Thomas

 

I watched them walk away, hand in hand. Both of them glancing back over their shoulders until they were out of view.

The letter was burning, and so was the thought of them. The thought of where this was going. The man I could be, with them at my side.

And her.

Polly.

The thought of her was enough to burn me alive from the inside out.

I’d always been a man of strategy, of surveying the whole board before I contemplated my next move. And so I did, seeking out the nearest piece of rock on the beach and taking a seat, staring out to sea. I turned that letter over and over, my heart in my throat as I wondered what words would be in there to greet me after so many years of silence.

Maybe the angry ramblings of a man as lost to me as he’d ever been. Maybe the rant of a father who’d never wanted to know the boy he’d turned away from all those years ago.

Or maybe something else.

Something I daren’t even hope for.

I finally plucked up the courage to tear into the seal with a vicious thumb, my jaw gritted as my heart pounded hard.

It was handwritten, the scrawl dancing before my eyes before I focused on the greeting.

Dear Tom

And so I read it. Page to page in a blur of heartache and tears, my breath barely rasping as I struggled to comprehend the meaning in those words.

It was nothing like I’d ever imagined. More than enough to bring me to my knees on that quiet beach with the Fosters heading into the distance.

My whole life spun before my eyes, every bitter decision I’d ever made crumbling to pieces and freeing the boy and his weakness and his tears to wail at the sky. The wind was a sting against my face, the spray from the waves dampening my cheeks along with the wetness from my eyes.

I knew it then and there, in that desolate heart of mine still reeling, that my life should have been so much more and so much less all at once.

No amount of money would cushion the blow of love denied. No amount of businesses fractured to shards would have healed the shards inside.

And no amount of marriages ruined would have been enough to convince me that I’d missed nothing but broken promises.

The afternoon was dulling as I ventured back up that beach, the light from the Fosters’ porch a beacon in the fading day. They were waiting with edgy smiles as I stepped into the bar to join them, a whisky waiting on the bar top before I’d even taken a pew.

They didn’t ask, not either of them. No questions and no prying, just the well-meaning stares of two people I’d hated more than all reason just a few short weeks ago.

I drank my whisky and passed the time of day with nothing but small talk, which they ate up gladly.

Talk of movies, and old holidays and their life back home back when they lived it in parallel to mine. Laughter about old teachers and recounting of Brett on the sports field, none of it filling me with spite as it had done for as long as I’d known.

And then, finally, as those other few residents around us drifted upstairs for the night, our own goodnight loomed loud in the air between us.

Only tonight I didn’t want to wave them off at the stairs. I wanted to be with Grace. Sharing the same closeness I’d come to rely on like air these past few days. Now possibly more than ever.

She saw it in me, I know she did, those eyes so similar in colouring to mine seeking out my gaze with a delicate smile on her pretty lips.

I watched her squeeze Brett’s fingers once he’d got the lights and dipped under the bar hatch, her grip conveying so much unspoken as his stare mashed with hers.

“I think we all need a port in the storm tonight,” she told him, and I felt his reluctance, every cell wavering at the prospect of closeness with a man whose relationship to him he was still trying to decipher.

I felt it too.

And Brett knew it.

But more than that I felt the need for another human body pressed to mine. The warmth of someone’s arms.

Of Grace.

And of him alongside her. Loving her as hard as I could. Harder than I ever could.

“No dicks,” he grunted, and it brought a grin to my face and a laugh alongside it.

“Fine by me,” I said. “We’ll keep it PG13.”

It was the strangest bliss in the world to follow them through to their room, pulling off my clothes so easily as they got ready for bed with their bathroom door wide open. I daren’t venture upstairs for my own supplies, choosing instead to throw myself into the moment when Grace appeared back in front of me with her pretty tits still in her lace push up bra.

My cock was hard in my boxers, my balls tight enough to blow at a simple touch, but she was careful, wrapping me in arms that gave me what I needed without tipping me over the edge.

Brett was already between the sheets when she led me around to her side, sliding in ahead of me and coaxing me in after her.

“This isn’t sex,” she breathed, for his benefit, I’m sure.

It wasn’t sex. It was a tangle of limbs and her body heat at my side, her fingers against my shoulder as they stroked my skin along with her breath.

I’d never done this. Not once.

Never shared a bed with another body for anything other than cold, hard fucking.

I thought sleep would be impossible, nothing like the wave that washed right over me. His breath was steady before mine, deep as the mattress shifted under all three of us and he rolled into his wife, his arm landing across the full breadth of her tiny ribs and landing right on mine.

He didn’t pull away, and neither did I.

“Sleep,” she whispered, and I nodded in the darkness.

For once I did what I was told. Without question, without deeper motives.

The sleep that found me there was the best sleep I’d ever had.

But the dreams, of words and memories and that letter I’d read so desperately on the empty beach that afternoon.

They were the best of all.