I've skipped ahead some again; I needed Emily to be just a little bit older for what happens in this chapter. Just so no one gets confused.
Will and Jade make there way on unsteady feet towards his shop. They have just come back from the only tavern in town, where they have both spent another night drinking and dancing. She giggles when she trips over her dress and nearly falls over; he somehow manages to catch her before she can with an arm around her tiny waist.
"Careful, Jade." His words hold a slight slur. "Don't want to get hurt."
She giggles again as they reach his shop.
"Oh, I've no need to worry about that, have I?" She replies dramaticly, her own words much more slurred than his. "Not when I have my wonderful hero to save me!"
He leads her into his small cabin without thinking, closing the door behind her so as to keep out the cool night air.
"Your hero? How grand you make things sound." He laughs as he plops himself down into a chair.
"Only because every moment with you is grand!" She exclaims a bit loudly, and Will frowns, only just now remembering his daughter sleeping in the other room.
"Hush. You'll wake Emily."
She whispers a 'terribly sorry' before clapping a hand over her mouth. Before he knows it she is stumbling towards him, and when she trips over her dress again, he has no choice but to let her fall into his lap.
His breath hitches in his throat as his body responds to her closeness. She has a strange look in her eyes now.
"Jade…I think maybe…"
She leans in closer.
"Maybe what, my darling?"
"Y-you should leave because…E-Emily is sleeping and…and w-we've had too much…" He is silenced when her lips covers his in a kiss. At first she is shy, but soon her hands come up to his head, bringing him closer and deepening the kiss. His head is swimming in rum and he is desperate for love. Any reason he might have seen is now lost on him, and his hands grasp her shoulders, then travel gently down the soft skin of her arms, and he trails kisses down her neck and lower over an ample chest as she moans softly…
"Papa?" A tiny, sleepy voice calls out to him.
He pulls away from Jade, breathing heavily.
"Papa, what are you doing?" The voice is louder this time, more urgent. "What is she doing here?"
He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, tries to force his thoughts into some semblance of order.
"She's, uh, she's just leaving." He finally replies. He tries to gently push Jade off his lap, but she refuses to move. He frowns and picks her up by the waist, setting her on her feet beside him. "I'll walk you home."
Emily has her arms crossed the way she always does when she's mad, and the expression on her face reminds him of Elizabeth. She's glaring a Jade.
Jade glares back as Will leads her out of the cabin.
Emily watches her papa lead Miss Jade out and crawls into the chair he was sitting in, hugging her knees to her chest, waiting for him to return. The events of the past few moments replay over in her mind and she feels like crying because she knows that her papa is beginning to forget all about her mother.
She still isn't sure what her papa and Miss Jade were doing, but she is seven and a half now and is smart enough to know when her papa's been drinking. This is not the first time her papa has gone out and come back drunk, and although he is never mean or hurtful to her, not even when he is like this, she hates it all the same.
It feels like hours pass before her papa returns, though it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. He comes in and leans against the door for a moment, then looks over to her. She glares at him, her chin resting on her knees.
"Please, don't." He says quietly.
"I hate her!" She blurts out, and she knows he will probably be angry with her for saying it, but she doesn't care.
"Emily…"
"She always comes in here and acts like she's my mother! And you forget about everything when you're with her!"
"Emily, that's enou…"
"You even forget about mother, don't you Papa?" She is yelling by now, tears streaming down her face, throwing a full on temper tantrum.
"Emily!" He yells right back. "That is enough! You're too bloody young to even know what you're talking about!"
She freezes. Her papa never yells at her. Never. He never swears either.
All is silent for a moment. All traces of anger quickly fade from her papa's eyes; he pushes off the door and walks over to her as if ready to pick her up the way he still does from time to time even as she is getting far to get too big for it.
"Come, now, Emily. Lets just get you back to bed."
The way he sways on his feet and the rum that she can smell on him, as well as the way his words are slurred, is enough to make her back away. He looks shocked. She sniffles and wipes her eyes before brushing past him running back to her bed. She makes sure to look like she's sleeping when she hears him stumble in to his own bed some time later.
She does fall asleep again for a short while, but wakes far earlier than she normally does on her own. Her papa is, of course, still sound asleep. She gets up quietly and kneels before her bed, reaching underneath it to pull out a small box which holds a small pair of trousers and a shirt. She takes the items and slips out the door and into the kitchen, where she quickly discards her dress and puts on her much more comfortable outfit.
Her papa might have a fit if he finds she's been out wearing pants again, and so will Miss Jade, but she is confident they won't find out. None of the other people in town seem to mind, for some odd reason. She walks out the door and into the cool morning air. The sun has just barely begun to rise.
She heads down to the docks before she goes anywhere else. Anyone around at this early hour is used to seeing little Emily around, and doesn't bother her, because they either do not care, or don't think she is any of their business. She knows they will not tell her papa where she's been; they never do. She makes her way down to the beach, and then looks up and down the coast to make sure that no one else is around. Satisfied that she is alone, she pulls off her shoes and wades into the chilly water.
She wishes her papa would've taken her Uncle Jack's offer to stay on the Black Pearl the last time they went out to see her mother. Emily worries that something went wrong; her mother's temper seemed to have shortened, and she had not at all seemed herself. The same had been true for the two times they had seen her before that as well.
Emily stays on the beach, walking along the shore with her feet still in the water for some time, before deciding it is time to get going. She puts her shoes back on and trudges back up and into the town, which is now teeming with the usual hustle and bustle of everyday life.
She is headed for the bakery, and slips a hand into her pocket to make sure the money she had taken from her papa before leaving the house is still there before entering the shop. She pays extra for the freshest loaf available, because she does not care if she uses just a bit of the extra money her papa was likely to spend on more rum (or who knew what else).
She then heads into the general store, which is not too far from her papa's shop, and is pleasantly greeted by the elderly woman named Mrs. O'Malley who works there. Emily buys a small bag of oats to make for a breakfast.
"I don't suppose you have anythin' to put on that bread, there, do you?" The Mrs. O'Malley askes in her thick Irish brogue, eyeing said bread where it rests in Emily's arms.
Emily shakes her head. The woman smiles and turns to the shelves behind her, taking down a jar of strawberry jam.
Emily's eyes widen.
"But I don't have the money, Miss." She says.
"Well, you can consider it a gift, then. Or, better yet, have your father come down here and talk to me when he decides to grace the world with his presence." And she is giving Emily a knowing look now. "And I'll gladly forget the money."
Emily takes the jam and nods, giving her a somewhat nervous smile.
"I..suppose..I can do that. Thank you very much, Miss."
Mrs. O'Malley nods and Emily leaves and heads back home.
This is where the real work begins. Now she has to start a fire so she can make oat meal out of the oats. She peeks inside the bedroom, but sees no sign that her papa has even moved, and so decides that there is no need to scramble back into her dress just yet.
She walks out the back exit of the cabin and over to the small supply of wood that her papa is always sure to keep there. It takes her several trips, but she manages to carry in just enough wood to start a proper fire, both in the oven in the kitchen and in the area where her papa works. She hopes this will brighten his mood a little when he wakes, as he is sure to be feeling ill from the night before.
She is getting nervous by now that her papa will wake soon, so she slips back into her more proper dress and quietly hides her pants and shirt back beneath her bed. Then she slips back out of the bedroom and begins preparing their breakfast.
She is trying to break the bread into pieces (she doesn't want to go searching for her papas knife, and wouldn't dare to use it anyways) when she finally hears a noise coming from the bedroom. She looks up and jumps a little when she sees her papa standing in the door way, looking around, startled in the same way he always is when she completes such grown up tasks.
"Good morning, Papa." She says, looking down instead of at him.
"Emily…did you do all this?"
She looks up at him now, smiling a little.
"Right, of course you did. Why should I be surprised…" He trailed off and came closer to her, but paused when he reached the stream of sunlight coming from the kitchens only window, wincing.
Emily turned back around and began trying to break the bread again. A few moments passed before her papa came up beside her, his knife now in hand.
"Here, let me."
She left him to it, turning back to take the jar of jam the kind old woman at the store had gifted her with. She set it on the table just as her father turned to see what she was doing.
"Where did you get that?"
"Mrs. O'Malley gave it to me as a gift."
"A gift?"
"She said…"
"What?
"She wanted me to tell you to come down and see her, and she wouldn't worry about the money."
Her papa scowls, but says nothing. He doesn't eat much, but actually does go down to see Mrs. O' Malley.
He comes back seeming somehow twice as unhappy as she's ever seen him and muttering something about 'nosy old women'. Emily is sure he purposely avoids her for the rest of the day. She decides not to ask questions.
She also decides that any rum they might have in the cabin will be poured into the sea down by the docks the next time she gets the chance. Or, maybe next time she'll use the rum to make a fire. Perhaps then it wouldn't take as much wood.
Weird place to stop it, I think, but I wanted to show how Emily thinks and works through things. Hope no one hates me too much for making Will the bad guy here, LOL.
Thanks for the reviews. AngieRosie: I've wondered the same thing too, actually. It kind of bothered me that they never explained that. (: