by Fay Keenan
‘You’re worried about tonight, aren’t you?’ Florence said as Sam set the two plates of warm, delicious-looking Camembert down on the table. She could feel her mouth starting to water as she spooned redcurrant sauce onto the plate. Breaking the breadcrumb crust of the cheese with her knife and fork, her stomach rumbled appreciatively as the gooey, warm cheese oozed out over the plate.
‘Which part of tonight?’ Sam joked.
‘Not this,’ Florence smiled back, in what she hoped was a reassuring way. ‘This is all absolutely lovely, and you don’t need to keep fretting about that. I mean, leaving Aidan at your Mum’s for the night? It’s worrying you, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe a little bit,’ Sam replied. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Only from your body language and expression and tone of voice when you talked about it,’ Florence said. She took a mouthful of the exquisitely cooked Camembert and nodded appreciatively. ‘This is great, by the way. I wasn’t expecting you to be such a good cook.’
‘Thanks,’ Sam said drily. He sighed. ‘But, yes, I suppose I am a bit uptight about it. It’s the first time I haven’t been there to keep an eye on things since his accident. I know it’s only twenty-four hours, and that every day, and every step like this, is progress, but I can’t help second-guessing things all the time. If Dad had still been around, then it would have been a lot easier; he always acted as a buffer between Mum and Aidan, who had a tendency to rub each other up the wrong way even before Helmand. Now, even when he’s having a good day, she seems to know which buttons to press. I hope that, with Kate and the kids visiting tonight, she might act as mediator, since I can’t.’
‘It’s not always going to be your job to keep an eye out for him,’ Florence said softly. ‘Surely every day is an improvement.’
‘Yes, to a point,’ Sam said. ‘But it’s not just about Afghanistan. He’s my little brother; I’ll always be looking out for him. Not that he sees it that way, of course. I mean, he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of me becoming his housemate, but given the price of property around here, I knew when I moved to Willowbury that I wouldn’t be able to buy for a few years, and even Aidan realised it made financial sense to take in a lodger. He gets fed up with me keeping such an eye on him, but he’s also grateful to have someone in the house who gets it, who understands what he’s seen and the issues he has because of it.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Florence said. ‘And he seems to cope pretty well most of the time.’
‘He’s so much better than he used to be,’ Sam said. ‘The nightmares and the fits of depression were terrible in the beginning. Survivor’s guilt, they often call it. Now, with better medication and a decent routine, he’s virtually living a normal life, but he still has to be aware of things. He’ll never get away from what happened.’ He put his knife and fork down on his plate, having wolfed down his portion of the Camembert, even though he had been talking. ‘This is the new normal for him. And routine plays a huge part in that. When you’re out in the field, when you’re in combat, there are just some things you can never unsee, no matter how hard you try.’
Florence wondered how much Sam was talking about himself rather than Aidan at that moment. She recognised, the more she got to know him, that compartmentalising things must have been a huge part of his life in the navy, and just as much now he worked for the air ambulance. The things he must have seen; he would have had to come up with some sort of coping strategy. She knew that Sam had seen active service in the Middle East as well, and coming back to the UK to do a job like piloting the air ambulance seemed to be an extension of that, as far as managing casualties was concerned.
‘How do you cope?’ she blurted out suddenly. ‘I mean, even now you’re not in the navy any more, you fly the air ambulance every day, knowing that you’re going to see people at their lowest ebb, people seriously injured, those, even, who’ve lost their lives, and yet you keep doing your job, flying the helicopter, keeping on. I just can’t imagine it.’
Sam smiled at her, and reached over to take one of her hands in his. ‘Mentally, it’s tough sometimes,’ he conceded. ‘But anyone involved in the emergency services will likely tell you the same thing; it’s about doing the best job you can. We think about the bad stuff, of course we do, but we also put it in boxes. When you’re working, it’s all about being a team, doing the best you can for the patient at the time. I’m a part of a process; I need to make certain calls, and the medical team needs to make other calls. We talk a lot after a job, and during a job we’re checking in with each other. After all, if someone’s freaking out, it can have a real effect on morale as well as the patient, so we need to be honest with each other.’ He considered her for a moment. ‘I mean, you must know when a student of yours is feeling below par; you can pick up on that, I’d imagine, and you can support them. That’s close to what we do in our job.’
‘Yeah, but mine’s not a matter of life and death,’ Florence said. ‘Although you’re right, to a point. If a student’s come to school without breakfast, with a chaotic home life, or even if something’s happened over the weekend, all of these things can have a huge impact on their ability to work well in school. Sometimes it’s more about encouraging them, building them up to achieve, than it is the achievement itself.’
‘And if you can sense that, and act on it, then everyone benefits,’ Sam said. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, that got really heavy really quickly, didn’t it? And there I was thinking that tonight was going to be about good food, hopefully, a few laughs and a few drinks.’
‘It’s nice to get an insight,’ Florence said. ‘I feel like, even though we were involved in the play, we were all so busy learning lines that we didn’t really get a chance to actually talk much. It’s nice to be able to do that without worrying about what Josie would say if she caught us bunking off!’
And, she thought, it’s kind of nice to have you to myself without worrying that Aidan’s going to come in and gatecrash! Much as she enjoyed Aidan’s company, the knowledge that he was in Cambridge, and that she’d have Sam to herself for the whole night, if they both wanted that, of course, was quite thrilling.
‘You still talk like a teacher, even on your time off,’ Sam teased.
‘Thanks,’ Florence gave him her best teacher’s stare. ‘I thought I’d left all that behind for the holidays!’
‘I bet you’re great at it, though,’ Sam replied. ‘You have a passion for Shakespeare, at least. I can imagine even the most reluctant English student being caught up in it when you’re teaching them.’
‘Now you really are trying to flatter me!’ Florence laughed. ‘But I can’t help getting enthusiastic about Shakespeare, in particular. I love him more, the older I get. He just knew humans, you know? Every emotion you can think of is there in a play or a sonnet. Some of the themes, like Hero and Claudio’s disaster of a wedding ceremony, might be a bit archaic now, but the emotions are timeless.’
‘Your eyes really light up when you talk about literature,’ Sam said. ‘I can see why you like to teach.’
‘If the marking wasn’t such a pain in the arse, it would be the perfect profession!’ Florence smiled. ‘But it is what it is. I can’t imagine doing anything else now, anyway.’
‘Now that I’m flying with the SAA, I can’t imagine anything else, either,’ Sam said, although Florence noticed a slight wistfulness in his expression.
‘What do you miss the most about the navy?’ she asked.
Sam paused for a moment, and Florence knew he was weighing up what to say in response. She was getting used to his guardedness, even if, after all the conversation they’d already had that evening, he’d opened up more than he had before to her. Eventually he replied.
‘The relationships you make… they’re like nothing else. You know that you’re a team, no matter what. That you’d all stand side by side against the hugest of odds. That no one gets left behind. But that’s similar to what I do now. I guess I miss the stability of that career, as
well as the unpredictability. And I definitely miss seeing different places, even when those places were incredibly stressful places to be. Travelling the world was a real perk, even if I was working all the time.’
Florence felt a prickle of disquiet at his words. She’d sworn, many years ago, never to allow herself to get involved with a military man for the very reasons that Sam had just outlined. The unpredictable experiences, the constant upheaval of being reassigned to new places, sometimes after months, sometimes after years, and, of course, the ever-present threat, when they were on active duty, of someone losing their life. Florence’s father had been stationed in Northern Ireland during the 1980s, and although she had been too young to truly appreciate the stress that the posting placed on her mother and the other military wives at the time, in later years she’d come to realise just how uncertain things could be when there was conflict, and you were at the heart of it. If Sam had still been in the navy, no matter how attracted she’d been to him, she’d have been much more cautious about getting involved. Finely tuned as she was to picking up the tones in people’s voices, she definitely detected more than a hint of longing in his when he spoke about his previous career.
‘Everything OK?’ Sam asked, and Florence realised that she’d zoned out, lost in her own thoughts, which had become a little freer with the lubricant of a couple of glasses of white wine.
Florence smiled a little more brightly than she suddenly felt. ‘Yes,’ she said. She tried to push aside the dark thoughts that Sam’s conversations had triggered. He wasn’t in the forces any more, and so there was no point dwelling on things. As she sipped her wine and watched Sam clearing the plates into the dishwasher and prepare to fry the steaks in the cast iron griddle pan on the top of the stove, she firmly closed the door on any thoughts like that. Sam might still miss the navy, but he wasn’t going to run away and re-enlist, was he? Determined to enjoy this chance to have Sam all to herself, she tried to push everything else aside, for one night at least.
27
The evening progressed, with slightly lighter talk of careers and their respective ups and downs. Sensing, perhaps, that he’d led Florence into darker territory than she’d been anticipating, Sam kept changing subjects, making her laugh with anecdotes.
‘I mean,’ he said as they finished up their steak and green beans, ‘there we were, flying hell for leather to the Bristol Royal Infirmary because the guy’s losing so much blood, and all he’s doing is making jokes and looking through Tinder for his next date. He’s got a chair leg sticking through his abdomen from where he fell off the table during his rendition of ‘New York, New York’ and he’s asking the paramedics whether or not he should message “Melanie, 29, GSOH, stockbroker”!’
Florence laughed. ‘Perhaps it was the shock.’
‘Well, you’ll be pleased to know he made a full recovery, and sent us an update on Twitter a couple of months later, saying that he’d dumped Mel and was now seeing Annabelle, 27, dog lover and accountant.’
‘Hopefully he learned his lesson and won’t dance on any tables again,’ Florence said.
Sam cleared away the plates and then glanced back at Florence. ‘Dessert?’
Never usually one to refuse, Florence found that she felt absolutely full. ‘Do you mind if we wait a bit?’ she said. ‘That was great, but I feel stuffed.’
‘Sure,’ Sam said. ‘Shall we go and sit in the lounge? I’ve been keeping an eye on the fire and it should be nice and warm in there now.’
‘Sounds good.’
They stood up and took their glasses, and the now opened second bottle of wine through to the living room. Florence smiled as she saw that the usual detritus of two single guys living together had been tidied away, although there was a copy of Much Ado About Nothing splayed open on the sofa.
‘I thought it would be nice to read the full version, since I ended up being in the play,’ Sam said, clocking her gaze. ‘I haven’t read any Shakespeare since school, so it’s taking a while to get into it, but I’m getting there.’
‘You just have to let go and try to enjoy it,’ Florence said, picking up the well-thumbed copy of the play. ‘Don’t try to understand every word, just feel the rhythm, sense the emotion in the words.’
‘I bet that’s not the first time you’ve said that about Shakespeare!’ Sam laughed. ‘I know I asked my old English teacher a fair few times what the flipping point of studying him was, and she came out with something similar.’
‘Thanks,’ Florence said drily. ‘But, honestly, it’s not about complicated words, it’s about feeling it, living the experience of people who are just like you but are in different circumstances. He shows us that we still had the same preoccupations four hundred years ago, still felt things the same, still loved, got angry, laughed, cried and felt pain, just as he did.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, I’ve gone teacher again, haven’t I? Must be the wine.’
‘I hope not!’ Sam grinned. ‘Anyway, it’s nice to hear you being so passionate about something. And I am trying to get to grips with it, I promise.’ He put his wine glass down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and, as he straightened up, he muttered, ‘Alexa, play Sam’s Soppy Songs playlist.’
Florence burst out laughing. ‘Really?’
‘Aidan, the tosser, hacked my Spotify just before he left, and I hadn’t worked it out until about five minutes before you were due to come over,’ Sam said. ‘And it’s a good playlist, so I thought I’d risk it.’
‘I believe you; thousands wouldn’t!’ Florence sank down onto the sofa and reached for her glass of wine. The soothing sound of the title track of Coldplay’s latest album weaved its way through the air.
Sam carefully sat down next to her, long legs bending towards her as he did so. She felt a jolt as his knees brushed hers.
‘This is nice,’ she murmured, sipping the wine before putting it back down on the coffee table. ‘I was, er, a bit worried about tonight.’
‘Me too,’ Sam laughed nervously. ‘Everything’s just been so intense, these past few weeks. I wondered how it would be, just talking to you about stuff that wasn’t connected to the play.’
‘I know,’ Florence laughed. ‘I mean, it’s stupid, really, especially after we’ve… you know… but I think I was just suffering from cold-light-of-day syndrome.’
‘And having my brother kicking around all the time doesn’t help,’ Sam said. ‘I’m trying not to think about what he and Mum will be talking about over dinner tonight!’
‘Then let me take your mind off it,’ Florence murmured.
She wriggled down the sofa until she was pressed up, side to side, against Sam’s long, jeans-clad thighs. Swivelling slightly, she put a hand up to his cheek and pulled his face to hers, luxuriating in the feeling of his mouth, cool from the wine but warm enough to make her gasp, meeting hers in a sweet, leisurely kiss. The kiss deepened, and Florence felt her spine beginning to tingle as Sam raised his hand to caress her cheek and the back of her neck. They drifted gently downwards onto the sofa, until Florence felt Sam’s full weight upon her, crushing her deliciously with the contours of his body, and leaving her in no doubt that he was feeling just as aroused as she was.
‘You feel so good,’ Sam murmured between kisses. ‘I’ve really missed you this week. Knowing you’ve been literally next door, but out of my reach, has been so frustrating.’
Florence smiled into the kiss. ‘We’d better make up for lost time, then.’ She wriggled out from under him and stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Sam asked.
‘Shouldn’t we… er, head upstairs?’ Florence asked.
Sam grinned. ‘It’s probably warmer down here, to be honest. The radiators are a bit temperamental on the first floor.’
Florence shook her head. ‘You’re really taking advantage of Aidan not being here, aren’t you?’ She glanced at the windows to make sure the curtains were firmly closed. It wouldn’t do to be caught in flagrante by a passing parent or student.
‘Well
, it doesn’t happen very often,’ Sam kept smiling.
He reached out a hand and pulled her back down onto the sofa. Leaning towards her, he began, very gently, to kiss her neck, until she’d leaned forward and had begun to lose herself in the sensations of his mouth. Pausing for a moment with his hand on the zip of her dress, looking into her eyes for consent to continue, which was swiftly given, Sam tugged down the zip in one fluid motion, eyes growing wider with pleasure as her deep blue bra, a stunning contrast to her pale skin, was revealed.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he murmured as his lips again began to kiss down her neck and further. ‘I can’t believe I was so worried about seeing you again.’
Florence arched her back, surrendering to the pleasure of his mouth on her skin, and then, recovering her equilibrium a little, reached under Sam’s jumper and pulled it over his head, taking his T-shirt with it. ‘Got to even things up a little,’ she murmured as she began to kiss his shoulder.
It didn’t take long for them to shed the rest of their clothes and, in the warmth and light of the fire, they were more than happy to lose them. Florence stroked inquisitive hands down the length of Sam’s lean, toned body, pausing on the way down to caress his cock, causing him to groan and close the distance between them, such as it was. As Sam’s warm, sensitive fingers caressed her and turned her insides to liquid, she could feel herself building, already, to a long overdue climax. It wouldn’t take much to send her over the edge, lying in his arms, feeling the whole length of his naked body pressed against her. There was just one last thing they needed.
Reading her mind, Sam at least had the good grace to blush. ‘In the back pocket of my jeans, if you can reach them.’