Page 50 of Christmas Is All Around
Charlotte stared out the window, unseeing. That was… so long. As long as Ava and Kit had been together, and they were married. With ababy. Instead of offering this unhelpful observation, though, she asked, “What happened?”
She heard him sigh, even as she continued gazing out the window. “We met through friends, when I’d been working in London for a year or two after uni. I was at a point in my life where it felt like I was… I don’t know. Ticking things off a list. She was getting a law degree, so she was studying all the time, and I was working all the time—and then when she got her degree, she was working all the time too. We moved into a flat in Notting Hill and talked about getting a dog, except that neither of us had time to take care of it. I worked twelve-hour days and I was exhausted, and I never had time to go visit my parents, or to help my dad with upkeep on the house, and would always offer to send checks instead.”
The self-loathing in his voice, on this last, was palpable, and Charlotte unthinkingly reached over to rest a hand on his where it sat on his thigh.
“Why did you break up?”
“We were almost thirty—both so busy with work that we hadn’t really had time to properly think about getting married. It was sort of assumed that we’d do it… someday. Buy a house farther out from central London. Have kids. But it never felt pressing. And then my dad got sick.” He paused, a long, heavy silence that she didn’t want to break. “I was going home a lot more often, obviously—and my dad was in and out of hospital in London, so I was spending time there, whenever I could. I took leave from my job, for a few months, so I could take him to appointments, give my mum a break. He wenthome, eventually… but he never got well again. And I’d come home, after these long days with my dad, feeling scared, but not knowing how to process it, and just feelinglonely, thinking about what my life would be like, if he died… and when I got home, sometimes she was there waiting for me, and sometimes she wasn’t—but I realized… well, I guess I realized that she didn’t make me feel any less lonely when she was there than when she was away.”
Charlotte swallowed around a lump in her throat at the ache in his voice—and at the bone-deep recognition she felt, at his description of that feeling.
“She was—is—a good person,” he said quietly. “I don’t blame her—I felt like a bastard about the whole thing, to tell the truth. There was nothingwrong. But it just wasn’t right. If my dad hadn’t got sick, I might have never realized—might have married her and thought I was happy. But something like cancer really puts things into perspective, and I realized that if I were in my dad’s shoes, spending days in hospital, going to endless appointments, frightened, tired, feeling like shit… she wasn’t the person I’d want waiting for me at home.”
He laughed then, under his breath—a low, derisive laugh. “This probably makes me sound like a complete ass. I was with her forsix years, and then realized that I didn’t love her enough to marry her?”
“It doesn’t,” Charlotte said softly, blinking into the darkness. “It just makes you sound… human.”
“Well, the fact that she met someone six months later, and married him another six months after that, does make me feel a bit less guilty about it,” he added, and Charlotte let out a surprised laugh. “They moved to Hampstead and just had twins and, from all I hear from mutual friends, are blissfully happy, so clearly she’s well shot of me.”
“No,” she said, squeezing his hand, and then removing hers. “It just wasn’t right. And besides…” Here, she hesitated. Felt the words forming in her mouth, considered swallowing them down again. Butinstead—here in the cozy confines of the car, with no one to hear but him—she said, “I’ve lived in the same city for most of my life—I have friends. A best friend. A wholelife. But I’ve been feeling lonely lately, too—and I think that the thing that would make it so much worse, totally unbearable, would be feeling this way even if I was coming home to someone at the end of the day. Almost anything’s better than that, I think.”
It was his turn to glance at her quickly, his eyes unreadable behind his dark sunglasses. All he said, however, after another long silence was a soft “I think you’re right.”
Silence fell within the car, Graham’s eyes on the road and Charlotte watching the rolling hills flash by, church steeples visible in the distant villages. It was a comfortable silence—more comfortable than any silence Charlotte had ever experienced with someone she’d slept with for the first time less than twenty-four hours earlier. This thought reminded her of her original question, which he hadn’t answered.
“So,” she said, “what’s the verdict, then? Is this a thing now? Are we doing this?” She kept her tone light and breezy, as if the emotional revelations of last night—of the past five minutes—meant nothing.
“Preferably not in the shower,” he said with a slight grimace. She glanced at him, grinning. “Not sure my knees can take that again.”
“No one made you get down on your knees.”
“I know. Horniness got in the way of common sense.”
“You’d just told me, like, two minutes before that having sex on arugwas a bad idea, but then you decided that going down on me in a shower was better?”
“Lane. Your point has been noted. I wasn’t thinking with my brain.”
“Listen,Calloway,” she said, offering his last name in an exaggeratedly posh English accent, “I’m here for three more weeks. Meaning that if you’d like to fuck me somewhere that isn’t going to cause you to need knee replacement surgery later, your days are limited.” She kepther voice light, almost dismissive, as though what they were doing was no different from any of the other casual flings she’d had in recent years—fun, yes. But not something that mattered.
“Is this how you attract all of your men?” he asked. “Lure them in with sexy discussions of their rapidly failing bodies?”
“No,” she said, gleeful at the realization she was about to share. “Because I’ve never slept with someone over thirty before.”
Thisdidnearly make him crash the car.
“Not the Mini Cooper!” she howled dramatically, clutching the dashboard.
“You cannot be serious,” he said, jerking the steering wheel so that the car swerved back into its lane. “You’retwenty-nine—have you been trolling the local secondary schools for dates?”
“Ha. No, it’s been a bit of a dry spell for the past year or so, and then before that…” She shrugged. “It wasn’t intentional, obviously, but I’ve always been a bit wary of older men—my dad is ten years older than my mom, and I think I just instinctively thought that anything that was a feature in their marriage wasn’t something that I wanted to replicate.”
“I’m honored that you aren’t too horrified by my age to be interested.”
“Honestly, the gray hair kind of does it for me. Who knew?” She gazed fondly at the half dozen or so strands of gray that were visible at his temples.
“Christ,” he muttered under his breath, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
And she realized, in a brief, terrifying moment of realization, that she washappy—happy in the sort of giddy, carefree way that she associated with a first crush, or childhood, or the day she’d made her first sale to someone she didn’t know. Happy in the sort of way that she did not remember ever being, in the years she dated Craig—or with anyof the men who had come since. Happy in a way she shouldn’t necessarily be, barreling down an English motorway under a gray winter sky, sitting next to—okay, yes, a very handsome man with a gifted tongue, butstill.
