Please Don't Stop the Music by Jane Lovering

Author:Jane Lovering
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Choc Lit
Published: 2011-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Rosie was convinced she was such a bad mother that Social Services would be along any day to take Harry away.

‘I can’t believe I went out! What was I thinking, Jem? Anything could have happened!’ Rosie was so caught up in her own feelings of inadequacy that she hadn’t thought to blame me or Ben. ‘I mean, what if he’d got himself trapped under the wardrobe or got his face stuck in something – he’d have suffocated! And I wouldn’t have been there!’ Another fresh burst of tears. Harry picked up on her misery and began wailing again, despite the fact that the doctor had looked him over and pronounced him to be ‘one of the healthiest specimens I’ve seen in a while.’

‘You weren’t to know. And we’ll make sure it never happens again, so stop fretting.’ Half my mind was trying to follow Ben’s actions in all of this, wondering what had been going through his head. ‘Harry, there’s nothing wrong with you and that’s official.’

I could feel my own lip trembling in sympathy with the weeping pair. Why hadn’t Ben stayed and explained himself? Was all this tied up with his fear of – yes, exactly what was Ben so scared of? Physical contact? He hadn’t felt scared, not for those few moments holding me in the kitchen. Turned on, yes. Desperate, yes. But not afraid, not until afterwards. I tried to think back over those moments when I’d seen that look of panic appear in his eyes but it all seemed so unrelated. He’d been frightened of going to Saskia’s opening, when I’d found out about his being in Willow Down, when I’d asked him to come for dinner – perhaps he was just plain weird.

I picked at the melon Ben had left and put the rest away in the fridge. Neither of us had much appetite, although Harry gulped down his bottle and then fell asleep. ‘Honestly, Harry, you’re such a bloke,’ I said, watching him settle drunkenly in Rosie’s arms. ‘No sympathy with emotional turmoil at all.’

I left her cuddling her son and went up to my room. Most of my gear was bagged; shirts oozed over the lip of my rucksack and my toiletries scattered like a puzzle over the jutting window ledge. I stared at it all. I’d never hung anything up or made use of the tiny cupboard. Even though I’d thought I was settled, my subconscious had known and told me not to bother, not to unpack.

I started to sweep loose items back into my bag. Panic was floating somewhere in my chest, unhooked from its perpetual moorings by this turn of events. Time to go, time to run. My mind raked back over Ben’s behaviour, his desperation for contact and then his ultimate rejection of it, but I didn’t kid myself that it was because of the way he’d let his guard down that I was going. It was my lowering of the barrier that had frightened me the most. The sudden rise of a desire that I thought I’d killed, the desire to be held, to be loved.

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