“Does it not strike you as odd thattalkingis the one thing I do with my tongue that you object to?”
“Don’t be dirty.”
She raised an eyebrow. It was something she’d learned to do young—I reckon she’d seen it in movies. “I think you rather like it when I’m dirty.”
And now she was standing close to me again, and my heart was going like the clappers. “You ain’t being fair.”
“Fair is for small people, and you, my nymph, have never been a small person.”
It was getting hard to breathe now. In what I’d have thought once was a good way, would still have said was a good way if I’d not been in a wedding dress with my husband on the other side of a pub wall. “Small’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. You was the one wanted—”
“Everything?” There was something about the way she said it that made it sound…well…like everything. Like a promise and a secret and a dream all wrapped up together. “Comeon, nymph, what sounds better to you, really? What’s in there”—she put her hand on the wall beside my head, which I took as her way of talking about Bobby and the reception and the life it all meant—“or what’s out here?” And now her hand came down, brushed the side of my jaw, and turned my chin towards her, and she kissed me.
It must seem such a little thing to you, your generation being your generation and mine being mine, but you need to understand that them words—and she kissed me—they weren’t words I’d ever said until I met you, until you got me to talk about this. It’s something I’ve not even wanted to think of most days. How it was and what it meant. Looking back at it now, I feel like, you know,that poem about that bloke what’s getting old and there’s this girl he kissed he’s still thinking of and it’s this whole important thing for him? It’s like that.
“I’m married,” I said when I could manage to say anything.
“Most of the best lovers are.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
I felt her smiling against my lips. “Is it, or does it tempt you just a little?”
“Tempt me to do what?”
Her hand strayed to my waist. “Come with me.”
For an instant, I let her fill my head with possibilities. For a little bag of moments it was a fairy tale and she’d come to whisk me away on her white horse, or at least in a car that she stole from her dad. Except it weren’t, it were just me and her out back of a pub in Stepney. “I can’t.”
“You can. You can do anything you want.”
“I’m married,” I told her for what must have been the third time, though I wasn’t counting.
“Married people do things like this all the time, and if it really bothers you, that’s what annulments are for.” She ran her fingers through my hair and I shivered. “I’m rich, nymph. Honestly I’m quitedisgustinglyrich. Which means I can do what I like, and it turns out I want to do it with you beside me.”
It was wonderful to hear, and terrible, and a little tiny bit of me was angry. “Where was this two years ago?”
She looked—not sorry, not really, Emily never looked sorry, but regretful. “I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes.”
“Then what are you saying?” And I was challenging her now, more than I ever had.
“I’m saying that he can’t offer you anything.”
I’ll always stand up for them as I care about, and whatever Emily may have thought, I cared for Bobby. “He can offer me safety. He can offer me family. And he loves me.”
She kissed me again then, quick and soft, just a peck on the lips. “But do you love him?”
“I do,” I told her. It were the second time I’d said those words that day, but they meant more then, in a way.
Pressing herself closer against me, she dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “Does he make you feel the way I make you feel?”
I couldn’t get the words out, but I couldn’t lie neither, so I shook my head.
“Thencome with me.”
My mouth was dry and my head was aching, and I could still taste Emily on my lips and my wedding dress felt like a prison all of a sudden. I felt myself nodding, heard my own voice—not much more than a breath—sayingyes.
And then I heard myself say “If…”
