"Do you ever think, what if we hadn't…found our way back together?" Sam asked. The words were slightly muffled, as she was nestled against his bare chest, her preferred way to fall asleep. Her breath was warm and soft as she spoke, her hair silky against his skin. She smelled of rose geranium from her bath and he could not help squeezing her gently before he answered.
"D'you mean, what would have happened to us?" he said. She liked to play this game What if when they lay together in the double bed that nearly filled the room or when she rubbed his head as it rested in her lap, aching after a long day of study in the library, of writing and crumpling the pages where he'd lost his way. Aching as it always did since the war, worse when it was bright; he had begun to be glad of the constant English rains everyone else muttered about, the mercy of clouds.
"Yes. Should you have married that girl, that Violet? Or a nurse like Milner's Edith? I think a nurse should have suited you, bossing you about and keeping everything tidy in the house," Sam mused. She didn't sound jealous or even terribly distressed at her own perceived failings as a housewife, but was entertained by the nurse she'd conjured, smart and pert in a white cap. He himself had hardly thought of Violet…Danvers, no, Davies, in years. She'd been a pretty thing but that was all. She'd liked romance but that meant dancing until the band packed up, not poetry, spending all his spare cash on flowers, not a picnic in the park. They'd never had made a match; he couldn't even imagine wanting to propose to her. As for a nurse, with the exception of Mrs. Paul Milner, he'd never met one who struck him as anything but stern or an overgrown Girl Guide, no one approaching what Sam described. It was his turn.
"I'd be a bachelor, like Dad, mucking around with my endless papers and poetry, boring anyone who let me with my theories about Carlyle and Dryden, my imperfectly metered verse," he said, enjoyed how her laughter felt against his body. Her feet were still cold but that didn't bother him at all.
"You'd never! I know, you'd fall in love with a glamorous lady-writer, like Harriet was before she was Lady Peter, and you'd get a very expensive, very fast motor-car in some delicious color…indigo I think, and you'd drive for hours, ending up in Scotland or Cornwall. You'd get married at Gretna Green and you'd fight over whose book had gotten better reviews," Sam announced.
"I think I've got a lady-writer right here after that précis. What about you? Would you have flown to California and reunited with your American soldier? Would absence have made the heart grow fonder if he'd sent you a postcard covered in orange blossom?"
"Goodness me, no! Joe was a dear but that, we should never had gotten married. I'd like to say I'd have been swept off my feet by a lord in disguise, like George, or perhaps an older man, someone wry and dashing, like Max de Winter, going grey at the temples," Sam said, wriggling around a little, tugging her nightdress free.
"Without the murdering, one hopes," Andrew pointed out, reaching for her, catching the sweet, dipping curve of her waist with his hand.
"Of course. I said I'd like, not that it would have happened. I suppose I'd have married a vicar in search of a parish or some rather milque-toast idealistic ex-officer, someone who wanted to be an MP in a poor London district and expected me to trail around after him, doing good works. God, it would have been dull! Dull as dishwater!" she said, sounding positively relieved she'd escaped the fate she had envisioned. As if she'd had a close call and has rescued herself from it when she'd nodded Yes to his proposal, his mother's garnet ring.
"You weren't made for dull, I'll grant you that. Maybe not all the mayhem you and Dad are so fond of, but certainly not dull. This isn't, we're not—are we? That's not why you asked what if, is it?" he said, suddenly tense, fearful that she was unhappy and could find no other way to say it, that something was wrong he'd not known to pay attention to.
"Oh Andrew! Only you could think that, you darling nit-wit! I'm perfectly satisfied, I'm perfectly overjoyed with our life, our marriage, our tiny flat and all our lovely daydreams," she said, scuttling closer, pressing her lips against his jaw. She turned his face towards her and kissed him properly, deeply, until he was breathless and reassured.
"I simply like to play…and I like for you to play along with me. We rather missed that part of courtship, don't you think? I do," she explained, surprised him by tickling his ribs, knowing just where he was most sensitive. He managed to stop her by rolling them over, so he lay nearly atop her. There was light enough in the room he saw the glint in her dark amber eyes, the dimple in her cheek before he kissed her back. What if could wait; he wanted to play a different game.