PSoML Part 8

Part 7 is here

Early One Morning

Ronnie woke early, the sun streaming through the window in the living room and across his face. He tested his head and found he was slightly hung over, but not too much. Arriving late the night before, Lucy and he had agreed that they wouldn’t stay up talking, but would take some time in the morning to catch up. Lucy insisted they toss for the bed in the bedroom, as opposed to the sofa bed that Ronnie ended up with. Ronnie had quickly tossed a coin, and Lucy called heads. He just glanced at it as it landed and said, “You win.”
Tired (and slightly drunk) as he’d been, Ronnie had forgotten to close the window blinds, hence the early awakening. After staring at the white ceiling for a few minutes, he made to get out of bed and was halted by Lucy’s voice.
“I hope you’re decent,” she said from the kitchen counter. “Coffee? Tea?”
“What’s brewing?”
“Cup of tea. But with UHT milk,” she said.
“Go on then.”

Ronnie had a quick shower and then sat in a fresh shirt and jeans at the kitchen table as Lucy pulled at the Vendéean plaited brioche she'd found on the doorstep first thing.
“So tell me about it,” she said.
“About what?”
“Your life.”
“You first.”
“I asked first.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start with why you stopped speaking to me.”
Ronnie felt like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. “Why, Mr Spade, you certainly are a man who likes to get straight to the point.”
“Stop stalling.”
“I have to say to you, it’s a hard place to start.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve thought about it over and over again over the past… years, you know, and apart from saying I was fucking insane there’s not a whole lot of reason I can find for why I did that.”
“Why were you insane?”
“I was jealous.”
“You’ll have to explain that. I don’t understand that.” Lucy looked across the table at him imploringly. Ronnie realised she had been up for a while, because she didn’t have any of the look of someone who had just woken up with a hangover. Her hair, which had been short and dark when he first knew her, was now just long enough to reach the top of her shoulders, and obviously treated with a deep red colour, possibly to conceal grey. She was looking good, Ronnie thought. In fact, she was looking great, green eyed and fresh faced.

Ronnie didn’t know where to go next, so he drank some of his tea, which was about the right colour, but tasted too creamy due to the UHT milk. Then he said,“I was jealous of you and Dave. Which I thought was obvious."
“Of the two of us, or just one of us?”
“I don’t know how else to put it. I wanted you, he had you, it destroyed me.”
“But you had… You know… You were…”
“There were others.”
“Yeah. What about…?”
“Sally, for example?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“She… she was never really interested in me, though was she? I mean, she tolerated the fact that I was all puppydog about her. But it was also safer for me that she wasn't interested.”
“And I wasn’t safe?”
“You were my friend. I could actually speak to you and get along with you on an equal footing. Aside from Dave, you were my best friend. You were part of my life. If I could rewrite history I would say you were, in fact, my best friend, more than he ever was. Then suddenly you were Dave’s girlfriend, and he had access to parts of you, to times of the day with you, that I didn’t have. He knew what you looked like on a Saturday afternoon. He knew what it was like to kiss you, to touch your skin. He knew what your house looked like, what your family was like. He knew you at school and that was it. And afterwards, I knew you through him only. Suddenly this really important part of my life was behind a door marked, ‘Property of Dave.’ I know that’s not the right way to say it, but I had to go through him to get to you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“That’s how I felt.”
“But that’s… what about all the letters we wrote to each other? Did you think he was reading them over my shoulder? Or dictating the replies?”
“Of course not. But you’re assuming rational thought at work. There was none. I was like a baby who wants something but can’t reach it. I just felt like--” Suddenly, Lucy interrupted:
“Shall I tell you what I felt like?”
“When?”
“When you stopped speaking to me.”
“Like I’d smacked you in the face?”
“Like you’d kicked me in the guts. I felt like the worst person in the world, that I’d done something terribly, terribly wrong."
"And there's nothing I can say to put that right. There are no words. I've regretted it for twenty years, and another twenty years of the same regret still won't make it right."

There was a long pause. Lucy’s momentary fury seemed to have subsided. Ronnie’s ears were throbbing with the sound of his own blood gushing through his veins.

Finally, she reached across the table and took his hand, and there were tears in her eyes. He decided to plunge in.

“Lucy, there’s only one reason I’m here. You’re it. And everything else, every body else, can go on hold as far as I am concerned. There is nothing else in my life that matters more than you. I don’t want that to be too much pressure. There’s no plan, no agenda. You were lost to me, I thought forever, but here we are, the internet really does change everything. And I’m just asking, what can I do for you?”

She sighed. “Okay. I know you mean it, I know you’re sincere. The main thing is, we can talk to each other, we can try the talking cure. But what you did back then, it wasn’t a small thing that happened to me. There are a lot of things you need to know about before you really understand that, I think. But we can talk.” She paused, still holding tightly onto Ronnie’s hand. “And Ronnie, whatever else happens, I came here for you, too. So we’re even. We’ve got to deal with the rest of them, because otherwise it would be too weird. But let’s find the time we need.”