After Forever Ends - Ramone Melodie (бесплатные книги полный формат TXT) 📗

I must admit, I went a little crazy with all of them gone. Actually, I went a lot crazy. I found myself being clingy and needy with Oliver when he was home. When he was gone, I was lonely and bored. I had no interest in any of my chores or hobbies. I found myself easily brought to tears and not sleeping well. I spent most of my days hanging about in the garden, talking to my trees.

“I want them!” I shouted at least ten times a day to the winds, “Send them home! Make them little again! I want my muffins little again!”

The goat was cute and funny, but she wasn’t enough to fill my void. I thought about getting another dog, but I couldn’t stand the idea of the heartbreak it would bring when he crossed the veil. I was not willing to go through that again. The pain of losing Duncan had left me shy. I could get a cat, I supposed, but a cat was likely to just be wild in the wood. The other’s had all gotten that way. I knew I needed to just get used to the idea that I would see the children at Christmases and when I was lucky enough to make or receive a visit. It just seemed so horribly dismal. I still had my need to mother something and no one to look after.

Seven muffins, seven empty beds. Three rooms upstairs and a nursery downstairs that we had put on just for our children, all sitting quietly where there used to be so much noise and so much action. And me, who’d given up a career and all self-interest to raise a family, had no idea of what to do with myself.

Oliver came home from work one night with a bag of sweets for the circle and a faerie cake. He took off his office jacket and walked to the stove where I was standing. “I’ve been thinking, Just Silvia, that I know what your problem is.”

“I have a problem, do I?” I asked inoffensively as I turned my chicken in the pan.

“Well, it’s not a problem, perhaps,” He tossed his jacket over the back of a chair, “It’s more of a predicament.”

“And what is my predicament, pray thee?” I stuck my face into his, “Are you forgetting something?”

“Not at all, Love!” He gave me a kiss, “I’ve thought of everything.”

“And what is everything?”

“Your problem is simple. You’re bored.”

“I am,” I agreed.

“Yes, you are! You’ve been bored since the moment you waved goodbye to Warren as he got on that plane, you have. I think you need a little something to occupy your energy,” He rolled the faerie cake in his fingers and then licked icing from his thumb.

“What do you suggest?” I asked as I turned off the stove.

“Well…is supper finished, Love?”

“It is. Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wash your hands then. I’ll have it for you in a second.”

“I don’t want to eat right now.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d rather do this,” I should have known when I saw the smile curve in the corners of his mouth he was up to something, but, being out of practice, he caught me off my guard. In a flash he took that faerie cake and he smashed it right into my face.

I stood there with my mouth gaping, cake and icing up my nose and sticking to my eyelids.

Oliver was standing in front of me now with his hands on his knees, that old, insane smile on his face, “Are you bored now, Love?”

“I’m…going to…do…you for that!”

“Ha! You have to catch me first!” He shouted and made a dash for the door, calling, “You are way too slow, Silvia! You’ll never get me!”

I grabbed a bread roll from the counter top being as it was the nearest thing I could smash into his face in return and jetted out that door hot on his heels. I couldn’t see for a moment through the cake in my eyes, but I could hear him laughing and shouting from the lawn.

We were seventeen again. I gave him a good chase across the garden and down the path, but he was still much quicker than I was. “Run! Run as fast as you can! You can’t catch me!” He called as he leaped over something in the way, “I’m the bloody Gingerbread--” It was at that moment his foot caught on something and he fell flat on his chest.

I had to stop running I was laughing so hard. “Are you hurt?” I called out to him. I kept forward, but I was bent sideways with laughter.

“I think I’ve ruptured my spleen!” He rolled on to his back and flopped his arms out wide. “I’ve been meaning to fix that hole!”

It was my turn to cackle and taunt him, “Can’t catch you, you’re the bloody gingerbread man? Did your break your biscuit when you hit the ground?”

He laid there and laughed.

I plopped down beside him out of breath, but smiling. “Here,” I handed him the roll, “You must be hungry.”

He drew me to him and sucked icing off my cheek, “I’d rather eat cake. Oh, that was a good. I should have bought a batch.”

“It’d have been all out war if you had. And anyway, all you ever eat is the icing.”

He was quiet. He played with my plait for a while, still smiling, “I love you, Sil.”

“I love you, too, Oliver.”

“You know, having them all gone doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can snog on the couch again in peace.”

“True.”

“We can snog all over, in fact. We’ve never done it on the path.”

“Ha-ha!” I slapped his leg, “Imagine that! On all these stones? I get the top!”

“Yeah, on second thought, that’s probably not the best idea.” He pulled himself up and helped me to my feet, “I’m starving. Let’s go eat some of your supper, Love. And when we’re done I’ll give you a right good snogging. Test the waters, you know, see if I still got it.”

“Oh, you still got it,” I assured him.

We walked back to the house hand in hand.

After getting cake smashed in my face, Oliver and I were back to our old ways again; pawing each other on the couch, swimming naked in the pond, throwing dirt at each other. We made love on the lawn and slept in the sun when we were through. We stayed up late at night wrapped in that old woollen blanket watching the sky. Oliver kept up his medical practice and I tended the garden. We both went together and talked to the winds and the trees and left sweets for the Lord and the Lady and their boon, of which they now had many more.

I got used to the cabin being quiet again and fell back into being who I was before the children came along, Just Silvia, Oliver Dickinson’s wife. And, as we always had been, we were happy once more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Once of the tricks about life is that it’s always changing. Sometimes the changes are good. Sometimes you think they’re good and you end up disappointed. Other times you think life has handed you a lemon and it turns out to be a diamond. And there are other times when it just is what it is. It’s not what you wanted, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just have to accept what’s happened and go on. Those are the toughest times in my book, the times when you simply have no choice and life just does what it wants without even asking what anybody thinks.

There had always been a hole in my heart, a space that my mother had left when she died. Most of my life I’d kept so busy that I didn’t take the time to know it. I recognized that there was a disconnection inside of me when it came to my family. By the time I was a teenager I’d become so engrossed in Oliver and his family and in ingraining myself into it that that I’d left my own blood far behind as if it never mattered. But the truth was that it did matter and as I got older, I began to feel a nagging inside. I was a Scot, born in the Highlands, and living in Wales. I missed my homeland. I began to think more and more about my ancestors, the men and women who had come before me, who had fought and died on the same soil that their father’s had. The same soil under which my mother now rested. The same soil I had left behind.

Sharon Mariana Nettles. My mother. Born twenty years before me. Married my father. That was all I knew of the woman who had given me life.