‘You don’t, you look beautiful,’ Will said and it wasn’t a line. She was flushed and glowing, a Venus in athleisure wear. ‘Do you want me to drive you home?’
What he really wanted was for Margot to stay and it should have been the simplest thing to say that out loud. But now that their clothes were back on and they were heading towards something deeper and more meaningful than getting each other off, Will found that he was stumbling in the dark.
‘I have to have a shower,’ Margot said firmly, arms crossed over her hoodie. ‘But if you have something I could borrow, I mean, if you wanted me to stay.’
Margot made everything simpler. ‘Yeah, I do want you to stay,’ he said.
Will sorted out clean towels and a little pile of clothes then waited outside the bathroom door until he heard the shower turn on and Margot swear as she waited for the water to go from needle sharp cold to warm.
It felt like the longest fifteen minutes of Will’s life until Margot emerged, freshly scrubbed and pink-cheeked in a pair of his tracksuit bottoms and an old Ramones T-shirt from his university days. She’d obviously decided that she couldn’t face putting her bra back on, and though Will didn’t want to be caught staring, he could see the shape of her breasts under the faded black cotton and he was already half hard again.
‘I don’t know why I bothered having a shower,’ she said shrugging, which made even more delectable shapes under the black cotton.
‘Why’s that?’ Will’s voice sounded like it belonged to a man who smoked forty Marlboros a day.
‘Because you’re going to get me all hot and sweaty again, aren’t you?’ Her eyes drifted down to where he was hard again.
He fleetingly touched the bulge in his jeans, embarrassed that he was like a teenage boy with no control, but when he did Margot let out a shaky breath, then her hand reached up to cup the heavy weight of her breast.
‘I’ve never wanted anyone as much as I want you,’ he told Margot, and she smiled goofily, which was much more Margot than when she was playing seductress. Or maybe they were both Margot. There was still so much that he didn’t know about her. ‘In bed, this time?’
‘Yes, please,’ she said, already turning to head down the hall towards his bedroom. ‘My back couldn’t take another go on your kitchen island.’
By the time Will stumbled after her, Margot was already in his bedroom, face obscured as she pulled his T-shirt over her head. Will had had a vague plan that he’d undress her slowly, kiss every centimetre of skin that emerged, but he revised that in favour of finally closing his hands around the unbelievable softness of her breasts and tumbling her down on his bed.
It was much better second time around on a firm mattress, Margot naked and spread out before him like a feast. There was no awkwardness, no worry that he was doing something wrong, that he was wrong, because this was Margot. Who liked to micromanage every situation. In exacting detail. Which was far more of a turn-on in bed than it was when she was sending Will bullet-pointed text messages.
‘Gently at first, then you can do it harder.’
‘You can use your teeth and another finger. Yeah, like that.’
Then, ‘Just shift a little higher. Little bit more. Oh, there! Yes, just there. Don’t even think of stopping.’
Afterwards, when they were both flat on their backs, panting slightly, his duvet tangled around their feet, Will rubbed his thumb against her still hard nipple. ‘God, you’re bossy.’
‘Not bossy,’ Margot said, without any heat. ‘I just know what I want.’
‘Bossy.’ With superhuman effort, Will managed to roll over so he could raise himself up on one elbow and look at Margot all over again; she was all soft peaks and valleys. ‘It’s not a criticism. Far from it.’
Then Margot shivered, which did amazing things to her breasts, but Will wasn’t sorry when she pulled the duvet around them, and nestled into his side, so he could wind his fingers through her curls.
‘I hope you weren’t expected downstairs in the shop,’ she said.
Will groaned. ‘If they needed me, they’d have let me know.’ Then he thought of his phone still in the kitchen and how it could have been chiming and buzzing all this time. ‘If it was really urgent, my mum has got a spare key.’
‘That would have killed the mood.’ Margot shook with muted laughter.
‘Let’s not even think about it,’ Will decided. ‘And Sage knows to pop Blossom out mid-afternoon.’
Margot sighed, her breath ghosting against his shoulder. ‘Poor Blossom. She was so terrified.’
You can do this, Will thought to himself. Because we’re not friends. And we’re not kissing. We’re beyond both of these things. So, you should tell her. You have to tell her. You want to tell her.
And he did. For the first time, he wanted to tell someone. Not someone. He wanted to tell Margot, because he didn’t want to shut her out. He was so tired of keeping secrets, the weight of them always wearing him down.
‘Before you came, she snapped at me,’ Will said, and he thought that maybe the trick was to keep his voice flat, emotionless. Not get too carried away.
‘Only because she was scared, Will,’ Margot said softly.
‘I know. She’d been triggered back to a place where someone was unkind, cruel . . .’ Will looked at the ceiling, at the recessed lights, the spot where he’d thrown his shoe at a fly and it had chipped the paintwork. He always meant to do something about it. ‘I know that place too.’
Margot’s hand curved over Will’s heart. ‘Your dad,’ she said simply, because she always made the impossible seem possible.
‘My father,’ Will corrected her. ‘Dad sounds like he played football with me, took me fishing, gave me a pound to get sweets. That’s what dads do.’
Peter Hamilton hadn’t done any of those things, but if you spoke to his friends, the blokes down the pub, they’d have told you that Pete was the ‘salt of the earth’. ‘He’d give you the shirt off his back.’ ‘Hasn’t got a bad bone in his body.’
Good old Pete. Always the first to get his round in and the last to leave a party.
But eventually he would leave the Old Red Lion or the bar at the British Royal Legion and come back to the little terraced house and his family, and resume his reign of terror.
Because Peter Hamilton was a man corroded by disappointments, big and small. By potential and promise never realised. And the fact that he was a functioning alcoholic and a mean drunk.
All he needed was the love of a good woman. Who’d believe him when Peter promised that he wasn’t going to drink any more, that he was going to do better, be the man she deserved. So, Amaryllis Bloom said yes when he proposed, because she was a good woman with a good heart who always rooted for the underdog.
‘But he didn’t change,’ Will said heavily, still staring at the chip on the ceiling. ‘Why should he when he had someone to take out all his anger on, to blame for his own failings? He never laid a finger on Mum, but he didn’t have to. He beat her down with his words, with his constant belittlement, made her believe that she was worthless, and he did the same to Rowan and me.’
Will couldn’t remember a time when his father was anything other than a source of fear. The sound of his car on the drive, his key in the lock, his muttered curse as he dropped his keys in the bowl on the hall table were the opening chords of a grand opera, and by the end of the evening, its dramatic climax would be his sister sobbing quietly in her bed, his mother sitting rigid on a hardback chair in the living room because she wasn’t allowed to sit on the sofa anymore ‘like a fat, lazy cow’, while Will took the brunt of his father’s anger, his seething resentment, because nothing made Peter Hamilton more bitter than having a son.