My heart drops. I know Landon’s will have done too. This is bullshit. Marvin is supposed to be ill, but he doesn’t look it. He looks normal, better than normal in fact. They are supposed to be in hospital in New York, not here, fucking up my moment. How the hell did they get here anyway?
“Fuck.”
Mom frowns at me.
“Tilly, language.”
There is a moment of absolute silence, before Marvin gathers himself enough to speak.
“I guess you weren’t expecting us.”
Landon
I knew it. I knew we’d run out of time, or miss our opportunity or whatever. Tilly’s eyeballing me so obviously across the room I’m surprised Rachel and Dad don’t pick up on it. She was about to fold as well, even though I know she’ll never admit it, one hundred percent she was about to beg me for it.
I guess in some way we got lucky. If Dad had rocked up even fifteen minutes later, he would have caught us at it, because there is no doubt in my mind that Tilly would have been launching herself at me as soon as I dropped my sweaty body into that jacuzzi. She was wet as soon as I started rubbing sunscreen on her tender skin.
“Well?”
Dad looks like a completely different person. Whatever they did to him has clearly worked, perhaps a little bit too well.
“A bug.”
“A bug? What kind of bug?”
“Just a bug. They didn’t really know much more than that, other than it wasn’t serious.”
“Serious? You looked half dead when they loaded you up onto the ambulance.”
“I know, right? I was in bad shape, that’s for sure. Thank you for organizing that by the way.”
Tilly looks just as pissed off as I do. I doubt this is the welcome back party they were expecting us to give them, even though they don’t seem to be picking up on it.
“And that’s it. One minute you’re puking your guts up all over the place, the next you’re better than normal?”
“Well, no, not exactly. They gave me some drugs, which worked, and then after an hour or so I felt so much better there didn’t seem any point in staying.”
“We tried to call but couldn’t get through, obviously.”
My eyes go to Rachel momentarily. She looks tired and can’t have slept much more than I have.
“And the ambulance brought us back here.”
“The private ambulance brought you back here?”
“He said it would be covered in the insurance. I knew you wouldn’t mind. So here we are.”
“Why didn’t you just stay in the hospital? You were pretty bad after all, and the last thing you want is it happening again.”
Good question, Tilly.
“Marvin doesn’t like hospitals. Besides which, once we knew it wasn’t something fatal, we figured there was no better place than here, with you guys.”
“Right. At least an hour from the nearest decent hospital, just in case it happens again. Makes perfect sense.”
Tilly nods enthusiastically.
“We would have been alright without you. Landon was even going to cook.”
“I can see.”
Rachel indicates the smashed window, which has been hastily fixed in the interim with cardboard and tape.
“I thought you were supposed to be good at throwing a ball.”
“I got distracted.”
“And clothes all over the place, Tilly? It’s a good job we came back.”
It’s a good job you didn’t come back fifteen minutes later and you really would have seen clothes all over the place.
“So, a bug?”
“That’s what they said.”
“How did you get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it contagious?”
“If it was contagious, we’d all already have it. It was a twenty four hour thing, clearly. You can see your Dad’s much better than he was last night.”
“It’s not even a twenty four hour thing. Twenty four hour things take twenty four hours.”
“I’m still not a hundred percent, but I’m definitely on the way there. They’ve given me some medication to take for a couple of days, and told me I have to take it easy.”
“Which means no long walks out in the sun.”
Tilly and I look at each other in horror.
“Three days inside is going to kill you, Marvin. Especially with all this nature surrounding us.”
Rachel decides to respond to that conundrum herself.
“We don’t want a repeat of what happened last night.”
“Maybe it wasn’t as serious as you made out.”
“I thought he was going to die.”
“Rachel, please. Can we just move on. I was a little unwell, but thankfully it’s nothing serious. Thanks to Landon I’m back here in much less time than I thought I would be. Imagine if we’d stayed in that first hospital. I’d still be waiting for them to do some tests on me. As soon as they got me in the ambulance I was already feeling better.”
If I hadn’t arranged that, Tilly and I would be fucking right now. In the jacuzzi, afterwards on the decking, on the sofa I’m sat on. We could have had the whole afternoon, all night and perhaps some of the following day enjoying a bit of alone time. Instead, we have to cope with the fug of sexual tension in a house so tiny we can’t even think without being heard. Even if she agrees to it, which she is even less likely to now, how are we going to fuck each other without being found out?
This also might be completely different when the vacation is over and we each go back to our separate lives. I mean, she lives with her Mom still. She’s even at University still, in a whole different state. If too much time passes, she might even begin to regret it.
“So, what have you two been up to?”
Tilly and I look at each other. She fumbles an answer and I do too. Eventually we talk over each other while Marvin’s eyes go from me to his stepdaughter. The result is a classic confusion of information which results in the initial telling of two stories that mould essentially into one with largely conflicting criteria.
In the end, I woke Tilly up and she was already awake when I came in. We sat for a while chatting in the living room, although neither of us can really remember what about. After that I slept in my bed, while Tilly showered and read and eventually we both found ourselves out on the decking at some point in the afternoon. We certainly did not fuck. Tilly did not have a multiple orgasm, or indeed, the best sex of her life, I did not have an orgasm that far exceeded any other I’ve ever experienced and we didn’t, subsequently, flirt outrageously with each other afterwards, pretending we didn’t want to do it again.
Rachel doesn’t seem entirely convinced by the story, and i’m not surprised, but she doesn’t have a good reason to believe we are lying, so she just nods happily and smiles as though we’ve made a joke and she’s in on it. Tilly goes red, and then tries to hide her face when she realizes it, and Dad just smiles at as both, with a mood clearly enhanced by the medicines he has been given.
It’s enough to move the focus of the conversation away from us and back to the holiday at hand. We have two more days here. Three if you count the day we are supposed to leave. Dad is essentially house bound, at least for the next day or so, the whole vacation if Rachel gets her way, which also means that Rachel will be housebound keeping a keen eye on him. That leaves Tilly and I either under their feet like a pair of rats running around a cage, or free if we decide to wander outside into the vastness of the landscape that surrounds us.
With Rachel and Dad unable to follow us, we will essentially be alone again. This might work out even better for us, because at least this way we’ll know exactly where they are. Forget about surprise appearances that result in broken windows and immediate softening of erections, this will be wilderness and wild fucking and nature and nothing else. I just need to convince Tilly not only to come with me but to come with me too. And the way she was acting earlier, shouldn’t be too difficult at all. We won’t be able
to do it today, which makes it all that more exciting for tomorrow.
“So, you’re stuck here, right? I mean, the doctor reckons you need to rest up after what happened.”
“At least for a couple of days.”
“Or more”, Rachel adds.
“But that doesn’t mean that we have to?”
“No, of course not, you guys can do whatever you want, you’re both adults.”
Consenting adults, Rachel.
“There’s plenty of stuff around here to do.”