The Beach Wedding Read online

  I had a very clear bump now and as it grew, the more scared I became about the future. I stepped out on to the pavement and felt a fluttering inside, deep in my stomach. Like butterflies.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ I said to Jake.

  ‘What? What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  I grabbed his hand and placed it on my stomach. ‘I just felt the baby move.’

  We both stood still, waiting, waiting, waiting … There, it happened again.

  ‘Wow,’ Jake said. ‘It’s a baby, it’s a real baby.’

  ‘I know!’ It was a real baby. For the first time since I’d found out I was pregnant it felt real. Like it was something that would actually happen. Tears sprang to my eyes. ‘I wish Drew was here,’ I said. ‘He so wanted us to get married and have a baby. Even when I wasn’t so sure, he was desperate for this. And now he’s not here for it.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Jake said. ‘I promise, it’ll be all right.’

  24 years ago

  I sat in a hospital bed and stared down at my baby. She was perfect. Her dark brown skin was wrinkled and soft. Her lips were parted as she slept, and her long black eyelashes almost reached her cheeks.

  Jake was collecting my parents from the airport and a few friends had promised to visit in the coming days.

  I didn’t want anyone, though. I wanted to go to a secret island with my baby and live there without anyone else. Not even Jake. Not even, I admitted to myself for a brief second, Drew. I wanted it to be just me and Nia, as I had named her, for ever.

  Now

  Jake curls his body around me and kisses my shoulder. I feel him growing hard against me and I know he’d like us to make love, to reconnect in a physical way, but I can’t. I’m finding all of this too much. Too difficult. I thought I could handle it; I thought Nia getting married here might break the curse of weddings on Bussu Bay beach. But it is getting more and more difficult to stop myself crying. I live here all the time and it is fine – I have found a way to make peace with that. I avoid the beach as much as possible by staying inside the resort or walking into the village. But with Nia here, with her wedding so close, I have to confront what happened and I am struggling. All I want to do is curl up and disappear.

  What Jake wants to do is make love. His kisses move lower, his hands start to caress my skin.

  ‘I can’t,’ I blurt out. ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ he says and moves away. ‘That’s OK.’

  It’s not OK, I know that. He needs us to make love to feel we’re connected because I can’t say ‘I love you’ to him. I’ve never been able to say it to him, not when I feel so guilty all the time about being with him instead of Drew. He accepts that, because I show him in other ways how I feel.

  Jake moves to the other side of the bed and I can feel the emotional gap between us. I know what he needs, but I can’t give it to him right now. I just can’t.

  6

  Now

  ‘And mind you do not move into the Honeymoon Suite when I am not here,’ my mother tells her granddaughter. Mum and Dad are heading off to stay with friends near Accra, Ghana’s capital city, for a few nights and will be back two days before the wedding.

  I think it’s all too much for them as well. Losing Drew in the sea broke Dad’s heart. He felt responsible for not finding Drew, and Mum felt powerless to stop the pain I was going through. Nia’s wedding, exciting as it is, has made us all a little jumpy and on edge. I think my parents are going visiting to keep their worries and fears away from her.

  ‘Would I do that, Grandma?’ Nia says with a pout.

  ‘Does your daughter think I was born yesterday?’ Mum asks me.

  I shrug. I’m not taking sides in this one.

  ‘I am a grown woman, you know?’ Nia says. ‘I can make my own decisions.’

  ‘I know that, child,’ Mum says. ‘And that is why I have given Kwame and Edward strict instructions to call me the very second you start making those “own decisions”.’

  Nia’s face is a picture. She glances at me, and I shrug at her as I mouth ‘Lightweight’ to remind her of what she said to me last night.

  ‘Bye, Grandma,’ she says when she realises I won’t be helping her.

  ‘Bye, bye, my darling granddaughter,’ Mum says and receives Nia’s hug. She turns to Marvin. ‘I am still not sure about you.’

  Marvin smiles. ‘That’s a huge improvement from last night. You’ve dropped the “yet”, so I’m looking forward to you being a bit more sure about me.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Mum replies.

  Jake is staring at me while the others go out to the car. He’s driving my parents the 130 miles to visit their friends, and he’ll probably stay there if I don’t ask him to come back. I do want him to come back tonight. And I don’t want him to come back tonight. I need some space to think. But I know that’s selfish, and everything does feel better when he’s here with me.

  Jake waits and waits for me to ask him what time he’ll be back. When I don’t ask, when he realises I’d like him to stay away, he inhales deeply and nods. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of days.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll see you then.’

  19 years ago

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ Jake whispered to me.

  It was late on a Sunday night and he was about to drive back to London after spending the weekend with Nia and me in Brighton. Every weekend he drove down to be with us, and when Nia was younger, he’d often come during the week to help me. He would go to the shops for me. He would clean my flat. Sometimes he’d just sit with Nia so I could sleep – basically going above and beyond the call of duty as a friend to help me out.

  We’d been watching something on the television and, as usual, I had fallen asleep long before he’d whispered goodbye.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I whispered, with my eyes closed. I was half asleep, but I couldn’t open my eyes and see his face if it meant he would be horrified by what I was saying. ‘Stay, please.’

  ‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he replied.

  I opened my eyes and he was sitting on the floor beside the sofa. His face was so close to mine I could feel his breath on my cheek. We stared at each other in silence for a few seconds. ‘Like I said, I’ll stay a bit longer, but I do need to—’ I cut him short by kissing him. He seemed unsure at first, probably shocked that I’d done this, and then he was kissing me too. Slowly, gently, he pushed me back on to the sofa and climbed on top of me, kissing me all the while. Our kiss deepened and I placed my hands on his face. A shiver of excitement ran through me at having his smooth, dark brown skin under my fingers, at having the weight of his body on top of me. It’d been so many years since I’d been this close to a man. I hadn’t come even near to it since Drew.

  Before either of us could change our minds, I reached for his flies and undid all the buttons, then pushed his trousers down over his hips. He groaned as I stroked the full, hard length of him.

  I had fallen in love with Jake over the last few years. And it was obvious from the way he looked at me, the way he came to see us no matter what else was going on in his life, that he loved me too. But Drew and what happened to him was always between us.

  Jake stared down into my eyes, and I was sure he could see what I was thinking: we needed to do this. It would lay to rest the ghost of Drew. Once we did this, maybe we would both stop being chained together with guilt and sadness, and we’d be able to move on and find someone else.

  Jake reached up under my dress and moved aside my knickers. With his gaze locked on mine, he slowly pushed into me. We both moaned as we became one. I let go of his face and grabbed on to his shoulders to pull him closer, to make the whole of him the whole of me.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered suddenly. ‘I love you.’

  I gripped him tighter, urged him to go deeper; I wanted more of him, all of him.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered again, louder this time, as he pushed harder and faster. ‘I love you, I lov
e you, I love you, I lo—’

  I put my lips on his to stop him saying it because I couldn’t say it back. No matter how much I felt it, no matter how many times he said it, I couldn’t say it back. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ he kept murmuring against my lips. Over and over and over until finally he orgasmed and I orgasmed and we collapsed against each other on the sofa.

  Eventually, Jake moved away from me and sat back to pull and do up his trousers. I straightened myself out as Jake climbed off the sofa and returned to sitting on the floor beside me, staring at the television. Nothing was said for long minutes and I wondered if we’d ever speak of this. Or if we would pretend it hadn’t happened.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Jake finally said. ‘You still miss Drew so much. I still miss him so much. He was my brother, you know? We grew up together, we did everything together. Double trouble, everyone called us. We looked alike, we were alike. My mum was always saying it was like she’d had twins, because she spent as much time telling him off as she did me. His mum said the same about me before she died. It makes sense we both wanted the same woman.’

  I pulled my legs up towards my chest. He couldn’t be saying what it sounded like he was saying …

  ‘It’d only seriously happened once before, though, when we were in college. She didn’t like either of us, so there was never any problem. Not until we met you.’

  ‘But I met Drew in a club,’ I said.

  ‘I know. I was there. In fact, I met you more than once in that club. I used to go to see you. It took me weeks to get up the courage to speak to you.’

  ‘I was smashed out of my head most of the time. I never remembered anyone I met. I only really remembered Drew because I went home with him. Did I really meet you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jake replied. ‘Well before Drew came with me. I was working up to asking for your number, so I could speak to you when you were sober, but then Drew came to the club that night and decided he liked you too. Since the woman we both liked in college, we’d always agreed that if we both like a woman, we both stay away. When my back was turned he went for you. Went home with you. We had a proper dust-up about it months later.’

  ‘You fought over me?’ I asked, horrified.

  Jake hung his head in shame. ‘It wasn’t just about you. It was what he did. How he went about it. We’d agreed. We’d agreed that we wouldn’t let anyone come between us again. And he just … I could’ve dealt with it if he’d left it as a one-night stand, but he didn’t. He was out of order. After the dust-up, even he admitted that he’d been out of order. He offered to step back. But,’ Jake shrugged, ‘I could see you loved him. I just had to deal with the fact that he’d made a move when I was still thinking about it.’

  Jake went on: ‘When he died … I hated myself. I’d spent so long secretly angry at him and secretly in love with you, I felt like I brought it on him. That I’d jinxed him.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ I said.

  I was reeling. It was all such a surprise, but was it? Did I really not know all those years ago that Jake might have had feelings for me? Drew, more than once, had accused me of having feelings for Jake. He said he’d seen us staring at each other. Once he even thought I’d slept with Jake because we’d both had our mobiles off at the same time. He’d only believed me when I broke down and begged him to end things if he truly thought I’d cheat on him. Maybe that was why Drew had been so possessive; maybe it wasn’t just a way to control me and stop me from speaking to Jake or any other man, as I’d once told him. Maybe Drew thought that Jake still had feelings for me.

  Jake stood up. ‘Like I said, I shouldn’t have told you. I’ll understand if you don’t want me to come over any more.’

  I reached out and took his hand. ‘Don’t go,’ I said. I may not have noticed before how he felt, but I knew now. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t fallen for him.

  I stood up too and led him to the bedroom.

  Once I had shut the bedroom door behind us, I slowly took off my dress and dropped it on to the floor. Then, just as slowly, I lay back on the bed, waiting for him to take off his clothes.

  I wanted to be with him, I decided.

  Carefully, his eyes staring into mine the whole time, a now-naked Jake took off my knickers.

  I wanted to be with someone I loved, I realised as he eased himself into me. I wanted to be with someone who, as I had just found out, had always loved me.

  Now

  I don’t watch Jake and my parents drive away. Instead, I stand in our bedroom, feeling guilty. I should have asked him to come back. I shouldn’t have just let him go like that. What if it’s the last time I see him? What if something happens to him like it happened to Drew? He will have left thinking I don’t love him. I’ve never said it. I’ve always told myself he knows how I feel and I don’t need to spell it out. But what if I never see him again?

  I reach for my mobile phone.

  I love you, I type. I love you so very much. You mean the world to me. I’ve spent so much of my life with you and you’re everything to me. I hope you realise that. I hope you know that you are my everything. All my love, Tessa

  I read those words over and over until they are seared into my brain. Until I can recite them off by heart. Slowly and carefully, I delete every single letter. I can’t send him that. He’ll expect me to say it, to hold him, to break through the barrier that’s always between us.

  I’ll see you when you get back. X I send instead.

  16 years ago

  ‘Mum.’ Nia had her serious voice on. She had obviously been mulling something over, and had decided that now was the time for her to share her thoughts with me. She was eight years old and a very deep thinker. In that way, she was more like Jake than Drew.

  Every day, to me, she looked more like Drew, even though everyone else said she was exactly like me and not a bit like him. But, no matter what she looked like, she became more and more like Jake every day. She thought long and hard about things. She was always mindful of other people’s feelings before her own. And the pair of them seemed to find so many of the same things funny, when I just didn’t get the joke.

  ‘Mum, I think you should marry Jake.’

  Taken aback, I stared at my daughter. Jake had been living with us for nearly a year – before that, he was always around – so I didn’t understand this sudden need in her for us to get married.

  Nia knew Jake wasn’t her father. She knew her dad had died before she was born, but she hadn’t shown any interest in Drew. I had originally put a photo of him in her bedroom, but she’d asked me to take it down because she didn’t like the strange man staring at her.

  Whenever I tried to talk about him, she would literally walk away. ‘Give her time,’ Mum told me. ‘He is not real to her, give her time; when she grows and becomes more curious about the world and her place in it, she will ask.’

  She hadn’t. She would ask all sorts of questions about all sorts of people – about her grandparents, about relatives who lived in Ghana. She would question Jake about his family, his siblings, about his relatives who lived in the Bahamas – but she never seemed to want to know about that person who helped create her.

  I wondered if it was because, somewhere inside, she was hurt and angry that he wasn’t here? That he had left her before she’d even had a chance to know him, and it upset her too much to allow him and the memory of him into her life.

  ‘Why do you think I should marry your uncle Jake?’ I replied.

  ‘He’s not my uncle. I’ve asked him over and over and he’s told me all about his family, and zero times has he said anything that would mean he’s my uncle.’

  ‘All right, why should I marry Jake?’

  ‘Because he’s there.’

  ‘Because he’s there?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what you do. You meet someone who is there for you and you get married to them.’

  ‘Where have you heard that?’

  ‘You say it all the time on the ph
one to your friends. You say you love him because he’s “there for me”. And if you love him like that, that must mean you should get married.’

  ‘It doesn’t actually.’

  Nia sighed and then pulled a face that basically said I was forcing her hand. ‘Mum, if you get married to him, I can call him Daddy.’

  I stared at her wide-eyed with shock. It hadn’t occurred to me she might want to call him that.

  She wasn’t finished: ‘I want a baby brother or a baby sister. You need a mummy and daddy to make a baby.’ She spoke very slowly as though I needed help to understand what she was saying. ‘You are the mummy and, when you get married, Jake will be the daddy.’

  ‘Jake might not want to get married. He might not want to give you a baby brother or sister.’

  ‘He does. He told me.’

  ‘OK, so that’s not a problem,’ I said.

  ‘So are you going to marry him?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so, Nia.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to get married again.’

  ‘But you didn’t get married last time, Mum,’ she pointed out. ‘My daddy died on the day you were meant to get married before I was born. But Jake didn’t. And you didn’t. So I think you should get married.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said to stop her going on.

  ‘OK, Mum.’ She ran off to play, and then came back seconds later and threw her arms around me in the biggest huggle in the world. She was always the best at them.

  7

  Now

  My daughter is the most laid-back bride in the world.

  So far, she hasn’t had a tantrum, hissy fit or even a cross word to say about the wedding plans. Adjoa, the housekeeper, begged me to let her plan the wedding. It was her dream to start a wedding-planning business and she wanted to practise on Nia. During the last few weeks Adjoa and my daughter have been in contact about the wedding via Messenger and email. Nia has said she’ll show Adjoa and me her dress later but now they’re going over those wedding ideas in person.