Sorry, pardon, why am I crying at my own story?

Apologies for the lack of updates. I just have the write this one as it comes and it hasn't came for ages!

iv. Closed Book

In which Eddie and Rachel realise that for all the things they know about each other, there are one thousand things they don't.

Summer Term

Week 8

He isn't much of a reader. She is halfway through a book, curled at the end of her sofa, the end closest to him. While her eyes are fixed firmly to the pages, darting ferociously from word to word, paragraph to paragraph, page after page, her fluffy-socked foot is outstretched, touching the holy, ribbed material covering his own foot. For comfort.

In the nights he spends here he has come to understand her somewhat. Between the school nights and the weekends, Rachel had become transparent to him. He just knows that she reads like this, almost hungrily. As an escape.

Yet for the first time this evening, as she has read her book and he has read her, he is struggling. As if the book he was trying to read was unopened. She had changed her mind about going for that drink tonight. She got her way, again. He is making do with the night's football match on the tv in the corner.

He had thought she was an open book. But then again, he had thought the same about Kim.

And look what had happened.

"That poor baby."

She curls her toes slightly as she speaks, as if to make sure he was still there. Shakes her head. Eyes still firmly on the words in front of her.

The more cynical side of him wonders if she is talking about the little girl that was born today in the school toilets to two sixteen year olds. But Rachel wasn't like that. Rachel wasn't like him. She was probably talking about the little girl who had just been taken away from her mother to be jetted off to a foreign country, for the second time in her short span of life.

"You can't take it all on."

"I know. But her future is so uncertain, I just-"

Perhaps she did mean Chlo Charles' baby. She was a teenager, now a mother, he didn't blame her for being unsure. Donte, the newborn's volatile father, had looked at the baby as if she were everything. He remembers that feeling. He misses it.

"Would you ever have children? Your own, I mean."

He watches her stiffen. When she looks up, it is the face of the woman he met in the school office, over a year ago. To read her would be to uncomfortably crack the spine of an expensive, unaffordable hardback.

"I don't think so, no."

Suddenly, the room feels a little bit hollow. Not perhaps because he is disappointed, but because he thought he knew all there was to know about her. School night confessions like this makes him wonder if he knew her at all. Closed book.

"I just…can't imagine feeling so helpless…"

For a moment he is transported back to that night. Soft new skin, whiter than white. Thick little eyelashes that just wouldn't open. That little sleeping boy. He can't remember if he cried out. He had been fine, when he had put him down. The hands-on dad. Had he missed something? He doesn't say any of it out loud, of course.

He doesn't need to. Suddenly, the book drops to her lap. A hand to her mouth.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't think-"

He squints glazed eyes at her, "s'alright."

"All this, for you…it must just feel-"

"Rachel. Its okay. It was a long time ago."

It was her turn to feel hollow.

She almost scoffs.

Two years was nothing. It was easier now, with him there, but still sometimes, when she closes her eyes, her hair is splayed out on a dirty, bare mattress again, and she is looking up into the ceiling of a dark, damp room. Watching the mildew spread and hoping that it soiled her before something…someone else did. She can't quite work out if that feeling, those dreadful feelings made her resonate more with Chlo Charles, or with her newborn baby...

Either way, the thought of that girl on the mattress cradling a baby, a baby of her own, makes her shudder.

"Not really. After twenty years I still think about the mold. I'm still-" she hadn't meant to say so much. She snatches the book back up and stares blankly at a page.

"The mold?"

Silence.

"Still what?"

"Doesn't matter. Like you said, it was ages ago." she murmurs.

For a while, the only sound is the low muffle of a crowd chanting through the television screen, the occasional whistle. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see his blank expression glowing blue from the screen. Today the people she cared about most had shocked her with what they were capable of.

"Maybe I missed something." he murmurs. His face looks haunted.

"What?"

"Nothing. What did you say about mold?"

"Nothing. It's okay."

Something about the fast approaching end of term made her feel uneasy. It always brought change with it and she assumed this one would be no different. She is struck by the thought of having no more nights like this. His shirt on the back of the bedroom door. Routine. Two toothbrushes. Hole-y socks. He wasn't always here, but he was always there. A quiet evening. An early night. Held. Drifting slowly off to sleep in someone's arms. School the next day.

"Do you want children? More, I mean."

"I think so."

Perhaps there were reasons not to look at people too closely.

She had gotten too close to Kim, perhaps.

And look what had happened.

Close, without really knowing her at all and, as ridiculous as it sounded, it felt like being burned.

But who really knew the girl on the mattress?

Like in sixth form exams, should some books be left closed.

She worried about that. For her and Eddie.

She can't shift the feeling that they were over before they had really begun. Without school nights what did they have?

"I do love you, you know."

The book closes. A smile. Socked toes curl.

"I love you too. Cover to cover."