The Pieces of You and Me

by Rachel Burton

  He laughed, and I watched as he followed Captain into the house ahead of me, ducking as he stepped through the front door. He turned around to look at me and as our eyes met I knew that tonight was inevitable. Of course it was. What happened tonight was always going to happen eventually. I couldn’t have avoided it if I’d tried.

  Dinner was delicious. Rupert had come a long way in the cooking department since university, when he’d lived primarily on cheese on toast. We chatted amiably like old friends, and any awkwardness between us was gone. But the electricity, the spark, that thing Gemma kept talking about, was still there, and it felt like the beginning of something.

  After we’d eaten we went through to the living room. Like the kitchen it was cosy but tiny, overly full of furniture and with books lining every wall. Most of them were textbooks, great tomes on the history of politics – books that bored me rigid but that I knew Rupert loved. There were a few shelves of novels too, mostly crime and thrillers, including two books that I knew very well, nestled next to a very old copy of The Bachman Books. It had always driven me mad the way Rupert never kept his books in alphabetical order but my heart skipped a beat to see mine there on his shelf, looking so well read.

  Rupert poured me another glass of wine that I didn’t really want, and put some music on, setting his iPod to shuffle. He sat down next to me and reached for my hand. I wrapped my fingers around his, squeezing gently.

  ‘It’s always been you, Jessie,’ he said.

  I watched as he closed his eyes slowly, watched the twitch in his jaw. I’d seen him do that so many times before – the first time he told me he loved me, the day he walked away from me at Heathrow ten years ago.

  ‘I’ve only ever loved you,’ he said, opening his eyes.

  As he did the music changed and I heard the opening notes to The Beatles’ ‘Eight Days a Week’ and suddenly it was 2002 all over again and we were lying naked in his bed. I knew I still loved him. I knew I had never stopped.

  ‘I love you too,’ I whispered. ‘Eight days a week.’ My lips were so close to his, my hands already raking through his hair.

  We barely made it to the bedroom, barely made it out of our clothes – those we did manage to discard lay scattered on the staircase. Afterwards, tangled and breathless, wrapped up in each other at the edge of his bed, he kissed me again and I laughed softly into his mouth. My eyes were closed to absorb the feel of him and for a moment I didn’t feel scared anymore.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his breath on my neck. ‘That wasn’t quite how I wanted it to be …’

  ‘You were planning this?’ I asked, feigning shock.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t planning what just happened,’ he said, that blush colouring his cheekbones again and transporting me to the past. ‘I’d wanted it to be a bit more romantic than that!’

  I smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I replied. ‘You’ve got all night to make it up to me.’

  I heard his breath catch in his throat.

  ‘I hope I’ve got the rest of my life to make it up to you,’ he said.

  Later, I thought about all the times before when I’d lain in his bed, in his arms. I never believed anything could be so bad that it could come between us. But something had been that bad and, for perhaps the first time in my life, I realised that the thing that had broken us was nobody’s fault at all.

  ‘Do you remember the last time we lay like this?’ he said as though reading my mind.

  It had been the night before we buried my father. After that night I had been too hurt and too broken to speak and the energy I did have had been split between Mum and salvaging my degree. I had all but forgotten about Rupert. I had forgotten that he was breaking and that he had final exams too. It hadn’t occurred to me then, I don’t think, that he wouldn’t get special dispensation for his results. It had been my father who had died, not his. At the time I had thought he hadn’t cared enough to find me, to spend time with me. I had been so wrong about everything back then.

  ‘I should never have shut you out after Dad’s funeral,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. I think I’m only just beginning to realise how much my actions triggered everything that happened.’

  ‘What happened was way outside of anything either you or I could control,’ Rupert replied. ‘And we were both far too young and inexperienced to cope with it. I should have been there for you, but instead I buried myself in my studies.’

  I turned around then to face him, his arms still around my waist, and I saw the tears in his eyes. He had loved my father so much. I reached over to touch him, catching a tear before it fell.

  ‘I know how much you loved Dad,’ I said.

  He blinked, closing his eyes for a little longer than necessary. ‘It’s OK, Jessie,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter now. All that matters to me is that we’ve found each other again.’

  It was a huge step to talk about this, even though we’d exchanged only a few words. Neither of us had ever really acknowledged the fact that we had stopped sleeping together after my father’s funeral. We had certainly never talked about it. Instead we had spent that summer planning the future, our wedding and our move to London. We had pretended that everything was going to be all right, that things were perfectly normal between us despite our lack of intimacy, until the day that I overheard Rupert talking to his sister, the day I thought I’d lost him forever.

  As I drifted off to sleep next to him, our limbs entwined, I knew we had both taken a leap into the dark and I knew then that eventually I would have to tell him everything.

  18

  JESS

  I woke up in an empty bed on Sunday morning, the sheets on his side crumpled, a note and a clean T-shirt lying on his pillow.

  Gone to walk Captain and buy breakfast, the note read. It was scribbled in the spidery handwriting that I could still recognise in a heartbeat, even after all these years. Make yourself at home.

  I lay back on the pillows and stretched, thinking about last night, sensing the smell of him on my skin, on the bed linen. Thinking about how his body had hardly changed from the young man he used to be, a little more filled out, more muscular, but still so perfectly him – his stomach still hard and flat, his arms and legs a little too long. I’d felt momentarily embarrassed to undress fully in front of him, my body still bearing the signs of illness, too thin, too pale. ‘You’re still the most beautiful woman in the world to me,’ he’d said.

  I hadn’t had sex in five years and I felt as though every synapse in my body was on fire. I was tired and achy, but the long sleep had helped, and I felt a lot better than I thought I would. As I lay there reflecting on the previous evening, I realised that last night with Rupert hadn’t hurt me. His touch hadn’t irritated my skin; his energy hadn’t drained mine. The few times Dan and I had attempted anything intimate after I first got ill, I’d been in too much pain to do anything. I’d felt as though my nerves were on the outside and that the slightest touch was agony. It broke us both in the end.

  Five years later and here I was. I smiled to myself at how far I’d come.

  I reached over for the T-shirt and pulled it on, rolled out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom. The mirror was still steamed up – Rupert must have woken up and showered while I slept. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept that long or that deeply. Sleep had eluded me for years, since I’d first become ill; always exhausted, never able to sleep.

  He’d left a clean towel in the bathroom for me and I turned on the shower, standing under the hot water and letting it soothe my aching muscles. My stomach turned over as I remembered why I ached so much. I lathered his shower gel into my skin, inhaling the warm musky smell that reminded me of him.

  I wondered if we should be doing this, whatever ‘this’ was. There was a chance that Caitlin was right, that this was all too much too soon, or certainly too much before we’d talked about all the things we needed to talk about. I hadn’t been honest about my illness and I hadn’t told Rupert about Dan. I was also pretty s
ure he wasn’t being honest with me about why he was back in England. But last night we had both unravelled; we’d acknowledged something we never had before and it felt more important than any of that other stuff. And I knew that it was a precursor to us both being honest. However hard that might be.

  As I wrapped the towel around me, I heard him come back in – his key in the lock, Captain’s claws on the wood floors. I walked back into the bedroom and heard him downstairs, talking softly to Captain as he fed him. I listened to him come up the stairs and I turned towards him as he stood in the bedroom door, staring at me.

  ‘I was going to ask if you wanted coffee with your croissants,’ he said as he walked towards me, already pulling his shirt over his head. ‘But it can wait.’

  ‘I’ve got a book to write,’ I said, without much real protest as he pulled me into his arms.

  He unravelled my towel and let it fall to the floor. ‘So have I,’ he replied.

  *

  Afterwards we lay eating croissants in bed. I watched him throw crumbs at Captain who was lying on the floor next to him.

  ‘Should you be giving him that?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably not, but it’ll keep him off the bed. I think he’s a bit jealous.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of you.’ Rupert laughed. ‘You’re in his sleeping spot.’

  ‘Does he want me to leave?’ I smiled.

  He turned to me, his face soft but serious. ‘It doesn’t matter what he wants. What do you want?’

  ‘I do have work to do,’ I began.

  ‘So do I,’ he interrupted. ‘But I’d still rather you stayed.’

  I smiled then, relaxing. ‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ I said.

  ‘Good, because you’re a much better bed companion than him,’ Rupert whispered, the corners of his mouth twitching, his fingers tracing my shoulders. ‘Less hairy and you smell fresher.’

  ‘You must have had other, less hairy bed companions over the years?’ I asked, trying to make the question sound light-hearted.

  He paused, looking at me. ‘It’s just been Captain and me for three years now,’ he said. His eyes didn’t leave mine. I knew he was telling the truth. I tried to hide my surprise. ‘I never had much luck with girls after you,’ he went on. ‘I’m not sure I really saw the point. You ruined me, Jessie.’ I thought about Camilla and how she finished their affair after only a few weeks, about how he hadn’t known she was going to be at Harvard. Why hadn’t I believed him at the time? Why had we thrown so much away?

  But I didn’t say anything as he began to draw slow circles on the bare skin of my stomach with his fingers. If I mentioned Camilla, I’d ruin the moment and I’d have to talk about Dan. Rupert’s gaze moved away from mine and then he asked about me, about my past relationships.

  I knew this question was coming and I knew that it was time to tell him the truth, to come clean about Dan. I briefly considered not telling him at all. As far as I knew Dan had never come back to England. As far as I knew he was still travelling the world with his camera slung round his neck, flirting with anyone who’d look at him.

  ‘I split up with someone five years ago,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Was it bad?’ he asked, as though he could tell from the way I said it that it was.

  ‘The circumstances around it were bad,’ I replied. The story of me and Dan was so tied up with the story of my illness and I realised too late that it was almost impossible to tell part of the story without telling the other. I’d worked so hard at moving on from what had happened and I hated thinking about it, let alone talking about it. But I had to try, one step at a time. I wouldn’t be the person I was now if I hadn’t been through that.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Rupert asked.

  I shook my head against the pillow. ‘Not really, but I do have to tell you something.’ I felt his hand stop moving on my stomach; I felt him prop himself up next to me.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It was Dan Kelly.’

  ‘You dated Dan,’ he said. It didn’t sound like a question.

  ‘For four years. I was trying to move on after you left.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Did it work?’ he asked. ‘Did it help you move on?’ His voice was cold suddenly as he moved across the bed away from me.

  ‘Not really. Not in the end.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something at Gemma’s wedding?’ he asked. ‘You must have known he worked for National Geographic.’

  I nodded. ‘It was getting that gig that split us up.’ It was more complicated than that, of course, but one step at a time.

  ‘He dumped you for a job?’ Rupert asked. I wanted to remind him that he dumped me for a PhD, but I didn’t because that was more complicated as well.

  ‘At the wedding,’ I said instead, ‘I had no idea this would happen. I had no idea how you still felt about me. I didn’t think it mattered.’

  ‘I kissed you, Jessie – wasn’t that enough of a clue?’

  I looked away.

  ‘Was all of this before or after you got glandular fever?’

  ‘After,’ I replied.

  ‘So he dumped you for a job when you were sick. Jesus.’ Rupert sank back against the pillows. I wanted to explain what really happened. I should never have tried to tell him half the story, but I still wasn’t ready to talk about my illness because I felt that could end things before they had begun. Judging by the look on Rupert’s face that had happened anyway.

  He flung back the sheets then and pulled himself out of bed.

  ‘Dan bloody Kelly,’ he muttered as he walked away. A moment later I heard the bathroom door slam behind him and all the hope I had felt after our conversation the night before slipped away.

  … It was always going to be Classics. Other than you, Classics was the great love of my life. From the moment we did that first project on the Roman Empire in our last term at school together when we were seven, I was hooked.

  You thought it was boring beyond belief, throwing your books across the room and demanding to know who cared about these ancient dead people anyway. Years later, when you were studying A-level Latin and annoyed that I was so much better at it than you, I reminded you of this. Why did you care about these ancient dead people anyway?

  ‘I don’t,’ you said. ‘But it’ll get me into Cambridge, so help me, will you?’

  It was the only thing you ever asked me for help with. Part of me was delighted that there was finally something that I was better at than you, but part of me didn’t want to help you because I wanted to keep it to myself. Besides, you were only doing it because your father told you to, because it would look good on your Oxbridge application. I wanted you to do something for yourself, just for once. To stop following your father’s pre-ordained plan.

  By that point I’d completely dismissed Cambridge as an option, taking my place to study Classics at UCL instead. I was never sure how you felt about that. You said you understood, but your eyes told me something different – especially when you found out Dan was going to be in London too.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ you said as the summer came to close. ‘We’re so good when we’re together.’

  I looked at you then, so different to the boy you had been even two years before when you’d first kissed me on that bench by the river. I didn’t feel as though I had changed at all but I could see that you had. Two years of battling with your father had started to sharpen your soft edges.

  ‘Do you feel different to who you were two summers ago?’ I asked.

  You shook your head. Maybe we never feel different because we live with ourselves every moment.

  ‘Don’t fight with your dad all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s not worth it.’ Even though you were only eighteen I could already see the ghosts of worry etched in your face.

  ‘He needs to understand that what I want isn’t always the same as what he wants. He can’t keep us apart, Jessie. I won’t let him. Your dad never c
omes between us.’

  My dad might never have come between us, but that didn’t stop him worrying – even though the worry wasn’t good for his heart.

  ‘He treats you well?’ Dad had asked when I first told him about you and me.

  ‘Of course he does,’ I’d replied. ‘It’s Rupert!’

  He’d smiled. ‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘But you’re my daughter, Jess, and fond as I am of Rupert, if he ever hurts you or makes you feel uncomfortable …’ He had paused then, looking quite uncomfortable himself. ‘Well, you will let me know, won’t you, sweetheart?’

  I’d nodded, baffled by the conversation and he had kissed the top of my head. Later, Mum had explained what he’d meant, even though I’d known really.

  ‘You’ll always be his little girl,’ she’d said. ‘No matter how old you are. You’re the centre of his world and he’ll never really trust any man with you – not even Rupert.’ And Mum had laughed even though I’d known it was true.

  On our last night together, before I went to London and you moved into your rooms at Trinity College, you asked me to tell you a story, something Classical. We lay curled up together on your bed and I told you my favourite story from Plato’s Symposium. There was a time, so the story went, when the original inhabitants of the earth were round creatures with four hands and four feet who were arrogant and frequently attacked the gods. To punish them, Zeus hurled down thunderbolts to split them apart. Each creature now roamed the earth looking for the other half of its whole.

  ‘How lucky we are,’ you said when I’d finished. ‘To have always known where our other half was.’

  But even so I needed to get away. I needed to get away from you for a little while. I needed to be Jess Clarke, not Jessie, the love of Rupert Tremayne’s life. Not that I had a problem with that, just that it would be interesting to be with people who didn’t know you. I never told you that though. I never told you I needed to get away from you …