"Shit, you made me bloody jump"
She had been miles away in her own little world washing up saucepans and knives and clearing the aftermath from the pasta sauce she was extraordinarily proud of making, sauce which was now sitting cooling on the cooker waiting to be heated up and shown off at dinnertime. At the same time she was listening to an Elton John CD, not that she was all that keen on him, well that was a bit of an understatement really, but he was one of Charles' favourites so she was making a massive effort to try …. when he'd appeared in the kitchen a good couple of hours before she'd expected him home. He put his arms round her from behind nuzzling her hair to one side of her neck and kissing round to her ear before resting his chin on top of her head and sighing, all without saying a single word. Still without speaking he moved his hands up under the 'T' shirt she was wearing until he reached her bra, and then rubbed his thumbs slowly over the white lace turning her nipples into thimbles and creating sensations that made her lean back against him, initially tilting her head back and trying to see his face, then giving up and closing her eyes, peeling off the marigolds and dropping them on the floor.
"Hello soldier, you got fired or some'ing?" She made another, more successful attempt to look up at his face "What's up, cat got your tongue? "
"Nope"
"Well, talk to me then, 'n what do you think you're doing, you 'aven't even said hello yet?"
"Hello …. that's enough bloody talking" He laughed "Nice 'T' shirt by the way"
"I thought so" She looked down at his 'T' shirt which she'd 'borrowed' and which was now covered in splashes of the tomato sauce she'd been cooking so that she pulled a slight face, not sure now whether the stains would come off.
He snorted out another laugh then turned her round and bent his head to kiss her, tongue moving against hers as though it was at least six months since they'd last seen each other, not less than six hours since they'd got out of bed. Molly, to spend her day off pottering about, shopping and window shopping on-line for new bedding and doing nothing very much else at all until she'd had this brilliant idea about cooking and Charles, well, allegedly he went off to do a full day's duty as a fully functioning member of Her Majesty's armed forces.
"I see you've missed me" She giggled at the expression on his face and at the hard evidence of just how glad he was to be home, evidence that was currently making itself very much felt through his combats as it nudged against her stomach while he put his head back and laughed, then started to kiss her neck again as he fisted a handful of hair and pushed it out of the way to the back of her head. He was chewing at his bottom lip as his eyes locked onto hers and he smirked as he slid his 'T' shirt, the one she was wearing, over her head leaving her naked from the waist up apart from her scrap of white lace and still with her back pressed up against the kitchen sink.
It was his turn to laugh at the expression on her face as picked her up so that she wound her legs round his waist and he looked around for somewhere to put her so that she could perch and they could be on the same eye-level "I'd put you up here" He laughed and nodded his head gesturing towards the evidence of her attempt at a vegetable pasta sauce which was littering every surface "But there doesn't appear to be any bloody room"
"That's your fault, I was just clearing up when you bloody come in and distracted me, and you still haven't said how come you're home so early"
He let her slide down his body until she was standing in between his legs then bent his head and took one taut nipple in his mouth over the rough lace of her bra, grazing it between his teeth and then looking up and grinning as he let her go slightly to that he could speak, his breath warm against her body as his fingers returned to the other nipple "I came home early to see you because I was sitting there in my office all afternoon thinking about my gorgeous wife and wondering what she was doing and whether I could go home and do it with her, or whether I could suggest something else that we could do together"
"Did you think of anything, you know, have you got some'ing in mind?" Molly said it as innocently as she could manage then put her head back and smirked, her eyes closing as she tried to pretend that she could ignore what he was doing with his lips, his tongue and his fingers but then couldn't quite manage it "Can we go to bed now?"
"I thought you'd never ask"
"Oh, didn't know you was waiting for me to ask" She managed to get a fairly credible expression of fake surprise onto her face and then enlightenment into her voice as he scooped her up again and took the stairs two at a time.
-OG-
"You're wearing too many clothes, you know that don't you?"
"You'll have to let go if you want me to take anything off"
He was laughing as he looked down at the tiny space between them, a space that was created by the fact that her small fingers were inside his clothing, tightly curled round him, words that made her tighten her grip even more as she whispered "Yeah I know" and felt him twitch in response but made absolutely no attempt to let him go so that he groaned and closed his eyes, then put his own hand down and unpeeled her fingers one by one from where they were wrapped round him.
Ever since her massive melt down a few days before they had both been very, very careful of one another's feelings. Although they had, on the surface, made up, kissed, forgiven and forgotten, and had a lot of sex, there was still a desperate need in both of them to reassure, to show their passion for each other. Despite everything that had been said and done she still felt there was edginess between them that she blamed herself for entirely. If she hadn't been so stupid, if she hadn't sat there and chatted with her arsehole of an ex-husband and if she hadn't thought that it would be a good idea to keep it secret, then none of it would have happened in the first place, and if she hadn't felt so bloody guilty afterwards she wouldn't have yelled all that stuff at him. She wished more than anything that she had a tardis so that she could put things back the way they had been before.
The stuff that she'd said to him, the accusations she'd flung at him when she'd been feeling guilty and trying to justify herself at the same time as feeling really sorry for herself were all true, it wasn't that she'd made stuff up or anything, but it just didn't feel as if it was anywhere near as important as she'd made out, well not now it didn't, now that she felt like she'd wrecked everything.
"I'm sorry"
"What for, what have you done now?" His voice had become low and gentle and his face had softened almost as though he'd been airbrushed, a complete contrast to the way he'd looked a short while before when she'd come back to earth and looked up at the way his eyes glittered, at the flush on his cheekbones and at the way his stubble shadowed jaw was clenched with that particularly intense look of concentration so that she'd been overwhelmed with feelings for him, had wanted to crawl inside his skin with him. Now he looked totally relaxed and happy and was smiling as he stroked her hair back behind her ears.
"I'm just really sorry about all that crap the other day, I know you keep telling me to forget it, but I can't, it's not the first time I've behaved like some sort of raving nut job is it? You must be bleeding fed up of it, I know I would be"
"Molly, stop it, stop beating yourself up, we've already talked about this and you're not a nut job, there's nothing for you to be sorry about, we had a row, that's all it was, it was a row, and I'm sorry that it happened too, but it's not as if you took a breadknife and threatened to cut anything off is it?" He nudged her, doing his best to bring the smile back to her face "Please can we just forget all about it now?"
"I could do that if you wanted"
"Do what? Cut something off with a breadknife? No thanks" He kissed her, stretched and swung his legs off the bed, then started pulling on some clothes "Tell you what, gorgeous, you finish cooking whatever it is you were cooking that smells so bloody amazing and I'll clear the kitchen, I'm starving"
-OG-
He very tactfully didn't mention the rather liberal amount of chilli that she'd added to the sauce, so much that they'd needed to drink glass after glass of water as they ate it, or rather as Charles had eaten it, Molly had abandoned hers after less than half a dozen mouthfuls when her lips started tingling and went numb and when her nose and eyes had started to run.
"Sorry" She giggled "I think I might have got a bit carried away there"
"It was lovely, I like spicy food" He grimaced then raised his eyebrows and smiled apologetically "Although maybe not quite as spicy as that"
"I know, I think I get a bit ….sort of generous with the garlic 'n the chilli 'n that"
She took a deep breath, knowing that things couldn't ever go back to normal between them until she'd told him, keeping it a secret was making her twitchy and uncomfortable, unable to relax, although there was a chance that telling him would mean that things would never be the same between them again, he was bound to think that she'd lied to him.
"Charles, there's something I've gotta tell you. You know I've always said that I was gonna like …." She paused trying to find the right way to say what she wanted to say, she wished now that she'd rehearsed it because once the words were out there she couldn't take them back "I'm sorry, it's not that I ….. I mean I never lied to you about it or nothing, but when I was up there in Yorkshire and you weren't anymore, when you was down here, well …." She shrugged "But it's all different now we're both down here innit? And when I was talking to Jacks about being in Sierra Leone 'n that and I listened to some of the other girls who was out in Afghan like you, I realised that it wasn't never going to be me that did anything or went anywhere like that and I'm ….. sorta sorry about that"
"What are you trying to say, that you want to stay in?"
"Nah, that's not it, well not exactly, but when I was speaking to Ian the other day and he asked me what me plans were I sort of realised that I'm not sure what I want, I mean I know I wanna be with you, that I don't want us to be separate again, but I don't know about anything else, not for sure, not anymore"
"What, you talked to Ian about it before you said anything to me?"
"No course not, I never said nothing to him just didn't say, it's none of his bleeding business is it?"
"No-one can decide for you, Molly, you know that, and I always knew that there was a chance you'd change your mind when it came to it, that you'd want to stay in" He smiled, trying to look as reassuring as he could and not to show her how taken aback he was by what she'd just said "You're good at what you do … and you love it, so why would you want to give all that up and do, well, what exactly?"
One of his worst nightmares had been that she'd be deployed somewhere dangerous before her four years was up, or that when her time was up she would change her mind and want to stay in, because the longer she stayed in the higher the odds that she would be deployed. Much as he would love to try he certainly wasn't going to do or say anything to influence her decision one way or the other, he'd just have to keep his fingers crossed and put his trust in Lady Luck… .
"Don't look so worried, you don't need to decide just yet but it'll be fine, whatever you decide will be fine and even if you put in your papers you'll be reserved for at least a year so you can be deployed for quite a while yet whatever you do"
"Really? And you'd be okay with me maybe changing me mind? If I do? You sure?"
"Molly I just want you to be happy, and maybe you need to do this because you're only part way through a journey and maybe you need to prove to yourself that what Kinders said was bollocks, which it was by the way, total bollocks, you need to do whatever it is that makes you happy"
"I love you"
"I know you do, I love you too"
-OG-
The dinner party was her idea.
Celebrating their six month anniversary with a party was all her idea although Charles pointed out that it might not be warm enough in early May to spend a lot of the evening outside despite the patio heater that he rushed out and invested in. Molly accused him of buying it because he enjoyed setting fire to things when she saw the initial inferno he created before he adjusted it to work as it should, in other words before he did what she suggested and read the instruction leaflet.
They'd decided on food from Waitrose, ready-cooked chilled stuff even though Molly had pretended to sulk saying that her feelings were hurt because she had been intending to use her new found cookery skills, but even though he'd grinned and said 'lovely, good idea' he'd quickly pointed out that if she cooked something spicy they'd probably need enough booze to sink a small battleship, especially as Jock and Lydia were on the guest list and as far as he knew didn't drink water. So she'd dragged him round Waitrose as a punishment, putting his more bizarre choices back in the chiller cabinet and giggling at his idea of what food went with what even though she was pretty sure that he was just winding her up. They had a separate trolley for the alcohol so that they'd both smirked at the carefully controlled expression on the face of the check-out lady as she'd rung up the totals, they'd spent more than four times the amount on booze than they had on the food so that the woman said very politely that she hoped they would have a nice party to which Molly replied "Nah, just a couple of friends coming round for supper" so that they'd both had a childish attack of the giggles as soon as they got outside.
Everything was almost ready when he pointed out that he'd been right when he'd said that it wouldn't be warm enough outside so that Molly had patted his arm, smiled sweetly and then laughed as she lied and said that she was sure that with his heater going full blast it would have been fine, except that it was pissing it down. He'd looked out of the back door at the rain bouncing off the top of his heater and laughed ruefully telling her that she wasn't funny and could she please shut the fuck up. She'd flounced out of the kitchen pretending to be offended, saying that he'd obviously forgotten who he was talking to and did she really look like one of the lads?
His attempts to show her that she didn't look anything like any lad that he'd ever come across meant that they were barely decent when the first guests rang the doorbell, so that Molly was heartily relieved to see that it was Laura and Steve because she was flushed, dishevelled and giggly and Charles wasn't much better. It wouldn't have taken a genius to work out what they'd just interrupted.
"I'd offer to go for a bleeding walk round the block if it wasn't for this" Laura stroked her hand over her bump and tried her best to look pathetic "Sorry mate I didn't know we were early and I didn't mean to interrupt or anything but I can't hang about for much longer, I need a pee"
"Go on then, and you're not early and you're not interrupting nothing either and don't you bleeding start saying stuff like that to the others when they get here, cos it's not funny, okay?"
"What, you don't want me to tell everyone that the host and hostess was having a quickie when we got here?"
"Don't you bloody dare"
-OG-
A/N: I don't usually update on weekends, but have been on my sick bed for a few days (cue violins) and this was almost finished, coupled with the fact that someone has turned the sunshine off so that it's horrible here, cold, wet and windy. Thank you so much for your reviews and feedback on Chapter 20, I hope you enjoy this.