Chapter Seven
They finished their coffees and then dispersed.
Maddie went to her bedroom to shower and change out of her pyjamas, while Emma and Ben migrated to the living room with Benjamin, and Autumn and Marley stayed in the kitchen to call Bluebell and Pip and tell them the news.
Before they went their separate ways, James bid them all goodbye and said he’d go home, if that was all right, and he’d see them all tomorrow.
Emma told him to take tomorrow off, too, and they’d see him the day after.
James’ eyes flitted to Maddie and then back to Emma and he nodded, thanking her gratefully.
With that he was gone. Maddie was surprised to find she felt relieved.
Every time she’d looked towards him, since their fumble in the kitchen earlier, she’d found his eyes on her, and she was worried he was making it obvious to her family that something had happened between them.
She really didn’t want them to notice. They loved James, they’d get over-excited, get involved and make her feel weird.
Maddie hopped into the shower and stood perfectly still beneath the steaming hot water.
She wasn’t sure what to do next. She’d already decided she too would take the day off, but because she hadn’t had a day off in months, she’d forgotten what it felt like to relax.
She cast her mind back several months, to a time before renovations and grand plans.
Back then she’d spent her free days reading in the garden.
Sometimes she’d wandered idly down to the local café or pub for a change of scenery and a break from her parents.
The ice had melted, but even still it was too cold outside to face the twenty-minute walk to the village. Plus, she was too tired.
She got dry in the shower cubicle to protect herself from the harshness of the cold marble bathroom floor and, without much thought, got back into her pyjamas and climbed into bed.
She really wanted to sleep, but the messiness of her bedroom was distracting her by reminding her of everything she still needed to sort out, so she clambered out of bed and trudged across the corridor to the spare room.
James’ room, technically, though he’d only used it once.
Maddie often slept in here when she was feeling restless.
It had never felt wrong to her before because the room had been unused, but it felt a little inappropriate now.
Still, she slipped beneath the duvet, adamant she’d rest there just for a moment or two.
She turned onto her side and caught a whiff of a familiar scent.
It took her a moment to realise the smell was James.
Her insides lurched involuntarily at the memory of the weight of him pressing her against the kitchen wall.
She groaned and rolled onto her back, trying and failing to move her nose away from the smell.
Her fingertips and toes tingled with desire.
Maddie was suddenly wide awake. Her heart was beating hard with longing.
Her bruised lips throbbed with want. She rolled her eyes at herself and gave her head a little shake.
What on Earth was going on? She had so much to do, so many things she needed to focus on.
She hadn’t even liked James this time yesterday, and now she was lying in his bed, sniffing his pillow and pining for him. She felt ridiculous.
Carrying on with James was a really bad idea.
She had no time to build a ‘happily ever after’ right now and neither did he.
He’d be leaving the country in just a few months and she had a recovery retreat to build and open.
This was the absolute worst time to start messing around with a man she barely knew.
Which was exactly why she wanted to do it.
She felt like she never got to have any fun anymore outside of her role as daughter, sister, aunty.
She felt like she was forgetting who she was.
This silliness could be something she did just for her.
Something out of character, something the typically sensible and considered version of herself would never do.
Plus, it had been a really long time since there had been a man in her life.
She tried to work it out in her head. Five years?
Her last sexual dalliance had been thoroughly unsatisfying, as had most of her conquests before that.
There’d been a couple of men she’d liked in her teens, but they’d been as young and inexperienced as she had been.
In her twenties, she’d dated a man called Nathan.
They had never been official — he refused to put a label on things and she’d been too young and inexperienced to see that as the red flag it was.
They’d had lots of sex but he’d had no idea how to give her an orgasm and she’d had no clue how to direct him.
In fact, she’d spent a long time thinking she’d probably had one, until she’d spoken about it with Bluebell and her sister had informed her that she had not, in fact, reached climax.
Bluebell had bought her a vibrator the following Christmas, and Maddie had taught herself about pleasure.
She’d tried to bring it into her relationship, but the toy made Nathan feel inadequate.
She’d tried to give him pointers on the things she liked, but he had taken no notice.
In the end, their passionless relationship fizzled out.
Six months later, she’d gone to bed with a man who’d taken her on a date.
It was the worst sex she’d ever had. No foreplay, two minutes or less of thrusting, then it was over.
Her lover had shown no interest in satisfying her, so Maddie had gotten herself off beside him in the bed.
Afterwards, he’d texted her to tell her that her actions had made him feel like his skills were insufficient.
Maddie had tried to reason with him, but he’d told her he wasn’t interested in seeing her again.
Two months later, he’d drunk-dialled her and invited her to his house for a bootie call.
She’d declined, so he’d called her ugly and said she was shit in the sack.
She had slept with other men here and there, but none had bothered to make sure she was satisfied.
Five years ago, deeply depressed after losing Bowie and sick of trying to find a man who cared a jot about any part of her, beyond what she could do for them personally, she’d resolved to stop bothering.
It wasn’t because she believed the guy who said she was bad in bed, nor was it because she didn’t want to have sex.
She had needs and desires like everyone else.
It was just that she’d been busy with her grieving family.
Plus, most of the men she met could hardly hold a conversation with her that wasn’t small talk, and she knew herself well enough to know that she probably needed more than that.
She wished she could be more like Bluebell, who’d learned to separate sex from feelings and found it easy to fish out men who would consider her needs, but that wasn’t who she was.
So relationships and all the fun that came with them were deprioritised and then fell off the agenda completely, and Maddie had been fine with that. Sex with a specific human had hardly crossed her mind in all that time. Until now.
Desperate for an explanation, she took some time to consider why this might be happening to her.
She wondered if it was a weird reaction to Autumn’s and Marley’s engagement.
Perhaps romance was catching. Or maybe it was the impending return of Bluebell.
Maddie’s sister would be home in nine days and she always accidentally made Maddie feel like she was thoroughly boring.
Bluebell was the personification of ‘main character energy’.
She would crash home in a whirlwind and bring with her enough melodrama and theatrics for an eight-episode Netflix series.
Or perhaps Maddie was — and this one scared her the most — lonely.
Terribly lonely. Maybe she was reaching for the first young, good-looking, eligible man she’d laid eyes on for a while because her mum had her dad, Marley had Autumn, Pip and Bluebell were off doing God knows what with God knows who, and she was the only one on her own.
She had to accept it was a real possibility, and probably the most likely scenario.
She spent the next half hour wondering what James was getting out of this, aside from the obvious physical release that came from having sex with a woman, of course.
He was devilishly handsome and had admitted he enjoyed one-night stands on a relatively frequent basis, so why was he bothering himself seducing her?
Maddie was no longer prone to ripping apart her appearance — she’d spent many hours doing that when she was younger and had grown out of it as she aged — but she still considered herself average at best. At the very least, she was sure he could pull far more attractive women than her.
What was he thinking, this man who’d pressed his erection against her and moaned with such soul it had almost tipped her over the edge?
Perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe he just wanted to fuck his boss, or fuck any woman, for that matter.
He’d said he did this often, but ‘it never felt like this before’, Maddie reminded herself.
It was feasible he too was caught up in the drama of Marley and Autumn.
Maybe he saw her as a cold, strong, independent challenge, or — and this was her worst-case scenario when James’ motivations were considered separate from her own — perhaps he thought he actually liked her.
She did not have time for that, and neither did he.