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“I can’t believe she kept those poems,” she says between laughs, leaning against the door as I take off my shoes. “She has a folder. A whole folder of your teenage angst.”
“She’s been archiving them for blackmail purposes,” I mutter, tossing my keys into the bowl.
Claire dissolves into another fit of giggles, clutching her stomach. “The rhyme about Napoleon’s horse—Tom, that was art.”
I groan. “You’re never getting your hands on the second folder.”
“Too late,” she grins, kicking off her heels. “I think your mum just adopted me as her partner in crime. She promised to send me copies. She might even send me pictures tonight.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Traitor.”
Claire steps forwards and slips her arms around my waist, still smiling but softer now. “That went better than expected.”
“I told you they’d still like you, even as my girlfriend, not just Kath’s friend.” I press a kiss to her temple. “And they don’t just like you. They adore you. You had them in stitches the entire afternoon.”
She exhales against my chest, and I kiss her hair again. Eventually she pulls back, brushing her thumb across my shirt. “You should go do your marking. I know it’s hanging over you.”
“You don’t mind?”
Claire shakes her head, already wandering towards the table where she left her laptop. “Nope. I’m going to play around with some design stuff anyway.”
I pause, resting against the counter as I watch her flip it open. “Design stuff?”
She glances up, a sheepish smile tugging at her lips. “The layouts you liked the other week. I wanted to see if I could make them work in a new format. I had some ideas from that graphic design course I’d been on and I want to try a few of them tonight.”
Realisation hits and I raise my brows. “Wait—the ones you were thinking of sending to Damien? The ones you were talking about after the trip?”
She shrugs, trying for casual but failing to hide the flicker of pride in her eyes. “Yeah. Those ones.”
“Are you going to submit them?”
“Yep,” she says. “I just want to give them a final look over now, and then I’ll send them.”
Something warm settles in my chest. I shake my head with a smile, grabbing the stack of papers off the counter. “You’re brilliant, you know that?”
Claire rolls her eyes. “Go mark your essays, Professor.”
I do, but not before stealing one last kiss. As I sit at the table I have a sudden moment of clarity. I could do days like this with Claire every year for the rest of my life, and not get bored of it once.
Chapter 35
Claire
“Iwant it noted,” James says, limping past me towards the art tables with a bag of cones over one shoulder, “that when you said ‘help out for one Sunday’, I pictured standing near some children saying ‘good effort’. I did not picture being nutmegged by a nine-year-old called Dexter, whilst a group of other nine-year-olds laughed at me.”
“Dexter nutmegs everyone.” Tom starts counting bibs. “It’s very character building for you.”
“No. It’s not. Claire, back me up.”
“You said you wanted to do more cardio,” I chime in.
“I said that once,” James says. “After two pints. It was a throwaway comment, neither of you were meant to remember it.”
I can’t help but giggle at James’s beleaguered expression
When we leave the community centre half an hour later my hands are still faintly blue. I scrubbed them twice in the bathroom sinks, but ten-year-olds with art supplies are a force of nature, and apparently so is whatever pigment they use in the blue paint. I keep catching sight of my knuckles as we walk back to Tom’s, torn between grinning and frowning as I contemplate how I’m actually going to manage to get clean.
When I’d told Tom that I’d emailed the charity he works with about helping with their Sunday art sessions, he’d smiled so widely it made my chest hurt. I’d then had to sort out enough paperwork to wallpaper a flat to get the clearance to work with kids.
