Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)

When we arrived in London and stepped off the plane, it was more freezing than anything that I had experience in my life, despite the fact that we were meant to be leading up to the summer. I groaned and pulled my jumper closer around me as I stepped down the stairs onto the tarmac. Tommy was close behind me carrying our things and tried to conceal the cold that he was also feeling. I guess he was not expecting it to be this cold, either.

When we stepped off the plane, we waited a few moments for Elizabeth and Abby to join us. We walked with them into the main terminal where we went through customs and various other check points before we stepped out into the main area of the terminal where there were lines of people waiting for friends and family. I heard Abby squealing when she saw an elderly woman towards the end of the line and rushed towards her. I smiled at Elizabeth as she quickly made her way over to Abby and the elderly woman that I soon saw the similarities between Elizabeth and the elderly woman. It was her mother who stood there and the woman that would soon be looking after Abby once she had passed on.

Tears welled at the sight as I walked towards them as Tommy walked towards a man dressed in a suit holding a sign that said, 'Tommy & Kassandra Ratliff'. I said that I would catch up with him as soon as I was finished talking to the group of girls that I was heading towards. Elizabeth turned towards me as I approached, motioning for me to join her. Abby broke away from her grandmother and looked up to me expectantly. When Abby tugged at her clothing, she looked back down to Abby to see the 'Vogue' that Tommy and I had featured on and had signed. The elderly woman gasped and looked up to me, holding out her arms towards me. Walking antsy towards her, I hugged her as she gripped me tight. Pulling away, she studied my expression and smiled.

"You're boyfriend, is he here to?" she said, her accent thick.

"He just went to get the car, but his here," I said. "We're here on our honeymoon."

"I would have expected you to pick something more beautiful than drabby old England," she said.

"England is perfectly fine," I said. "I have no idea where he's taking me but hopefully it's some place with a fireplace."

The elderly woman smiled and extended her hand, saying, "So much for the formalities, but I'm Daniella."

"Nice to meet you," I said, taking her hand and shaking it.

"Did you meet on the airplane?" Daniella asked me.

"They took a particular interest to them, as well as my husband," I said, glancing to Abby and Elizabeth. "I was going to offer them a lift home but I didn't realise you would be here to pick them up."

"Are you going straight to your hotel from here?" Daniella said.

"I'm afraid so, if you give me the home number of your house, I'll be able tell you the number of our room when I get to the location so we can keep in touch," I said, taking out my mobile and switching it on.

"Doesn't that thing have international roaming on it or something?" Elizabeth asked, motioning towards my mobile.

"Tommy has placed a strict ban upon the use of the phone so once we reach our location, this will be confiscated," I said with a sigh.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When I said goodbye to them for the last time, it was hard, I must admit. I wanted to help them but the least I could do was take their number and be on my way. I gave each of them an elongated hug as I disappeared amongst the Heathrow airport crowd. It took me a few minutes before I found Tommy waiting outside with a limousine. I was Impressed, I must say, even if we were dressed in shabby clothes.

He held the door open for me like a gentlemen as I slipped into the seat and he followed. Closing the door behind him, the car took off and took us to a destination that was unbeknownst to me. I turned to Tommy, his hair slightly messy from the flight and a tired underneath his eyes. We did manage to get some sleep but it was an uncomfortable one at that. We both would have preferred the soft beds of the hotel room that I assumed that we would be heading to.

After a while, though, I began to question how long it would actually take to get to the hotel, tuning to Tommy and asking him, "So, how long will it take to get to the hotel?"

"What hotel?" he replied with a smirk upon his face.

"Don't tell me we're camping for the next few weeks," I said, getting a little bit worried.

"If i wanted to do that," he said, glancing to me. "I would've taken you to Australia."

"Then where are we going?"

"You'll see," Tommy said without another word.

Another long while passed when I gave up trying to guess where he was taking me and lay down across the backseat of the limousine. My head rested in his lap as his long fingers ran through my hair. I let my head loll to the side as I felt him wrap the blanket that we used upon the airplane over my body. I snuggled underneath it fell into a distant sleep.

It wasn't really a sleep, it was more like a rest that I constantly came in and out of in with the bumps of the road. I thought of how far we might've come while I had been drifting in and out of my rest when I felt Tommy picking me up as the coldness of the English weather spread throughout the car. I was semi-protected by the weather by the blanket that I had around me but it didn't prevent the wind to start sapping the warmth from my face.

I don't know where he carried me, but I heard voices asking him where he would like the bags to be placed and if that was all. He dismissed them with a few words and I heard the car drive off into the distance. Tommy carried me into a warm place that I didn't really recognise yet in my haze. He set me down upon a coach where I rolled inside my cocoon and stretched out.

As I did so, I looked around at the simple home that looked like something out of the nineteenth century but had it's hints of the twenty-first century hidden amongst it. There was a cold fireplace that Tommy was attending to and attempting to light it. I smiled at his efforts as I continued to look about my surroundings. There was books lining various parts of the room with a small television in the corner. A stairway sat beside a doorway to the kitchen leading up to another floor of hidden surprises.

Tommy had managed to get the fireplace going with a grunt and stepped back for a moment before feeding it some wood. He placed the mesh protector around it before he turned back to see me fully awake, saying, "I'm glad you're awake. It would have been sad to sit in front of this alone."

I unwrapped myself from my cocoon and shuffled over to him where I sat down in front of the fire. He disappeared from my side for a moment, hearing him clattering about the kitchen before he returned with two cups of tea, a packet of marshmallows and some skewers. I laughed at his attempt to try and create some kind of bonfire with the marshmallows and skewers and took them gratefully as he set the tea in front of us. I poked a few marshmallows onto a skewer before handing it to Tommy and poking some more marshmallows upon mine. He pulled the screen away from the fire and I felt it's warmth wash over me. I shimmied out of the blanket and wrapped it around Tommy's waist as he settled down beside me.

Although the blanket didn't fully cover us due to the warmth that the fire was producing, it wrapped over our legs and around our waists, bringing us closer together. I picked up my cup of tea and looked to Tommy, raising he cup to him as I said, "To us."

"To my closest friend who finally has become my beautiful wife," Tommy said, picking up his own glass.

"No wonder I married you," I said as we clinked our glasses together and took a sip.

I set my back down and turned to the fire, beginning to roast my marshmallows upon the skewer as Tommy said, "Why did you marry me?"

"I thought I made that pretty clear in my vows," I said, glancing over to him. "You practically make me feel like the person that I was meant to be."

"But why did you marry me?" Tommy persisted as I set down my marshmallows with a humph and turned to him.

"Why is this even an issue?" I questioned. "Should I not have married you? Because I seem to think that I made a very wise decision in doing so."

"You could've married anyone but me!" Tommy said, taking my hands in his. "You could have even married Adam! His the one that is most likely going to be the father of the children within you and more likely to be a better father than I could ever be."

I slapped Tommy hard across the face. He rolled with the blow before he slowly looked back to me with a blank expression. My face was hard with annoyance that he would be questioning our marriage when it hadn't even been a day yet, with how he could question us at this point in time. He must've seen my hurt or whatever I was feeling at that time because it was all too confusing and looked away, glancing down at his steaming tea. He looked like he was going to say something but definitely took his time in saying it. I continued to look to him as he did so, watching him take deep breaths as he played with the spoon in his cup.

"Adam might be a good father one day to his own children," I said with a sigh. "We won't know if they are his children or not but I sincerely hope that they are yours. If they are Adam's, things could only get worse. I will have some tests done when the time comes."

"I'm just scared," Tommy said, looking back up at me and picked up a marshmallow as he did so, playing with it between his fingers. "That's all."

"And you have every reason to be," I said, taking the marshmallow from his fingers. "At least we have each other."

I leaned towards him, eating the marshmallow as I did so. I could still feel its solid form in my mouth as I kissed him. In a moment, I felt his tongue shoot into my mouth towards the marshmallow and took it from me. He pulled away with a cheeky look upon his face as he at the marshmallow. Once he had eaten it, he said, "I believe that is mine."