The Truth Club (72 page)

‘Stop running away from me.’ He grabs my arm roughly, and I
flinch.

‘I’m not running away from you.’

‘Yes, you are…’ He sighs. ‘And I might as well admit it.’

‘
Admit
what
?’ I snap.

‘You’re shouting at me.’

‘Yes, I know I am. And that’s because you can sometimes be extremely irritating, Nathaniel. Extremely annoying, and… and quite uncaring, actually.’

And then Nathaniel leans forward and kisses my lips for the
briefest of moments. ‘Shut up, Sally,’ he says softly. ‘Please just
shut up and let me speak.’

I’m so dumbfounded that I just stare at him.

‘What I was going to admit,’ he begins slowly, ‘is that I suppose
I’ve been running away from you, too.’

My breath catches in my throat.

He places his hands firmly on my shoulders and looks steadily
into my eyes, unblinking. ‘Let’s face it, Sally: we scare each other
shitless. Because if we get into this – this weird thing we have, it’s
going to be really hard to get out of it.’

There are butterflies doing the rumba in my stomach.

‘In fact, we may never want to get out of it,’ he continues. ‘We
may be stuck with each other.’

‘But… but why haven’t you said this before?’ I gasp.

‘I’ve given you countless hints that I care for you, but you’ve
perversely ignored them.’

‘What hints?’ I demand defensively.

‘I have scoured Dublin for Chinese takeaways for you. I have
helped you find
two
lost great-aunts and a wedding ring. I saved you from having your bottom spanked at that reception, and stopped you from flying off to California, and –’

‘I wouldn’t have allowed him to spank my bottom!’ I declare indignantly.

‘Look at you now, Sally! I’m telling you I love you, and you’re
turning it into some kind of argument.’

‘You
love
me?’ I almost fall over onto a large, wet bit of seaweed.

‘Yes. So now you can go off to Brian, or Sammy, or whoever your latest beau is, and forget about me. But at least I’ve
said
it.’
His eyes are blazing with emotion.

I don’t know what to say. I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming. He
can’t love me. A man like Nathaniel wouldn’t love me. Men like
Diarmuid love me – or think they do for a while. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me. Or maybe it does…

Suddenly I feel absolutely terrified. I am actually shaking.
‘It’s not true. You’re making it up.’

His blue eyes suddenly soften. He reaches out and enfolds me
tenderly in his arms. ‘I know,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘It’s kind
of awful in a way, isn’t it? Kind of scary and sweet, all at the same time.’

‘Yes,’ I whisper back.

His lips brush the nape of my neck. He pulls back and looks at
me quizzically; then he kisses the tip of my nose.

‘But what about the others?’ I press my face into his jumper. ‘Greta told me all about them,’ I continue, though my voice is
slightly muffled. ‘She made it sound as if you were
besieged
with
female admirers.’

‘Of course there aren’t hordes of women chasing me, Sally. If
there were, I’m sure I would have noticed.’

‘But –’

‘I suppose there are some women who
like
me,’ he continues,
running a hand gently across my back. ‘But nothing like as many
as Greta suggested. She decided to talk me up, like she talks up her PR clients. I think she thought you’d be impressed.’

‘But… but why would she bother to do that?’ I frown.

‘Because she knew how I felt about you. She wanted to be a
matchmaker. She confessed on the phone yesterday… and then she w
ent on about this Brian Mulligan fellow. Who is he?’

‘No one you need to worry about.’ I smile, and hold him more
tightly.

‘That’s why I rushed over. I wanted to prise you from Brian’s
clutches.’

‘I was never really
in
his clutches at all.’

‘Good.’ Nathaniel hugs me so tightly I gasp for breath.

‘I wish all this had happened a bit earlier,’ I say. He takes my
hand and we walk towards my cottage.

‘Yes, so do I,’ he sighs, pressing me snugly to his side. ‘But I
backed off because of Diarmuid. I really felt that, if you could make your marriage work, I should let you. And then Diarmuid went off with…’

‘Charlene,’ I supply.

‘Yes, Charlene. And I thought I should wait for a while. Your
marriage was so on and off, I thought it might start up again. I didn’t want to pounce on you.’

‘Oh, dear… I wish you had.’ I kiss him again. I want to kiss him
all over.

‘And then I had a secret I couldn’t tell you, about DeeDee,’ he
continues. ‘And you suddenly got all distant and haughty –’

‘Only because I thought women were virtually throwing their
knickers at you in Grafton Street.’

‘Then I decided that you were emotionally vulnerable and I shouldn’t exploit the situation, so I took the job offer in London to see if I could forget you.’

‘Why?’ I frown.

‘Well, I think we’ve both had some sobering romantic experiences recently. I didn’t want us to end up together on the rebound… and you didn’t seem that interested in me, anyway.’

‘I must be almost as good an actress as DeeDee,’ I say.

‘But I think I made my own feelings pretty obvious, as I said earlier.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ I protest. ‘You behaved as though you saw me
as a friend.’

‘I probably thought about it all far too much. I’m sorry.’ He smiles at me sheepishly. ‘My head was buzzing with compli
cations. And then DeeDee told me to calm down and listen to my
heart instead. It worked. I suddenly knew that I had to see you.’

‘DeeDee?’

‘Yes, I went to talk to her about all this yesterday.’

‘Oh.’ I can’t quite take it all in. I feel quite giddy with disbelief and relief, and joy. I need to be somewhere warm. I need to let all
this sink in, with Nathaniel beside me – and Fred, of course. He has been watching us very quietly, almost hopefully.

‘I think you mentioned something about chocolate cake and
tea,’ I find myself saying. ‘There’s a nice café off that side-street.
If we hurry, it might still be open.’

‘Can I come back to your cottage afterwards?’ Nathaniel’s eyes
have darkened; he grips me more tightly.

‘No.’

I can feel his disappointment.

‘We’re going to Bull Island in Erika’s camper van.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I giggle. ‘I’ll explain over a large slice of Black
Forest gâteau.’

‘I’m not sure if this was such a good idea,’ I say, much later.

‘Yes, why
did
you suggest this, Sally?’ Nathaniel grins at me.
‘This van isn’t particularly comfortable.’

‘I… I think I wanted to show I could be as impetuous as you are. It was stupid.’

‘Yes, very stupid… but kind of nice.’

‘At least it got us here,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t sure it would. Erika was
v
ery surprised, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes, and grinning from ear to ear.’

‘It’s lovely to be so close to the sea, though. God, is that a flea?’

‘
Maybe. Come here.’ He grins dangerously.

‘But –’

I don’t complete the sentence because his lips are on mine. My
head is bent back with the force of his kiss. His tongue is
searching my mouth. He is holding me with such passion, such longing. I want him to ravish me, see all of me, search me out. The thing is, I’m not sure either of us can wait to get undressed.

‘Take off your blouse,’ he orders.

‘Only if you take off your shirt,’ I order back.

We disrobe silently, determinedly, staring at each other. It’s like
an exquisite striptease. As each layer goes, I feel more desperate
to have him close, so close that he is part of me, in me and around
me – no escape, just him kissing my eyebrows, the back of my
shoulder, the little wrinkled spot on my elbow. Not just going for
the obvious. Taking care.

‘Now,’ I say. ‘Please, now!’

I gasp at the force of him, the hard, impatient passion; the depth of it. No one has ever reached that far. That far into my heart.

The camper van rocks. There is nothing I want to hide from
him. Glorious sensations are rippling through every molecule of
me, and I feel them building until a flood of ecstasy fills me. I let
go, and he does too.

For a moment we are too dazed even to register where we are
or what has just happened. Then we look at each other and laugh.

Half an hour later we are sitting up in bed, cosily eating
chocolate biscuits. Nathaniel bought them on our way here. As I
eat them, I decide I’m going to take up DeeDee’s offer. She wants
to open an Extravaganza in Dublin – she has enough savings to fund the enterprise for a year, to see if it takes off – and she’s a
sked me to be the manager. I’ve told her that I’d like the
emphasis to be on tea rather than coffee, though of course we would offer both – and hats, and Erika’s cats, and sofas, and
heaven knows what else. It will be our version of the kind of shop
they used to have in Ireland, where you could get a pint of beer and a new shirt and a bag of coal to keep you warm. We need more warmth, in this strange new world with its reality TV and loneliness, where we know more about eight people locked in a
house for a month than we do about our own neighbours; where
we can hardly summon up the courage to look a stranger in the eye. We need more contact, more connection. We need more beautiful strangers.

Nathaniel is sleeping like a little boy now. Tears of amazement
and relief prick my eyes. Nathaniel, my Nathaniel, the most
beautiful stranger I have ever met, is lying right here beside me.
We are covered in love and chocolate biscuits. I wipe a cascade of
crumbs from the pillow and softly kiss his cheek.

Also by Grace Wynne-Jones:-

Ordinary Miracles     1905170647    £6.99