.

It was the thought of that word that had conjured up the night terrors. Huge, sweeping tides of panic moved through me every time I wondered if this was it, whether he would leave.
When
he would leave.

Then a similar tide would crash through me as I wondered what would become of us if he didn’t leave. If we would have to keep on living with huge unspoken truths between us. Then, I had begun to wonder if he still loved me. He stayed with me, but is he here because he loves me, or because he feels duty-bound, obligated?

At some point, when the terrors had snaked their icy tentacles over every inch of my mind, and in some places twisted back in on themselves, I fell asleep. And then I woke up again, but not fully. Which is how I like it. Floating in nothingness, too asleep to think, too awake to dream. Just floating here.

And now he’s trying to bring me round. Why he thinks I would want to come back here, I have no idea.

“Come on, babe, I know you’re not asleep, please open your eyes.”

Well, when he’s called me babe and asked me so nicely … Slowly I prize my eyes apart. It is still dark, still the middle of the night, because the sun hasn’t started to rise and the birds haven’t begun their dawn chorus.

He is on his side, leaning over me, a smile on his face, sparkles in his eyes, a completely different person to the one I went to bed with.
What has happened to transform him in the past few hours?

He strokes his thumb over my cheek and I bite my lower lip, wondering why he is behaving as though he loves me again. “I was thinking,” he says, his eyes never leaving my face. “If we get
going in the next couple of hours, at the crack of dawn, we could go to Paris.”

“Paris?”

“Yeah. And if we take an overnight bag, we’ll see if we can find somewhere nice to stay last minute. If not, we’ll come back, try to find somewhere to stay up in central London.”

I frown at him. “Why?” I ask.

“To celebrate our anniversary.”

“I thought you were working today.”

“Nope, I’ll call them from the train. I’ll even leave my laptop and BlackBerry at home.”

“Why?” I ask again.

“To celebrate our anniversary,” he repeats. “Do you fancy it?”

Of course I do. “Hmmm …” I say. “Maybe.”

“Oh, maybe, huh?” He climbs on top of me, straddling me, his knees gently resting on either side of my thighs. “Well,
maybe
I can’t help but notice that you’re wearing one of my shirts.” He reaches for the first button. “And
maybe
I need a way for you to make it up to me.”

“Nope, don’t think so,” I say, as he continues unbuttoning me. Pleasure pulses through me as he dramatically rips open the shirt. His soft fingers move over my skin, as if trying to read me, and my body comes alive with excitement.

He suddenly buries his nose in my belly button and starts to tickle me. I yelp, squirming, trying to get away from him. He holds me firmly between his legs, and soon we are both laughing as we dig at every available bit of flesh, kicking and screaming.

Mal’s large hands close around my wrists, pinning them on either side of my head. “Do you concede?” he asks, his face an inch away from mine, his chest moving rapidly.

“Yes,” I gasp. “Yes.”

“OK,” Mal says, and his hands slip away as he sits back.

I launch myself at him, catching him off guard and in the ribs, knocking him off center onto the bed. “You wench!” he cries at me as he lands and I climb on top of him, pinning his wrists to the bed.

“I can’t believe you fell for that,” I laugh, staring down at him. His hair, the color of burnt butter, has grown recently, it lies in thick curls all over his scalp. His russet eyes and his mouth are all alight with mirth, his skin flushed.

“Neither can I,” he replies.

“OK, now I can do some questioning: do you really want to go to Paris?”

“Yes. I’m sorry to tell you, babe, I know the sex is fantastic between us and everything, but I am married. And I love my wife. And we’ve never been to Paris together, so I want to go there with her.”

“Why, oh why, are the best ones taken?” Excitement and happiness flutter around my stomach like a bird in a cage. This is how it felt between us when we first met. How I haven’t felt for more than a few seconds in so long.

Mal uses my distraction, the slight loosening of my grip on his wrists, as a chance to flip me onto my back. Before I can react, he opens my legs and is making love to me. My body becomes boneless underneath him, like a fluid that moves with him, molding myself to the curves and lines of his body. As I sigh, he buries his face in the pillow. I remember when he used to cover my mouth with his, swallowing any sigh, moan or groan—any sound I made—into himself, as though he wanted everything he could get of me while we made love. But it’s only a little thing. I don’t even remember when he stopped doing
it. And it really is only a little thing, and it doesn’t matter. We are together again. Properly. As man and wife. As woman and husband. As Steph and Mal.

And there is nothing … uhhhhhhhh … nothing as delicious as this.