This is the first part of a love story that I have been trying to work up into a novel for ages. Trouble is I keep forgetting myself and my two characters just end up in bed. Hope you like it.
*
The door slammed as the teenager left the room.
"Kids ah?" he said.
"They drive you mad, no rhyme nor reason, just to piss me off." She folded her arms.
"I get cross with my two don't worry."
"Oh yours are only young yet, you've got years to go until you want to strangle them. I sometimes think Brian died just for bloody mindedness."
"It's tough isn't it."
"I do miss him," she said, "not the way that you miss Jenny though," she dismissed.
"How do you know?" He grinned cheekily.
"Oh you two were still in love. I think I miss Jenny more than I miss Brian."
"Well, she was your sister, it's allowed."
"Yeah but I was married to him for almost twenty years, I stopped living with Jenny when she was sixteen. I should miss him more than I do. He was almost twenty years older than me though." She said, "I'm thirty-five and he was like an old man when he died. And Jenny, well..." She let the thoughts of her late sister hang in the air.
"Yeah," he said with a surprising amount of calm, "basically, life isn't fucking fair."
She was surprised by the way he'd almost spat out the expletive, she'd never heard him swear or even raise his voice before.
"Christopher!" she said in mock outrage at her normally quiet brother in law and pretending to almost drop her empty coffee cup, "anyway fucking fair or fucking unfair, I wasn't getting any at all." She giggled.
"Any what... Ooooh," he said with a smile at her crudeness in response to his.
She looked knowingly at him and shook her head. He looked her up and down, "what not even before his illness?"
"Not that much," she sniffed in mock disgust.
"Nothing since?"
"Nope, just my little plastic pal."
"Your... ooh!" he said with embarrassed realisation.
"The kids never seem to wonder why the batteries in their toys don't seem to last."
"You nick them for..." he wagged a finger, "Shame on you!"
"Oh I know," she said with a sideways grin, "but it's better than me strangling them after all;" Emboldened by the new candour and her own curiosity she asked, " are you... err... seeing..."
"Nothing at all, I'm always too knackered to go out somewhere to find someone, then there's the babysitting, the innuendo, any amount of pity from everyone that isn't single themselves."
"Oh tell me about it," she said with an understanding but very knowledgeable groan.
"Oh, and the whole singles thing, no matter how posh it pretends to be, always seems so bloody sordid and... nasty."
"And don't you just hate it when friends invite you to dinner parties, and absolutely insist that they want you to come and it's not just to make up the numbers?"
"Oh yes," he giggled "and you get to the party and find yourself sat opposite someone's last surviving single sister..."
"Or Brother!" she laughed, "How does it go now?" she grinned, "This is so-and-so," she chuckled leaning forward,
He joined her on the punch line, "They're on their own too!"
The both laughed. The laughing stopped suddenly both aware of the closeness of the other.
"Perhaps that's why I don't get asked to dinner parties any more." He said.
"Yeah," Although she hadn't made any serious effort in that direction herself she had to agree. Her frustration about her lack of sex was tangible, she had recently finished her period and had been really horny -- so much so that she'd gotten out her vibrator and some of her late husbands pornography; the images that those thoughts created, the nasty phone sex lines adverts, the surgically enhanced eighteen year old actress/glamour models missing both pubic hair and personality, and adverts for toys -- worst of all the ridiculous looking sex dolls had almost made her stop reading the confession stories she found so arousing.
"There should be a phone number in the book you can ring when you're climbing the walls." She said looking into space, "You ring a number and get to speak to a person in the same state, send round a car, no names, no pack drill. Just a good hard shag with no baggage or having to pretend you like the person." She stopped herself, suddenly realising the implication of what she had actually said. There was no visible change in her normally quiet brother in law. He smiled again,
"Yeah, what is it with sex that makes it all so bloody complicated."
"I don't know, but it's bound to be the blokes fault." She growled
"Of course, mind you Blokes can do what you suggest already only it costs them."
"Have you ever?"
"Nah!" he said with a laugh. "Couldn't afford it for one, wouldn't know how to find one anyway." They were looking at each other, he smiled, she smiled; the silence went on for just too long and it was obvious that someone had to say it. "Look, Cathy... I don't want to get weird or anything but if you ever are... like... desperate... you know..." The room was silent, she just looked at him. "Ring me. Somehow... I don't know why but it seems like it would be OK, for us I mean... so long as... we... it didn't get too... " It was silent in the room again. "Sorry Cath, I shouldn't have said that, bang out of order."
"No, not at all."
"Look seeing as I've ruined the ambience I'd better go, I'm sorry about that I don't know what I was thinking..."
"Chris," she burst out, "You don't have to go, honestly. I'm rather flattered actually."
"You are?"
"Yeah," she stopped smiling, and took a deep breath fiddling with her fingers then tucking her hair back behind her ear, "it would be a wasted trip because..." she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, "you'd only have to drive all the way back after I rang you..." she paused and brushed her hair back behind the other ear.
"What, you mean..."
