Page 88 of From Now On

Again.

‘I feel a bit sick.’ Nina clutches her stomach. Bile burns her throat as she swallows.

‘I’m not surprised with the amount you’ve drunk.’

‘I haven’t drunk that much,’ Nina says, although the bottle is nowhere near as full as it was when she opened it.‘It’s because I haven’t eaten.’

‘Want me to make you something?’ Maeve asks. ‘An omelette?’

Nina thinks of Sean again. Cracking the eggs with one confident hand.

‘Nah. Let’s go to the chippy.’ Nina stands. The floor rocks beneath her feet and she slumps back onto the bed.

‘I’ll go – you wait here. Curry sauce?’

‘You know me so well,’ says Nina although that isn’t the truth. Maeve doesn’t know the longing in her heart. The love she feels but she just can’t tell her. It would change everything.

Nina must have slipped into sleep because she jolts awake and feels the drool seeping down her chin. She unfolds her stiff body and staggers downstairs, into the kitchen. The walls are rolling in, the floor tilting left to right. She reaches out a hand and grips the worktop to steady herself. Her vision blurs in and out of focus. She thinks she’s alone but then realizes she isn’t.

And her alcohol-fuddled brain tells her that perhaps she doesn’t have to be alone ever again because as she focuses on the lips she so desperately wants to kiss she feels something.

A connection.

She doesn’t stop to think about whether the warmth she feels is down to the vodka because she tells herself how is it possible to like someone for such a long time and for them to not like you back?

She lurches forward. Presses her mouth against lips that begin to move against hers before they become unwilling. She is shoved roughly away.

‘Sorry… I… sorry.’ Mortified she turns and stumbles towards the front door,a blast of warm air grazing her cheeks as she falls out into the front garden. She begins to run.

‘Nina! What were you thinking?’ Sean’s voice snaps at her heels but she doesn’t turn around. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he calls. She doesn’t stop running but she can’t escape the feeling of rejection.

Humiliation has sobered her up by the time she reaches home. She quietly opens the front door, creeps down the hallway. The door to the lounge is open. Charlie is sleeping in her dad’s armchair, but he is not their dad and he does not love them. He just loves himself and… sex.

She treads careful footsteps, avoiding the third stair, which always creaks. Her room is tidy, her bed made. Charlie must have done it after she went out. She unzips her rucksack. It’s virtually empty, Charlie had taken her PE kit to wash. She brushes the thought of this kindness away, tipping her bag upside down and shaking out her schoolbooks. She slides open her drawers and hurriedly throws things into her rucksack.

It is gone 1 a.m. by the time she stumbles out into the street but she doesn’t care she’s broken curfew.

She doesn’t care about any of it.

She’s never coming back.

Chapter Forty-Two

Charlie

Charlie wakes, his body stiff and uncomfortable. He’s been in the armchair all night. He’d fallen asleep waiting for Nina to come home. There’s a crick in his neck that twinges with pain as he moves his head. He kneads one shoulder with his fingertips before massaging the other. Nina must have snuck past Charlie last night when she came home. He feels a mixture of annoyance and exhaustion. He understands why she didn’t wake him – they’d only have had another row – but she could have, at least, thrown a blanket over him.

Is this how all parents feel, Charlie wonders, as his tired legs trudge upstairs. This constant gnawing ache that you’re getting everything wrong, or is it just him, out of his depth?

It’s a mess.

He has to meet Pippa in the café in approximately five hours and he hasn’t even talked to the kids yet, wanting to gauge Nina’s reaction before he approached Duke.

He doesn’t blame her for exploding when she found the earring. Her trust is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. Gossamer-thin and easily broken.

There’s still time to explain everything though.

Tentatively he taps on Nina’s bedroom door. She doesn’t tell him to come in but she doesn’t yell at him to go away either and this, he thinks, is progress.

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