Nowhere Girl ~ John Lennon/The Beatles

Chapter Twenty Three: Go Back

With Robin's eighteenth birthday fast approaching, John was rather outraged that Robin only told him the night before. Even if she was now his girlfriend, their relationship official for just over a week, it seemed that there was still so much he didn't know about her.

After the revelation of her Uncle's unconditional support, Robin and John had been able to fully explore their relationship and the two of them found it thrilling that they were officially together, not that anyone else really knew. Whenever they saw their friends they kept a social distance, sitting close and keeping watch over the other but not acting like a couple. They thought by keeping it a secret the thrill of them being boyfriend and girlfriend would heighten and they'd be able to enjoy the privacy of their very new relationship, and thankfully no one other than Stuart or Kay had even noticed anything. Obviously both Stuart and Kay had known something was going on for a long while, but they weren't going to burst Robin and John's bubble.

If they kept a distance with each other in public, they certainly made up for it when they were alone, especially since John had started to make a habit of sneaking into Robin's room at night so the two of them could make love and then fall asleep in each other's arms. They tried to be as quiet and as subtle as possible, with John always sneaking back out early the next morning, and so far no one but Albert knew, both Mimi and Rita being none the wiser about their relationship. Robin was always a little confused as to how John got into her room considering he'd sneak in through the window and he didn't seem physically strong enough to climb up the drainpipe, until she noticed that Albert had left his ladders out from cleaning the windows and John had made good use of them. Robin wondered if Albert had left the ladders out as a declaration of his alliance to the couple, but she didn't dare ask and was instead silently grateful. Albert's forgetfulness, whether it was on purpose or not, had meant that she had started to become reliant on John, feeling like she couldn't sleep until she felt him climb into her bed. Their closeness at night was probably one of the reasons why she was growing more and more enamoured by him day by day.

The two of them usually lay in comfortable silence, their bodies intertwined, but the night before her birthday, John didn't want to stick to that routine.

"Why didn't you tell me it's your birthday?" John sighed in irritation as he played with a strand of her hair, her head on his chest as he was spread out across her whole double bed, her body wrapped closely to his.

"Didn't want a fuss," she shrugged truthfully, though she knew that her whispered answer wouldn't satisfy him. "Seriously, I'm not a party person,"

"Yeah you are, you love getting pissed!" he pointed out, reminding her of New Year.

"Every party you've seen me at hasn't been one in my honour though!" she protested, trying to keep her voice low, listening out for her mother's quiet snores from the room next door. "Please, don't you dare ring the group first thing tomorrow and arrange something!"

"Then what do you want to do? You're not working and we go back to college next week, we need to celebrate!" he insisted, letting out a hushed laugh when she raised her eyebrows flirtatiously at him. "Other than us lay in bed and shag all day, what do you want to do?"

"Dunno," she answered honestly. "Back home we never did much. There's this little bakery in town near the city hall that me and my Dad would go to and pick up a cake, then we'd go to the art gallery. Sometimes we'd sit by the theatres or in the peace gardens and eat lunch, then we'd go home and watch some musical on telly,"

Birthdays in Sheffield felt like a lifetime ago. In fact just the memory of her hometown felt like things belonging to a different person it was that long ago. It had only been nearly four months, yet life had changed at such a quick pace that the thought of Sheffield felt almost bittersweet. She had thought back in September that Liverpool would never be her home, but Merseyside had slowly stolen her heart, and the Steel City had become a thing of the past to her. That was sad, considering the amount of happy memories she had there. The move had made it all seem bittersweet, as if everything at home had been a long dream and Liverpool was the reality.