The Accidental Mother (28 page)

Louis seemed to consider the offer seriously as he looked from her to Jake and then at his feet.

“I’d better go,” he said at last, and the tension, real or imagined, seemed to drain instantly out of the room.

“I’ll let you out,” Sophie said, deciding she needed the minute or so it would take to get back up the stairs to her flat to figure out what had just happened.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” Louis said as they reached the main door. “I don’t know why. I mean, it’s obvious
you
would have.”

“Is it?” Sophie said.

“Well, yeah,” Louis said. “I mean you’re, you know—great-looking and generally…great. Of course you would.”

Sophie felt a rush of pleasure at his words. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so flattered in her life. Certainly other men, including Jake, had said things that were far prettier and much more romantic, but for some reason none of those words had sounded as completely honest as Louis’s did.

“Gosh,” she said and then, “did I say
gosh
?”

Louis laughed. “You did,” he said. “I like it. Look, it must have made things difficult for you with Jake, having the girls. I hope that your relationship hasn’t suffered because of it?”

“Oh no,” Sophie said. “Jake’s been great, but actually he’s not quite my boyfriend. He’s more of a sort of date thing. Except we haven’t been on any dates yet.” She wondered why she was sharing this information so inexpertly with a man whose business it certainly was not.

Because she wanted him to know she was single? She wanted her dead best friend’s husband to know that she was single? She refused to think about what that meant on the grounds of taste and decency. But the more she got to know him, the more she was warming toward Louis, which wasn’t what she wanted at all. Now was not the time to develop an inappropriate crush.

“Right,” Louis said. “So I’ll see you in the morning and we’ll plan the big trip.”

“We will,” Sophie said. They smiled at each other as she held the door open, letting the chill of the night air numb her cheeks.

“Good night, Sophie,” Louis said. And for a long moment after she closed the door she stood and thought about what it had felt like to be standing next to him. It had to be wrong to feel like she had in that moment. It had to be. There was only one thing for it. She’d have to go upstairs and kiss Jake.

“I was starting to think you’d gone with him,” Jake said, holding out a glass of wine.

“Don’t be silly.” Sophie sat down on the sofa next to him. She looked at his lovely mouth and gorgeous blue eyes and took a large gulp of wine.

“He’s younger than I thought he would be,” Jake said. “He’s younger than me, I think. Don’t you?”

“Um, he’s my age I suppose,” Sophie said, diligently admiring Jake’s chiseled nose. “So a bit, I guess.”

“And really tall,” Jake said.

Sophie laughed. “Anyone would think it was
you
who fancied him,” she joked before she realized exactly what she’d said.

“Me as opposed to who?” Jake said carefully.

“No one!” Sophie said hurriedly. “That’s not what I meant, I just meant…” She looked into her wineglass for inspiration. “I meant you sounded very interested in him.”

“I’m always interested in my competition,” Jake said, his tone cooling.

“Jake!” Sophie exclaimed. “Louis is my dead best friend’s husband! He’s not competition!”

“Are you sure about that?” Jake asked her.

“I’m sure.” And as if to prove it, she did something she had never done in her entire life. She lunged at Jake and kissed him.

For a moment he was immobile with shock, for a second or two longer he kissed her back, and then slowly and reluctantly he pushed her away.

“You’re really screwing with my head,” he said.

“I’m not,” Sophie said. “That’s why I asked you to come over tonight. So we could move things on. You and me—a couple if you want.”

Jake sat up and looked hard at her. “Something in you has changed since the party,” he said. “You look less reserved, less detached. Actually, that’s wrong, you don’t look at
all
reserved or detached. You look like someone turned you loose in the world and you’re enjoying living and breathing in the middle of it, instead of just looking on from the edges.”

“Yes,” Sophie agreed, even though she didn’t quite get what he meant. “I am. I mean, I am doing those things that you said because of you.
You’ve
set me free!”

“Nope,” Jake said. “It’s not me.”

“It is!” Sophie insisted, sounding, she realized, a little too desperate for it to be true.

“Sophie.” Jake looked sad as he said her name. “It might be that the new challenges life has thrown you have woken you up. Or maybe it’s realizing when you found out Carrie had died that life is too short to sleepwalk through it. Maybe it’s even those two girls and their father.” He looked grim. “Maybe it’s him.”

“Him!”

Jake cut off Sophie’s protest with a wave of his hand. “Whatever it is, it isn’t me,” he told her firmly. “And I’m not the kind of man to take second best. I thought you’d wake up one day and see what a charming, good-looking catch I am and that you’d want me as much as I want you. But as sorry as I am, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“I have,” Sophie said. “It is.” But even she wasn’t convinced.

“I think I’d better go,” Jake said.

“I don’t want you to go,” Sophie said, her voice small.

“I know you don’t,” he said. “But I think you want me to stay as a safety net to catch you if all this high-wire balancing you’re doing doesn’t pay off. I can’t be that to you, Sophie, as tempting as it is. I can’t be your safe option. Whatever you need to make you happy right now—it isn’t me.”

Jake set his wine down on the table and leaned over and kissed Sophie’s cheek. “I’ll call you when you’re back in the office. We’ll schedule a meeting.”

“Jake, I…” Sophie didn’t know what she wanted to say.

“It’s okay, honey, I know,” he said as he headed for the door. “You’ve got a lot of other things to think about right now.”

T
here had been longer journeys in terms of distance and even importance, Sophie knew that. Like Edmund Hillary reaching the summit of Everest or Neil Armstrong playing golf on the moon. Those were, she knew, difficult, almost impossible, and world-changing, humanity-inspiring journeys. However, she was also entirely convinced that never in the history of mankind had anyone taken a journey so tiring, depressing, and remorselessly irritating as the journey she was taking to Cornwall on that cold and rainy day.

A real test of human endurance, Sophie thought, was a daylong car drive with a car-phobic three-year-old, a know-it-all, often-annoyingly-correct six-year-old, and their long-lost, emotionally confused, irritatingly attractive father. And she had come to that conclusion only forty-five minutes into the trip.

It was dusk when they drove into St. Ives. The optimistically anticipated six-hour trip had stretched into an excruciating eight, and at last, the car was quiet. Izzy had finally fallen asleep about twenty minutes earlier, and Louis and Bella had fallen silent for an entirely different reason, Sophie guessed. As they descended into the heart of the town, past hotel after hotel, and a brace of B & Bs, all garnished with a procession of forlorn-looking palms bending in the wind, she glanced at Louis’s profile, occasionally highlighted by the beams of passing cars, and in the rearview mirror at Bella, who stared fixedly out the window. Both of them wore exactly the same expression, that of people watching the life they had once known and loved slip silently past their windows like a lost dream. Sophie knew all too well what Bella had lost, and as she watched Louis’s face, she realized his sense of loss was almost identical. He must have loved Carrie very much, she realized sharply. He probably still did.

“Louis,” Sophie asked, feeling awkward for breaking into his thoughts. “Have you got the directions to the B & B?” She had to repeat the question before he heard her voice and blinked at her.

“The directions? Oh, right. Yes, of course. Sorry, miles away.” He fished about in the plastic bag that he had between his feet and pulled them out. “Right, it’s on Porthminster Terrace, so left up Albert Road, that’s the next left, and then left again.”

Sophie nodded and, glancing to her right, saw the sea moving darkly in the gloom. “Oooh, look!” she exclaimed, by force of childhood habit. “There’s the sea!”

Izzy did not stir, and both Louis and Bella blinked blankly at the view. “Mmm,” they both said with identical laconic cadence. And then the car was silent once more.

Sophie looked around at the family room she was sharing with the girls. It wasn’t a bad room, it was clean, and once you got past the pinkness, the rose-patterned wallpaper with contrasting border and the lurid magenta candlewick bedspreads, it was quite pleasant.

“We’re less of a B and B and more of a boutique hotel,” Mrs. Alexander, the proprietor, had assured them as she showed them this room and Louis’s single next door.

“Oh?” Louis had said, looking around him with genuine interest. “What’s the difference then?”

Mrs. Alexander had seemed to purse her entire body from the lips down. “Well, I would have thought
that
was obvious,” she’d said.

Miraculously, Izzy had not woken as she was transferred from the car to the double bed. She didn’t even stir as Sophie gingerly undressed her and exchanged her pants for a pull-up nappy, deciding it was better to be safe than sorry with other people’s bed linen.

She carefully tucked Izzy into one side of the bed and looked up at Bella as she returned from the en suite bathroom already in her pajamas.

“You haven’t even eaten yet,” Sophie reminded her, glancing at her watch. It was only just six.

“But I had all those Pringles in the car,” Bella said. “Anyway, I’m tired. You don’t mind, do you?”

Sophie now considered herself experienced enough in child care to know that a tube of salt and vinegar Pringles did not constitute what Tess would have called a balanced meal. But she also knew that there was no point in forcing a tired child to stay up and eat broccoli.

“Of course not,” she said, pulling back the covers so that Bella could hop into bed, leaving the single free for her. She didn’t mind Bella’s early night exactly, but while having an actual bed to sleep in was a definite improvement, she had not foreseen the disadvantage of the enforced early bedtime brought about by sharing a room with two children under seven.

“Do you want a story?” she asked hopefully.

Bella shook her head and yawned. “Night,” she said, and she was instantly gone, as if she could not wait to escape to the refuge of sleep.

Sophie listened to Bella’s rhythmic breathing, complemented by Izzy’s squeaky snore, as she sat on her single bed in the dark and looked at the thin sliver of light that ran along the bottom of the door. She glanced at the luminous dial on her watch; she could either stay here and stare at what she supposed to be the ceiling for hours on end until she fell asleep or she could go and see Louis next door. It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with going to see Louis, or as if her going would have any special meaning or anything. It was just that the idea of going to visit him in his bedroom in a B & B in St. Ives felt rather strange. Mainly because, until very recently, he had been the archvillain in everybody’s life, including his own, but also because, once she was in his room, Sophie had no idea what on earth they would do for an entire evening, if it wasn’t to talk intensely and earnestly about the girls or Carrie. And Sophie knew that she, for one, didn’t have the energy to do that. But there was nothing else to do. With her hand on the doorknob, she paused, and then she turned around and crept into the small bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and hair in the twilight and risked the haphazard application of some clear lip gloss.

Louis seemed to have been expecting her; he smiled as he opened the door and stepped aside to let her into the narrow room. Sophie glanced around. His single bed was positioned against the wall that divided their bedrooms. Her bed, she realized, was in exactly the same position but on the other side of the wall, which for some reason that she didn’t want to dwell on, disconcerted her.

“Just in time.” Louis gestured at a tray of sandwiches and a pot of tea that balanced on a narrow dressing table. “I ordered us food. Apparently providing food in the evening is what makes the difference between a B & B and a boutique hotel.”

“Obviously,” Sophie said, smiling, partly to cover her surprise that Louis had not only been expecting her but also ordered her sandwiches. She found the plate of white triangular shapes with the crusts cut off curiously touching.

“I thought both the girls would be exhausted,” he said, repositioning the tray on his bed and pouring out two cups of tea. “But I got them extra sandwiches just in case. Bella asleep too?”

“Out like a light.” Sophie nodded. “Filled up with junk food.”

“I felt a bit guilty not being in there helping you, but well, I don’t expect Bella would have wanted me barging in, would she?”

He couldn’t help but let a hopeful note creep in, so Sophie just said, “She was really tired. Couldn’t get two words out of her. I know how she feels.” She laughed weakly, hoping he’d take the hint.

Louis nodded and sat down on the bed on one side of the tray, which Sophie took as an invitation to sit on the other side. He held out a cup of tea, which she took with both hands and sipped. Louis nodded at the TV that was positioned on a shelf on a wall opposite the bed.

“There’s quite a good film on,” he said and helped himself to a tuna sandwich.

It turned out that Sophie didn’t have to worry about what they would talk about because they didn’t talk at all really, except to make the odd comment about the film, the sandwiches, or the rather pungent plug-in air freshener that Louis finally had to banish to the hallway when the tuna started to taste of petunias. Instead of the intense and earnest discussion that Sophie had feared, time slipped by and their conversation rose and fell as easily and naturally as the tide against the shore.

The music to the ten o’clock news woke her, and she realized that she must have nodded off propped up against the wall on Louis’s bed and had probably snored and possibly dribbled.

“Fuck,” she said, sitting bolt upright and surreptitiously wiping her apparently dry chin just to be on the safe side. “Sorry.”

Louis smiled but did not take his eyes off the TV. “It’s cool,” he said. “Although I was wondering how we’d both fit into the bed if you didn’t wake up.” It was a casual remark, but it was still enough to make Sophie feel the heat prickle on her skin as she got a fleeting impression of what it
would
be like for both her and Louis to be closely entwined in that bed…Sophie wondered if he’d made the comment deliberately to rattle her and then dismissed the thought immediately. Of course he didn’t, she told herself. He had no clue that she was finding it increasingly difficult to be around him, he was just making conversation. She was the one blowing it all out of proportion.

It was classic behavior, Cal would have said.
Cal
would have said she was fixating again on a man she could never have, precisely because she could never have him. Because she preferred to torture herself with hopeless fantasies rather than risk anything messy and physical and real. Well, Cal might have been right, but if he knew how frightening it felt to be this close to the object of her attraction, then he would understand. It was simply better not to let it get out of hand.

“Utterly inappropriate,” Sophie accidentally said out loud.

Louis looked at her with a furrowed brow. “Pardon?” he said.

“Oh, nothing.” Sophie stood up, smoothing her tousled hair behind her shoulders and pulling her shirt down over her jeans. “Just that I should go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning then. We’re sticking to plan A, aren’t we?”

Louis nodded, but he looked hesitant, unsurprisingly, considering what constituted plan A.

“Louis, are you okay?” Sophie suddenly felt compelled to ask him, despite his obvious reluctance to talk about any of the reasons they were here. He shrugged and stood up, switching off the TV. Suddenly the small room was filled with him.

“I’m all right,” he said, looking down at Sophie. “Like you said, I’ve got to be, haven’t I? After all, I am the grown-up here and—” In the silent seconds of his pause, it seemed as if they simultaneously closed the gap between their bodies, just by the tiniest fraction. “And, well, I’m glad you’re here,” Louis finished. “Listen, are you bored of me thanking you yet?”

Her mouth formed half a smile. “Bored? Never,” Sophie said with fragile lightness. “I love gratitude. Bring it on.” Louis’s smile widened, and Sophie was sure that the oxygen levels in the room depleted.

“Well then. Thank you again,” he said, and without warning he bridged the remaining space between them in one swift move and left the remnants of a soft, warm kiss on her cheek almost before she knew what had happened.

“Right then,” Sophie said, her voice a decibel higher than usual. “Bedtime for me. See you in the morning. Night then!” And she closed Louis’s door behind her before she had finished the last word.

She stood for a moment in the hallway and studied the endlessly swirling pattern of the carpeted floor as she considered the phenomena she had just experienced. Taking a brief audit of her sexual history, Sophie worked out that she had had three lovers in her lifetime, one a boyfriend with whom she’d had the most sex to date. She was fairly certain she had been in love with him, which automatically made sex better according to popular belief. She and Alex had had all kinds of sex, all over her flat
and
his, which meant it must have been good sex, because everybody knows that sex that’s not in a bed is good sex. They had done at least three positions, and there had been orgasms. Alex had not always been there, but nevertheless, orgasms had been had while she had been seeing him. Whenever Eve had joked about her near-virginal frigidity, Sophie had confidently scoffed, remembering those orgasms. And as for Carrie’s schoolgirl-crude exclamations of what it meant to be truly turned on, Sophie had just laughingly agreed and secretly decided that that degree of sexual pleasure was merely fictional, the sort of thing that women’s magazines and slushy novels go on about all the time but that nobody really ever experiences. And nothing, not even Alex, had ever led her to change her opinion on that subject.

Until about two minutes ago, when her dead best friend’s husband had kissed her innocently on the cheek, and for the first time in her life, Sophie had felt something that she really could describe only as her knickers. Fizzing.

“Bollocks,” Sophie said.

She crept into the room she was sharing with Louis the irresponsible cheek kisser’s daughters and, undressing quickly, climbed into her single bed without even bothering to clean her teeth. “Damn,” Sophie cursed once more under her breath and yanked the bedspread over her head. She had been really looking forward to a good night’s sleep in an actual bed, and now when she finally had the prospect of one, she wouldn’t have time to do any sleeping. But it looked like the way Louis made her feel was more than just her usual safe, unrequited crushes. It was hot, intense, and very real.

No, she wouldn’t have any sleep tonight. She’d have to spend all night lying awake and worrying.