21. “Six, I think”
“Six, I think”
Vicky
I bit my lip as I stared at Mike across my kitchen island. He was in only his thermal because I was wearing his flannel shirt.
I had no idea if it was okay to continue to steal his clothing, but when he’d been brushing his teeth this morning, I’d picked it up and tried it on, wanting to be surrounded by the woodsy Mike smell and feel the soft material against my skin.
He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, when I started to take it off, he’d yanked it back up onto my shoulders and buttoned the front, telling me he liked me in his clothes.
Then, before I could put my leggings on, he’d grabbed my hand and taken me downstairs. So here I was, in just my knickers and a huge flannel shirt, watching the most beautiful man I’d ever seen prowl around my kitchen.
“I want to cook for you, love, but you appear to be missing a toaster?”
I slipped off the stool he’d put me on and pulled open the cupboard doors that my toaster and kettle lived behind.
His eyebrows went up, and he smiled.
“You hide your appliances?” His tone was teasing.
Lottie had helped me to identify when someone was teasing and when they were being mean. I wasn’t always that great at it, but I was much more proficient than I used to be at telling the difference.
“I really don’t like clutter.” This was an understatement, but I didn’t want to elaborate more than I had to.
He turned away from the toaster and stepped into my space, giving the brief pause he always did in order to warn me, then gathering me in his arms and kissing my nose.
“I kind of realised that when I came back to bed last night, and my clothes were folded on your chair, socks too.”
“I can be a bit obsessive,” I whispered. The socks had definitely given me away. I just hoped that discovering all my quirks all at once wasn’t enough to put him off.
He shrugged. “Me too. Maybe not about socks and toasters, but definitely when I’m working on a piece. Obsessed is putting it lightly. Right, let me make you food, woman. How do you like your eggs?”
I bit my lip again. “Mike, I’m really specific about eggs. It’s… complicated.”
His arms gave me a squeeze, and his voice softened. “How about you show me, and then I’m ready for next time.”
At the mention of a next time, I stared up at him and smiled a huge smile.
An almost fierce expression crossed his features before he gave me a brief, hard kiss, another arm squeeze, and then let me go to start the eggs.
As I was getting everything out for them, I asked Mike how he wanted his eggs, and he just told me he’d have them the same as me.
That level of flexibility always intrigued me.
He didn’t even know how I was going to cook my eggs: how runny the yolk would be, how brown I’d toast the bread.
I had to have poached eggs. They needed to be cooked for exactly two minutes and thirty-five seconds.
The bread had to be wholemeal, but not seeded, and toasted for one minute and ten seconds, exactly, in a pre-heated toaster.
“Hold on, let me write this down,” Mike said as I rattled off what I was doing. “And what do you mean by a pre-heated toaster?”
My face felt hot, and I ducked my head to avoid his eyes. “I turn it on for thirty seconds so that it’s hot when the toast goes in.”
I continued avoiding eye contact as I bustled around the kitchen. When I eventually presented him with poached eggs on toast and sat next to him on the kitchen stool, I just stared down at my plate, my appetite gone now that I felt weird.
Was pre-heating your toaster weird?
“Hey.” I glanced at Mike who was now turned fully towards me, but then ducked my head again, allowing my hair to block him from view.
But in typical Mike fashion, he just put his hand on the back of my stool and turned me to face him by spinning the seat, then used his other hand to tuck my hair behind my ear. “What’s up? Why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m a little bit… specific about food,” I said. “It’s not an ice princess thing. It’s not me being spoiled or deliberately awkward. I just?—”
“Vicky, you’re making your breakfast in your kitchen,” he said. “You can be as specific as you like.” His voice softened then. “And baby, I’m sorry I called you a princess. I didn’t know you then, and I made assumptions. You know I don’t think that now, right?”
He paused for a moment as an expression I couldn’t read crossed his face.
“Vicky, you lost weight after I was a dick to you, and Ollie had to come and find you under that bloody coffee table. I will never forgive myself for that, but I’m going to do everything I can now to sort it.
I don’t want to stress you out again. I would never think you were being spoiled or awkward. ”
I managed a small smile. “Mike, you’ve got to admit, I can be a little bit awkward.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think so.”
I sighed. “I have a colour chart for my tea preference according to time of day, Mike.”
“Yes, well if anything, that makes you less awkward,” he said casually. “If only everyone would do that, a lot less tea would go to waste.”
I blinked at him. “I think that too,” I whispered. “I told Lottie that, and she assured me that most people wouldn’t agree. I’m not allowed to bring it out at meetings.”
He frowned. “You take your chart wherever you like, love,” he said in a grumpy voice. “You should have the tea you bloody well want.”
I put down my fork and turned to him on my stool. “I really really like you, Mike Mayweather,” I told him, and he smiled, his white teeth against his tanned skin and beard, so beautiful I felt stunned for a moment.
“I really, really like you too, baby,” he said in a low voice that I seemed to feel everywhere.
Heat rose to my cheeks, and I bit my lip.
His gaze dropped to my mouth and then he cleared his throat and shook his head as if to clear it.
“Listen, eat your eggs, woman,” he said, his voice now hoarse as he turned away from me. “I don’t want to be the reason you lose any more weight.”
“It wasn’t just what happened that day,” I blurted out, not wanting Mike to carry all this guilt anymore. “It wasn’t just your rejection. There was other…stuff, and, well… it wasn’t just because of you that I stopped eating.”
Mike stared at me for a long moment. “You’ll tell me the other stuff when you’re ready?” he asked, and I was glad he wasn’t going to push this now.
“Okay,” I said in a small voice. Then he kissed my temple, gave me a brief side hug, and just like that, my appetite was back.
Or it was until my phone started ringing, and I looked at the display. It was as if I’d conjured her up just by mentioning the other stuff that had stressed me out.
Knowing that she would only keep ringing until I picked up, I decided to just get it over with.
“Hi, Mum,” I said, pushing what was left of my poached eggs on toast away.
“You need to ring the florist to pay for the arrangements,” she snapped.
This was the first time she’d spoken to me in over six weeks. No hello, no asking me how I was.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But Mum, I already paid for the flowers. The florist invoiced me last week. It was?—”
“We’ve decided that we want both the table displays and the taller orchid cascades. It’ll be an extra five thousand.”
“Mum,” I said quietly, aware Mike was watching me with a curious expression on his face. “Is Gareth aware that?—?”
“Don’t you stick your fucking nose in with Gareth,” Mum semi-shouted.
Mike stiffened next to me, clearly having heard her shrill voice.
I sighed. Gareth would be deeply unhappy if he knew how much extra was being spent on the wedding behind his back, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“Okay, fine. I’ll call them tomorrow.”
“And don’t wear anything to upstage your sister.”
I blinked. “I’m not going to?—”
“I won’t have it, young lady.”
“Mum, I paid for her wedding dress. It cost ten thousand pounds, and it’s Oscar de la Renta. Nobody is upstaging Rebecca. It would be impossible.”
“Just don’t wear anything flashy.”
“Listen, do you want me at the house before the ceremony? Gareth said that?—”
“No. The house is only for the bridesmaids and close family.”
“Right,” I whispered. “I’ll… um, see you at the church then?”
“Hmm,” Mum hummed, non-committedly.
“Listen, Mum,” I said, trying for a completely neutral tone. “Honestly, if you’d rather I wasn’t there, I don’t mind. I know I annoy you and Rebecca, and?—”
“Oh, God. Stop with the martyr stuff again. Spare me, please. You have to be at the bloody wedding. It’ll look strange if you’re not. Just try not to speak to people too much. And for God’s sake, don’t mention hedgehogs, or any other of your little obsessions.”
I nodded, even as my heart sank. I was really hoping that she’d let me out of going.
But she needed me there. People knew she had two daughters.
She was right; it would look strange if I wasn’t at my sister’s wedding.
But the thought of a whole day with people who didn’t like me made me feel like there was a heavy weight on my chest, and for a moment it was hard to catch my breath.
Rebecca’s friends had never liked me, either. They teased me, but not the good kind of teasing. Even as a child, I knew it wasn’t the good kind.
“Okay,” I whispered, but she had already put the phone down. My hand was shaking when I transferred my phone onto the granite in front of me.
“That didn’t seem like a very fun conversation,” Mike said cautiously.
I shrugged. “It’s about my half-sister’s wedding.”
“I didn’t know you had another sister.”
“Mum married Gareth three months after she had me. They had Rebecca a year after that.”
“Was your dad ever with your mum? I know he left Margot after you were born. He never married your mum?”
“Oh no, dad hated her. He never lived with us. I was a mistake. He told me that I was her attempt to trap him, but he wasn’t having any of it.”
“He told you that?”
Mike sounded angry now. Maybe this wasn’t such a good subject.
“How old were you when he told you that?”
“Six, I think.”
“Your father told his six-year-old daughter that she was a mistake, and the result of an attempt to trap him?”
Oh dear. His voice was rising now. I didn’t want Mike getting angry, so I told him the facts in an effort to calm him down.
“Well, it was the truth, and Dad knew I liked the truth, and that I wanted people to be honest in their dealings with me. It was only facts he was relaying to me.”
Mike closed his eyes slowly and took a deep breath in and out through his nose. “You don’t relay those kind of facts to a fucking six-year-old, Vicky.”
“No, you don’t understand. He?—”
“How old were you when you stopped speaking?”
What on earth? Where had that question come from?
I blinked at him.
“How old, Vicky?”
“I was six,” I said quietly, and he stared at me. I shook my head, putting what he was implying together. “No, that wasn’t the trigger.”
His eyebrows went up. “Worse shit than that went down when you were six? Is that what you’re saying?”
I stiffened.
Yes, worse shit had gone down when I was six. But I wasn’t going to go into that.
“I don’t want to speak about my childhood anymore.”
He watched me as I sat stiffly on the stool for a moment, and tracked the movement of my hand as I tucked some hair behind my ear. I brought it back to my lap when I realised it was still shaking.
“Okay, love,” he said softly. “Eat your eggs.”
I grimaced when I looked at the now-cold eggs. “I…um, well…”
“I’ll make you some more,” he told me, jumping off the stool.
“No, it’s fine. I can?—”
“Vicky, are you going to be able to eat a cold poached egg? Tell me the truth.”
“No,” I whispered, feeling like a fusspot, but that was the honest truth.
“Well then,” he said simply.
“But—” I was about to tell him that I’d do it. He might have watched me, but he didn’t know all the exact timings and?—
“Don’t worry,” he said with a grin, holding up his phone. He’d typed a whole paragraph of notes and timings in his notes app with the title, Vicky’s Eggs.
I smiled and felt my eyes sting, which was ridiculous. It was just eggs.
“Thanks,” I said in a hoarse voice.
He gave a firm nod and set about making my second breakfast.
“When is that wedding?” he asked casually.
“W-what?”
“Your sister’s wedding that you were talking about with your mum. When is it?”
“Oh… next Saturday.”
“Right, what time am I picking you up?”
My mouth dropped open.
“Picking me up?” My voice was high-pitched with shock now.
“For the wedding.”
“You’re picking me up for the wedding?”
“Baby,” he said firmly. “If you think that after overhearing that little chat with your mum, I’m letting you go to that wedding alone, you’re crazy.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that Mike might be willing to take me to Rebecca’s wedding. That weight on my chest lifted at the thought of having him by my side.
“Vicky?” He’d paused what he was doing to look at me. “You okay?”
“Thank you,” I said, putting as much feeling as I could into the words which came out a little choked as I had to force them past my tight throat.
He stared at me for a moment with a fierce expression before he put the pan down and strode around to my side of the kitchen island. He turned my chair towards him in that bossy way of his and kissed me. When he pulled away to rest his forehead on mine, his expression was soft.
“That’s okay, love.”