Sorry for the delay but the muse just hasn't been around for a while.
This is another story that just 'appeared out of a single paragraph'. You'll notice that it's not really my usual chosen subject matter and out of my comfort zone, but I did enjoy the challenge of writing it despite that.
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If someone had told him that he would take a 'pensioners' holiday' aged 32 he would never have believed them.
But here he was drifting slowly along the Rhine, conscious of that strange effect of slow-moving boats, giving that feeling that the boat is staying still and it's actually the land that is moving along. He raised his glass and sipped from it, a quite exquisite wine he was sure but not one that he would ever be able to recall or could really have commented on. For the twelfth of thirteenth time that day he had seriously doubted the wisdom of his being on this trip.
While he knew some of his fellow passengers they weren't really his kind of people. He was the youngest there by at least thirty years with that being quite a generous guess. The majority of the group were retired couples that lived within a few miles of each other, including his mother, currently and temporarily languishing in a nursing home with a broken hip on strong painkillers and a long way short of being able to undertake a trip like this one for a while.
From her bed she had insisted that her newly separated son should take her deluxe balcony cabin on her nine day, all expenses paid European trip with all meals and drinks included.
He had tried hard to convince her that it wasn't his kind of thing at all. She had already contacted the local retirees' group to cancel her ticket but it was so close to the date of departure that his Mum wouldn't get her money back.
"Pack a bag John, and grab your passport, you can leave your car on my drive and walk to the coach pick up point and you're away!" she winced a bit as her enthusiasm flexed her damaged hip.
"But I won't know anyone Mum, they are all your friends."
"Oh for God's sake John, it's a bloody holiday; you don't actually have to know anyone!"
"But..."
"You're a bloody journalist!" she snapped at him parentally, "make a job out of it..."
So that was how he had found himself on that overcast early summer Monday morning, stood in the Community Centre Car park chatting with a host of little of ladies and their hubbies, all greatly interested in how his Mum was doing and how awful it was she was missing this trip that she had been looking forward to for so long. He climbed on the coach and took the seat next to the toilet that started to smell the moment the engine started, but it was far enough away from the older couples for them not to start chatting to him about what a nice boy like him was doing on a holiday like this all on his own.
The coach made a few more pick-ups and he ignored most of them, tapping away into his small screen and reading the few emails from some of the editors, and another one from his former partner.
He opened the email about her not being able to collect all of her stuff, as the long awaited house move of her parents was now happening and she wouldn't have anywhere to leave anything and even her parents were taking tonnes of stuff to the tip and the charity shop; and hey, guess what, she was STILL so very sorry for what she did to him and now she was promising to be out of his way as soon as she could but her collection of books, chick-flicks, CD's and box sets would sit there as a reminder of her for a bit longer.
He had known that there was a new dentist called Rob that worked in the same surgery as her as she had gone out of her way to mention what a nice bloke he was.
It wasn't that he was a 'good dentist', not that he was a 'nice man' or even a 'good chap'; he was a 'nice bloke' and that 'bloke' was terminology that she so rarely used and only about previous boyfriends or men that she had known and liked before him.
After the 'nice bloke' comment there were other things that told him something had happened, at least twice. She rushed to get to work and she had never done that before, work was work - nothing more. Then she came home from work late and with faintly damp hair and smelling of the shower, and while she had occasionally used the facilities in the office before a staff party or night out she totally hated using a bathroom that wasn't hers.
That wasn't like her; the 'showering at work' was because she had to work late; working late had never been necessary, not once. Her practice worked shifts and never did emergency work - ever - so late working wasn't needed. She had even told him that the 'working late was for a favour' rather than extra money and that didn't seem like her employer at all.
While she hated using strange bathrooms she did like to shower after sex, unless it was at home with him and in their bed. In hotel rooms, at their parents' houses, holiday flats - they would make love passionately, wonderfully, warmly, lovingly; but she would get up half an hour or so afterwards and have a shower, returning to the bed she had recently made love in.
Like most men in any sort of relationship he knew his partner's menstrual cycle almost as well as she did and it was strange that the night before she had not only put on a T-shirt, she had worn panties, both anathemas to this girl that slept naked all the time they had shared a flat.
That morning she said she was starting later in the day and would have a lie in; totally out of character for the girl that never missed a day's work, conscious that the practice relied on her and her nursing colleagues. He left for work, at least he told her that he did, slamming the door noisily and starting his car and driving around the block stopping outside his neighbour's house. He let it idle for five minutes until he looked up and saw steam coming from the bathroom extractor - not that much of a lie in then. He opened the front room door and tiptoed in, the noise from the shower and the radio in there hiding his presence.
He walked into the bedroom - the bathroom was ensuite - seeing her panties and T-shirt from the night before in their laundry basket. He gently pushed the bathroom door open,
"Hiya Honey! Forgot my entry badge!" waving his ID hanging from a company lanyard.
She spun around backing away, pulling the short shower curtain across her breasts. She did have great breasts, probably the nicest he'd ever seen; but she'd never felt the need to hide them from him before.
"Oh!" she burst out, "you... you frightened me!"
"Sorry Baby," he said, watching with interest as she grabbed her towel and made to cover the naked, wet and still soapy body he knew so well and that she had never hidden from him before and he thought he caught sight of a mark on her right breast.
She turned back into the water, pulling the shower curtain back across the side of the bath and finishing off rinsing her hair. He made her a cup of tea and by the time he'd taken it upstairs for her she was dried and dressed and smiling at him.
At work that day he tried to rationalise what was going on into something innocent. He didn't want to suddenly demand explanations from her for what could be just a set of coincidences or, God forbid, something medical that she was trying to keep a secret from him until she knew more.
He failed in that; Julia told him everything, that was the kind of girl she was - she couldn't have a headache without letting him know. This just didn't make sense and while part of him desperately wanted to maintain a blissful ignorance and didn't want to know if something was going on, the healthy male ego just had to.
He had a rather lacklustre day struggling to concentrate on the two articles he was working on, and after staring at his computer screen for two hours with nothing to show for it, left slightly early slowing as he went past the surgery on his way home; it was Wednesday, and the one guaranteed early closing evening, and even that was four pm, no exceptions and he saw that the place was indeed closed for business with lights on upstairs.
There was the new brass plaque standing out next to the older ones polished to a sheen with some of the blacking in the letters polished out decorating the wrought iron fencing around the surgery. It read 'Mr R D Summerville BDS' and it was so new and shiny that he guessed Mr Summerville had not been in practice long. There was her pushbike and a large motorcycle but no cars nor other signs of life in the ground and first floor areas where all of the consulting rooms were and where the dentistry always took place.
Standing in the street he looked at his phone and checked the practice website and saw on the list of staff the new starter Rob Summerville, qualified for two years and fresh out of locum work and ready to work hard for the practice. That he was evidently doing but with his partner of five years. His photograph showed a good-looking Alpha male in his late twenties, with dark hair and designer stubble. Flash bastard.
He rang her and it was answered on the fifth ring.
"Hi John!" she said with far too much energy for that time of day.
"I'm just on my way home," he said leaning back on the railings of the accountancy firm across the road and looking up to the illuminated loft room windows, the only light in the entire building, 'the flat' as it was known. "I'm going to be there in about twenty minutes, are you home yet?"
There was a pause,
"No," she said, "just helping Doctor Summerville with a late emergency client." As he looked up he saw the centre sash window of the three lit ones slide down and the same face with designer stubble lean out, bare shoulders and pec's on display with a hint of redness from something or other. "How long do you think this will take Doctor?" He heard her say.
The man in the window turned his head and smiled back into the room, and he had the strange vision of the moving lips above him and hearing the delay in the voice from the phone.
"At least another hour," it said, "I may need to re-stitch this gum around the extraction, it's..." he paused and John could see him leaning further out into the evening air, "It's still bleeding..." Doctor Summerville smiled back into the room and wiped his forehead, his head shaking with an obviously silent chuckle.
"At least an hour Darling," she said, "I've made a start on dinner, it's in the slow cooker on a timer and will be ready for about six, you go ahead and have yours and I'll have mine as soon as I get back." He saw her slowly appear at the open window next to her work colleague, a nervous smile on her face evident from this distance and her phone to her ear, her bobbed hair style obvious and the lighting, while not giving detail, showed that she was evidently as bare-chested as Doctor Summerville, but with the distance he could only make out the two points of her very dark nipples pushing against the frosted glass as she too lent out for cooling fresh air. The line was quiet, "John?"
