Chapter Fourteen

Once I got home, Mum came around for afternoon tea to give Dad some time alone. He’s very protective of his alone time. At home he could just go into his study, but his space here was limited. Not that Mum seemed to mind.

We sat in my living room, her on the sofa and me in the armchair. I set the tea tray I was unloading on the coffee table.

“I met a friend of yours this morning,” she said as I handed her a slice of cake.

“Oh?” I couldn’t think who.

“Yes, a young man named Tom.”

She’d met Tom? When? How? The only sound I was capable of making was, “Oh?”

“He approached me in the delicatessen and asked if we were related. He said the family resemblance was uncanny.”

Now she mentions it, I suppose it is. I’m just so used to it that I don’t notice anymore.

“What a lovely young man he is,” she said.

“He is,” I agreed. I wondered if she’d recognized him. I remember her telling me she’d watched one of his movies, so . . .

“He said you’d been helping with his physiotherapy.”

“Well, just going for a walk each day.”

“And that you were helping him with a project in January?”

“Well, he helped me with my photography,” I explained. Tom had made me out to be entirely too altruistic.

“And is he the gentleman with celebrity friends?” Mum asked with a knowing smile.

“So you recognized him, then?”

“I’m old, not dead,” she said dryly.

“You’re not old,” I argued. Fifty-five isn’t old, is it?

“Anyway, he seemed very interested in you, my dear.”

“Mum!” My voice held a note of warning.

“What?” she asked, her face the picture of innocence. “There’s nothing wrong with telling you what a nice young man he is, is there?”

“Don’t.”

“Kelsey, I realize you’ve had a . . . trauma. But you can’t wall yourself off forever, love. You’re still young. You still have time to have a family.”

“Mum!” My voice was a perfect echo of her schoolma’am voice that she used on unruly kids. “Tom and I are friends. Please don’t push me.”

“But—”

“No!” I snapped again. “You thought Darren was lovely, remember? You have lost your right to any say over my love life . . . or lack thereof,” I added, only slightly deflated.

Mum opened her mouth to reply, then closed it and took a moment to think.

“You’re quite right,” she said stiffly. “I just . . .” She sighed and tried again to collect her thoughts. “Having you has been the highlight of my life, sweetheart. The thought of you never experiencing the joy you and your father gave me . . .” I could see tears shining in her eyes.

Yes, she was meddlesome, but I knew it came from a good place.

I reached over the table and took her hand.

“I want that one day too,” I admitted. “But you have to understand that I’m still gun-shy. I need to do it at my own pace.”

“You’re right.” Mum nodded. “I’ll try and let you get on with it.”

“Thank you.”

“I know it’s nothing compared to what you endured, but these last ten years have been hell for us too,” Mum said. “And I’m not comparing, really. I’m just trying to say that while I may overstep my bounds sometimes, I will try and respect your boundaries because I never want us to become as distant as we have been. I’ve missed you. We’ve missed you.”

Her tears spilled over. She wiped them away with her free hand.

It wasn’t all their fault that we’d become estranged; Darren bore most of the responsibility because he actively tried to isolate me and take away any support networks I might have had. But I had some blame in here too.

Yes, my parents had been obtuse, but I could have told them the truth about what was happening to me and I didn’t. Part of that was Darren’s power over me and my fear of reprisals, but part of it was my own shame and fear. Even with Darren gone, it took me over three years to tell them what had been going on.

Now that the truth had come out and my fears had been proven unfounded, I wished I’d told them sooner. That was on me for misjudging them.

I moved to sit beside her on the couch and pulled her into a hug.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I missed you too.”

“We won’t let it happen again,” she said as she rubbed my back in a maternal fashion.

“No,” I agreed, swiping the tears from my cheeks.

“So,” she began as we separated. “Am I allowed to ask how long you’ve known Tom for?”

“Um . . . four or five months, I think.”

“And he isn’t working?”

“He had an accident. He’s waiting for corrective surgery on his leg.”

“I think I remember something about that.” Mum frowned as she searched her memory. “I thought he was limping.”

“He’s got burn scars that are severely restricting his mobility in one leg, and now he has balloons in his leg to stretch the healthy skin so they can be grafted over the burn site.”

“And he’ll be all right again, will he?”

“His doctor says so,” I answered. Then a thought occurred to me. “Wait. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Well, I might tell a few people about my daughter’s new friend, Tom. But I don’t think I’ll be telling anyone I met an actor. My students would never leave it alone. Not to mention their mothers!”

The very thought made me giggle.

A bit later she helped me make dinner. I lamented once again how small my kitchen was. I mean, it would be fine if I didn’t have the table in there, but there was nowhere else to put a table.

I’d have to move, I decided, wondering what my savings would buy me. A nice house, I was sure, but it wouldn’t leave me much of a safety net.

Dad turned up later that evening, and we shared a lovely dinner together. He even had three glasses of wine, which was almost unheard of.

It was a wonderful night, full of slightly tipsy laughter and love.

I would be sorry to see them go.

***

Saying goodbye to my parents was harder than I might have believed possible a few weeks ago, but it was lovely to be on good terms with them again. After wishing them a safe journey and promising to keep in touch, I walked home and found Tom waiting for me. It was a little early for our walk but not unduly so.

Tom didn’t look good, however. In addition to his unshaven, hobo look and the dark smudges under his eyes, he was scowling.

Even when he was grumpy, he tended toward depression rather than anger.

I asked him what was wrong as I unlocked the front door. He explained that his leg was hot and irritated after having the balloons filled again that morning. He hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, so he claimed that he wasn’t in the mood for a walk.

I told him that was fine and offered him some tea and sympathy instead.

I’d made a cushion for when he visited, which was basically very thick foam hollowed out to curve around his injured thigh so it could accommodate the balloons. We replaced my usual sofa cushion with it while he was there.

He sighed as he took a seat. I went to boil the kettle and grab a tube of cream from the fridge.

“Sit on the edge and roll your trouser leg up,” I told him as I came back, perching on the coffee table in front of him.

“Any reason?” he grumbled. He was a tad tetchy today.

“I want to gawp at you,” I said, deadpan.

That put a crack in his grumpy facade and made him smile. He complied with my request.

His leg was starting to look very deformed now.

I squeezed a little of the cream onto my hand, then began to carefully rub it in over the balloon-filled skin. Tom groaned orgasmically and leaned back, closing his eyes.

I tried not to think that I was touching him rather intimately, or that I was responsible for those delicious noises, or that his skin felt deliciously warm to the touch. I also tried not to notice that he was wearing a tempting cologne.

“What is that?” he finally asked when I was finished.

“Peppermint cream, just for you,” I said, handing him the tube. “It came this morning. I put it in the fridge so it would feel even cooler.”

“Marvelous idea,” he said, lowering his pant leg.

“So if we’re not walking, what do you want to do?” I asked, sitting beside him.

“Can we just sit and talk?”

“Sure.” I smiled. “Want me to put that back in the fridge? I can put some more on before you go.”

“Oh God, yes. Please!” He smiled and handed me the cream back, but as I went to take it, he caught my hand. “Thank you, love. Really.”

My heart skipped a beat and my answering smile was huge, I’m sure.

“My pleasure.”

I fed and watered him, and we chatted easily for hours. He updated me on his filming plans. I told him about my first forays into photographing frost patterns and how I was enjoying getting used to my new camera.

We also made plans to go location hunting the next day, which I was looking forward to. Tom had four possible churches to visit, so we’d be spending most of the day together.

Before I knew it, it was getting dark and I had to turn the lights on.

“I should be getting home,” Tom said with regret.

“Sure.” I think I said it with equal reluctance. “Do you want me to cream your leg before you go?”

“That would be lovely.” He flashed me a grateful smile.

I fetched the cream. When I returned, Tom already had the pant leg rolled up and was ready to go.

It was silent as I worked. When I glanced up, expecting Tom to be lying back with his eyes closed as he had been before, I instead found he was staring at me with this warm, contented expression on his face. I blushed and offered him a shy smile.

He didn’t look away. I was grateful when I needed more cream as it gave me an excuse to break our gaze. Sometimes when he looked at me, it felt as if he was looking right down into my soul.

I won’t deny it turned me on something rotten.

I didn’t look up again for fear of being trapped under his perceptive gaze once more and I let my hair fall around my face like a curtain. Once I was finished, I pulled his trouser leg down, hiding his all-too-tempting flesh from my sight. Yes, even deformed by balloons that were swollen to the size of Coke cans, he was sexy!

Life just isn’t fair sometimes.

***

Location scouting was fun!

The interludes in the car with him while I drove him on one errand or another were quickly becoming a favorite part of my day. Sometimes we chatted casually about our pasts or about current events, other times we sang along with the radio. When we ran out of things to say, our silences were comfortable.

Between locations on the second day, we pulled up at a pretty play park to eat the sandwich lunch I had prepared. The kids were running about, chasing each other, involved in some intricate game whose rules they had clearly invented.

Tom laughed at the colorful chaos and asked an unexpected question. “You were married for ten years, right? Didn’t you want kids? Or . . . ?” He blushed at the intimacy of his blurted question.

I blinked at him in surprise. “You have to have sex to have kids.”

“You and he . . . didn’t?” He sounded astonished.

“No. We had a lot of sex to begin with—part of the love bombing. He made me feel like the sexiest woman alive. But as time wore on, less and less. I think he found it distasteful, so he used his lack of interest to make me feel unattractive, like it was my fault.”

“Didn’t you ever talk about having a family?”

“We did. Well, he did. I listened. He brought it up a couple of times before he died, talked about a woman’s thirties being the best time to have kids, how she was more mature at thirty, but IVF might take a few tries so better to start at thirty than thirty-five.”

“IVF? Was he infertile or something?”

“No.” I let Tom’s hand go and reached for my coffee flask, topping us both up so I had something to occupy my hands. “But it had been at least two years since we’d made love. Before that, probably another year. I was pretty sure he was having an affair. While half of me was furious at the idea, the other half was glad to have him out of the house for longer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He said if I lost another stone then maybe we wouldn’t have to have IVF, maybe he’d find me attractive again and be able to . . .” My words trailed off, and I sighed. “At five nine and eight stone, I was already underweight. I looked awful, but I still tried to lose more weight because while sex wasn’t very pleasurable, it was at least some form of affection.”

“I’m sorry,” Tom said, taking my hand.

My cheeks burned as I realized what I’d just done.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bringing him up all the time, not when I’m with you. It’s not fair.”

“Darling!” He held my hand tighter. “I want you to tell me. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. So if you feel the need to talk about Darren, do.”

“You’re supposed to be my friend, not my therapist!”

“I know, and I’m not going to offer you advice or tell you what to do. But the fact is we’re more than friends and you know it. Of course he’s going to come into your thoughts sometimes. I get it. I’m not upset. I don’t feel you’re measuring me against him, you’re just trying something that last time was immensely painful, emotionally and physically. Of course you’re wary. I understand—well, I understand as much as anyone who hasn’t been in your position can. I want you to know you can talk to me, you can lean on me, you can ask me for whatever you need.”

Wow. I swallowed, unable to really process the depth of his words and form a coherent response. Instead I felt my eyes welling up with tears. Tom looked stricken.

“Oh gosh, now I’ve upset you,” he said in a worried tone.

“No,” I assured him, squeezing his hand before letting go to wipe away my tears before they could fall. “You’re just a really good guy, Tom. Sometimes that makes me really happy.”

He relaxed and reached for my hand again.

“You’re an easy woman to be good to,” he assured me.

“You ready to move on?” I asked. I certainly was—physically and metaphorically.

Tom agreed, so I put our litter away in the lunch box, emptied our plastic coffee mugs, and headed back to the car.

Tom folded himself into my little Renault and we ventured off on the next leg of our magical mystery tour. Okay, it wasn’t much of a mystery as I’d programmed my satnav with the postcodes of the churches, but I’d never been inside any of the places before.

I had my camera so we could photograph the churches for future reference.

Saint Luke’s was our next church. From the moment we walked in, I thought it was pretty perfect! Built in the 1980s, the interior painted white . . . while there were exposed wooden beams, they were pine so it looked more like a barn conversion than a church interior.

There was one undeniably churchy feature: at the rear of the building, just behind the altar, there were three tall, stained-glass windows depicting religious scenes. However, the pulpit was far over to the left of them and next to a large, wide, plain glass window that looked out onto a rose garden. We’d have to pan quite far out to show that stained glass—but we would need to reveal that the scene was a funeral eventually.

Also, the seating was set up with individual chairs, not rows of pews. We could easily move them to any arrangement we needed.

“It looks perfect,” Tom said, using his hands to frame the shot and walking backward as he did, which wasn’t easy with the chairs in the way! To stop him before he tripped, I dragged him to the rear of the church and we looked at the screen on the rear of my camera, which I could set to the same wide-screen dimensions as film. I started with a long shot, showing the pulpit and the stained-glass window.

“Go and move that microphone stand to where a person’s head might be,” I told him.

In his excitement he managed a fairly rapid, limping gait to the front and positioned the stand behind the pulpit.

“Perfect,” I said, estimating the right height. We could always have the actress kneel on a box or stand on a small step if the height was troublesome.

Tom jogged up beside me and watched as I zoomed the image in until I was tight on the microphone.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better set if I’d built it myself!”

“We still have one last church to look at,” I reminded him.

“It can’t be better than this, can it?”

I laughed to see him so pleased. He looked like a kid who’d found exactly what he wanted in his Christmas stocking.

The last church on the list was Saint Martin’s. A 1960s building, it was the oddest of all the churches we’d seen so far. From the outside, it might even be described as ranch style! Inside, the altar featured a brown brick backdrop and red brick wings. Outdoor paving tiles topped the raised platform and the steps leading to it, and velvet curtains hung to either side.

There was no pulpit. The only thing that even identified it as a church was a minimalist black cross hanging behind the table that was passing for an altar. I took a few pictures and looked at the scene through my camera so we’d get an idea of the proportions.

“We could seat her up there with a chair, and as there’s no pulpit or anything when we pan out we could include her whole body. No one would know it’s a church until the cross is in the frame,” I said.

Tom was just standing there, staring. “Mmm,” he hummed in reply, which wasn’t exactly helpful.

“It just looks like an eccentric seventies house, especially if we take the altar table away.”

“Yeah,” he muttered.

Was he even listening to me?

“We could bring our own podium if you think we need a pulpit,” I added, thinking that the odd layout had thrown him.

“That cross could be something you’d have hanging at home,” he finally said.

“True.” It was large but unobtrusive.

“Other than that, nothing here says ‘church.’”

He was right. “While the last place, once you pan far enough out, there’s no mistaking it.”

“Exactly,” he nodded. “This makes a good backup, but I want Saint Luke’s.”

“Have you spoken to the churches yet?”

“I sent an initial email. Only the ones we’ve visited replied that they’d be willing, so hopefully we can agree on terms.”

We strolled back to the car, Tom walking with that faraway look in his eye that told me he was thinking. We walked in silence for a minute; I didn’t want to disrupt whatever was going through his head. I watched as thoughts chased themselves across his face, his expression becoming increasingly more excited. I felt the smile on my face widen at his growing exhilaration.

Quite suddenly, he turned and threw his arms around me.

“We did it, Kelsey! It might have taken three days, but we found it!” He pulled me close as he squeezed and rocked me in his enthusiasm.

I gasped something in response along the lines of “Oof!”

And then his lips were on mine in a kiss of shared elation.