At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  I almost heaved as I caught a full-frontal view of Ned’s erect penis before he managed to conceal it inside a pair of jogging bottoms. The music was still blaring, Michael’s gravelly voice singing on, regardless of the life-altering scene unfolding on the kitchen table.

  ‘Nelly.’ My mother held her hand to her forehead as she gathered her clothes to her naked chest with the other. ‘Oh God! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We didn’t think you’d be back until much later,’ Ned chimed in, frantically pulling on his shirt.

  Magnus meowed and wriggled free of my grasp, before doing exactly what I wanted to do and crawling underneath the kitchen counter. Was there room enough for me there too?

  Mum moved over to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. I flinched and slapped it away with a shudder. ‘Don’t touch me, woman! I know where that hand’s been!’ I cried.

  Charlie arrived at my side, just as my mother’s clothing failed to hide her modesty and a large pink nipple came into view.

  ‘Jesus, Ned! People eat here,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Close your eyes!’ I quickly held up a hand and clamped it over his cornflower blues. I would not have him seeing my mother’s breasts before he’d even come close to seeing mine! ‘Mother, for the love of God, cover yourself.’

  ‘Wha— This is yer mother?’ He cleared his throat and held out his hand. ‘Nice t’meet yer, Mrs Coleman.’

  She shook his hand awkwardly. ‘Call me Cassie. Please.’

  I lifted my free hand, my other still clasped tightly over Charlie’s eyes, and slapped their hands until they fell apart. ‘Don’t touch that!’ I shouted at Charlie before I took him by the shoulders, quickly turned him around and walked us both into the living room.

  When there were no longer any naked bodies of parental figures in view, I unclasped my hand from Charlie’s eyes and fell down onto the sofa, then I thought that the kitchen table might not have been the only surface that Ned desecrated our friendship on and abruptly stood, sitting down again on the floor beside the fireplace.

  Charlie placed his hands on his hips and blew air through pursed lips. Nervous footsteps approached and a moment later Ned appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Err, Ned, for yer own safety, I think yer’d better leave her for now,’ Charlie said from by the window.

  ‘Sorry you had to see that,’ Ned said as he moved towards me. ‘Make her a cup of tea, will you?’ he said to Charlie. ‘Milk and one sugar.’

  Charlie disappeared quickly and I hoped that my mother was fully clothed by now, lest he get a second flash of areola.

  ‘Tea won’t fix this,’ I said, cradling my head in my hands. ‘My mother, Ned. My mum!’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’

  ‘Find out? How long has this been going on?’ I asked, looking up at his face, a light sheen of sweat coating his brow. He pressed his lips into a hard line. ‘Since when, Ned?’ He still didn’t answer.

  ‘Seven or eight times, over the last year. Ever since she came to stay with us after that work trip of hers and she stopped off for a few days.’ I retched and Ned had to stifle a smile. ‘We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d react this way. We decided to see if it was something we wanted to pursue before telling you but we didn’t want you to freak out.’

  ‘So, you decided that a visual example on the kitchen table was the best way to break it to me?!’

  Ned sighed and sat down in front of me.

  ‘Nell, when a man loves a woman …’

  ‘Don’t!’ I said, holding up a warning finger. ‘Don’t you even dare use sweet, beautiful Michael Bolton to get yourself out of this one.’

  ‘Fine. Fine. Sorry. But, Nell, can I just ask you one question?’ I looked up in to his eyes, waiting for him to ask me some deeply scarring question like: ‘Can you start calling me Dad?’ or ‘How would you feel about a baby sibling with my nose?’ but instead, he just raised his hand, brandishing the snow globe and asked, ‘What the fuck is this?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I don’t know if the snow globe was displayed, pride of place on the kitchen shelf to make me feel better about the fact that I had been both mentally and emotionally scarred by seeing my mother splayed out on the kitchen table like a spatchcock chicken, or if Ned actually found some kind of enjoyment in a tack-tastic, diamante-eyed, Virgin Mary swilling around in a jar of glitter water. Whatever the reason was, the snow globe was there, her eyes boring into me as I attempted to eat the takeaway sushi that Mum had bought in to make me feel a little better.

  I knew that I was an adult, an adult who had sex. And because of this, I understood that my mother was also an adult, an extremely attractive adult, who had the same physical needs, but there are some things in life that you can know but never dwell on and there are some sights that you simply cannot come back from. I skewered a salmon nigiri from my plate of untouched food on a chopstick and gave it a healthy soak in the sodium bath of soy sauce, before raising it to my mouth. I had tried to forget about what I had seen, but even the action of skewering the sushi had made me break out in a cold sweat and I fantasised about stabbing chopsticks into my eyes so they could never be harmed again by such heinous sights.

  Mum and Charlie were filling the void of silence between Ned and me by talking about her work. I think that Charlie was genuinely interested, but I could see the strained looks behind their eyes. The look in his that said, ‘I’ve seen your nipple, Mrs Coleman,’ and the look in hers that replied: ‘Please tell no one.’

  I stared at Ned over the expanse of the table, my lids lowered, my jaw clenched, as he pretended that he didn’t see me, making patterns in his wasabi paste with the end of his chopstick.

  How? How exactly could my closest friend possibly go behind my back like this? They had been so discreet and lied to me so seamlessly that I hadn’t suspected for a moment. But why would I suspect such treachery from the person who filled the void of best friend and father in one fell swoop. I guess that he was taking that paternal role he’d always filled in my life before to new levels now.

  For now, the image of Ned’s betrayal was still there inside my brain in glistening 4K ultra HD, but I held out hope that my brain would soon adorn the offending memory with a neat little fig leaf. I chewed the nigiri three times before spitting it back out onto the plate and washing my mouth out with lukewarm water.

  It took me a moment before I realised that everyone was watching me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, looking down at the half-chewed sushi on my plate and only now realising how gross that would have looked. ‘I’m just nursing some PTSD.’

  ‘Joel came by again while you were gone,’ Ned said, deftly changing the subject. ‘Brought another box.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I answered, passive-aggressively stabbing a tuna maki roll and dousing it in wasabi. Maybe the burn would take away the memories. ‘What was in it this time, a dust bunny he thought I’d grown emotionally attached to or a broken spatula from six years back?’

  ‘Nope. It was just the one thing this time.’ He stretched out a leg to the side where an empty Walkers Crisps box sat on the floor by the wall. He kicked it under the table and I looked down between my knees at whatever treasure he’d sent back to me this time. The box was big enough to fit fifteen or so books, but sitting down in the bottom right-hand corner was one tiny thing that made my stomach lurch.

  I reached down and picked up the ring – silver with a large black stone set into it and little delicate flowers made of the same silver that kept the stone in place.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a deep breath as pressure began to build behind my eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ Charlie asked, his comforting hand landing on my knee. The warmth of it snapped me out of my thoughts and I placed the ring onto my finger.

  ‘Just an old trinket,’ I said, unconvincingly.

  I stood in the bathroom, my chin dripping water into the sink as I stared down at the ring on my hand. Rings
were so small, so losable, that I’d just put it there out of fear of mislaying it. But having it there, sitting on my prematurely bony finger, was bringing back all sorts of memories. Not all of them good, but memories nonetheless.

  I sighed and stared hard at my reflection. Why was I even thinking about Joel right now when Charlie was in my bedroom, getting ready to jump into the same bed as me?

  We’d had a quick debriefing before I’d come to wash my face about what the logistics of sleeping in a bed with someone you would very much like to lick every square inch of, but couldn’t out of respect for his grieving process. We’d agreed that there was no pressure from either side to do anything other than sleep. He didn’t want to be alone and, to be honest, neither did I. We were two fully grown adults. We were capable of sleeping next to each other without succumbing to hormones, like Ned and my mother seemed incapable of doing.

  Three quiet raps came on the door and, without invitation from me, it fell open and Mum’s face poked through. Excluding the event that I hoped my mind would soon blank out and the following horrendously awkward dinner, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her. ‘Hey, Nelly,’ she said with a worried smile and slipped into the room.

  I took a breath, wiped my face with a towel and made a concerted effort not to remember my own mother’s sex face.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ I said as she hugged me. ‘How come you didn’t tell me you were coming?’ I said. I almost added that she probably did it so that her and Ned could have a secret tryst before seeing me, but I let that particular comment die on my tongue.

  ‘I wanted to surprise you and surprise you I did, I suppose.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I flinched, shifting away from her a little, looking down at my feet and wondering how best to say what I wanted to say. ‘You’re not playing him around, are you, Mum?’

  ‘What do you mean, love?’ she asked, her flawless brow furrowing. She really was a beauty. Her usually pale as milk skin held a slight tan, obviously out of a bottle because her skin was impervious to tanning, and her piercing green eyes were a nice contrast against her honey blonde hair.

  ‘I know this is going to sound like I’m sad about my childhood or something – I’m not, I had a great childhood. But what I feel like I need to say is that, talking as someone who has fallen foul of thinking that you’ll stick around for them, I know what it feels like to watch you go, after convincing myself that you won’t leave again.’

  I saw my words hurt her, but they were true and she needed to hear them. ‘Ned’s already had one woman string him along and break his heart, so if you’re going to be just like Connie, end it now.’

  ‘Honey, what happened between Ned and me—’ She stammered her way through the sentence.

  I held up a hand. ‘I know Ned much better than you do. He’s a romantic. He cries at rom-coms and dreams of silver anniversaries. And I know you. You’re loving and kind, but everything comes second to work. Other than you, Ned is the only family I have and I won’t lose him over a relationship gone wrong.’ I stepped closer, placing my hand on her arm to lessen the harshness of my words. ‘Please, Mum. I can’t imagine my life without Ned. Don’t make me have to.’

  She looked as if she might cry, raising her palm to press it against my face. ‘Of course, sweetie. But just so you know, you have never come second to anything, not since the moment I found out I was going to have you.’ She pulled me close and we both tried to disguise the fact that we shed a few tears. ‘You know,’ she said as we left the bathroom, ‘maybe it’s time to come home and settle down again.’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ I scoffed, remembering the last few times she’d said this in passing, as if it meant nothing more than suggesting she’d pop out and buy some milk. She didn’t know how much it hurt when she then signed up for an eighteen-month assignment to China.

  She shrugged her eyebrows and nodded. ‘Well, yeah.’

  I shook my head and grimaced. ‘Ned. I just never thought he’d be your type.’

  ‘Me neither.’ She chuckled.

  ‘You know he has a strange affinity with Celine Dion and reads history magazines, right?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And that doesn’t put you off?’

  ‘Actually, quite the opposite.’

  I shuddered and wished I’d never asked.

  By the time I got back to my room, Charlie was already in bed and the sight of him there made my insides twist with excitement.

  Everything that had happened between Charlie and me, thus far, had happened in such a baptism of fire that I no longer questioned the strength of my feelings towards him. You often hear about love forged in extreme circumstances and how it burns bright and fast, ending in just as much of a cataclysm as it started in. I hoped that we wouldn’t fall foul of that same affliction.

  I slipped into the room, the tears from my conversation with my mother still moistening my lashes.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked, sitting up a little against the headboard.

  ‘Yeah.’ I nodded, shutting the door. I suddenly felt very awkward.

  ‘So,’ he said, looking down at his hands, which were clasped on his lap atop the duvet. ‘The ring that Joel dropped round. What’s the story?’

  ‘What makes you think there’s a story?’ I asked.

  ‘’Cause all the blood drained from yer face like yer’d seen a ghost the second you saw what it was.’

  I sighed and sat down cross-legged on the bed facing him. I turned the ring around on my finger, remembering the market stall where I’d first seen it a month before it landed on my finger. ‘I always said, for the whole time that I was with Joel, that I didn’t want to get married. Something about the idea of it made me panic, like I was being trapped. So, I told him one day and it seemed like he was on the same page.’

  I turned away from Charlie, looking down at the ring, the stone duller than it had once been. ‘One day, about two years into the relationship, we went to this craft market in the middle of town. I saw this ring and really loved it, but neither of us had any money and so I left it there and forgot about it.’ I pulled it from my finger and handed it to Charlie, who took it tentatively and looked it over.

  ‘Joel took the woman’s card. He emailed her and explained that he wanted to buy it, but would need to get some money together first. She agreed to keep it for him and a month later, when the market came back, he bought it and gave it to me. He said that he understood that I didn’t want to marry, but he wanted to give that to me as a sort of promise ring, saying that we’d love each other forever.’

  ‘Sounds like he really loved yer,’ Charlie said, clearing his throat.

  ‘He still does – that’s what makes this so hard.’

  ‘What do yer mean?’

  ‘I mean that …’ I took a deep breath as I plucked up the courage to say what I had been thinking for years. ‘I mean that it was never that I didn’t want to get married, it was just that I never wanted to marry Joel.’

  ‘Is that a hint?’ He chuckled and handed it back to me.

  I laughed nervously and held on to the ring, not wanting to put it back on, but not quite ready to let go of it. ‘I just see what you had with Abi.’ He looked down, unable to meet my eye while I spoke her name. ‘The kind of love you had, still have for her …’ I’m not going to lie, that last part stung. ‘Joel and I never had that. We were never meant to be.’

  ‘Yer know, I never believed in meant to be or destiny or anything like that.’ He spoke quietly and reached a hand over to my knee. ‘But the way this has happened, finding that sticker up there on the clock tower and leading me to Ned, then to you and meeting you in that café. It all just feels like someone wants us together.’

  We had been through so much together already and, in that moment, I finally realised that I loved him too deeply already for this to all be for nothing.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘I just can’t help but think that maybe this is what was meant to happen and
I was meant to love you, but to me the timing …’

  ‘… feels off?’ He finished my sentence for me.

  ‘Exactly.’ I sighed and shuffled a little closer to him, the warmth of his hand finding my knee. I leaned in and placed my palm gently on his cheek. His impossibly blue eyes latched on to mine. ‘I love you, Charlie Stone.’ His mouth broke into a smile and for a heart-jolting moment, I thought he might say it back, but he just swallowed his smile and breathed a shaky sigh.

  ‘I want to kiss you without you thinking of Abi. I want to spend the night with you without you feeling like you’re being unfaithful to your wife. You’re still grieving, and that’s okay.’

  He opened his mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes showed me that he agreed with what I was saying. ‘You need more time. Time to put your heart back together before you give it away again. I want us to have a chance and if we’re going to have that, we need to be patient.’

  His eyes were glassy now, his lips puckering as he drew them into his mouth. ‘Yer right.’ His voice broke and he groaned in frustration. ‘Erg! I’m sorry I keep cryin’ all the time.’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’ I placed a hand on his other cheek and angled his face back to mine. ‘You need to let yourself feel it. It’s like owning a mean old bird.’

  He chuckled and dislodged more tears. ‘How the hell is this anythin’ like owning a mean old bird?’

  ‘Okay, maybe not my best analogy, but hear me out. If you cage it up and lock it away, you’re never going to be rid of it. But if you open the cage door and let it out, it’ll take off out the window and make room for a nice friendly one to move in.’

  ‘And the nice friendly bird is what exactly?’

  ‘Happiness,’ I replied. ‘Let yourself hurt, Charlie, and when you’re ready, we can see what happens.’

  He wiped his tears away and took my hands from his face, folding them inside his. ‘What if everything’s changed by the time I’m ready?’