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PROLOGUE
You Are My Night And Day
"Hey"
His voice was soft, almost a whisper against her skin as he pulled her closer to him tucking her into his side so that she was breathing the warm, slightly fuggy smell of his body, or rather of their bodies, from under the duvet, the familiar smell of one particular warm, sleepy male. She ran her hands over the body that she'd got to know so well in recent weeks, almost as well as she knew her own, so that the firmness of the well-sculpted muscles on his chest and his back and the slight softness of his stomach where he hadn't been able to exercise because of his injuries were incredibly familiar, as was the firmness of his slim, well-muscled backside and legs and then there was his reaction to her closeness and the way she was running her hands over him which was now very evident. Despite all his concerns a few weeks back, the anxiety that he'd done his level best to hide from her, she didn't know that particular reaction nearly as well as she knew the rest of him, well only since the night before in reality. She giggled as she moved her legs until one was wrapped across his legs, everything had changed last night, although the erection that was currently nudging at her thigh had nothing to do with last night, it was a direct result of the way she was sprawled all over him.
"Hey"
"Did you sleep okay?"
"Nah, not used to sleeping in the same bed as someone what fidgets the way you do, am I?"
"Glad to hear it, I hope you're not used to sleeping in the same bed with anyone, fidget or not" He rolled her onto her back and then leaned over, supporting himself on his forearms as he looked into the eyes that he kept telling her made her look like Bambi "And I do not fidget"
"Yeah you do, you always fidget in bed, so I'm pretty sure it were you and not me" She laughed as she looked up into the softness of his brown eyes "We're not gonna say anything to anyone about this, are we? I mean, I sort of think we should, you know, keep it to ourselves for a bit"
He could hear the insecurity in her voice as she asked, so that he knew just what it had cost her to say anything, and for a moment he was absolutely furious with himself. It hadn't occurred to him that she would have doubts about him, about them, about what was between them, and he knew that it should have done.
"I don't want to keep it to myself, Moll, I want to tell everyone who might be even the slightest little bit interested in us and then I want to tell everyone who doesn't give a shit as well"
"I dunno, Charles, I'm not sure that it's a good idea" He'd meant to make her happy but instead he could feel the tension building as she stopped smiling, shook her head, then spoke "If we tell people, then all that gold-digger shit is gonna start up again, you know that don't you? And I don't know if I can do all that again"
-OG-
'Then It's The End Of My World For Me'
Molly's Story
"But why?"
"I dunno, mum, how the fuck would I know? He was fine yesterday, at least I think he was, he never said a bleeding word so he must of just changed his mind unless he's lying in some ditch somewhere without his fucking phone"
"If I get a hold of him he'll wish he was bleeding well lying in a ditch somewhere" Nan was almost purple with outrage "Either that or dead ….. and we can get that sorted 'n all"
"Nan ….. " Molly didn't know what to say, her instinct was, as always, to leap in and defend him but maybe not this time.
"Hey, will we still have to pay for all of this do you reckon? Got a good mind to go and find them and tell them they owe us for it. I don't see why them greedy buggers should have the lunch that we paid for, they looked like they could well afford to buy their own" Nan was muttering on as Molly shrugged, dry-eyed although she wanted to scream at her Nan and the rest of her family who were all standing around pulling faces at each other to just shut the fuck up because she didn't care about the bloody lunch, in case they hadn't noticed he'd said he couldn't go through with it as though it was a visit to the sodding dentist or some'ing and anyhow who was this 'we' and 'us' she kept on about? Last time she'd checked it was her what was paying for all of it.
Her and her dad had turned up only a little bit late cos that were the tradition apparently and had then had to hang about for ages in the wedding car cos the best man had come out and told them that they was missing one vital accessory, the bloody groom. A few, actually a few hundred, calls later to Paul's mobile and she'd still got no answer and his bloody mum and dad had then done a disappearing act and fucked off as well. Finally he'd sent her a text saying he couldn't go through with it and he was sorry. Sorry? Not half as sorry as Molly was. An hour after she was supposed to have become Mrs Paul Walker and to have started her happy ever after she was sitting with Bella, who was still wearing her bridesmaid dress, on the couch in their parent's front room wondering what the fuck to do next, whether to start screaming now or whether to wait till she got home to her own place.
She'd known from the start that she would be paying for it, after all she was the one who'd opened her gob to Paul's snotty cow of a mother when the old bag had gone into patronising mode and said about not wanting to do things on the cheap and had said as how her and Paul's dad would chip in and pay for it cos she could see that Belinda and Dave couldn't possibly afford it. Molly was the one who'd said that her mum and dad were going to fund the whole sodding thing because that's what parents do, but the only problem was that mum and dad hadn't got two ha'pennies to call their own any more than she had, and Nan had said not to look at her cos her pension wouldn't run to it either. Molly's wages only just covered her rent and the essentials ….. they bloody definitely didn't run to silk dresses and imported flowers and cakes that cost the same as the deposit on a small house somewhere and table arrangements and god only knows what else, and that was before you even got to the actual food.
His mum and dad were paying for the booze cos it was apparently traditional for the groom's parents to pay for the champagne 'n the wine 'n that, so thank fuck for small mercies, although the booze wouldn't have been so bad, at least they could have taken it back to east Ham with them and necked it which was more than they could do with the sodding 'finger' buffet for hundreds of his friends and family, a buffet which she'd paid for.
She'd been going to have all the things that her mum had never had, not the wedding cos she really wasn't thinking about that, but a decent home somewhere where debt collectors and bailiffs had never even heard of them, let alone been regular visitors at the door where one of the Dawes clan would open it and lie, would pretend that they were honestly gonna pay up next week, without fail, and the debt collectors would pretend to believe them, knowing full well that they'd be back the following week. She'd been going to have a nice house with a nice garden in a nice place with kids that looked like they came out of the Boden catalogue, they'd even started to house hunt looking at places to rent, and Paul had said that they'd look at buying later on when they got back from Spain, and they were going to have holidays every year somewhere nice, if not Spain then in a nice hotel somewhere not a couple of days in a caravan in Clacton, and Paul?
Paul was her passport to that life and it wasn't that she didn't love him, she did, she was pretty sure about that, but it was just that ….. well … he was an army officer with a snotty family and a whole load of snotty friends who all seemed to have even more snotty wives and girlfriends. Still, it was him she loved and him she was marrying, not his friends and certainly not his family, which was just as well because Molly's inclination whenever she spent any time with his mother was this over-riding urge to punch her straight in her gob … . She'd never realised that love was this hard, or this exhausting either, but her Nan and her Mum had kept on telling her that it was never like the love songs, that you always had to work hard at it, and now, on top of all that, there was this little question of how she was going to pay for all of it …. .
Even maxing out her credit cards and maybe getting another one wouldn't go anywhere near paying for all the stuff that his mum thought was essential and while shifts in the local "open all hours" mini-mart/dump didn't actually fulfil any of her lifetime ambitions, in fact it probably wasn't the answer to anyone's prayers unless they were desperate, but those shifts were a simple means to an end. What was also bloody convenient was Paul's deployment to Afghanistan. Okay, so she didn't much like the fact that he was out there and it was dangerous, but there was this great big silver lining in that he wouldn't know what she was doing when she wasn't working at her proper job, so it was all a bit of a lifeline what with one thing and another.
All her life she'd had a craving for the sort of security that being married to him would provide for her, security that he took for granted, because money, or rather the lack of it, hadn't ruled his family life like it had hers. His family had a holiday home in Spain, they lived in a big house in Dulwich in south London, they had a cleaner and Paul drove a Porsche whereas her Dad had a very unhealthy relationship with the stuff. He was the eternal optimist about which of his dodgy scams would produce the next windfall, then, wherever it came from, and it wasn't a good idea to ask, it always ended up the same way, being pissed up the wall of the local pub.
-OG-
Standing on the check-out watching a somewhat "cheerful" customer loiter around by the 'Wines and Spirits' shelf, which they were supposed to police in order to stop the local piss artists doing a bit of self-service, Molly was listening to Lecture number fifty from her workmate and new 'surrogate mother' about what she should be saying to Paul's mum.
"Tell her it's none of her bleeding business what people get to eat, that it's the bride's side what decides that" She chuckled "You could probably get a discount on a job lot of them party platter things from here"
"Yeah right, I can see her face now, hundreds of sausage rolls with not a lot of sausage in 'em, and them disgusting soggy mini pizza things" Molly giggled but didn't take her eyes off the drunk who was waiting for their attention to be diverted elsewhere before he did his "shopping". Having a drink-dependent father had made her acutely aware of the deviousness of people like him so that she could carry on a conversation at the same time as watching him like a hawk, any shortages in the alcohol stock would be deducted from pay packets at the end of the week.
"Yeah good point, but it don't have to be, what did you say she wanted, scallops, scollops? whatever they are, and chorizo, does it?" Betty chuckled again as they both watched the drunk stumble his way towards where they were standing on the check-out and put a single packet of crisps down on the counter together with a handful of loose change.
"Loyalty card?" Molly looked at his face and knew that if they searched him, or got the police in to do it, they'd find a bottle of something hidden on him somewhere, then decided that she didn't fancy rooting around in his pockets or, heaven forbid, down his pants and trouser legs and to let him get away with it, she suddenly felt a little bit sorry for him "I'll tell you what, you go and tell her for me and I'll hold your coat while you do it"
"No problem" They both giggled maliciously, although Betty had never met Paul's mother she'd heard enough about her to be convinced that they wouldn't like one another "You know he's got something, don't you?" She nodded towards the retreating back of their 'customer' "We must be going soft in our old age"
"Yeah, I know, but I couldn't be arsed"
"No, me neither, poor old sod"
Saying good-bye to all her friends and colleagues at the mini-mart was far harder than she could ever have imagined, and saying good-bye to some of the regular customers was equally hard, especially the pensioners who came in for a small loaf or something but really for a bit of a chat. She was going to miss them all dreadfully, well, apart from the ones who talked on their mobiles the whole time she was serving them, the one's that never said please or thank you and just pointed at things like the chewing gum that they wanted from behind the counter while they carried on with their conversation on their phone. She was often tempted to point back, but to use just one vertical finger.
Paul was due home in a couple of days and there were only a few weeks left till the wedding so that she needed to have a bit of a rest beforehand, otherwise she was going to look at least two hundred in the photos. She had three maxed out credit cards and was up to the top of her overdraft limit, hadn't had a day off for months and had been working shifts, including nights, and then working on the check-out every spare hour there was and it had taken its toll on her so that she didn't dare sit down anywhere or she'd drop off almost immediately and EasyJet would probably count the bags under her eyes as excess baggage when they got on their honeymoon flight to his parents' place in Spain.
-OG-
Molly had come under huge pressure to be part of the party. Most of her mates had done their level best to bully, badger and brow-beat her into going with them to the club because her first instinct had been, as usual, to shake her head and say thanks anyway but she didn't think so.
"I'm not ready, and anyhow I've got nothin' to wear"
"Course you have" Sally started routing through the pile of clothes that Molly had discarded and dumped on the bed one by one as being too tight, too loose, too short, too long, too boring, too tarty, too just 'not what she wanted to ever wear again'.
"Here" Sally poured her a second glass of wine as Molly looked at her glass which for some completely unfathomable reason seemed to be empty, although she couldn't remember drinking anything from it, well certainly not emptying it "Get that down you and stop being such a miserable cow, you'll feel a hell of a lot better after you've had that, take my word for it" Sally picked up the glass and pushed it towards her urging her to take it "You need to get out, Molls, it's time. You can't just sit here feeling sorry for yourself for the rest of your bloody life, can you?"
-OG-
A/N: Hey, I'm back, well, that's the thing with being an addict isn't it? I probably won't be able to do daily updates on this because it's not even properly written yet, and I have this mini canine terrorist who needs long walks, but I will do my very best to update every couple of days or so, well, as quickly as I can.
Please review for me, it is always such a motivation to get on when you do … Hope you enjoy the journey …. Oh and thanks a bunch to the late, great Cilla.