‘Oh, Sam,’ Katie muttered, tugging his head back up and searching his face. To her shock his bloodshot eyes were actually wet. She felt her own fill with tears as she leaned in to kiss him. His body jerked as her lips met his, but after a moment of hesitation he hauled her even closer, then flipped her over him so that she was laid out on the sofa underneath him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered as he kissed down her neck, yanking at her clothes almost desperately. ‘I’m sorry I messed it up. Please stay with me.’ Katie knew that if he weren’t so drunk he would never have let himself be so vulnerable. Maybe that was why she’d never seen him drink any more than a couple of beers in her presence before.
‘I’ll not leave you, honey,’ she told him, her hands sliding into his hair and down his back almost reverently. ‘You’re stuck with this taffy* nightmare now.’
She felt him smile against her neck before he pulled back so that his face was hovering above hers. His smile faded as he stared into her eyes. He looked so serious and troubled that she felt her chest constrict for him.
‘I’ll try, okay?’ he whispered, ‘I’ll try … If it’s not enough, then please –’
She cut him off with a swift punch to his arm, her small fist bouncing off his bicep. ‘Stop that. No more Mr Negative Weird Rambo. We love each other, the rest we can figure out as we go.’
Then she smiled, and watching her beautiful face light up, Sam felt for the first time like he could believe her.
Maybe.
*taffy –slang for Welsh
Epilogue
For bringing back my boy
Sam watched as Katie waddled up the garden, the crazy, fit-inducing print of her dress stretched snugly over her rapidly expanding stomach. The logistics of Sam’s genetics being brewed up in Katie’s small body made for very uncomfortable pregnancies and the inevitable ‘sunroof’ exit, as Russell termed it. ‘Better than having your foof ripped to bits,’ Russell had told her when she was upset after the obstetrician had broken that news in her first pregnancy. ‘And all that panting and sweating, looks like a most undignified business, darling; you’re best off out of it.’ Diffusing an emotive situation with humour was Russell’s speciality and Sam had actually grown to like the camp bastard over the years.
‘You managed it then,’ he heard Bryn say next to him, and Sam turned to smile down at him. He was frailer now, relying on a frame to walk, but still not succumbing to the indignity of a wheelchair.
‘Managed what?’ he asked as he felt a firm tug on his trouser leg.
‘Daddy, cuccol!’ shrieked Annie from the ground, stamping her chubby little leg and frowning up at him. One of her bunches was half out, the other sitting at an awkward angle on her head. Her face was smeared with icing, and there were twigs and dirt all over her dress and in her hair. Sam shook his head as he smiled at his daughter and lifted her up to kiss her dirty little face. The last time he’d seen her, she had been with Oliver and Thomas, holding hands with both of them as she toddled away between them. Whatever state she was in now, Sam had no doubt that those boys were a hundred times worse.
‘Naughty boys?’ Sam asked.
‘Vewy naughty, Daddy,’ she said solemnly. ‘I mucky.’
‘No more playing with naughty boys then,’ Sam told her, and her face fell.
‘But I wuv the boys, Daddy,’ she wailed, her bottom lip trembling. Sam laughed and blew a raspberry in her soft neck, making her squirm and giggle in his arms until finally his wife made it to them.
‘Anya Clifton, what on earth happened to you?’ Katie cried.
‘As if you need to ask,’ Sam said, settling Annie on his hip and smiling down at his barrel-shaped wife, before pulling her into him and kissing the side of her head. She looked up at him like he was the eighth wonder of the world for a moment, before she smiled back and attempted to wrap her arms around both him and Annie. Her stomach got in the way and she gave a ‘humph!’ before pulling back.
‘I’m completely spherical; if this baby grows any more I’ll be as wide as I am tall.’
Sam felt it diplomatic to not point out that they had already passed that point of the game, saying instead, ‘You look no different to the first time I saw you.’
‘You thought I looked ridiculous the first time you saw me.’
‘Maybe, but you were still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.’ Katie gave him that look again, and jumped a little when Bryn cleared his throat.
‘Goodness, Bryn, I didn’t see you there,’ she said, turning to him and kissing his cheek. ‘It’s a bit of a circus I’m afraid. Rob’s already had to break up a fight between Gweneth and Ida over the prime cake spot on the trestle table. Carnage. Can I get you a chair so you can sit up here out of the fray?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Katie,’ Sam bit out. ‘If I see you lug one more chair around I swear I’ll lose it. Wait there, Bryn.’
When he returned with two chairs in one hand and Annie still on his hip, Katie was frowning at him.
‘Sam!’ she hissed. ‘For the last time: you can’t blaspheme at a church barbeque.’
Sam put down the chairs and levelled a look of supreme unconcern at her. ‘I can do what I like inmygarden outsidemyhouse. If the church doesn’t like it, they can go to hell.’
