{A/N} Here's the second chapter! Apologies for the delay in uploading it; please let me know what you think!
It's late, probably almost midnight. He's lying in bed, restless, unable to get comfortable, watching clouds move silently across the sky out his window. A knock at the door…then another. He grumbles, rolling out of bed and pulling on a t-shirt, before opening the door, rubbing at his eyes.
Her eyes meet his own, standing on his doorstep. Blue as the ocean, wiping a tear roughly from her cheek. (It's the biting winter wind, she tells herself.) This is a dream, he thinks. She's gone. She left: ran out of chambers; didn't return his calls; wasn't home when he knocked; left without a trace, her photographs gathering dust on the desk across from his.
Her hair is mussed, blown around by the wind. Cars stream by on the road outside his flat, sending beams of gold and red over a scene which, in his mind, should be covered in hues of blue and black and confusion, sadness. She watches him, quiet, eyes large, trying to gauge his reaction at her appearing on his doorstep without any warning, and a single, battered, suitcase.
'You don't have a spare fifty quid, do you?' His eyes are laughing but tongue is venomous, and Martha can see a steely resolve paint itself across his features, flinty and grey like a thunderstorm.
Martha's got no lipstick on, no trademark fire. She's flat, exhausted. 'What for, Clive?'
'For the hundred-and-something times I called you? Sent my phone bill through the roof?' His acid tone continues, biting, salt in her gaping wounds; the wounds she had to valiantly ignore to get this far down the M1, retracing her steps. 'The calls you ignored?' Yep, she thinks. Welcome home.
Her grin is forced, brittle and tentative. 'You'll have to wait till the morning; bit late to go out looking for cash, now, isn't it?'
He can't help his reaction, though, really; it's the posh schoolboy coming back again, ruthless with his words to protect his aching insides. (He realises that part of him always returns when he has no idea how to deal with an issue: the cutting, smartarsed remarks come flying out when he's really, really lost. There's probably a psychology theory behind that: reversion to childhood.)
'You'd better come in, then,' he murmurs, the fight almost gone from his voice, kicking the door shut behind them as he walks her into the lounge. She sits down timidly on his couch; he goes into his room and returns with a hoodie for her. In that, Martha sees he realises just what an inconsiderate ass he's been, and somehow, however much she wants to deny it, a small fragment of their icy greeting dissolves as he hands her the fleecy jumper, his eyes darting around, anywhere but her face.
Martha sheds her coat and slips the jumper on over her clothes, as he walks into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea (hot, with two sugars). Her hands slide around the mug, letting the warmth seep into her bones, as he comes to sit at the other end of the couch.
He's different, now. She can see the way his eyes have changed, the way he actually looks at her now; doesn't ignore her, wishing her away, out of his flat, so he can go back to bed. It looks to her like he's glad she's come home.
The snow always melts, in the spring, however long you have to wait for it. And she's sitting here, on his couch, tired and sad and confused, but she knows she has to wait for it. She knows that's how Clive is.
Then, the sun comes out. The ice disappears. 'Do you want to talk about it?' He asks, before glancing over to her shaking figure, cold and lonely. He puts his mug on the table in front of them and slides across the couch to fold her into his arms. She crumples into his embrace, as his fingers caress the back of her neck and the small of her back, massaging gently. His words send pulses through her body, where her ear is pressed against his heart. He makes the decision for her, then. 'We won't talk about it. You need to go to bed.'
Martha wonders what it feels like to always have someone to take care of you; unconditionally, without strings attached. She wants to laugh bitterly at the realisation that that is what she and Clive are, that everything they do, and have done for a while, has been so wrapped up in brown paper and packing string neither of them could find the heart underneath it, lost in a mess of miscommunication and loss. She's too tired, though, and the thought manifests itself in a wry smile instead, as she watches his figure retreat into his bedroom again.
Clive pulls an extra duvet onto his bed and a pair of pyjamas out of his bedside drawer, turning his back to her as she changes slowly, her bones aching with exhaustion and sadness.
'You alright, Marth?' It's not what he wants to ask, but it's all that comes out when he watches her, when he just wants to take her in his arms and let her cry. She nods slowly, silent; he's noticed how big her eyes are now: blue and fearful as if she's been beaten, run ragged, and this gentle homecoming, however long it took, isn't near what she expected, nor what she thinks she deserves. He realises she didn't expect him to thaw, to warm to her again. He holds a grudge. That's what she knew, what she expected, and was used to.
'Okay,' he murmurs, as she climbs into bed; he pulls the covers up around her shoulders. 'Yell if you need anything,' he whispers, a hand on her arm, before going out into the lounge and settling down on the couch.
Ten minutes later, she pads out into the lounge and stands in the doorway to his bedroom, bare feet peeking out from under his pyjamas. Her voice is soft, almost childlike. 'Clive? Will you sleep with me?' His eyes are gentle in their relief, a quiet smile coming to his lips, as follows her into his room.
She has trouble sleeping, even as his chest is solid at her back; a defence. Her breaths come fast and jumpy, catching in her throat, like her sternum is formed of jagged pieces of glass, shoddily melted back together to make a form of a woman, without the soul. It hurts, to breathe. To be. (Her fast-beating heart catches on the splinters of her bones, bleeding and spilling itself throughout her insides; there is no composure.)
He sleep talks; she remembers that from Nottingham. The pain of that memory is bittersweet, now lying in his arms again. His words ghost over her shoulders, down onto her collarbones, under the fabric of her clothes.
'You came back to me.' He is in disbelief, even in sleep, and she feels his hands relax over her hipbones, wide and strong where she is fragile, pale and unable to be alone. 'You came back to me; you came home.'
/
There is something about them, the way they are, that is rough and broken and hurtful when they are too close to one another. Despite this, though, ever slowly, the cracks and sharp edges are worn down when they stop pretending, like 'actors on a stage' dressed in silk.
/
A few weeks later, Martha finds herself a flat again, near her old one, and settles back into life, London, who she used to be. She and Clive slip comfortably into a routine of texting each other again most nights; once Martha arrived into his life once again it appeared to Clive that the contrast between she and Harriet, following his heart and following the expected, comfortable path, was opening before him like a gaping, black chasm, and he was standing before it like a child: small, blue-eyed and blond haired, and he was being forced to jump.
So, jump he did; he'd always been good at separating the personal and professional (except, perhaps, when it came to his relationship with Martha following his silk party), but his years at the Bar had led to a good reputation among the fraternity, and there was hardly an eyebrow raised when he dismissed Harriet, secure in the knowledge that Billy had taught Jake and John enough about top-class clerking to successfully run Shoe Lane alone. And besides, he realised later, with Billy gone, who was there for Harriet to police?
Now, they text back and forth as she gets her bearings; small things. It comforts him, to talk. One morning, lying in bed, he writes 'Hope you're well x' and her response: 'just forgot how hot it was in London in the spring eh'. It's not what they used to be, but he knows she's brave enough as is, walking back into the place that burned her, scarring her back with angry, red stripes, so painful that she didn't want to be who she was, anymore, if it meant she wouldn't get hurt.
They talk of comfortable things that bring a smile to his lips as his phone buzzes with her reply, as if she, unbidden by him, holds a part of his heart in her hands, and every time she talks to him it jolts with happiness and peace. A feeling that told him he was back where he was safest.
(It's strange, he thinks, how someone who probably thinks her life is a whirlwind of dissymmetry and mess, can bring him so much harmony, the routine, that seemed to have slipped silently out of his life. She doesn't even know it, he muses.)
He comes round, one Wednesday night, with fish and chips and a bottle of red; a scarf round his neck and collar loose around his throat. She answers the door, a soft smile crossing her features, 'Hi, Clive. Come in.' She seems softer, this new Martha. He's not sure if she's had a complete shake-up while she was away, or whether she's still reeling at Sean's verdict, and is now branded with an unfamiliar lack of self-confidence.
She's wearing a black tracksuit, wrapped in her old red and yellow dressing gown (Martha curls into it as if it'll help her return to who she once was, the woman she used to be. She cried when she pulled it out of her suitcase), face free from makeup and hair curling soft around her ears. Martha laughs as she eyes off his bounty, pulling him across the threshold and into the kitchen where she contemplates looking for plates, then gives up, and they pile onto the couch, licking grease from their fingers. The newspaper, dotted with oil, crackles in their laps as they eat, silent, and then Clive looks up at her, and asks, 'What did you do in Bolton, Marth?' (She's not told him that's where she went, but he assumed as much, and soon thereafter, his thoughts are confirmed.)
She grunts, chewing, then off-handedly replies, 'Family, mostly, and a bit of legal aid; just whatever I could slip into that wasn't all blood and guts, knives and whiskey.' Clive is surprised at that; he remembers Martha once telling him she'd do anything but family law, but then he considers that maybe the destruction of all she knew of her home, here, meant the destruction of some long-held beliefs, too, just to survive.
Clive watches her, thoughtful, then murmurs, 'Did you like it? Being home?' Her answer is instant, definitive.
'Bolton is weird, it's all grey and brick houses some days; feels like another world. It was hard to be anonymous there, which is what I guess I wanted, but you run home when your home is blown to bits, don't you?' She coughs, staring out the window onto the street, trying to skim over the implications of what she just said. That here, with him, essentially, was her home. 'It just felt like, after a while, that I was sixteen again. Mum kept asking me whether I was going to settle down, did I like coming home (she frowns then, indignant), telling me how she always knew London would chew me up and spit me out. Eventually, I yelled the house down and left.'
Clive laughs at that, envisioning the fire in her eyes, and then shudders to think what punk rocker Martha, decked out in eyeliner and piercings, would've done. 'How did your dad handle you…' he breathes, to himself, mostly. She heard him, though, and smiles softly, nostalgia painting her face golden, but a dark navy, too. Around her eyes.
'He laughed, for most of it, and just let me go. One day, near the end of school, I came to him and told him I wanted to be barrister, and he just looked at me and his eyes went soft.'
A tear forms in the corner of her eye, and she brushes it away roughly; on the defensive. He's hit a nerve.
'I think that's what he would've liked to have done, to dive into a world of books and history, and just having it all planned out in front of him, you know? Elements to tick off; sequential.' She's moved closer to Clive, as she talks; their shoulders are touching. Neither of them used to think much of it, the physicality of their relationship; she remembers meeting Brendan Kay in prison, her first case in silk, where she and Clive sat at the rickety metal table across from him. Her arm was touching Clive's, shoulder to elbow, and no matter how much crap he got for being her junior, that touch told him that she relied on him, as a sounding board, a protector when she needed one, someone who had her back.
It's just the same, now, as they sit on her couch; he has her back as she works through her pain: pain in her chest, pain in her head, pain in her feet from running. Here, sitting together, where he's cracked open the bottle of wine he brought, it's him caring for her.
An unbidden vision floats through her mind, and she sees herself, near full-term in her pregnancy, with her heels tossed onto the floor and feet resting in Clive's lap. He massages them, telling her about his day, and she sees his piercing blue eyes full of laughter as they float over her body, caressing her stomach with his gaze. There's a sense of comfort, a quiet kind of peace, she sees now, in letting herself be cared for. What if I'd had his baby?
/
Her dad used to listen to The Beatles. She remembers old records floating up through the mist to her second-storey window from his shed on a wintry Saturday as she studied for her final exams, while he fiddled with wood and nails, in company of McCartney and Lennon.
You're asking me will my love grow
I don't know, I don't know
You stick around now it may show
I don't know, I don't know
1} Something by The Beatles