For him, familiarity bred contentment, albeit one focused on few people and fewer things. Mostly, Michael was a self-contained, tight-lipped man who brushed off the prevailing fondness for approval or intimacy. Cool… yes. Detached at times… oh, yes. But for Sonya, also thoughtful… decent. Integrity and a quiet generosity gently shimmered from him, in soft beats.
He stuck to his guns in most things, even in his business affairs. His work since she’d known him was as a stocks and bonds trader operating from home, a perfect cocoon for his temperament. He’d chosen it well, she decided. Intellectual stimulation, the adrenaline of the markets, and no people. Plus, keeping yourself away from the daily hub-bub helped you filter out the noise and maintain perspective, a lesson he said he had gleaned from his earlier days freelancing as a journalist.
He claimed it was a useful tool in trading on the markets as well as in everyday life but Sonya was never as convinced about the virtues of isolation. It did have its moments, like when she powered her motor bike down after a day’s lecturing and she’d find him at their grey sliver of fence that overlooked the beach, ready for their ritual chat over a freshly-poured wine or whisky. She never knew if it was his first drink since alcohol didn’t affect him as much her. Sonya was tall and slim so her vulnerability was a metabolism and fitness thing, nothing to do with her being a blonde as a friend once joked. As she’d head through the house to join Michael at the back fence, she’d try to guess from the wafting aroma what he had cooking. As well as a journalist, he’d also worked as a chef. What jobs hadn’t he done? She’d pass by the dining table, usually set for two, often with a spray of fresh tulips. Like last night.
For Sonya tulips went with everything, even her job lecturing in business studies. It wasn’t just their cheeky cup shape or their splashes of vivid colour. It was also the history of the manic speculation they’d fired up four centuries ago. Every year, she got a kick out of telling her students how Rembrandt earned less for his 1640s masterpiece, The Nightwatch, than the hammer price a single Viceroy tulip bulb got knocked down for at auction.
There were other kindnesses: gifts, and especially conversations. But Michael kept that side of him to their private world; the modern fetish for public displays of affection, even warmth, repelled him.
Where would she have been without him? Living comfortably on a university salary, for sure, but not in their beach house… well, hers actually… but that was another story. One she had certainly rationalised but never quite worked out.
A barbed sapling brushed against her but she palmed it off, just as she’d done for years to the gibes and gossip. Like Michael she didn’t care for the sneering but, truth be told, she yearned that he would occasionally display his emotions so others could see him as she did. Her late mother had always stereotyped him. That he was so reticent, so uptight, because he was British. It wasn’t that, Sonya was sure, but there was something. An itch she couldn’t scratch.
Sonya knew she should speak to him about it, and she would.
Today.
Six minutes…
Heck, did she really care if he was reserved? Live for the moment! And with him, there were great moments. She brushed back some loose strands of hair, for a change blasé that the whole world could see she had one ear with a lobe and one without. It was an oddity she normally covered up with longer hair, even though Michael claimed he found it endearing.
How often had she engaged in these same arguments with herself? She would definitely raise it all with him today. For sure. What better time, now that he’d agreed, finally, to a baby? Thirty-five on her last birthday, she had certainly been hearing her body. Tick… tick…
The early morning sun slanted through the treetops, leaping from branch to branch like flames. She stopped at the viewing platform, drawing in the crisp sea-spray of the sou’-easterly and watching the wind-shadow skip across the water. An augury perhaps.
Her thoughts lingered, imagining that the rhythmic swell of the water was Michael, his chest rising and falling just as it had been when she’d slipped out of their bed that morning.