Chapter 12
Rachel
‘It’s the sort of thing my mother would have done, you know.’
Josh prongs a chip with a wooden fork. ‘What is?’
‘Taking that pill,’ I say, flicking a shard of batter on to the shingle for the gulls.
Dad has told me Mum was always trying to jump-start her feelings, endorphin her ennui away.
She liked to drink, and gamble. She once bought a stake in a bar – an inordinate amount of money for two people on average incomes trying to raise a child – without consulting my father.
An investment, she insisted with a jutting chin, which was when the shouting started.
Neither Dad nor I were surprised when the whole venture purportedly got mothballed not long after she left us.
Josh and I have come to the south coast for the early bank holiday, to a cosy little B how do we know if pregnancy would even be an option? And, if it was, how safe would the baby be?
I climb off the bed, take a single step over to him. I’m desperate for comfort perhaps; I don’t know.
He puts his hands to my hips, then nudges up my T-shirt to expose the flesh of my midriff, dipping to kiss it once, twice. His breath is wet and warm against my skin.
‘I’m sorry, Rach. I wish I could just . . . not be afraid. I wish we didn’t have to think about any of this stuff.’
I lower my lips to his head, drop a kiss into his dark jumble of hair. ‘Then let’s not. Let’s stop talking, or thinking.’
With a nod, he pushes me silently back on to the bed, the mattress so tiny it can barely hold us both.
The room is snug enough that we’ve been colliding with the furniture, and each other, the whole time we’ve been here.
He eases down my shorts, and then my underwear, then his own.
And soon he is inside me on a bed that rocks and creaks comically in a way that would ordinarily make us laugh, and perhaps relocate to the bathroom, or, failing that, the floor.
But not tonight. Tonight, we make love as though there is something at stake.
Breathless and urgent, as you might if you’d just been told an asteroid was on course to obliterate earth. As if it might be the last time ever.