We Could Get By

xxvi.

Sweeney came rocketing back into the waking world as if he had fallen from a cliff and splattered onto the mattress. He hesitated a moment, listening for any little sighs that might indicate he had awoken Mrs. Lovett, but the world was quiet. He thought he could hear the ticking of the clock in the living room, though it easily could have been his imagination. Even the sea beyond their cozy walls seemed to have fallen away.

He took it for granted- the feel of the carpet beneath his feet, the fire glowing in the living room on cold nights, the hot meals Mrs. Lovett pushed at him, the comfortable chunk of money they earned, the small woman twisted in the sheets beside him. If Nellie had never taken him in, where would he be? If she did not prepare meals in spite of him pushing them away, he'd have starved long ago. And he'd had no money upon his return to London. Nothing but the clothes on his back, really, but Nellie had opened her home and her arms and her heart to him. Though he supposed the latter two had never quite been anything but open.

He had not noticed her much when he and Lucy lived above her shop. She was kind to him when they met in passing, always ready with a smile and an offer of pie and a polite wave. Nellie had always been there in the background, bustling about and catching the corner of his eye. And of course she was quite nice-looking, with her corkscrew curls and her soft brown eyes. In retrospect, he saw the way she had nearly melted around him, the unrestrained affection beaming straight out of her face every time he came near.

None of that had mattered to him at the time. Mrs. Eleanor Lovett had merely been his downstairs neighbor, a cheery little shape he spotted from his window, a shadow on the flowered wallpaper, just somebody he lived above- an afterthought. When he came back, bewildered and bedraggled, from Australia, it had only mattered to him because it was the very reason she let him stay instead of booting him to the gutter. Nellie had done nothing but love him, no matter how cold and cruel he might have been to her.

He saw her suddenly, blurred and sepia-tinted like a photograph that belonged to some other person from another lifetime, pining away for him. Even after he had been dragged away, he could see her standing in her shabby kitchen and staring hopefully through the window. He saw her searching the crowds for a glimpse of him. He saw her moping about the house like a little black cloud, heavy and sagging with rain that refused to fall. He knew, somehow, that she had done those things. And he saw Nellie smiling at him when he was Benjamin, passing through her shop on his way upstairs. Sweeney remembered the way she would start singing sometimes while she was baking, and her warbling would fill the house. He saw the practiced quirk of her smile and the way she had leaned across the counter to push up her breasts. But he hadn't noticed then. Or rather, he had noticed and pushed it all aside, stacking the evidence miles high and letting it turn, yellowing and brittle, to memories.

She had been all blunt edges and filled to the brim with romance, reaching out to him desperately in whichever way she could. Sweeney saw that now, of course, much too late for it to be of any use. Nellie stirred beside him, settling into a new position and curling herself inwards, bones bowing towards him, as if even ensconced in whatever dream she might be having, her very atoms longed to be near him.

Sweeney was overwhelmed with the sudden flush that accompanied an unusual, unbidden desire to press his lips to the cool pale of her forehead. He had looked at her more times than he could ever count, though only recently he had started to see her for what she was. Nellie came together like a puzzle or some sort of picture, blurred at first but bit-by-bit coming into focus so that he could finally understand it as a whole. She really was an absolute wonder, he mused to himself, looking into the darkness in her direction though he could not see her. He could imagine the slight crease between her arched eyebrows as she dreamed peacefully beside him. This woman had given him everything- a home, a job, a family (as reluctant as he had been to be any part of it), a chance in spite of everything that he had done to her. That he continued to do to her.