Page 126 of All the Forbidden Things
“Okay, I’ll FaceTime you later. Miss you.”
I want to say more, so much more, but I know it’ll be too much. Way too much, way too soon. I feel like our relationship is on crack. Because we spend all day and most evenings around each other, and because of our history, it’s like our relationship is weeks or months old, rather than days.
“Miss you too, Max.”
She ends the call.
Billie
Jay and Marnie are aswelcoming as always when I arrive. They live in the most amazing refurbished property, right on the edge of the New Forest. The main house has about eight bedrooms, four of which are taken up by their daughters, and sits on fifteen acres. They have stables, a large paddock, greenhouses, an art studio for Marnie, a state of the art recording studio for Jay, an indoor/outdoor pool, and a thirty-seater cinema. The place really is the stuff of dreams.
Marnie is from California, and we met up a few times while I was studying and working there and she was visiting.
When we pulled up on their driveway, her and Jay were both there to greet us, and now I’m sitting in her kick-arse Victorian style kitchen. Jay makes Mick and Frankie a coffee while both of them chat away to us, asking questions as they move around each other. Jay holding Evie, their youngest, on his hip.
Ava, Wren, and Belle, their other three girls, are at the huge, dining table with school books spread out around them. Not that there appears to be much studying going on. Lot’s of noise, but very little studying.
I pour my tea from the pot it’s been served in, and listen to the noise and the chaos around me, I take in the big red Aga and the worn and scratched farmhouse table and the love in Jay’s voice as he tells his cackling daughters to turn the volume down a notch, hits me.
This is what I want.
With Max and Layla and all of the new babies I plan on giving him, this is what I want. The noise, the love, the chaos, and the laughter, maybe not a big red Aga because cleaning that monster is so not my jam, but all the rest? I’m all in.
So, when Micky kisses me goodbye and tells me to be good, and when Marnie and Jay leave the room to wave him off and Marnie returns asking me what I’d like for dinner, I barely notice any of it.
“Billie, you okay?”
I look up at Jay as a tear tracks down my cheek. I brush it away. “I’m so sorry. I think the stress of today has just hit me.”
Marnie sits at the table opposite me while Jay herds his daughters up and out of the room so we can talk.
“I’ll get them all to shower and pyjama up,” he calls out.
“You’re my absolute hero, and I promise to love you forever,” Marnie replies.
“He’s so good with them. I love having him home. I’m dreading them going back in the studio and on tour next year.”
“Will you go with him?”
“Yeah. We have a full-time tutor for the girls now, so she’ll come with us, and I won’t have to worry about their schooling.”
“Belle turns ten next year and has asked to attend the local high school once she’s eleven . . . secondary school, do you call it here?”
“Secondary or high school, they’re all pretty much the same. I didn’t go to school until I went to live with Cal.”
“And how did you find it?”
I sip my tea. “I went to school in London, remember? It might be different out here.”
“You hated it.”
“Yeah,” I admit. “But I’d had so little interaction with other children, I wasn’t prepared for their meanness.”
“Hmm. Belle has three sisters and is quite often the instigator of the meanness.”
“She’ll do just fine then.”
She smiles into her tea as Freya Ridings begins playing through a hidden sound system. Marnie rolls her eyes. “The hormones have kicked in with Belle already. The only songs she’ll listen to are full of angst and emotion.”
