Page 65 of From Now On

She is in love and the feeling is both new and familiar. It’s as haunting as listening to Nina Simone singing ‘I Put a Spell on You’. It’s butter melting into toast. A candle in the darkness. As exhilarating as a roller coaster and equally frightening too.

From her window she can see Charlie and Pippa walking towards her house. Funny, Nina thought Pippa would be here all evening. She’s literally here all the time, teaching Charlie how to cook, how to care for Mum’s house plants, how to organise a fridge as though he is some useless Fifties’ husband. But then he has been pretty useless and it’s not like she minds Pippa being here.

She gives Charlie advice too.

Once, she overheard Charlie asking Pippa how he can get Duke to come out of his shell a bit more as though he is a snail.

‘It’s about finding some common ground,’ she had said.

‘But he won’t play his sax.’

‘Books then?’

And so Charlie had formed the lamest book club ever, just him and Duke.They’re reading some ancient story calledGoodnight Mister Tom, and Nina doesn’t understand why because they have a TV and Netflix now. She’d rather watch the film.

Anyway, Charlie hasn’t tried to find anycommon groundwith her and she’s glad.

They don’t have any.

She likes being on her own, like now. Sitting at her desk, smoothing out a blank page. She rubs at an itch on her cheek and catches the faint trace of Sean’s aftershave. She breathes it in deeply, trying to recapture the feeling of his arms around her.

A spark of possibility ignites but grief tries to extinguish it as she catches sight of a photo of Mum and Dad on her bookcase. She has no right to be happy, no right to any of it and yet still she hopes and dreams and signs the name she wishes were hers over and over again.

Nina Kelly

Nina Kelly

Nina Kelly

It’s childish practising a signature that is not, may never be hers but she remembers how alive she felt on the top of that hill, being comforted, and she holds it to her heart as proof that she is loved. She is wanted.

She turns to another page, allows her innermost feelings to spill out onto the paper – a love letter she will never send. I want to…

Touch you.

Kiss you.

Taste you.

And then, ashamed of the ridiculousness of it all, the trouble it would cause, she scratches out everything she’s written, the nib of her black biro tearing at the paper until her words are barely legible,making as little sense on the page as they did in her head. Still, she tears up the letter into dozens of tiny pieces before letting the fragments flutter through her fingers into the bin. She wishes she could throw away her emotions as easily. She wishes she didn’t feel the way she feels. It isn’t right.

But still, she closes her eyes to see that face, that smile, those lips she wants to press against hers and she knows it cannot, will not ever happen, and she curls herself onto her bed and cries. The pang of loneliness is so sharp, so fierce, that she stuffs her fist into her mouth so no one can hear her pain.

When there are no more tears to fall she unfolds herself and goes to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. When she comes back into her bedroom, Charlie is standing over her desk, the piece of paper in his hand with her childish signatures on.

Why hadn’t she torn that up too?

She snatches it from him and scrunches it into a ball, glares at him with all the hate she can muster and throws the one thing at him that she knows will hurt him the most.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Charlie

Charlie hadn’t meant to invade Nina’s privacy. After he had walked Pippa home, fetching her a glass of water and a couple of paracetamol, he had thought he could take the kids out to dinner, but Evie had rung Duke and invited him over for pizza which just left him and Nina.

Nina’s room was empty, the door ajar. He’d wandered inside to wait for her and, as he stood next to the desk, he couldn’t help noticing the piece of paper containing two words that struck fear into his heart.

Nina Kelly

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