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It’s a bad idea from the start, going with Seb to London.
They’ve only just split up, and Taggie’s not sure yet whether they’re going to manage being friends, plus she’s never liked the sort of music he likes (part of the reason they weren’t clicking, she gathered, is because she’s not punk rock enough for him, which is a point she really couldn’t argue, owning as many dungarees and gingham-patterned sundresses as she does, and a point she didn’t really want to argue anyways since Seb wasn’t Rupert enough for her) so it really shouldn’t matter that he bought her the ticket to this concert back when they were still dating; he should invite a friend or something, only he’s weirdly insistent about her coming along in a way that she actually finds a bit endearing, determined to be friends, possibly because her dad is his boss, and Taggie’s never been good at saying no to people.
So she goes along. The train ride there is awkward, the two of them alone in a nearly-empty car, and then they meet up with some of his friends at a pub near the venue and that’s awkward as well, because Taggie runs a catering business and lives with her dad and struggles to read recipes, let alone books; she doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Seb’s artsy counterculture crowd. She secures one pint and resolves stolidly to prop up a wall until they move over to the venue, where she can find another wall to prop up and continue to try and melt into invisibility; a smashing successful plan so far, since no one’s paying her a lick of attention.
“And what do you do, Taggie?” one of Seb’s friends asks her once — a girl with a nose ring and studs on her jacket, speaking loud and slowly like Seb’s rung them all ahead to warn them she’s dyslexic and they all just took that to mean dim.
Still, Taggie forces a polite smile and says, “Oh, I cook.”
“At a restaurant?” the girl asks, sharply. “Which one? So many of these posh restaurants round here, they use immigrant labor — you know, exploitative shit, paying them under the table — ”
“Taggie caters,” Seb butts in, like he’s just now remembered she’s here. “She’s brilliant.”
Taggie flashes him a grateful look.
“God, catering.” The girl with the nose ring shudders. “What, like for all those wasteful, stuck-up garden parties out in the Cotswolds?”
“Shut up, Laur,” Seb says fondly.
The girl shoots him a sharp look, like she’s caught him at something. “You’re just too busy kissing arses to remember who the enemy is. You’re stuck on the teat.”
“The teat, honestly,” Seb says, rolling his eyes, while Taggie stares at her pint and remembers Seb’s clumsy mouthing at her breast in the back of his car and feels herself turning pink.
“Yes, Sebastian, the teat,” the girl says, reaching over to tweak his ear. “Admit it. You’re too grateful for Declan bloody O’Hara — ”
“Laur — ”
“— giving you a job, saving journalism, letting you fuck his daughter — ”
Taggie lifts her drink just to have something to hide behind.
“Lauren, for fuck’s sake,” Seb says, a little sharper — more serious.
Taggie tries not to feel like her ex should be defending her a bit better, because he is, after all, her ex. It’s not Seb’s fault that what she really wants is a man who’d be willing to deck her own father, who has in fact decked her own father, a man who would get up and take her home and not make her sit here and listen to Lauren the cutesy nose ring sneering at Seb: “And as if that’s not bad enough, now you’re running round with a member of bloody Parliament. You know two days ago you were in the tabloids?”
“Shut up,” Seb says again, coming up out of his chair, pointing with his cigarette.
Around them at the table, the rest of his friends drop their own conversations to ooooh at the fight that seems like it’s about to break out. Taggie doesn’t really notice; she’s too busy blinking, reeling, and trying to figure out what the hell Lauren’s talking about.
“Rupert?” she says, after a stunned minute. “You’ve been hanging out with Rupert?”
“Been getting sex tips from a bloody MP!" Lauren crows smugly, before Seb can do anything but stare at Taggie and open and close his mouth like a fish, caught. “Teaching him how to fuck you! You, Taggie, are the direct beneficiary of the sexual knowledge of one of the United Kingdom’s most privileged, womanizing arseholes — ”
“Lauren, shut your fucking mouth!” Seb yells, definitely drunk and loud enough to get them ousted promptly from the pub.
By the time they make it to the venue — Seb’s mates staggering along, Taggie lingering near the back with half a mind to just split off and find her own way home, her heart pounding in her ears because what Lauren said back at the pub can’t be true, it actually can’t, it doesn’t make any bloody sense — Seb and Lauren have resolved their differences so marvelously that they’ve come out the other side, and spend the entire opening set necking against a column. Or maybe they haven’t resolved their differences; Taggie’s parents being who they are, she’s no stranger to the fact that two people can go at it like rabbits while still hating each other’s guts, sometimes pausing to argue between rounds. Either way, Taggie finds the bar and finds herself a bottle of water, and by the time she turns around the band has come on stage, the crowd is yelling and shoving into the mosh pit, lights strobing in the dark and the bass starting up so hard she can feel it in her chest, an awful, noisy racket, and she can’t locate any of the people she came here from the pub with, so she goes to join the queue for the loo.
She does rather have to pee actually, and she’s got nothing better to do; except once she’s inside she runs into Lauren at the sinks, which could be awkward except Taggie doesn’t give it a chance to be. “I think I’m going to head home,” she says, then when Lauren shouts WHAT? over the music, she gets in close to hear ear, smelling stale beer and sweat and Seb’s cologne, and shouts louder, “I’M GOING HOME,” which Lauren evidently hears, since she gives her a vaguely hostile thumbs-up. Taggie optimistically takes that to mean that she’s going to tell Seb, so he won’t wait around looking for her or worry she’s been kidnapped or something, then heads back out the front door onto the street. “Excuse me,” she says to the bouncer — a beefy woman in a leather jacket with a neck tattoo and roving eyes, “do you know where I could get a cab?” — then heads off in the direction the woman points her.
Traditionally this is where the night might go very wrong for a country girl wandering around the big scary city by herself, but Taggie did actually live in London for the first twenty years of her life, so she knows how to get a cab. She makes it to the train station without incident, and then makes it onto the right train (she has to ask someone to help her find the right platform, because the letters on the board aren’t cooperating and she’s tired and she’s had a drink, but the old man at the ticket counter is very nice and happy to have someone to assist, she thinks), and rides all the way out to Rutshire alone in her carriage, watching her own reflection in the dark window.
No, the trouble starts when she arrives at Rutshire station and remembers suddenly that Seb drove them; Seb’s car is the only one waiting in the car park, and she hasn’t got the keys, and even if she did she couldn’t just take Seb’s car. There are no cabs, because it’s Rutshire, and it’s late but it’s not so late that her father will be in bed, so she goes to the phone box and rings him. He doesn’t answer — but she knows he doesn’t even hear the phone, sometimes, if he’s really in a rut with work, so she rings him again just in case he didn’t hear her the first time. No such luck; after seven rings she hangs up, tugs her coat a bit tighter around herself, and sets out to walk.
It's not actually that cold of a night; it’s crisp, yes, but the air is still and the stars are out, a great twinkling blanket of clear black sky over the familiar landscape of this place that has become her home. Taggie likes to walk, anyway, and it’s only a few kilometers to the Priory.
Perhaps she’ll run into someone she knows, someone who can give her a lift; a bit of conversation would do wonders, she thinks, to distract her from the new, nauseous fact that Rupert may or may not have coached her ex-boyfriend on how to touch her, which it honestly would make no sense at all if he had, because ever since the night Venture won the right to put in a bid on the franchise — that night in her kitchen, his hands on her waist, skimming so light it was almost like he was scared, until he pulled her around frantically and pressed her to him; Tag, he'd said in the doorway, sounding so floored, and she’d thought — she’d thought, when he’d kissed her, that it meant something, that it meant he’d finally decided he wanted her more than he wanted to be in business with her dad, except of course it hadn’t meant any of that. Rupert’s been running around with Cameron Cook for a month now, as well he should; at least she can keep up with him. Probably he realized while he was kissing Taggie that he didn’t want a girl who couldn’t even figure out where to put her hands — why would he, when he can have any woman in Rutshire, married or unmarried, and they’re no doubt all more experienced in bed than she is and a lot less hassle? — and probably that’s why he’s not spoken more than a few stilted words to her in passing, since.
Probably Taggie should pay more attention to her surroundings, and less attention to the blindingly obvious fact that the man she’s fairly certain she’s in love with wants nothing to do with her, aside from maybe possibly giving her ex-boyfriend sex tips — it’s because Rupert’s personable, she decides, and he likes to talk about his conquests, and he spends a lot of time with the Venture team and Seb is youngish and a bit ungainly and maybe he seemed like he needed advice about women in a general sense, nothing to do with Taggie specifically — and anyway, she meanders around a tight corner, lost in thought, and doesn’t see the headlights coming at her until the driver is laying on his horn and Taggie’s stumbling out of the way, blind in the light and mind wiped blank by shock, and the car is swerving just in time to avoid hitting her dead-on. It sideswipes her instead, sends her crashing back into a hedge, and it would all be fine except that Taggie lands on her wrist and she feels something snap.
She’s the sort of person who goes silent when she’s hurt, always has been; her mum’s even told her that she barely cried as a baby, and Taggie’s never been sure whether that says more about her, or more about her mother, but she’s silent now except for a sharp intake of breath. She expects the driver to stop his car, to get out and run over and ask her if she’s alright, offer to take her to the hospital, except instead the bastard only stops for a second before he steps on it, leaving her sitting in a hedge, watching his tail lights disappear around the next curve.
“Unbelievable,” Taggie mutters, trying hard not to cry. Crying, she reminds herself in her mother’s voice, has never helped anything, Agatha dear — unless you’re on stage or you want to manipulate a man, which she’s not and she doesn’t, so that’s right out. Getting up is a puzzle; she grabs a branch and manages to pull herself out of the hedge with her good hand, bits of twig and leaf stuck in her hair, then staggers back out to the road on legs shaky with adrenaline.
If this were a novel — one of those books on tape that Caitlin mails her, the bodice rippers in which charming, widowed rakes brooding in empty castles on the high moors have their way with unsuspecting serving girls, which Taggie pretends not to enjoy but secretly listens to with her headphones on, bundled tight in a blanket and sitting on her window seat late at night, staring across at Penscombe — this is when her knight in shining armor would arrive, possibly in his own expensive, exotic car, possibly on horseback, to whisk her away to be tended by some discreet, convenient family doctor who does house calls in the middle of the night for sprained wrists, and she would never want for anything again.
But it’s not a novel, so she has to trek a quarter of a kilometer back down the road to the nearest phone booth, where she again tries and fails to ring her father, then gives up and rings Lizzie instead.
She gets James first, who sounds half-manic and insists on thinking she’s Tony Baddingham calling because of some work emergency with a television franchise that Tony Baddingham doesn’t own anymore, and by the time she manages to convince him that she wants to talk to his wife, the pain in her wrist has gotten so bad that she’s in real danger of crying.
“Taggie, sweetheart, what is it?” Lizzie says worriedly, when she finally gets hold of the phone. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Taggie gets out, her voice a bit weepy, clutching the phone to her ear. “It’s only, my dad won’t pick up, and I was walking home from the train station and I got just a little bit hit by a car — ”
“Oh my good God,” Lizzie blurts, and hangs up promptly to come and get her.
Taggie sits on the rock wall next to the phone booth, cradling her wrist to her chest, and tries to feel grateful that she has a friend willing to drop everything in the middle of the night and come get her, instead of wretched that she’s all alone and hurt and miserable after a rather shit night, in the first place. Lizzie pulls up in James’ car, gets out to mother her a bit and coo over the state of her and then usher her into the passenger seat, and by the time they get going Taggie really is crying, overwhelmed by all the gentle attention, because she knows if she’d managed to get through to her dad all she’d have gotten was admonishment, why were you walking out here alone at night, why did you ever think it was a good bloody idea to go with Seb to a punk concert, Taggie? I mean honestly, a punk concert — I’m going to bloody kill him when he drags himself into the office tomorrow — and if, in some strange alternate reality where Maud hadn’t stormed off back to London to live with Patrick’s godfather, she’d ever managed to get her mum, all she would’ve got from her would’ve been admonishment of a different sort, honestly, why did you leave early? You have no sense of culture, Taggie, when I was your age I’d stay out all night with directors, poets, artists, you’ve never really lived until you’ve bummed a cigarette off the bassist of a band after he’s fucked you in the back alley — and I don’t mean that just spatially, mind you.
Lizzie makes sympathetic noises and plies her with tissues, and Taggie holds them to her face one-handed and apologizes over and over again, mortified to be such trouble and then to be sobbing all over James’ car besides, while Lizzie assures her over and over again, harried as she tries to navigate them to the hospital, that it’s no trouble at all, that this is what friends are for, that of course Taggie doesn’t have to be sorry for getting hit by a car.
“Only a little bit hit by a car,” Taggie interjects wetly.
Lizzie gives her a fond, slightly manic little smile. “Getting a little bit hit by a car,” she corrects primly, and then they’re both laughing, Taggie breaking off in the middle to complain oooooohh, ouch when the motion jostles from her chest to her shoulder down her arm and pangs her wrist.
“Almost there,” Lizzie assures her, reaching over to rub her hand over Taggie’s back, and Taggie leans into the touch gratefully — and then they’re at the hospital, and Taggie has to walk again, into the bright light of the A&E, which at this time of night in Rutshire is thankfully empty.
They go back right away, and the doctor takes one look at her wrist, prodding it less carefully than Taggie would like, and declares, “Yep, broken.”
“Broken?” Taggie echoes, startled. “I thought — maybe sprained?”
“Went to med school, did you?” the doctor says condescendingly, scooting away on his wheeled stool. “It’s broken. We’ll get an X-ray to confirm, but I don’t really need one.”
“Well,” Lizzie says, when he’s twitched aside the curtain and marched off to do no-doubt very important middle-of-the-night in Rutshire doctor things. “He was a bit of a ponce, wasn’t he?”
Taggie snorts a laugh.
The staff of the A&E decide to make up for the speed with which they admitted her by making her wait a few hours to go back and get an X-ray, even though there doesn’t seem to be anything else going on, except a couple of nervous new parents who come in thinking their baby has a fever. They put them in the little curtained bay next to Taggie and Lizzie, so they can hear the nurse who comes over to assure them that there’s nothing wrong, that a temperature of 37.5 is within the normal range, and since the baby’s sleeping peacefully and has no other symptoms they can be confident he’s alright. “My advice?” the nurse says, in a friendly tone. “Stop taking the poor lad’s temperature once every hour. He’ll let you know if he’s not feeling well.”
Then the parents and their baby are gone, and Lizzie manages to rustle them up a couple cups of tea — the nurses are fans of her book — and they go back to their idle gossiping. The nurses join in — apparently they, too, think the doctor is a ponce, there’s absolutely no reason he couldn’t send her back for an X-ray right now, except that he likes denying his patients things to make himself feel like he’s doing something important, not running an A&E in one of the sleepiest towns in England. They volunteer that there was a man in here last night who’d tried to stick a vibrator up his arse and lost his grip on it — squirelly thing was halfway to his colon before we got a grip on it! one nurse confides — and that the woman who drove him in was not his wife, though they draw the line of disclosure at telling them who it was, so Taggie and Lizzie have a good time guessing.
Turns out two of the nurses were at a holiday party that Taggie catered over the winter, and they badger her for her Yule log recipe, which makes Taggie flush bright red because it’s not like a bloody Yule log is her best work — she insists they take her recipe for jammy dodgers as well, and luckily the wrist she broke is her right one, so she has an excuse to dictate the ingredients to them instead of letting them laugh at her abominable spelling.
She’s still waiting for an X-ray by six in the morning, when Lizzie stands up and tells her apologetically that if she doesn’t get back to get the children up and take them to school, James will probably forget and let them have a holiday by accident.
“Oh, of course,” Taggie says, even though the thought of being left alone here makes her heart flutter into her throat; she can handle being alone; she’s certainly done it enough. “Thanks so much for picking me up, Lizzie, really.”
“We’ll take good care of her,” one of the nurses puts in.
“We’ve got a vested interest in that wrist working again by the time Ginny’s garden party comes along,” another jokes, and then Lizzie’s shrugging on her coat and ducking in to kiss Taggie on the cheek and tell her, “I’ll send someone along to drive you home, don’t worry.”
“Maybe my dad’s up by now?” Taggie says hopefully, though she thinks he was probably up last night too, just ignoring the phone.
“I’ll pop round and check, after I’ve got the kids off to school,” Lizzie assures her, and then she’s gone, and Taggie’s alone.
Only it’s not her father who shows up a half hour later, tires squealing in the car park and storming through the automatic doors, dramatic herringbone coat flapping like he’s coming to rescue her from something much more dire than a lightly broken wrist.
“Taggie?” he calls out. “Tag, where are you?” yanking aside curtain after curtain — it’s a good thing she’s the only patient here — until finally he finds hers.
“Oh God,” she complains weakly. She really is too tired for this. “Lizzie called you?”
Rupert just stands there for a moment with her curtain in his hand, staring at her like he expected to get here and find her dead or something. Taggie struggles to push herself up to sitting, her bad wrist cradled against her body. “Honestly, Rupert, I’m alright. You didn’t have to come rushing all the way down here.”
“You’re not alright,” he argues impatiently, coming into the little curtained room to touch her gently what feels like everywhere except her now alarmingly swollen wrist, his warm palm on her cheek and strong hands on her shoulders and his body close enough that she has to fight the urge to just — keel over into him. “Your wrist is broken, Lizzie told me you’ve been in here all night — you got hit by a bloody car — ”
“I only got bumped by a car,” Taggie corrects stubbornly. “And it was my fault. I was walking home alone, in the dark, and there are so many blind turns — ”
Jesus Christ, Tag, you could’ve been killed, her father would say, all irritation at her stupidity for coming up with such a harebrained idea in the first place, but Rupert just says, “Why didn’t you call me? You know I’d have given you a lift.”
Like you gave my boyfriend sex pointers? Taggie wants to throw at him, snippish — he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and he’s got a hand on the curve of her neck and one braced behind her head, pressing her back into the elevated pillows, and Taggie feels safer than she has all night, maybe safer than she has in her entire life, apart from the three other times she’s been in his arms, but suddenly she’s so bloody mad at him that she shoves him in the chest with her good hand and says, “Stop touching me, Rupert.”
To his credit, he lets her go at once, reeling back like he’s been hit. “Sorry,” he says, looking sick. “I’m sorry, Taggie, Christ.”
Taggie feels wretched. “You can’t just — disappear for a month and show up acting like we’re, like we’re — ” She stops in frustration, unable to find the words — and not for the usual reasons. She doesn’t know what the hell he’s acting like they are.
She feels tears pricking her eyes, and Rupert looks like he always looks when she’s about to cry — like it’s all his fault and he’d do anything to take it back. Taggie rolls her lips between her teeth, and stares down at her lap, wanting his hands back more than anything, and tells him, “I didn’t call you because we’ve barely said two words to each other since — since — and I didn’t know whether you would — and I didn’t want it to be out of pity, because I’m your — your business partner’s child — ”
“Tag,” Rupert says softly.
She shakes her head, not looking at him, and doesn’t say anything else.
Rupert hesitates for another moment, like he wants to say something more on the subject, then seems to notice how she’s holding her wrist and shifts focus. “Why haven’t you got a cast yet?” he asks, suddenly sharp. “Lizzie said you came in last night.”
“We did,” Taggie says, relaxing. “Apparently the doctor’s an arse who gets off on making people wait for X-rays,” which is when Rupert storms out to speak to the nurses and then bully his way back to the doctor’s office, where he does so much yelling that Taggie can hear him all the way down the hall, dressing the man down for doing paperwork while one of his patients is in pain, threatening to make his yearly donation to the hospital contingent on one Dr. Chester Burton never working again, in this hospital or in fact any hospital in the entire kingdom, at which point the doctor shouts back, “Fine, fine! I’m going, you madman!” and stomps out of his hidey-hole to take Taggie for an X-ray.
Rupert insists on accompanying them, and Taggie doesn’t argue, because she has a feeling it’s only Rupert looming in the corner with his arms crossed and his face hard that stops the doctor from jostling her on purpose while he puts her arm under the X-ray. It takes another half-hour to get her cast on, and Taggie spends the whole time wincing and flinching, which cues Rupert into the fact that no one’s given her any pain meds and evidently they should’ve done. That's a whole other round of yelling — until Rupert seems to remember all at once that Taggie hates yelling, and why, and takes the doctor outside for a tense, lowered conversation instead.
By the time she’s sitting in the passenger seat of Rupert’s coupe, exhausted and floaty under the fuzzy blanket of the good pain meds, the rest of the world has woken up, and there are other cars on the roads. Taggie lets her head rest heavy on the seat and watches them go by and lets herself stop thinking, for a minute, of all the things she has to do when she gets home — find someone to help her with the catering for the Jones’ party, since she’s only got one hand, clean up whatever mess her dad’s made in her absence, take Gertrude for a walk and start putting together a menu for Ginny’s garden party next week. Phone Seb and apologize for leaving early, and offer to cover the cost of her ticket, since she barely went to the concert at all.
“Hey,” she says, remembering suddenly — head lolling to look at Rupert in the driver’s seat. “Did you really give Seb advice on what to — what to do in bed?”
Rupert darts her a look, and she can see that he’s planning to lie, so she narrows her eyes to let him know he’s not going to get away with it. He laughs a little, uncomfortably, and admits, “I may have.”
“You should offer a tutoring service,” Taggie mutters, charmed in spite of herself; ever the rake, truly. “Train the young men of Rutshire up to your standards.”
“I should hope I won’t have to train up all the young men of Rutshire,” Rupert says, alarmed. “I know I can’t tell you who to sleep with — and God knows I wish I could — but I’d hope you’d be a little more discerning.”
Taggie looks at him again, more intently. Now she wishes she weren’t on such good drugs. “What?”
Rupert shoots her a look. “What, what?”
“I thought you were just being — helpful!” Taggie exclaims.
“I was being helpful,” Rupert returns.
“No, helpful to Seb,” Taggie insists, trying to sit up. The seat feels unrealistically slippery under her. “Helpful in the sense that you’re both men and he’s not slept with as many women and you were — I don’t know, showing off your superiority or something. I didn’t think it was about me.”
Rupert does a double-take. “Of course it was about you.”
Taggie finally manages to sit up, indignant. “I can’t believe you! If you decide you don’t want me, it’s none of your bloody business what I get up to with someone else, honestly — ”
“Decide I don’t want you?” Rupert says, hotly.
“Yes,” Taggie insists, brazening past the part of her that wants to curl up into a ball and cry — as she has done, repeatedly, alone in her room with the curtains shut against the light from Penscombe — over the fact that she’s been assessed and found wanting. “It’s fine, Rupert, it’s fine,” she insists, talking over his attempts to say something else. “You don’t have to want me, and I understand that the franchise is more important, and you don’t want to rock the boat with my father, and it’s not worth it just for a roll in the hay that you probably won’t even enjoy that much since I’m no good in bed, after which all the novelty will be gone because one you’ve ravished me it won't be this forbidden thing anymore, and it’s all fine, you have a right to choose what you want — ” countryside and one-lane road blurring past outside, and Taggie knows distantly that she should really, really shut up, but she can’t seem to stop herself — “but if you’re going to make me be with someone who’s not you, then I think it’s only polite to give me the space to get over it, and not make me think of you every time I’m in bed with him!”
Rupert yanks the car over onto the grass shoulder and grinds to a halt. “In bed with him,” he says, in a voice like a tight fist.
Taggie blinks at him. “You knew — I mean you gave him — ”
“I know,” Rupert says, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, breathing like a bull. “I know, Tag, just — please.”
A second ago Taggie felt invulnerable, like she could’ve marched into 10 Downing Street and yelled at Margaret bloody Thatcher, but at the sound of his voice she deflates. She starts to say, feeling helpless and small, “But you didn’t want — ”
“Of course I did,” Rupert says harshly.
“Fine, then,” Taggie says, firmly tamping down on the thrill of hope in her chest. “Fine, so I just — wasn’t as important to you as the franchise. It’s — ” alright, she almost says, but she can feel right before she does that if she tries to get the word out she’ll break into tears, so instead she balls it back down and says, “I understand. My father made the same choice. He’s always made the same choice, over and over. Work before — “ family, except she can’t say that, not when they’re barely even friends, right now — “Work before everything else. I shouldn’t be surprised. I should be used to it.”
For some reason this makes Rupert look even worse. Taggie shrinks back into her seat, turns her face away, stares out the window. This car is the only place on earth she wants to be, and yet she’d give a kidney to be anywhere else.
Finally, once he’s got his breathing under control, once he’s eased his hands away from the steering wheel and turned off the car, Rupert says, “Taggie. You really think I give one iota of a shit about the franchise?”
She looks back at him, startled.
He gives her a broken, rueful smile. “Have I ever struck you as a man who particularly cares what’s on television?”
Taggie shakes her head, lost. “Then why — ”
“You told me you wanted to stay in Rutshire,” Rupert says.
Taggie stares. “You’re telling me you came up with all of this — that you got Venture together and decided to bid for the franchise in the first place — for me?”
“Yes,” Rupert confesses, rough.
Taggie opens her mouth and closes it a few times, bewildered, before she manages to say, “Why? Why would you do all that for me?”
Rupert looks like she’s torturing him. “I’d do anything for you.”
“Why?” Taggie demands.
And Rupert says, “Because I love you. Because I’ve loved you since that morning after your brother’s party, when you let me tuck you into bed — ”
Taggie closes her eyes, overcome, and a tear slips down her cheek. Rupert makes a noise like she’s hurt him, and she can sense his hands hovering, but he doesn’t touch her. Taggie remembers telling him not to, back in the hospital, and suddenly wishes he were a little less religious about following her directions.
She opens her eyes and reaches for him, begging, “Rupert,” and he catches her hand, brings it to his mouth to kiss, then leans in and catches her head as she calves towards him. He steadies her, slides his hand in her hair, palm cradling the back of her skull, and rests their foreheads together gently. But for once she doesn’t want gentle; she presses against him harder, until she can feel bone, and he just holds her and lets her, nuzzling his nose against hers.
“Why did you leave, then?” Taggie asks him, remembering that first moment alone in the kitchen — how she felt smaller after he’d gone, how her whole body went rapidly from tingling under his touch to freezing cold. “Why did you stop talking to me, why did you act like you didn’t care?” Her voice hits a break on the last word, and Rupert makes that hurt sound again, his thumb petting her ear through the thick curtain of her hair.
“I’m no good, angel,” he says, close enough she can feel the vibrations. “I’m going to hurt you.”
“I’ll forgive you, if you deserve it,” she promises.
“I don’t want you to,” Rupert insists, vehement. “I don’t want to be one more person in your life who walks all over you and takes advantage of your kindness, I couldn’t stand it — ”
“Then don’t be,” Taggie says.
“You terrify me,” Rupert tells her, not for the first time. A car speeds by outside and Taggie resists the urge to slide closer and bury her face in Rupert’s neck, to hide in him and let the rest of the world fade away. “I need to get it right, with you. If I get it wrong, if I mess this up…I think I’ll be finished.”
“Rupert,” Taggie says patiently — more patiently than she should probably be capable of, given that she’s still floating off pleasantly in medicated la-la land — “if you get it wrong, I’ll tell you, and then you can fix it. No one gets it right on the first try.”
“What about Seb,” Rupert protests, brokenly.
“He didn’t even get it right on the third try,” Taggie admits wryly.
Rupert makes a noise that could be a groan or could be a laugh. “No, I meant — what about your boyfriend.” His thumb is on skin now, rubbing over the knob of bone behind her ear. “I’m trying to be better here, Tag. Cheating doesn’t feel like better.”
“Oh,” Taggie says, distractedly, “Seb and me split up weeks ago,” and doesn’t even finish getting the last word out before Rupert presses forward desperately and muffles her with a kiss.
Taggie’s clumsy with drugs and with the ungainly cast on her arm, and she can’t seem to figure out how to time her breathing between kisses, gasping into his mouth, but Rupert doesn’t raise any complaints. He gathers her against him, both of them leaning hard into the gearshift, and kisses her long and slow and deep, with the same reverent care that he did last time, and Taggie doesn’t do much except shiver in his arms and fist her one good hand in the shirt on his chest, feeling the solid, hot shape of him under it, and whimper against his tongue, but when they break apart for air he still sounds wrecked, like she’s destroyed him.
She gives into the urge to hide her face in his neck, finally, smiling helplessly against his skin, breathing in the warmth of him and the smell of him, something liquid and terrifying and uncontrollable in her chest, and it’s easier like that, when she’s not looking at him, to say, “I love you too, you know.”
Rupert groans, his mouth pressed sideways against her hair. “Christ, you’re killing me.”
She makes an inquisitive sound and moves to pull back — and Rupert moves his hands to let her go as soon as she does. “What do you mean?” she asks, looking him in the face. “Why am I killing you?”
“Because, angel,” he says, tucking her hair behind her ear, mouth twisted self-deprecatingly. “You just told me you love me, but you’re drugged to the gills and it would be completely unforgivable of me to touch you any more than I already have.”
“Why would it be unforgivable?” Taggie asks, not following. Her brain feels all gummed up.
“Because,” Rupert says softly, “I don’t know if you mean it.”
Taggie wants to insist that she does, that she’s loved him since long before he threatened to sue the A&E doctor if he didn’t get her painkillers, probably since that same night when he tucked her into bed and fixed all her problems and then went and fixed Charles’ problems, too, just because she was worried — like he’s been taking his cues from Mr. Darcy — that every time she had Seb’s hands on her she wasn’t quite thinking about Rupert, because who could confuse such unskilled fumbling with a steady hand, but she was wanting him, wishing it were him lying over her instead of this relative stranger, wishing it was Rupert’s hand on her thigh in the dark at the cinema, Rupert laughing while he tried to fit in the back seat with her, knocking his head on the roof, Rupert with his face buried against her neck breathing God, Taggie against her throat, Rupert who not a week after they met stood in her family’s ballroom after everyone else had gone and listened to her pour her heart out in a way she’d never done with anyone, not even Caitlin, and instead of running in terror had come back over and over and let her do it again; Rupert who she can say anything to, anything, who has just admitted to her — not five minutes ago — that he’s afraid to do this wrong.
So instead of pushing, she eases back until he’s not touching her anymore, and sits stiffly in her seat — despite the fact that her whole body is hot for him, that her blood is burning and that there’s nothing on earth she wants more than his hand between her legs. And she says, “Okay, then. Take me home, and put me to bed — to sleep — and I’ll tell you again when I wake up.”
Rupert’s staring at her like he’s never seen something so — so —
“What?” she asks, reddening.
Rupert reaches over, and pulls her close just to kiss her one more time, mouths closed, almost chaste, like he can’t stand not to touch her for another moment.
Then he lets her go, and starts the car, and drives her home.