raspberries. Fuck me, I loved her for it.
Sometimes we’d be too desperate for flesh on flesh to do anything other than rip each other’s clothes off the moment we were back in through the door.
We’d talk. We’d laugh. We’d hold each other tight. Just like we should have been doing the past decade through.
She’d talk to her parents, and Vicky, and Nicola, and message the girls from work. I’d be on video chat to Millie every evening, talking about her school day without so much as a peep from Maya in the background.
My mother was silent. Just like she should have always been when it was none of her pissing business.
We were happy.
Really happy.
It was that first Friday in our new life that I took Anna out into the city to celebrate. We ate pizza, and laughed as we tore into garlic bread, and toasted our happiness with a prosecco at the table.
But she wasn’t smoking, not anymore, and neither was I.
She hadn’t had any seizures either. Not in days.
“Maybe we could do a pizza night again when I meet Millie,” she suggested, and I smiled over at her.
“Millie does like a good slice of pizza,” I told her. “Maybe we could do an ice cream sundae to follow.”
I had a strange tingle of excitement every time I pictured Anna meeting my little girl. I loved the thought of them laughing together in our kitchen, and eating popcorn on the sofa and watching old kid’s films, and Millie’s explosion of absolute joy if we really did go through with our potential plans to get her a pony in the paddock.
Yet still, I was nervous.
I was so fucking nervous for the two most important parts of my life to combine and make a new one.
“You’re thinking,” Anna said across the table, and I jolted back to my senses. “What are you thinking about?”
I took another sip of prosecco.
“I’m thinking of you meeting the little princess.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting the little princess,” she told me, with a big smile on her face. “I’m sure I’ll love her loads if she’s even a tiny bit like her dad.”
I hoped so.
Holy fuck, I hoped so.
“Maybe we’ll make another little princess one day,” I said, and her eyes shot open wide. “Sorry,” I added. “Thinking out loud there.”
She pulled off another piece of garlic bread. “Maybe we will.” She took a bite. “Maybe if the epilepsy eases, and things settle down with everyone around us, and we can be that little family we want to be.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” she smiled.
“Maybe in the meantime we should hit the bars, and head on out for another prosecco or two.”
“Maybe in the meantime we should indeed hit the bars, and head on out for another prosecco or two,” she laughed. “I think the girls from work are out at Bar Royale tonight.”
So out we went.
We met up with Stacey, Melissa and Lucia and I watched Anna join in with their work chat with a big grin on my face.
We danced to some terrible tunes that neither of us liked, laughing right the way through, and resisted the urge to head out onto the smokers’ terrace like true champions.
I couldn’t keep my hands off her when we left the club, my mouth on hers all the way up the street on our way to the taxi rank. Her arms were around my neck, and her tits were pressed to my chest, and clothes were a barrier I’d tear off in a flash just as soon as we were out of the realms of public indecency.
I hadn’t had quite enough proseccos for that just yet.
It was Anna who suggested we take a detour a few streets over and head to the Neptune fountain.
It was me who grinned right back at her and said I’d love to go the Neptune fountain, just so long as she didn’t expect me to be making any wishes with any damn coins.
Neither of us expected to be standing on the lawn at the front of the spurting water, staring up at Neptune himself, hand in hand, when the charge of stumbling feet sounded up the street behind us.
And there he was.
The cunt himself.
His tie was loose around his neck as he stumbled his way down the road, and I knew straight away where he was heading. His path was from Oscars to Casey’s Casino, with two of his suited idiot mates rocking along at his side.
They were oblivious, all three of them, clearly off