It was still dark when Sophie woke.
For a moment she lay there waiting for her eyes to adjust as a thin line that ran around the doorframe cast a sliver of light into the room. For a moment, still warmed and comforted by sleep, she stared at the door, trying to work out how it had moved from its previous position.
And then she remembered she was in Louis’s room.
Sophie did not leap out of bed, partly because she did not want to wake Louis but also because she discovered that her limbs were so tangled in his that it seemed impossible to move. She lay still, staring into the dark, listening to her heart thumping in her chest. Piece by piece, everything that had happened came back to her in a series of jolting and shocking tableaux.
The moment they had returned to the B & B. A second’s hesitation before they’d crossed the doorstep. Their silent ascent to Louis’s room, not looking at each other as they climbed the stairs, their fingers just touching on the handrail. Louis looking over his shoulder at her as he unlocked his door. Sophie standing perfectly still with her ear pressed to her and the children’s door, looking at the pointed, scuffed toes of her pink knee-high boots—now water-stained and dirty—as she’d waited, holding her breath, for a small voice to call out her name. Not knowing if she’d wanted to hear that voice or not.
Sophie felt again the knot of anticipation that had clenched her stomach into a fist as Louis had held out his hand and she’d taken it, and then…
She remembered his kisses all over her face and her neck, in her hair and across her shoulders. Their clothes somehow disintegrating, the heat his body gave off a moment before his skin met hers. The touch of his hands on her breasts, then his lips and teeth. Her own hands exploring the curve of his waist, the length of his thighs. Feeling him harden against the soft cushion of her belly. Feeling him shudder when she touched him and kissed him. Feeling him moving inside of her, experiencing every tiny sensation, every part of him connected to her until she buried her face in his neck, her teeth catching the skin of his shoulder as she came, and a moment later his voice whispering something softly in her ear, words she couldn’t make out and did not want to understand.
They’d been silent then and still, seeming to slot perfectly together in the narrow bed like a pair of puzzle pieces. And they must have fallen asleep soon after, because that was exactly how they still lay, Sophie folded inside Louis, his long arms and legs wrapped around her, holding her back against his chest. She edged herself onto her back and turned her head to look at him. Most of his face was in shadow, just the tiniest slice of light picked out one corner of his eye, the curve of his jaw, and the corner of his mouth. His breathing was regular and deep; he was fast asleep.
Sophie was now wide awake, and she could feel her blood pounding around her body. She felt breathless and anxious as the remnants of sleep slowly receded to reveal a sense of raw, wide-awake panic. It seemed as if the reasons for this not happening, which they had hardly talked about and quickly dismissed last night, were solidifying into cold, hard realities all around her.
Sophie frantically tried to close herself off from the feelings that were surfacing with the early morning. Last night it had seemed so possible to do as Louis had said. To explore their attraction to each other free from the restraint of history or circumstance and then go on with their lives as they had been. Louis had seduced her with his reasoning, his looks, and his touches, and she had let him. But she had been wrong when she’d thought there would be no consequences. If she had had a stupid unrequited crush on him last night, this morning it was much, much worse. Spending the night with him had brought all her dreams crashing into the real world, where they could be trampled on and torn apart.
She had gone and fallen in love with him.
She could not do this. She could not be here with Louis. With Carrie’s husband, with Bella and Izzy’s father. Being here was a betrayal, it was pointless and weak. She should have realized. He might have slept with her, but he’d talked about Carrie with such warmth last night, how could he not still love her? And the place was so full of Carrie—everywhere she looked she felt her friend’s presence—her friend who had always been there for her. How could she have even daydreamed about a life with Louis and the girls?
Reaching down to the side of the bed, she felt for her bag and was relieved when she found it almost right away. She took out her cell phone and checked the time.
It was just after five-thirty. The girls could be up at any minute. She had to get up, get dressed, and get back into her own bed before they noticed that she was not there. Immediately Sophie was gripped by panic as she began to grasp the implications of what she had done, and the reckless joy that she had felt in Louis’s arms seemed in another lifetime.
“Oh, Christ,” she whispered to herself, feeling the prick of tears behind her eyes. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Carefully she began to ease herself out of Louis’s embrace, but as soon as he sensed her moving, his arms tightened reflexively. The thumb of his left hand ran lazily over her nipple as he kissed the back of her neck, burying his face in her hair. He shifted a little, moving his other arm out from underneath her, using it to prop himself up above her. Sophie felt him looking at her even though she could not see his face.
“Not a dream then,” he said softly, and she felt his fingertips run lightly across the contours of her face and neck, traveling over her breasts. For a heartbeat she allowed herself to remain still, closing her eyes even in the dark. And then she closed her hand over his and stopped its exploration. “I’ve got to go next door,” she whispered. “They’ll be awake soon.”
Louis flopped back onto the bed with a heartfelt sigh. “It’s still dark,” he protested, his voice warm with sleep.
“I know, but still…,” Sophie whispered.
Louis didn’t try to stop her as she swung her legs onto the floor and, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over searching for discarded items of clothing. Instead, as she found her knickers and pulled them over her ankles, he transferred his caresses to the back of her neck and along her spine.
Abruptly, Sophie pulled her underwear up as she stood. “I can’t find anything,” she said irritably, feeling claustrophobic in the darkness.
“I’ll turn on the lamp,” Louis said sleepily.
“No, don’t—” she said, too late to stop him.
Soft light filled the corners of the room, and all sense of unreality was gone. He was really lying in his bed watching her. She was really standing before him, almost naked and feeling more exposed than she had ever felt before.
“You are so amazing,” Louis said, his eyes running over her body. “Come back here, please, just for a moment…” He smiled as he held a hand out to her.
Sophie saw her T-shirt lying inside out on the floor and, picking it up, pulled it hastily over her head. She retrieved her jeans lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed, her fingers fumbling as she tried to pull one leg out the right way.
“I can’t,” she said, her voice tight and nervous. “If the children wake up and find I’m not there or even come in here…” Finally she slipped her legs into the cold denim and buttoned the jeans at the waist. “And anyway, that’s not what we said, is it?” she made herself remind him, keeping her voice cool. “It was just a one-time thing, remember?”
Louis sat up in bed. “I didn’t mean it literally,” he said. “I meant—”
“What did you mean?” Sophie asked him, her anger surfacing protectively.
“I meant we could get the lust out of the way and then take it from there.” Louis looked at the expression on Sophie’s face. “I’m not very good at this,” he said quickly. “At words and stuff. Look, I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect to…” He faltered to a stop.
“To what?” Sophie whispered, conscious of the thin wall between them and the children. “Get laid while you were sorting out your wife’s estate? Must have been a real bonus for you.”
Louis sat up sharply
and pulled on his trousers. “Sophie, please. Why are you so angry?”
Sophie couldn’t tell him, she couldn’t tell him she was furious with herself for falling in love with him. It was better that he thought she was angry with him. Better than the terrifying possibility that she might show him the reality of how she was feeling.
“I have to go now,” she said, gripping the door handle.
“Sophie, wait…”
She closed the door on him.
For a moment Sophie stood outside the room where Louis’s two daughters were sleeping. She couldn’t go in there, not yet, she realized. She was sure the instant that Bella looked at her, she would know something had happened with Louis, something that shouldn’t have. Sophie didn’t want Bella to know. The last thing she wanted was to wreck the fragile peace that Bella had found both with her father and within herself with one foolish, thoughtless act. Bella trusted her, loved her even. Sophie was determined to preserve that.
She walked past her bedroom door and crept down the carpeted stairs. She pulled on her boots, opened the front door, and stepped out into the dark morning. The cold immediately raised goose bumps on her skin, but Sophie welcomed the chill that numbed her burning cheeks. Her mother had said to her once that the darkest hour was always before the dawn. She meant it, Sophie knew, as an uplifting metaphor, a way to try to get Sophie through the loss of her dad, when she couldn’t see any hope, but as Sophie walked down through the near-empty town, still perfectly dark and quiet, she was certain that when the sun came up, her troubles would really begin.
Sophie found her way back to Porthmeor Beach, where she had run into the sea after Izzy. She told herself that it was a random destination, that it was inevitable she would end up staring at the sea. But she knew she had come here deliberately. It was here that Louis had brought her and Izzy out of the water and here that the four of them had stood together, embracing one another. It was on this beach that Sophie had experienced the very last thing she had expected to feel.
A sense of belonging to each of them. To Bella, to Izzy—and to Louis.
As she sat on the sand, Sophie watched the magic and movement of the ocean begin to reveal itself. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself, a whispered question that was immediately lost on a gust of wind. “How did this happen?”
It had started as an inconvenience, she admitted to herself. Carrie’s children forcing a hiatus in her busy and ordered life. It was only now that she realized that life before Bella and Izzy had arrived had been the hiatus, because nothing about Sophie had changed for years until that moment. She had let year after year of her life slip away without anything to mark them out as special or important besides a new piece of jewelry or fabulous new shoes, as her half-forgotten dreams and ambitions quietly stagnated.
Sophie wasn’t sure exactly when it happened, but she knew it was only after Bella and Izzy had come that she had started living inside her own life again instead of passively watching it tick by without her. And now, because of Bella and Izzy, she was in love, maybe for the first time, maybe even forever, because they had kick-started her heart.
The trouble was, it wasn’t just Carrie’s children she was in love with. It was Louis too. Sophie weighed the heavy, debilitating sense of longing that seemed to be pinning her down, and she found it hard to breathe.
It was odd, she thought, and sad that the very thing that had brought her so close to Carrie again—so close that she could almost feel her sitting beside her on the cold sand—was loving the people Carrie would never be able to hold and love again. Sophie felt but did not hear the sob that formed in her throat. She felt so guilty. She felt like a grave robber.
Of course, it was the thought of actually being with Louis that terrified her. The reality of being with a man she wanted so much made the possibilities of it all going wrong horribly real. Cal joked about her intimacy issues, but secretly Sophie knew she kept her distance from love because she could not bear the thought of another man she loved leaving her.
If there was anyone who might make her want to take that risk, perhaps it was Louis, but Louis didn’t come on his own. He came with a past that was full of Carrie and with his children.
Even if the children didn’t exist, there were hundreds of reasons not to let anything else happen with Louis. He had passionately loved another woman. One Sophie knew for sure had been more beautiful and vibrant than she could ever be, and whom Louis might still love, despite his protests.
He had talked about other girlfriends since Carrie, that was true. Women he must have been attracted to in the same way he was attracted to her. Sophie couldn’t exactly remember the way he had described those flings, but she thought the phrase “never anything special” had been used. The panic tightened in her chest again.
What if Louis felt that way about her? What if everything he had said and whispered last night had been a succession of lines, part of a tried and tested seduction routine? She reminded herself that he was still mostly a stranger to her. That despite the last few weeks and the night they had just spent together, she hardly knew him at all. She couldn’t bear to be another nameless encounter he might one day refer to as “nothing special.”
Amazingly, Sophie felt herself laughing even as the tears ran down her cheeks. She was hilarious. She was insane. She was just as afraid of him loving her as she was of him not caring for her at all.
She shook her head and tried to focus on a way to untangle this mess she had made for herself. She thought about Bella and Izzy, and how she felt about them. She loved them too, and she felt this fierce, overwhelming urge to protect them from anything that might hurt them. She found she wanted more than anything else in the world to know for sure that neither of them would ever be hurt again.
Sophie drew her arms tighter around her and watched the sea.
It was so simple, really. She knew with a sudden clarity that there was no dilemma. All she had to do was what was best for the children, for Carrie, for Louis, and for herself. She had to do the only thing that would preserve each of them from suffering any more hurt.
She had to leave.
If she left now, the girls would still think about her happily, they would still love and trust her, and she would always be someone they could turn to. Sophie felt that by going she would be keeping her promise to Carrie, always, forever, whatever. She would be able to love her friend’s memory instead of spending every day trying to compete with her ghost.
And if she left, Louis’s pride might be a little stung, but it was better to make this break now.
Sophie knew if she went back to her old life, eventually the routine of work and home would insulate her once again against the threat of love and loss that was looming over her now. She would have back the life she had treasured so dearly. A calm, cool, peaceful life. She would be able to do whatever she wanted, when she wanted.
Knowing that comforted her, but at the same time it made her cry even harder. She forced herself to stand and start walking slowly and stiffly back to the B & B. Sophie knew then that the darkest hour really was before the dawn.
Twenty-seven
The road ahead was clear, so Sophie put her foot down and floored it, watching the speedometer climb steadily past eighty and toward ninety. It was the first time she had speeded since Izzy had arrived in her life and every torturous car journey had had to be taken at a steady twenty miles per hour in the city and a laborious seventy on the motorways. Sophie had expected to find the freedom of having her car back to herself as just a machine—the child seats removed, the Manic Street Preachers silenced at last, and the cat sunscreens stuffed in the glove compartment—much more exhilarating than she did. But driving as fast as she could get away with, nothing but the sound of Phoebe’s—the car’s—engine quietly humming, had somehow lost its joy.
A mountain of black cloud was building on the horizon ahead, and Sophie knew that somewhere in her near future it would be raining very hard, but she kept her foot down all the
same, heading toward the bad weather with steady determination. She had told herself that once she was back in London, back in Highbury, and back in her flat she would be able to hear herself think again and start to make sense of the way her life had turned itself inside out and upside down without any notice or warning. Better still, she decided not to think about it at all. Not have to think about everything that had happened with Louis last night. Not have to think about the way she’d left the children that morning. Not have to think about everything that had happened leading up to that parting, because she was sure that as soon as she got home, everything would be all right.
But home was a few hundred miles away yet, and still Sophie kept playing the events of the last two days back again and again in her head, like trying to make sense of a foreign-language film without the subtitles.
After returning to her room that morning, she had re-dressed herself in clean clothes and then helped the girls as much as they wanted her to as they chattered and giggled and chose each other a rainbow collection of colors to wear. Sophie had looked on, relieved that Izzy seemed to be over the trauma of her tumble in the ocean and was now just enjoying the excitement of it, building the adventure with every rhythmic retelling.
The hour and a half that Sophie had had to wait between joining Louis for breakfast and nine o’clock had seemed like an eternity. As she’d sat across the table from him, Sophie had felt that she was almost visibly smothered in the vividly persistent memories of the night, as if Louis’s mouth and hands had left marks on her skin that revealed where each kiss and each caress had been.
She had poked at her breakfast with a fork and sipped her coffee, smiling dimly at the girls as they chattered and made plans for the day. It was exactly as it had been the previous morning, except that Sophie did not speak directly to Louis and he didn’t talk to her. It had been clear to Sophie that Louis was just as certain as she was that this had all been a foolish mistake.
The Accidental Mother Page 33