Not One of Many - Chapter Twenty Four.
Previous chapters - Prologue One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty Twenty One Twenty Two Twenty Three
Tag list - In the comments
Words - 2,780
Warnings - 18+ content, adult audience only. Minors DNI!
“Jesus fucking Christ, the size of this gaff!”
Beth and Della’s heads virtually swivelled toward one another as they lay beside each other on the sun loungers, hearing Magda’s unmistakable tones coming from inside the house, two days after they’d arrived. “She’s here!”
“Yes!” Beth squeaked, both women hurtling up and running to greet her as she appeared in the kitchen.
“Oh, that’s all my pasty arse needs, Barbie dolls in bikinis to make me feel bad about myself!” she exclaimed, hugging and kissing them in turn.
“Mags, don’t be silly!” Della cooed affectionately, moving to the fridge to pull out the jug containing the fruit punch she and Beth had been enjoying, pouring her a glass, retrieving a beer for Dennis too.
“Yeah, but my size twelve curves look bang out of place next to a couple of tiny sorts like you pair! It’ll be like sticking a bloody lump of leftover clay between two fine art statues!” She then turned to see Dennis looking thoroughly pleased at being hugged by Della, sipping his newly opened beer.
“Beer and a bikini babe. I’m a happy chap,” he exclaimed, Beth moving in to give him a hug as well. “Oooh, two now!”
“You put your bloody eyes back in your head!” Magda warned playfully, pointing at him. They were swiftly joined by one of the villa staff, who escorted them to their room, Magda arriving back with them dressed in her swimsuit after twenty minutes, receiving wolf whistles from the girls.
“Oh, stop!” she shouted, a certain set of ears pricking up.
“Is that my Magda?” Alfie roared from the upper terrace area.
“It is, darling!” she called back, sipping her drink before placing it down.
“Mags, I’m warning you right now, he’s on full holiday mode, meaning he’s naked and stoned.” Five seconds later, and a very naked, very widely grinning Alfie appeared at the top of the stone steps, holding a small towel over his privates so he didn’t end up with sunburn of the cock.
“Don’t bother me, babe.” she shrugged, turning to look up at Alfie. “Come on, then! Gizza hug!” she shouted.
“I’m comin’, treacle!” She did expect him to keep hold of the towel, but just before he embraced her, it was dropped, Magda enveloped in a bear hug she couldn’t escape.
“Alfie! Your cock’s touching me leg!”
“You love it!”
Beth and Della nearly wet themselves laughing, Marcus booming out much the same from his place atop the terrace, where he was also just as stoned and nude. “Get off me now!” she cried, smacking his bare bum a few times.
“Don’t do that, Mags, he won’t let you go!” Beth cried, still laughing, Alfie amping up his brazenness by licking her cheek before finally letting her go.
“Comin’ for a smoke, darlin’?” he asked, Magda picking up her drink again, shaking her head through her laughter.
“Nah, gives me a right headache, the ganja. Dennis probably will, though.”
“Where is he, anyway?” Before she could reply, her husband appeared from the kitchen, stopping to point at Alfie with a slightly exasperated look.
“Dennis! Shalom!”
“Alf, put your cock away, mate!”
“Nah, come give me a hug, you twat!” Opening his arms, he then ran in his direction, Dennis looking a little fearful.
“Oh shit!” Into the house he flew, with a very fast-moving Alfie going in after him, the women all screaming with laughter. They finally emerged after a while, Alfie grabbing a few more bottles of beer from the fridge (non-alcoholic for him and the rest for his guests) with still not a single care in the world over who saw him naked as the day he was born.
“So, why no clothes, lad?” Dennis asked as they took the steps, Alfie stopping to give Beth a kiss on the way.
“I ain’t getting' no fuckin’ tan lines, mate, nah!” He at least picked up his towel again on the way up.
“I swear, Marcus is going to look like a bloody beetroot. Alfie actually goes brown, but my husband? He’s too ginger for it! I thought he might have got some base colour while we were in St Tropez, but he just went pink and then white again.”
“Yep, as a fellow ginge, I identify heavily with that. I’ll go tomato red and then back to white, but fuck it, I bloody love the sun! Surprised to see your pale arse out here and not hiding under an umbrella, Bethany,” she replied, stretching out.
Beth’s lips upturned into something resembling a devilish grin. “I’m only going it because Alfie said he’ll lick every single tan line I have later.”
“Ooooh!” Della cooed.
“Mucky pups!” Magda admonished, lighting herself a cigarette. “You ain’t gonna have many, size of that tiny bikini!”
“Well, I’ve brought fake tan with me so I can make myself match. I’ll do that after my inspection.” she giggled, taking a sip of her drink, feeling her head buzz a little. She didn’t usually start drinking until late in the afternoon, but there she was at midday, getting a nice buzz on. This caused her feelings of confliction, still feeling like she should be doing something other than lounging, Alfie taking her phone from her earlier and hiding it after he’d caught her making article notes in her OneDrive app. It went both ways, though...
“Excuse me, sir? Is that a work-related email you are perusing?” Beth asked in the kitchen a little later, a now dressed Alfie quickly trying to swipe back.
“Nope!” She held out her hand, raising her eyebrows.
“Hand it over.”
“But...”
“Now! You’re too stoned to focus on work anyway.”
“Bloody bossy women people!” He reluctantly relinquished it, Beth scurrying off to hide it somewhere before joining him again, picking up her lunch plate of fresh pittas and several different kinds of salads, heading over to the table to eat.
“Looking very luminous there, Marcus,” she commented as she sat, the man himself grinning.
“No tan lines, though!” he beamed, his wife shaking her head in despair at his red glow. Luckily, he’d been coaxed into dressing as well, but had done his own naked terrorising before that, lying himself down on top of Magda as she’d snoozed in the sun, Della and Beth again almost dying laughing. Their respective partner’s holiday modes both included reverting to overgrown teenage boys, it would seem, Magda seeming to cop the brunt of that.
“Well, if we want to ignite he fire pits later, all we have to do is place tinder in your general direction and woof! It’ll catch in about three seconds!” She winked at him as the table erupted, Alfie grabbing her hand and turning to kiss her shoulder. He loved that she got on with his friends, engaging them in a bit of her banter. Apart from her little wobbles, she fitted into his world perfectly. Those wobbles were something she detailed a little to Magda later that afternoon, the guys heading out for a walk around, and Della snoozing in her room.
“Crikey, babe. I’ve never known you to have a panic attack.” Reaching for her hands, she squeezed them tightly, her face concerned. Magda was rarely soft, but when it came to Beth’s welfare, her blunter edge was abandoned completely. “I kinda get it, though, what you were stressing about. You ain’t like the birds he’s had in the past, you’ve never been a moocher, always wanted to forge your own path, earn for yourself. What you have to remember is, you still are, love. You just happen to be dating a man who is massively wealthy and very generous with it. You being deserving or not don’t come into it, it’s just a fact.”
“Imagine how he’d feel and all, if you started paying your equal way for things, when fucking hell, he must earn in a week what you do in a few years. You’d be skint and he wouldn’t even notice it from his finances. It’s tricky, because you can’t ever meet in the middle. Reason being, the middle is never gonna be fair for you, but you’ve staked out a little compromise there. You can’t really expect the fella not to spoil you rotten, though. He loves you!”
They couldn’t meet in the middle, because the middle would never be fair for her. She'd never really thought about in it such terms before, but it was glaring for having her best friend point it out to her. Beth made on average at best, thirty to thirty-five thousand a year as a freelance journalist. Alfie made that in a week on the very villa they were staying in alone. The course of the last week really had opened her eyes further to her boyfriend’s staggering wealth.
“It still makes me feel uncomfortable, deep down,” she confessed, Magda sipping her drink.
“Okay, well how about look at it like this. You love him, right? You accept him for who and what he is?”
“I do.”
“Then accept that you need to do a little mental adjustment, because if you do accept him, you accept him being the kind of man who wants to treat you in accordance to his lifestyle. What if someone was asking you to dial back you being a journalist, ay?”
Another excellent point.
“I’m being a dickhead, aren’t I?”
“Tiny bit, sweetheart. Tiny bit.” Magda slapped her bare foot lovingly, opening her arms. “It’ll be fine, once you get used to it all. Enjoy yourself. You’re young and in love! Come on, my glass is entirely too dry.” They got up, heading into the kitchen to refill, Beth thoughtful as she poured punch from the jug.
What was it that prevented her from fully enjoying herself? She was having a great time with her new love, about to move in with him, they’d decided very quickly how serious they were over each other, Alfie especially, putting his wild ways of multiple girlfriends into his past for her, so why did she feel she wasn’t deserving?
And there it was. Because her love, and this life she now had, it came at the expense of three other women, one of them reviling her so much for it, she was now stalking her. If she really faced it and questioned herself, that was what she had an issue with. Of course, her own down to earth ways, her pride in being self-sufficient played a part as well, but mostly, she had to reconcile what lay deeper for her.
“You know you’re being a right daft mare, don’t you?” Alfie voiced later that night, just them sitting on the private terrace off their bedroom. ”You and Mimi are becoming firm friends, Amira reached out to you three days ago to say all was well with her an’ all, and she wants to be mates with you, so I just don’t understand it. It’s almost like you feel bad for being with me, and that ain’t sitting right with me either, duchess. I have to say.”
Scrambling up and joining him at the rail, she was quick to reassure him. “It isn’t you.”
“Ain’t it? Because it feels like you’re throwing it all at me. You ain’t comfortable with me making so much money, you ain’t comfortable with me spending it on you and you ain’t comfortable with me leaving behind my old life for you. Bloody hell, how many more hoops have I got to fuckin’ jump through, ay?”
“Alfie, no. No, it isn’t you. It’s me, feeling guilty, I’m trying to tell you that it’s why I feel like I don’t deserve the life I have now,” she began to explain, her boyfriend looking agitated.
“Well don’t, because you’ve got fuck all to feel guilty about, right? I fuckin’ told you that when we got here, didn’t I?”
She felt flustered, like he wasn’t really listening to her, like he thought he could control how she felt because he didn’t personally see such as an issue. “I can’t just turn off how I feel because you tell me to!”
“Yeah? Fucking try.” He held his arms wide, dropping them at his sides. “What, ain’t I worth it?”
She felt her eyes prickle, not wanting for her honest sharing with him to end up like this. “Of course, you are!”
“Then fuckin’ sort it out, right?”
Her brows knitted, frustration colliding within. “Alfie, it’s not that simple,” she began, his boom interrupting her.
“Seems it from where I’m standing.”
“See, there you go! From where you’re standing! Just because you don’t see it as an issue, it doesn’t negate the fact that I do! People aren’t taps, you can’t switch off their emotions to suit yourself, you know!”
“You’re being stupid, Beth. You’re fuckin’ smarter than this,” he spoke flatly, flexing his fingers as he paced around, riddled with agitation.
She was aghast. “Don’t you fucking dare call my intelligence into question!”
“Yeah? I just did. What you gonna fuckin’ do about it?” She hated this side of him, the side that she’d only ever heard in conflict with others before, the fiery temper, the defiance, challenging the opponent of his verbal tirade. The parallel between Talia trying to tell him of her feelings and him barking the same response time after time, and now her attempting to do the same with her own issue wasn’t lost on her.
“I’m going to try and talk to you, if you’d just calm down for five seconds,” she stated, taking a deep breath, realising one of them had to at least attempt to de-escalate the situation.
He frowned, coming to a stop, arms folded. “What, more bollocks about feeling guilty? Because it is. It’s fucking bollocks, biggest pile of shit I’ve heard come out of your mouth. Feeling guilty, fucks sake. So what, what? The alternative is what, you wanna call it a day because you can’t handle that you and me being together came at someone else’s expense?”
“Now you’re being bloody stupid! Of course, I don’t want that, Alfie! I think I just need time to reconcile it all, mentally process it. I know I shouldn’t feel like this, but I do. I worry about how my actions impact others all the time; I can’t help it!”
He scowled at her, laughing darkly. “Yeah? Try worrying a little bit now, over how your actions in the present are impacting your boyfriend.”
“You don’t have to be impacted! You’re taking this massively personally for no fucking reason! It isn’t anything to do with how I feel about you, it’s how I feel about me! ME! Jesus Christ, listen to me!”
“Nah, I’m fucking done with listening to your shit. I try and reassure you and you don’t want to know, then I just get screamed at more, fucking bandy mare. Have it your way, then. Sit there feeling guilty, fucked if I bloody care.”
He stormed off then, leaving her to flop back down into her seat, dejected, embarrassed and angry. He really was difficult when he was pissed off, a man truly of little patience and a very short fuse. Their first fight. It was bound to happen at some point, all couples argued, but obviously she wished it hadn’t occurred. With no one else up, she got ready for bed and turned in, her mind racing as she lay there alone.
How could she try and placate him when he didn’t want to hear her, or rather, wouldn’t hear her? Her guilt had nothing to do with the way she felt about him at all, but he wouldn’t have it. She lay there and began questioning it, from her side, wondering if she was wrong, if she was simply so unused to having something go her way that she had to throw bombs at it, make conflict, shake it up somehow because she couldn’t believe how well life was treating her.
Her thoughts weren’t far off the mark, but that didn’t mean Alfie shouldn’t have taken her feelings into consideration, rather than just telling her to stop feeling them because he personally didn’t believe she should.
Whatever the outcome and resolve was, she knew she wouldn’t reach it until they’d both calmed down a fraction and could talk through it sensibly. When that would be, she didn’t know. He didn’t return to their bedroom that night, and when she awoke early after little sleep, Martina informed her that he’d gone out for a jog.
When he did arrive back, he didn’t even look at her. It certainly didn’t bode well for them getting it sorted out that morning.
39 notes
·
View notes