The words make me dizzy on top of my tiredness. I want to sink into him right now, to make no objections. I want to give in.
‘I’m in my sixties. You’re in your forties. That means something.’
‘I’ll be fifty soon enough. Will it matter then? And I beg to differ. Look,’ he says, pointing to where his eyelids meet his temples. ‘If I’m such a child, what do you call these?’
He means the little kisses at the corners of his eyes. I can’t tell him that I call them that. I say nothing at all.
‘Margi, you don’t get to tell me how to feel about ageing. I’ve been going silver for years and barely even thought about it, but you leaving your hair uncoloured is supposed to be some kind of affront to society?’
‘Yes. To all the Kenneths,’ I joke.
‘But that’s bullshit. The difference in standards is crazy. You’re no older than Jamie Lee Curtis or Sharon Stone or Michelle Pfeiffer, and they’re all hot as hell.’
I scoff at this, but it’s hollow sounding. There’s so little resolve left in me.
‘Look at Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas,’ he says. ‘There’s like twenty-five years between them, isn’t there?’
I cast my mind back to whenOK!andHello!went bonkers for their wedding and all the salacious, unkind jokes made about them in the press. That must be two decades ago at least.
‘They’ve been together for ages, haven’t they?’ he says.
‘They have,’ I agree.
‘So, did their age gap matter, really?’
‘Not fair!’ I protest weakly, wanting to close my eyes and slump into a sleepy pile on the stage but making myself fight like I can really win this. ‘Age-gap millionaires are nothing like normal age-gappers! I can’t afford to get things lifted or filled for a start.’
‘I’d hate it if you did.’
‘You say that now, but give it twenty years and I’ll literally look like Michael Douglas! Then what?’
He laughs, and there are those eye kisses again, sending starlight in lines across his temples.
‘I think you’re running out of excuses not to want me,’ he says.
‘Wanting you was never the problem.’
‘I won’t hurt you. I won’t leave you. I won’t humiliate you. I’m not fickle. I’m not Don. And I don’t care about village tattletales, and neither should you. Not when there’s this thing between us.’
And that’s how my resolve snaps. Blinking at him in the glowing light in the silence of the empty school after midnight, I have nothing left to throw at him.
His eyes are searching my face as I lift myself towards him, and he lets me draw my leg over his, straddling him. He doesn’t touch me yet.
‘Let me?’ I ask before – as slowly as I can so I know that he’s certain – I kiss him, and the electrical connection between us buzzes back into life.
His hands rise up over my thighs and wrap around me to the base of my spine. He straightens his body, pulls me hard towards him, and we’re goners, kissing uncontrollably in the glow of the little world we’ve made for ourselves, forgetting everything and everyone outside.
Chapter Eighteen
Wednesday 20 December: Dawning
I’m dreaming on a soft bed with a heartbeat at my ear. Warm. I can go back to sleep. With my eyes closed I still see Patrick’s lips. Patrick’s chest. Hmmm, tiredness in my whole body. I stretch out.
It’s so dark. There’s no morning alarm for a while yet. How I love a deep winter’s sleep. I let myself dream again.
Voices penetrate the haze. Funny, that sounds like Sully. He’s saying, ‘I made one more gingerbread house.’
There’s his Leo too. ‘It’s cute, Sull, but I don’t recognise it. Is it a Wheaton cottage?’
