Ellie's Return

  Copyright© 2013 Bronagh Pierce

  The moral right of Bronagh Pierce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This document may not be reprinted in whole or in part by any means including but not limited to electronic publishing, mechanical publishing, audio recording, etc. without the explicit written consent of the copyright holder.

  One

  The airport was crowded that morning, but it mattered less now that she was on the return leg of her journey. Ellie Russell’s anticipation was behind her now, no longer fresh and vibrant and full of possibilities but a lesson learned, a first step towards changing her mental attitude to one of quiet acceptance of at least one thing that may never be, rather than what of might have been. People will tell you to demand what you want of life, not to accept second best, not to give up on your dreams. Nobody had needed to tell Ellie that, she was not one to accept less than she wanted from life, at least not where she could control the outcome, but other people can disappoint you. In demanding less of themselves they are resigned to the fact that only other people get to live their dreams. You suffer for that because you wanted to love and respect them but if they won’t do their best for themselves, if they won’t believe in themselves, how can they do that for you?

  Ellie was trying to clear her mind of that negativity, and she needed to do it quickly. When she had fled three years ago she did it because she needed to move on, and she had done all she could to set things straight with Tom but if he would not speak to her it was like losing the love of her life and her best friend all at once, and there was nothing else to keep her there. He had disappointed her again now. She tried to console herself that their two year relationship followed by three years of angst and regret would at least be easier to deal with than having a five year relationship that had gone inexplicably sour and which would have caused her a great deal or torment and sorrow that she would have to start dealing with now, whereas actually she was now way ahead of the game. She still had the disappointment of love lost and a sense of betrayal from a man who was not all he had seemed, but it was weakness more than anything that he had betrayed her with, so her overwhelming feeling was one of disappointment rather than one of betrayal, and her adjustment to that had begun long before. She may never come to terms with it though, so she needed to move on, change her environment and try to put the disappointment behind her rather than let it infiltrate her soul lest she too, should someday stop short of what she could be.

  Ellie had been staring into the distance while she thought about this, and was playing with her hair, twirling a short blonde lock around one finger as she stared into the distance. As she came to she saw that a man was staring at her, and had insinuated himself into her line of sight so that she would see him when she stopped daydreaming. He was giving one of those smarmy knowing looks that she so detested, and she felt instantly repulsed by it. That was a shame because if she had seen him first she would have been impressed. She guessed he was early to mid thirties, probably a couple of years older than her, and he had thick short hair, not too trendy and try hard, and a bit of stubble, which suited him. His body was athletic and toned and he dressed to its full advantage so she knew he was confident in a way, but that smarmy know-all grin just made her want to kick him in the teeth. She wished she could be more casual about attraction and play by the rules of it instead of analysing those rules, but she was what she was, and she thought again with regret about how she missed the one person who ever really seemed to understand what that meant.

  She couldn’t really blame the smarmy man. She was wearing a push up bra, a white low cut shirt, and tight jeans, her standard travelling outfit in other words. She knew it would have been a bit of a torment to Claudia to dress like that this morning and stand before her and then hug her as she left but that was rather the point of this outfit, she might not need anything from anybody when she was travelling, but anything she did need she could get pretty much anyone to do for her because when she looked like this everyone, male or female, seemed to want to help. For all that, she also knew that she might get attention she did not want it so much right now. She stood up to her full height and stretched, and as she did so she glanced quickly up and saw the man’s eyes widen as he took in her full height and perfect proportions. She reached down to her large bag and just as quickly he registered disappointment as she stood up straight again and covered herself in a baggy unflattering fleece. He sloped off, message received loud and clear; but thanks for caring, she thought. It was good to have an ego boost as long as she didn’t need to hear the tedious chat up line that went with it.

  She felt brightened by that. The feeling of sadness was coming and going, even if she knew that it only went when she forgot it and inevitably came back moments later. The airport, as vast as it was, felt oppressive, and she kept checking the departure boards from her vantage point, looking closely and then having to look a moment later because she had failed to take in the information or had forgotten it already.

  She looked forward to getting back and seeing Venice. She hoped to see it once more with the wonder of a tourist. It was too beautiful to ever take for granted, but in the three years since she had settled there she had got used to some aspects of it. She thought of that stage of acceptance simply as another step in her relationship with the place, the way that one starts to accept a person or a place or a thing as part of one’s own life, at least for a time. We don’t think about endings when something is beginning, because if we do we cannot properly begin them at all, but somehow we still know that most things are temporary. Venice had always been temporary, she knew that well enough, and she had left it to go back and fix things with Tom because she had not known that he was temporary too. She felt the rush of loneliness, the sense that this was wrong; that it was too soon to picture a future without him because in all the time she had to prepare for that, in those three years without him it was not something she had ever really accepted at all. For now she would think of being alone, she would deal with that first. Small steps, as Tom always used to tell her.

  She thought she had seen Tom in the distance, just a flash of him going by, but she had thought that a dozen times this morning and it was a different person every time and never who she wanted it to be. How silly to think it would be him, how silly to want it to be. His parting shot had been one of his increasingly cryptic messages, so far from the straightforwardness she had first loved about him. Once he had given inspiration and demanded respect, it was something irresistible and inevitable about him, but now the no nonsense Tom was gone, faded out into a colourless gloom that no longer gave or demanded anything. Ellie needed to think about something else, since even the greatly reduced Tom was better than an exaggeration of most men she met. She still could not stand before him even now without being drawn almost magnetically into his world, and even the frightening gloom that was his daily demeanour now was filled with a romantic charm that she found difficult to resist, knowing that their assignations of old revealed more instinctive knowledge of each others bodies than either of them could ever expect from another person, and she wondered even now if that amalgamation of body and soul would have been enough to keep them together when everything else had faded. It was the one thing she did not want to find out, so she had walked away, and even now as she sat in the airport lounge she struggled not to imagine his weight on her or her own ecstasy as she rose to meet his entry into her.

  She needed to think of something else. Mara would be waiting for her at the old apartment, and she would have to explain what had happened because their communications had been short and obtuse, and Ellie had told her again and again that she would
let her know when she saw her what had been going on. She had characterised events as complicated when she knew that only her feelings were really fitting of that description, and because of that she had been unable to detach herself from events because she was hoping that given some time to herself, events would eventually filter down and she would know finally what she thought. Time was a great healer, everybody said so, but the downside was that it took time and she needed relief now, so distance would have to do until time had the opportunity to do its part. In a world where Ellie was increasingly sure that nobody ever listened to anybody else and where you can go close to mad with everybody only wanting to listen to themselves, Ellie also had mixed feelings about the fact that the one person who knew how to really listen, insisted on doing so with such utter commitment that the only thing she never heard was when Ellie said she did not want to talk about something. It was not that Mara was not to be trusted, she was a good and true friend and Ellie had always been grateful to have her in her life, but sometimes she really did not want to talk about something until she had understood it for herself, and all she knew right now about her and Tom was that it had no right to be over, so she did not know what she would say when Mara asked her.

  Two

  Where to begin though? It was only three days that she had been away but now everything seemed so final. She had wished that Mara were there to talk to face to face. Claudia had been good to her and taken her in when she did not have to do that. She had tried to strike the right balance between being there for Ellie and having nothing to do with Ellie’s problems or the people who had caused them. Ellie’s visit had been a strain on Claudia because of the ghosts she bought with her, the memory of Lola and the world she had tried to leave behind her, but also the feelings she had once had for Ellie which Ellie knew she had once naively taken full advantage of for her own gratification. If this haunted Ellie she saw it clear as day in Claudia’s face, in her movements, her responses and her body language, but she hoped now that some good had come of this weekend even if she was not to see her again.

  Now she saw that there was delays all up the departure board, and her own flight was delayed by at least two hours. She didn’t want a coffee, it was too early in the day for a glass of wine, and she had not bothered with a book. She could never read when travelling, when she did not read she was bored and when she did there were too many distractions, but today there was no way she could read, there was too much on her mind and she didn’t need to lock it all in any more she needed to let it all out, because there were still one or two things that didn’t really make any sense. She tried to imagine that she was already with Mara, and they were sat comfortably at home, and she had at last the distance she needed and could think it all through. What would Mara ask her first? This was like an interview, why did she need to think about what Mara would ask first? She reasoned that Mara would ask the right questions, she always did, and through that Ellie had learnt to always answer them because of what she might discover about herself. Mara was a gifted listener, a practised listener. She could always hear what you said, and if she listened very carefully, she could hear what you needed to say too, but first she needed to know what had happened when Ellie had first arrived home. Or maybe it went further back than that, maybe she needed to tell her why she had left when she did, because Mara had been away for a few days and the departure had been unexpected, so there was all that to tell too. She had left a note saying that she was going back to England after all, and she did not know if she would be back and Mara could let her room if she needed to but she had left her cases in the utility room and just taken her hand luggage, and she was so sorry but she was sure Mara would understand. Mara understood everything, somehow, and if she didn’t understand it right off, she made it her job to understand rather than say she could not or would not. She was older than Ellie, maybe not that much older, but she seemed to know things that other people didn’t know. Ellie thought maybe that was why she was so great at listening, or maybe it was because she was so good at listening that she knew things, but either way she seemed to have it together and she never talked about herself, as though she already knew all that and it was old news, but that everything about other people fascinated her and if you listened to her, listening to you, you might just learn something too.

  It wasn’t the journey then, because that was just a tedious journey and the only difference between the trip out and the return was that she had come into one airport with hope and left via another airport without it, but the story began before that. Not three or five years, she would come to that in due course, but maybe this journey had begun a couple of weeks before she had left, when she had found that there was a hole in her soul where Tom used to be, and she had ignored it and hoped it would heal over but it had not. It was the break up with Alfonse that had caused her to realise again how she had missed Tom.

  Three

  The break up with Alfonse was not a big deal to Ellie. Alfonse had always seemed to feel that his attraction lay in his lack of availability, and in a way it did. Not because Ellie wanted him more and more the less she saw him, but because she liked him less and less the more she saw him, to the extent that she was finally happy not to see him any more. That was almost certainly not the crux of his strategy, and when she had tried to tell him some weeks before that she wasn’t exactly turned on by his turning up for sex and then not calling for three weeks, he had caused a big scene, humiliating her in a packed bar, then stormed off and not called for three weeks.

  Ellie had decided with that incident that enough was enough, and had decided not to waste any more time on him. She knew she only entertained him for his purposes as a distraction and for the purposes of sexual gratification, he being so vacuous in any other respect that while she could get quite clouded over by the prospect of sliding on and off him for whole weekends when they were first together, there was not a lot else to say or do outside of that. This was what she had liked about him, the fact that he was available for sex, and that he did not mind that she was not available to him in any other way, but she still needed him to be reliable, because if he was not reliable he was replaceable.

  They had met through a friend of Mara’s, though Mara had said she could not vouch for him, she did not know him personally. He worked in some kind of sales office but it was never very clear what kind, or what his role was. He never seemed to do much in the way of overtime other than as an implausible excuse for not turning up somewhere and he never seemed to have much interest in what he did or what he was going to do in the future, at least not that they talked about. He always seemed to have money and was always expensively dressed, and often he would be well dressed too, the occasional over-reliance on casual sports gear notwithstanding. When Ellie did go out with him she did not really know what they talked about, mostly he joked around and tried to make her laugh and mostly she was happy to laugh, and since the specific and only aim of their relationship was mutual sexual exhaustion, talking was only really ever to kill time anyway, but if they could do it in nice restaurants and bars then so much the better. He was younger than her, maybe by five years or so, so he got to go out with an older woman and she got to go out with a younger man. It wasn’t enough of an age gap to create a cultural difference but their respective cultures were. Language was not the barrier, his English was good and her Italian was good, it wasn’t really a question of how they would say anything, but whether they had it to say, and conversational highs had been discounted as a dispensable luxury quite early on.

  When he did turn up again after three weeks it was nevertheless with a tedious regularity that you could set your calendar by. When she had first met him and they were arranging a date he would take a couple of hours to get back to her with something as simple as a text that said yes or no to a proposed arrangement. It was not too long before she realised that it was always a two-hour interval that he left and she had decided to manage him out of that habit. One afternoon after they had been seeing
each other a few weeks she sent him a text asking if they were meeting that night as tenuously arranged a few days before. He had not replied for the standard two hours and even then his reply had been vague; he thought he may have other options and did not want to commit himself, so he would let her know if he was going to be free. Ellie had seen his younger brother at the street market in the afternoon and he had said that Alfonse was seeing her tonight so as far as she knew he did not have other plans but she did not like his off hand behaviour. She decided that she was not in the mood for seeing him tonight so she would use the opportunity to teach him a lesson. Ellie decided to wait until two hours after his last text message, and then she sent him a series of short text messages.

  Alfonse had been lying on his bed when the first text had arrived. He had been on the verge of getting back to Ellie after her earlier text in which she had asked what their plans were. While he had been lying on his bed waiting for the two hours to pass before he could reply to her without seeming too keen, he had been planning his seduction. He was imagining Ellie coming to him dressed, then he pictured her in various developing states of undress, sometimes with her undressing for him, sometimes with him telling her what to remove next and her complying with his demands. He was picturing when and where and how he would touch her, when he would make her gasp, how long he would taste her before he stroked her gently with his tumescence before she would have to grab him and pull him into her as she bucked under the pressure of waiting so long. He let that thought linger as he went to pick up the cell phone to read the message that he knew must be from her.

  The first flurry of texts said that she was sorry he was busy because she had been looking forward to their date all afternoon. She was feeling especially horny and had hardly been able to contain herself when she had been lying in the bath thinking about him. Her breasts had become swollen while she thought about him and her nipples were hard, and she didn’t dare touch them because she was already so turned on. She really wished that he had replied earlier because he could be with her by now, instead of having to play by herself. Alfonse was startled and wanted to reply straight away but his cock which had been on readiness alert for most of the afternoon was now suddenly fully straining to be unzipped and it was all he could do to slowly release it, never mind him concentrating on managing to text anything back. The second batch of messages that Ellie sent a few minutes later said simply that she was now out of the bath, covered in moisturising lotion and was reclining in the armchair in her bedroom waiting to dry off but that it was very humid today, with an occasional breeze through the window. She was feeling very turned on and was struggling to keep her hands off herself, and she wished he had replied earlier and they could have played on the phone. Alfonse was desperately trying to think of something to say that would suit the mood but she was way ahead of him, and his mind was anything but clear. Besides, he expected to be the seducer and she was very much in control of the situation. Her third text was much shorter and said that a bead of perspiration had slid down her chest so quickly that it had run down to her erect nipple and had hung there for a moment. When she blew it off it had landed on her soft inner thigh and run down again, and she was so turned on by now that she had followed it with her fingers….