I can feel myself blush, he tilts his head and licks from the hollow of my throat, out across my left collarbone, then back and across my right, I squeeze my internal muscles again. “Georgia, you keep doing that and I will come without even moving, I swear to God baby that feels good.”

I look over his face and eventually into his eyes. “Sean?”

“Gia?”

“Would you make love to me please?”

“It would be my absolute pleasure Georgia, my absolute pleasure.”

He rocks his hips very slowly into mine and I rock back, we find our rhythm instantly, I tilt my hips so that I can feel him deeper inside and I love the sound he makes when I do this. He slides his hands around to my hips, his fingertips dig into my arse cheeks, his thumbs press onto my hip bones. I dig my nails into him, his shoulders, his back, then his bum, I pull him by his bum, into me, I want him as far inside me as he can get, no space, I want no space between us, so tight together that there’s not even room for air, nothing, just me and him, Georgia and Sean, Sean and Georgia.

My orgasm starts as heat warming my core, then spreads, my blood, my skin, my internal organs, everything burns, everything, every single part of me is on fire but there is no pain, just absolute pleasure. I feel it in every cell, in every hair follicle, pleasure like I have never known, I’m calling his name and telling him I love him and I can hear him saying similar things to me and then at the exact same moment we are both silent and just look at each other. At the exact moment I feel him come inside me, he whispers, “Gia,” and my second orgasm hits me, entirely different to the first. It’s short, sharp and unexpected and I whimper and I just know that I have tears again and in a whisper that I can barely hear, he sings a song to me, a song that came out not long after we first met, when I was just a girl and he was just the boy that I knew I would always love. A song that I haven’t heard in such a long time, it’s just the two lines but we change the words slightly, like we always did and sings the first line of Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet, then waits for me to sing the second, it was just a thing, that we did.

“Georgia Rae, when we made love you used to cry… ” He waits for me to sing my bit, I try to swallow down a sob but I end up singing through it…

“I said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you till I die.”

And it’s suddenly all too much, he cries, I cry, we cling to each other and everything is just as it should be, Sean and Georgia, Georgia and Sean, us against the world.

We fall back to sleep with our arms, legs, bodies, hearts and minds completely tangled up with each other, no telling where one starts and the other one ends.

CHAPTER 19

We spend Friday morning lying in bed at my brother’s house talking. Well Sean talks, I listen as he tells me about the huge success that the band has had, the places he’s been, the people that he’s met. He tells me about the warehouse him and Marley have bought in the old docklands area of East London and with the help of my Dad’s firm, they have had converted into eight luxury apartments. Sean and Marls now share the penthouse on the top floor, complete with a roof garden. He tells me how he’s back in contact with his Dad and they now seem to have a pretty good relationship; he does ask me about my life and my work but oddly enough, he already knows everything that there is to tell. It would seem that we’ve handled our separation in the exact opposite way to each other, where I shut everything out and wanted no reminder of anything to do with Sean or his life, he has sort out every piece of information that he can about me. He knows about my work and how successful we’ve been, he knows about the countries I’ve visited, he even knows that I finally got to own my dream car and then says something really strange.

“You have no idea how hard it was to find one in that colour, I knew you wouldn’t settle…” he trails off.

“How do you know what colour my car is?”

“You always said you wanted it burnt orange and black, ever since we saw that one down the Kings Road years ago, remember?”

“Yeah, but how do you know that’s what I’ve got? What did you mean about it took ages to find one that colour.”

“I bought you the car.”

“What?”

“I bought you the car, alright?”

“But, how, why? I don’t understand.”

“You were what, thirteen, fourteen when we first saw that car and you told me that was the car you wanted. I swore back then, that if the band… if we were doing okay and I had the money, then I’d buy you that car, I never said anything, I never told you, in case I couldn’t afford it.”

He looks up at me, we are naked, his head in my lap, my fingers are raking through his hair, exactly the way I used to, we are, exactly the way we were and yet, so entirely different…

“Jim told me you had passed your test and were driving around in a Beamer your Dad had given you and I just knew that you’d be hating it. Then Jim said that Frank was looking for some old car for you and was having trouble finding it.” He looks away for a second, as if debating something.

“Then she told me that your Dad wasn’t really looking too hard because he didn’t think an old car was safe, he wanted you to have something German or a Land Rover or something similar.” He shrugs his shoulders. “So I found your car, that disgusting colour you wanted, the soft top and the tacky fake walnut dashboard and got it delivered to your Dad’s car place in Epping and they fixed it all up and…” He shrugs again. “The rest is history.”

I’m gobsmacked! “You did all of that for me, but you didn’t come for me, you never thought… you never just thought fuck it, I don’t care if she wants to see me, I’m gonna see her anyway?”

“A million times G, more than a million. I sat outside your Mum and Dad’s old house and almost broke in one night. I was gonna break in and just sit and watch you sleep but then I remembered that Frank has a gun and I didn’t want him to shoot me.” As sad as I feel, I still manage a small smile.

“I went to the shops once, I waited outside for a bit and then just as I plucked up the courage to go in and speak to ya, you came walking along with your Mum, you looked…” He closes his eyes and smiles. “You looked so beautiful. So grown up. You had a cream suit on and sling back shoes, you reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, all elegant and ladylike.”

His eyes sparkle as he looks up at me. “Nothing like the Georgia I remembered in her monkey boots, camouflage trousers and Sex Pistols t-shirt. Anyway, once I saw your Mum was there, I knew it was pointless, I knew she wouldn’t let me near you.” Again I’m floored by what he’s just told me.

“I know that day, I remember wearing that suit to a business lunch with my Mum and she had told me to put my hair in a beehive because the suit was very Hepburn. Sean that was only last year, less than that, last summer sometime.”

“I know when it was G, there’s been other times since then but that was just driving past, I just didn’t know what to do. I had the note remember; it told me to stay away, to never make contact.” My belly goes over and then ties itself into a complete knot. “Babe, you’re pulling my hair.” I look down at my hand, twisting a handful of Sean’s hair, I release it.

“Sorry, sorry, that’s what thinking about her and what she’s done to us does to me, I wanna kill her Sean. I should’ve done it years ago, I should’ve done it that night she licked your face.” He throws his head back and laughs, his shoulders shake in my lap.

“What’s funny?”

He has tears rolling down the side of his head. ”You were, that night, you beat the crap out of her, there were handfuls of her hair everywhere, and I’ve never seen you move so fast.”

I don’t know why he’s laughing, I wish I had stomped on her head and as if reading my thoughts he says, “G, don’t even think about it, just let it go. If we keep going over it, it means she’s won. killing her is not an option so let’s just ignore her, we’re here, we’ve ended up right here, naked, like this, talking like this, loving each other like this, despite everything that she’s done, we’re right where we were always meant to be, together.”