For a Rainy Afternoon (8 page)

“My uncle e-mailed me,” Jason announced on a lazy Sunday morning in bed. “I forgot to say. He’s visiting my great-uncle to talk about what he recalls of my great-gran and Maggie.”

“I ought to talk to people, you know. There has to be someone around here who knew Maggie when she was younger.” I curled into Jason’s side and kissed each line of muscle I could reach. I loved this man so much that it hurt. I wanted to be with him all the time, to love him and have him for as long as I could.

“We could research,” Jason agreed. “After….” He didn’t say anything else, just rolled me so he was nestled between my spread legs and had both my hands captured with one of his. The sensation of being held was intoxicating, and I wriggled against him just a little. We kissed and rubbed against each other, but that small niggling need for more insisted on being heard. We had lube and condoms in the drawer then, but even though the lube had been used for many an interesting evening, the condoms had stayed put. I’d bought them maybe a week back and placed them very deliberately next to the old lube and the new unopened one. Jason would have had to have seen them, but he hadn’t commented.

With slick fingers he pressed against my hole as he sucked my cock down. It was more than I could actually bear, and I was so damn close it hurt, but then suddenly he wasn’t there. He was up over me and looking me directly in the eye. He didn’t have to say anything, I knew what he wanted, the same thing as me.

“Please” was all I said, and I punctuated it with a slow roll of my hips, my cock pressing against his.
Please let him know what I mean….

He stretched me with his mouth on my cock, and he edged and backed off and pressed and pulled, and my whole world, my entire universe, centered on this one man and what he was doing to me. He rolled on a condom and pushed against me a little at a time, kissing away the murmurs when it burned, swallowing the gasps I made as he went farther and farther, and then… I felt the pressure inside me, against my prostate, and that was it, I was lost.

Time didn’t make any sense from there on in. There was only the battle to climb higher and higher and to enjoy the sensation of the orgasm curling from spine and muscle—until I shouted my completion and came between us without being touched. Jason pushed more, again and again, and with a curse he stiffened and arched into me. I grabbed at any part of him I could, my nails raking his sweat-slicked skin and gripping at his arms until he collapsed against me.

“Too heavy for you,” he muttered.

All I did was wrap my legs around him as he softened and pulled out, and held on tight. “Never,” I whispered. And I meant it.

I
WAS
actually in the dream. Only watching, but I saw things that made me sad and angry and wanting anything to make sense of what it all was. I saw a much younger Maggie crying at a marker in the grass. A name and tears and a date and the strong arms of a man around her, me? I was Maggie, and the intensity of loss was utterly overwhelming. The dream was vividly real.

The loss I felt when I woke up was absolute, and I only woke up because Jason was shaking me and calling my name.

“Robbie.” He kissed each of the freckles on the back of my right hand and whispered my name over and over as I finally lost the tenuous grip on the dream. Stunned and emotional, I curled into his embrace and held on tight. I’d never felt this needy before, as if all it would take was his touch and the emotions from the dream would disappear altogether.

“What was it?” Jason asked me, and I wished I could’ve said. All that remained was the sadness, and it lingered all through our first coffee and breakfast. Every so often I would catch Jason’s concerned gaze, but I just laughed it all off and opened up the station house as normal for the usual run of customers. Individually, each person in Maggie’s coffee group arrived: Doris with her long raven hair and tattoos, Audrey with her pearls and slim-fitted jacket, and Jemima with her knitting always by her side. Each of them had a story about Maggie, the time she pickled beetroot and it exploded, the different charities she donated money to, that one time she confronted a thief in the post office and threatened him with her umbrella. All about how good a person she had been. I knew these stories, I’d heard them before, but this morning, after last night’s dream, I felt fragmented and thoughtful.

The door finally shut at ten minutes past five, late this time because Doris had popped back with cookies, telling me it was because I was sad. As soon as I had pulled the sign to Closed, I went into the kitchen to find Jason. I didn’t even give him time to notice I was there.

“Can we check in on the cottage?”

He glanced up at me with that dazed expression he sometimes had when he was in the middle of writing a scene and blinked at me a couple of times. “Wha’?” he asked.

I felt such a surge of affection for this man who had fallen into my life. He was obviously tired, and I wondered if my dreams had affected his sleep as well. Still, he was smiling at me, and he reached up to grasp my hand and tug me close for a hug, with his face against my stomach and his hands around my lower back.

“I want to go and see the cottage.”

“Mmm,” Jason murmured and nuzzled at my shirt until he revealed the soft skin over my hipbone. He pressed a kiss there and squeezed his hug tighter for an instant. In a lazy move, he used me to stand up, then cradled my face to kiss me deeply. He tasted of cinnamon, and I laughed inwardly. Despite my latest attempt at the applesauce cake, a pile of crumb with squidgy apple causing it to collapse, he had pulled it closer to his laptop and had actually eaten some of it.

We parted with matching smiles; then by unspoken agreement, we left the station house by the back door and walked up the hill to Apple Tree Cottage. There was evidence in the front garden of the work being done inside: a tumble of bricks and wood peeking out from under tarpaulin and several pallets of bags. The work was extensive, but they were only a week away from making everything right again. We bypassed the tools and stuff, and driven by something in my dream, I led Jason down the side path and round to the orchard behind the house. Apples lay scattered under some of the low-hanging trees, some of them rotting, some as bright green and fresh as if they still hung, ready to pick. I stopped at the closest tree, then closed my eyes. I recalled the things I had seen in my dream and had to focus past the overwhelming grief I remembered to the other parts of it.

“What are you looking for?” Jason asked after we had explored most of the orchard. Being under the trees meant the grass wasn’t tall, but the weeds were slowly making progress in their attempt to find space to grow.

“Not exactly sure,” was all I could really say. Thankfully he played along with whatever I was doing, and he dodged nettles and burgeoning blackberry bushes to follow me. Finally there was something familiar—a water butt collecting rainwater from the drainpipe on the cottage. I stood with my back to the icy water and faced out toward the orchard. The foliage in this garden was rich and green, and I squinted then… there… the tree. I stumbled as I twisted my foot on an abandoned hosepipe, but Jason caught me and I walked on. The tree had a distinctive shape. It was out of place, the trunk straight, not twisted in the way the other apple trees were. I crouched down in the long weeds and grass. Jason saw it before me. A glint of metal in the green, and we pushed everything back until we could see what was on the small plaque. I imagined it was a memorial to lost love or something dramatic like a clue to the reason behind why Maggie never fell in love again. Instead there was a date, and the plaque was nothing more than a flattened piece of metal with something scratched and scraped into it.

3 Sep 1942

I pulled my phone out and took some photos of the plaque.

“You think this was the date it was planted?”

“Or the date that Maggie’s lover died?” I pointed out. Typical that I would immediately latch on to the more angst-ridden explanation. Still, after this, I felt more at peace, and for a little while, we stood holding hands and chatting about Maggie.

“Mr. Young!” a voice called from the house, and Andy crossed to meet us just at the gate to the pathway.

“Call me Jason,” Jason reminded him as he shook hands with Andy.

“Kitchen’s a couple of days short of being done, and I just wanted the say-so that we upgrade the plumbing to the utility room as well.”

“That would be great.”

“And that we found another of those boxes… hang on, I was going to bring it down to you.” Andy disappeared back in the house, then reappeared almost immediately clutching a metal box that was a muted sage green and had stenciled numbers on the side. It was the kind of thing I’d seen in army surplus stores, and I was immediately intrigued. Jason took the box and tucked it under his arm. I wanted to open it then, but it wasn’t mine to open. Instead we walked to the Red Lion for dinner and talked as we passed through the village.

“So your great-uncle says Maggie and her sister fell out?”

“All he could say is that there was resentment, something about decisions my great-grandfather made that affected how his brother may well have died. Rumors his brother wasn’t ready for the gunnery position but that my great-granddad took his brother anyway. I’ll let you read the whole e-mail on my phone when we sit down.”

“Would make sense,” I mused out loud. Something had caused the sisters to fall out, and made Maggie stop writing at the same time her sister died in the sixties.

The weather was warm enough for us to sit outside, and while we waited for the food to arrive, Jason levered open the box with his keys. The box opened, and this time the contents were a lot more interesting—papers, some photos, alongside a copy of Monroe Kitchener’s, aka Maggie, last-ever novel. The box had kept the book tidy and neat, and I placed it reverently on the tabletop.

“Recipes,” Jason said as he flicked through the loose-leaf pages. An envelope fell from the bundle of them, and he picked it up. The fact that the envelope was new wasn’t the weirdest thing—that would be the fact it was addressed to Jason and me jointly.

“Shall we read it?” Jason looked uncertain, and he passed it to me as if he thought I was going to be any better at dealing with a possible letter from a woman who had played such a big part in my life. I took the envelope and opened it carefully. There was a letter and an aged loose-leaf page. The words in the letter were short. This wasn’t a flowery missive explaining the story of Maggie’s life, this was succinct. I read it out loud in the empty garden of the pub.

“Dear Robbie and Jason. I understand you are probably confused as to why you have only just found this letter and that you have lots of questions. Long story short, I knew you would be good together, and this is my first matchmaking since I introduced my sister to her husband.”

Matchmaking? I guess she meant me and Jason. I managed a smile across to him, and he nodded to encourage me. I cleared my throat and continued.

“Under the tree near the water butt is a plaque. The date on it is the date we planted the tree, and I had to move the plaque each year when the tree grew. The date is important because that tree was planted with love. Evan helped me dig the hole, we dug such a long way down, and we watered it and I remember we sat there on the grass and just stared at it. That was the first time Evan told me that he loved me and I said it back. Then he asked me to marry him and I said yes. I was so deeply in love, and my heart broke when he died the very next day. I tried to be strong, but in my grief I was so stupid. I blamed my sister for having the brother who lived, I blamed him for being alive, I blamed Evan for wanting to be a hero and for dying. I never spoke to my sister again. She left for America with her love still alive. All I had left was a box, this box, filled with the things the brothers left behind. The cookery book, papers, nothing that I thought had real meaning. When my sister died, I stopped writing. I didn’t have the heart for it. But I found the cookery book and made so many people happy that finally I can say I regret everything and nothing. Maggie.”

Jason sat back in his chair. “Wow.”

Thinking on which part got to me the most made my head spin. I decided that the one detail I was focusing on was the matchmaking part. She had made it so we would meet. At the end of the day, we were co-beneficiaries. But she could not have known that Jason and I were going to end up in bed together. Abruptly I felt uncomfortable and instead focused on the cryptic end to her letter.

“She regrets everything and nothing,” I murmured. “That’s kind of profound.”

“She regrets blaming everyone and losing touch with her sister, maybe she doesn’t regret the path her life has taken.”

I looked at the man who was so cleanly fitting into my own life, and I fell just that little bit more in love. He thought the same as me, that she was happy at the end. I put everything back in the envelope, and we ate dinner in a comfortable and peaceful silence and walked back to the station house hand in hand. When we clambered into bed that night, we kissed, but we were too caught up in making love to talk about the day.

But that was okay. I was kind of done with talking. I had thinking to do instead.

A
FEW
days passed before I picked up the small envelope again and checked out the loose-leaf sheet that fit nicely into the book of Granny B’s recipes. I don’t know why I didn’t immediately go to find the book that had helped Maggie find her peace. Perhaps part of me wanted to keep the idea of a solution to everything out of my reach. After all, who wanted everything easy?

I’d woken way too early for Jason to have emerged from his side of the bed. He remained all wrapped up in the quilt, only his tousled dark hair and the lump his body made evidence that he was in there at all. Deciding I needed tea or coffee, I took the recipe book and sat in one of the comfy sofas in the corner by the coffee machine. This time instead of flicking through the book, I carefully examined each page.