ログイン共有
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE From The Stands
公開日:
2026-06-20 19:29:13
最新チャプター
Staying with him CHAPTER 34-Her Father
The house smelled the way it had smelled her entirechildhood, a smell she could not have described to astranger but knew in her body the instant the dooropened, gravy and radiator dust and her mother'shand cream and, underneath all of it, something olderand unnameable that was just the house being thehouse she had grown up in.Her mother hugged her too long in the hallway, theway she always did, holding on a beat pastcomfortable so that Olivia had to be the one to end it.Then she turned to Damien and took both his hands inboth of hers and looked up at him and said, you arevery tall, which was her mother's entire approvalsystem delivered as raw data, and accepted the tin ofmince pies without a single word about the fact thatthey were plainly from a bakery, which meant she hadclocked it in half a second and chosen grace, whichwas so precisely her mother that Olivia had to busyherself with the coats.Her father shook Damien's hand in the front room andsaid, good drive.
Staying with him CHAPTER 33-The Drive Up
You are doing it again, Damien said, somewhere pastOxford.Doing what.The thing where you are extremely calm aboutsomething you are not calm about. You went very stillabout twenty minutes ago. You have been watchingthe motorway like it owes you money.They were on the M40 with the boot full of presentsand a tin of mince pies sitting on the back seat thatOlivia had bought from a good bakery and decantedinto one of her own tins, which she had decided wasnot deception so much as a small mercy to everyoneinvolved, including herself. The rain had set in pastBeaconsfield and had not let up, the wipers keepingtheir patient time, the country going by flat and greyand enormous. He was driving. She had offered, at theflat, and he had said he liked driving, and she had lethim have it, which two years ago she could not havedone.I am not nervous, she said.You changed your jumper twice this morning.That was temperature.The flat was twenty degrees. You stood in front of thewardr
Staying with him CHAPTER 32- The Architect
Remi was already at the table when Olivia arrived,which had never once happened in eight months offriendship, and there was a bottle of red open in frontof her with one glass poured and a second waiting,which was how Olivia knew before she had her coatoff that something was wrong.You are early, Olivia said.I have been here forty minutes, Remi said. I have readthe menu enough times to have opinions about thefont. Sit down. We are drinking.Olivia sat down. She hung her coat on the back of thechair instead of folding it into her lap, which was asmall thing she had taught herself to do, the not-bracing, the arriving properly. What happened.I quit, Remi said, and pushed the second glass acrossthe table. On Tuesday. I walked into Geoff's office andI gave four weeks and I have spent every hour sincethen alternating between feeling like a genius andwanting to be sick in a bin.You loved that firm.I loved being able to say I worked there. Remi turnedher own glass without drin
Staying with him CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE From The Stands
She made it to her seat with eight minutes to spare,out of breath from the walk up from the station andthe thing that had run until two, and the south standwas already most of the way full around her, theSaturday hum of it building toward three o'clock.She had a seat she liked. She had worked out overeight matches, nine, which part of the stand gave herthe best line on the half he tended to start in, and shesat there now with her coat still on and a cup ofcoffee that was not good but was warm, and shefound him on the pitch the way she always found him,immediately, without having to search.He had patterns before a match. She knew them nowthe way she knew his patterns at home, the order hedid his stretches in, the two short sprints, the momentnear the end of the warm-up where he stopped andput his hands on his hips and looked up into thestands. He did it every time. She had asked him aboutit once and he had said he was just looking, and shehad not believed that was th
Staying with him CHAPTER 30-What Comes Next
October again. The leaves going gold and the light going low andLondon doing its brief reluctant beautiful thing before the grey cameback and stayed.She was at the kitchen window with her first coffee when hecame in from his run. She heard the door, the keys in the bowl — theyhad a bowl for keys now, she had bought it in August, one more smallpermanent thing in a life that had become full of them — and thetrainers coming off and him moving through the apartment toward herin the unhurried solid way of someone who was comfortableeverywhere he was.He came up behind her and put his arms around her.She leaned back into him without thinking about it, which wasitself the whole story — the not thinking about it, the way it hadbecome reflex, the way his arms around her was simply somethingthat happened now and her body's response was to lean.They looked out the window together. Below, the street wasdoing its Tuesday morning thing. A woman with a pushchairnegotiating a kerb. A
Staying with him CHAPTER 29-One Year
She was on the tube going home when she remembered it was a year.She had not been thinking about it. She had been looking at herphone reading something she could not have told you the subject oftwenty minutes later, and then she looked up at the dark window ofthe tunnel and thought: a year. It would have been around now. Themoving van parked on the pavement at 6:45 on a Saturday morning.The music. Her robe and her professional nod and the very thoroughand entirely wrong decision she had made within the first forty-eighthours that she despised him.She looked at her reflection in the dark window.She thought about that woman. Thirty years old, certain about theshape of her own life, completely clear on what she needed and whatshe did not. The quiet mornings. The system. The carefullymaintained distance between herself and anything that might requireher to feel something at full volume.She had been so sure.She had been so entirely and specifically wrong in the mostuseful
あなたも気に入るかもしれません
The Day I Kissed An Older Man
Cher the Cherished1.0M ビューPunished by His Love
Suzie4.4M ビューCEO's Tears Over Pregnancy Test Discovery
Faith Shaw737.1K ビューCEO Husband's Crazy Love For His Little Wife
TSI1.5M ビューMy Husband's Double Life
Mira Livelle168 ビューDripping Taboo: {Collection Of Forbidden Wet Desires}
Joyce Claire256 ビューBROKEN BY MY STEPBROTHER
Whoosh103 ビューTHE CEO LEFT ME.... THEN CAME BACK BEGGING
L.NOCTURE139 ビュー
