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‘Can’t you think about anything but that?’ Sally demanded bitterly.
‘Such as?’ Joel challenged her.
‘Such as these.’ Angrily she threw the bills down on the table.
She hadn’t received this month’s salary yet and already it was almost accounted for. Paul had come in last night saying he would need new football boots and now here were those bills. She felt sick at the thought of opening them, knowing already that she might not be able to pay them, and all Joel could do was grab hold of her and…
Silently Joel watched her. The unopened bills lay between them on the table. Sally reached for one of them, ripping it open, scanning it feverishly. Perhaps with the money her sister paid Joel for the decorating they might just be able to cover it.
She reached for the other but Joel stopped her.
‘That’s addressed to me,’ he told her flatly.
Sally stared at him. Joel had never minded who opened their post, and invariably she was the one to do so because he was at work when it arrived.
Suddenly she just couldn’t take any more.
‘You open it, then,’ she told him angrily. ‘And you pay it as well…’
Bitterly Joel watched as she stormed out of the room. He could still vaguely feel the imprint of her hipbone against his fingertips. Once she would never have confused a gesture meant to comfort and solace with one that was sensual and questioning… Once… once a lot of things had been different…
He picked up the unopened bill and opened it.
‘You pay it’, she had challenged him. He could feel the painful burn of his emotions searing his eyelids.
Once she got upstairs Sally discovered that she was
shaking with reaction to their row.
She shouldn’t have spoken to Joel like that, she knew, but couldn’t he see the strain she was under? Other people could… Like her sister… like Kenneth.
She sighed and got up. In less than an hour she had to be at work, and before that she had to persuade Joel to do her sister’s decorating.
* * *
Philippa saw Joel walking up the drive from an upstairs window.
‘The car’s still in the garage… It’s round here,’ she told him awkwardly as she went outside to meet him. The wind was ruffling his hair, thick and dark and silky. She had an odd urge to reach out and touch it. To touch him…
Uncomfortably she distanced herself from him, hurrying ahead of him as she led the way round the side of the house. What was happening to her? She just didn’t feel like this about men… react to them like this.
She looked over her shoulder, suddenly anxious to tell Joel that she had changed her mind. She didn’t want him here. It was too…
He was standing looking at the ground she had been clearing.
‘I’m working on my vegetable garden,’ she heard herself telling him uncertainly. ‘I thought…’
Joel bent down and picked up a handful of soil, letting it trickle through his fingers.
‘Good soil,’ he told her, ‘but you’ll have to watch that hedge; cut it down a bit otherwise it will take too much light…’
‘You obviously know a lot more about it than I do. Are you a keen gardener?’
‘No,’ Joel told her abruptly and then, realising how curt he had sounded, he added, ‘My father had an allotment—it was one of my chores as a boy to work on it…’
There was an expression on his face that told Philippa that his memories of that work weren’t good ones.
‘That must have been hard work?’ she sympathised.
