CHAPTER 2

THERE was quite a turn out at the starting point on Sunday morning, a large pub car park, where a very stately-looking and well-spoken older woman addressed the group in a commanding voice to ensure everyone was aware of safety first during the walk. Before they set off, Jake came over to Gill and renewed his acquaintance with her children.

Jenny had been quite sullen during the car journey and scornful of the expected exercise, which she declared would be a ‘boring waste of time’. She also felt gawky and uncomfortable standing around in the car park with all these strangers, but she brightened significantly once the handsome Jake came on the scene. Although her mother had said that ‘John from the copy shop at work would be there’, Jenny never really listened to anything her mother said any more, but then the girl instantly remembered she’d had a crush on him when she was about eleven years old.

Clay had also been less than enthusiastic about the Sunday outing, until Jake showed him his iPhone and pointed out an application that mapped out the route. It would also track Clay’s progress and count how many calories he’d burned; Jake loaned it to him for the duration of the walk and also pointed out the ‘Stand or Attack 4’ game app which was loaded up and ready to use, provided Jake entered a password, which he promised he would give him when they stopped for lunch.

So it was quite a merry band that Gill started out with on their gentle walk. Clay actually forged onto the front of the strung out group, continually referring to the directions on the PDA, while Jenny hovered immediately behind Jake and her mother, who walked along companionably next to each other. Every now and then the group would stop and gather outside an ancient building or tree with some interesting history associated with it and one of the senior members of the party would give a brief talk on it. They were a lively group, comfortable in company with each other, and there were always questions, comments and banter, with plenty of laughs.

Gill and her children soon relaxed, Clay gravitated towards a couple of lads of similar age who were very interested in the PDA, while Jenny was engrossed with a young mum encumbered with a double buggy and two very young children.

Halfway through the morning walk, Jake left Gill’s side to hurry ahead to help with various buggies and toddlers through styles and kissing gates leading off-road for a stretch, and told Gill to carry on and he would see her when they stopped for lunch.

It was then the old woman who appeared to be the organiser fell in to walk beside her. The lady was surprisingly sprightly for her age and had no trouble keeping up a brisk pace on the grassy track next to a field of rapeseed, already brilliantly in flower, a startling golden haze which flowed overthe undulating field almost to the horizon.

“Hello,” she started, “I’m Gertie, Jake’s grandmother, you must be Gill. Are you and your children enjoying the walk so far?”

“Very much so,” replied Gill, “You certainly have a mixed crowd taking part and all thoroughly enjoying themselves.”

“We have a wide spectrum in the group, some of them come out with us every month and others progress onto more challenging treks after a short while and they are replaced by new members. Hopefully, you and your children will come along next month?”

“I think we probably will,” laughed Gill, realising that she was really enjoying the fresh air, the gentle pace and somewhat relieved that her children appeared to be having a good time with very little effort on her part. “It’s just beautiful being able to get out in the fresh country air, and the exercise is something I really need, the gym just doesn’t cut it compared to this.”

The vista was lovely, a splash of yellow blossom, and white and yellow flowers in the fresh green hedgerow, topped off by an azure sky dotted with fluffy cotton wool.

“I would like to be free to do this every weekend,” Gill thought out loud.

“Tell me if I am being nosy but, while my grandson talks to me all the time, he never actually tells me much about himself and nothing at all about his private life,” Gertie said quietly, linking her arm into Gill’s and leaning in so as not to be overheard. “I see you do not have any rings on your left hand, so, are you going out with Jake?”

“Well, John, er, Jake is just a friend from work,” Gill answered carefully, “we are old friends, I suppose. I’ve known him ever since I started at the bank a dozen years ago. He suggested today’s walk as a good way of getting my children outdoors and active for a change. As for my rings or lack of them? Well, according to my divorce lawyer I should be officially single again in about six weeks’ time, if everything runs to schedule. I’ve not even thought about dating anyone at all, let alone Jake yet, or even whether I want to, ‘once bitten’, they say.”

Gill smiled ruefully at the thought. One door closing, an important chapter coming to an end, with only two highlights, her children. It was a shame that their father had let her and them down so badly through his own selfishness.

“Sorry to hear about your marriage dear. I had three husbands myself, but I outlived them all. My grandson Jake is the only man in my life right now, but I think he is the best of them all, better even than his father and grandfather and they were great men,” Gertie whispered. “So your children, Jennifer and ...?”

“Clay, short for Clayton.”

“Yes, Clayton,” continued Gertie, “They live with you or your soon-to-be-ex-husband?”

“Most of the time they’re with me, they spend every other weekend with their father.”

Gertie cackled at that, saying, “In that case you’d be free to go camping with Jake next weekend, he’s tackling a handful of Derbyshire hills over the two days, nothing too strenuous, I assure you. I am sure he’d enjoy your company. I do like your sturdy walking shoes, by the way, good ankle support. You have obviously hiked before.”

“I used to hike a lot as a teenager and before I married Wayne. I’d forgotten just how much enjoyment I got out of it. As for Derbyshire, my grandmother used to live in Matlock so we often walked in the Dales when I was a child, without tackling anything major. The views were fantastic, the rock formations and the streams, I just loved those long summer holidays.”

“Well, you will have to tell that to Jake, I’m sure he would welcome your enthusiasm.”“Oh, I couldn’t do that, I am really out of condition, an hour or two each week in the gym wouldn’t help much walking up and down the Dales all day carrying camping equipment. Besides it’s been twenty years since I last camped out. I wouldn’t want to hold him up. I don’t even have any camping equipment any more.”

“Don’t you worry about gear, dear, I have quite a number of single tents at home, even if he doesn’t one to spare. As for holding Jake back, well, the hills will be there for him to conquer any other day, while the company of a pretty woman would beat hiking on his own hands down,” Gertie chuckled. “Anyway, you give it some thought, my dear, I must check out the gate ahead to make sure we all go the right way on the other side!”

‘Amazing!’ Gill thought, as Gertie kicked down a gear and sped off up the incline, leaving Gill almost standing, and Gertie must be 80 if she was a day! ‘Regular exercise and fresh air must be good for you, there’s no argument about that!’

Gill was beginning to feel warm, walking up that hill, with the early spring sunshine beating down. With her dark-brown hair tied in a sensible ponytail, she could feel the spring sun’s warmth on her bare neck and even through her clothing on her shoulders. She took off her thick sweatshirt, it had been cool first thing in the morning and she had been glad of it then. She tied it around her waist. She was pleased she had opted for shorts rather than slacks; it felt good to let the air and sun get to her pale legs. Now with just a thin white short-sleeved vee-neck tee-shirt and sports bra, khaki mid-thigh shorts, brown hiking boots and ankle socks, she thought she looked quite cool among these much younger mums and their toddlers.

Gill looked around to check up on her children.

Jenny was behind her, she noticed, laughing and smiling with a bleached blonde girl not much older than Jenny. She was pushing a double buggy with a couple of very young children sitting in it.

‘Tsk!’ Gill thought, ‘Jenny must be sweltering in her clothes, thick black sweatshirt and heavy jeans.’ Jenny was going through one of those self-conscious phases where she wanted to cover herself up all the time. Gill thought that her father leaving home must have affected her confidence, too. It had certainly affected Gill’s confidence adversely; losing a husband to a younger woman can do that to you.

She looked around for Clay but couldn’t see him at first. She knew he had gone to the front of the group, so she started moving past some of the slower walkers, so she could get a better look.

Gill saw Jake ahead, helping a mum get a pushchair over a kissing gate at the top of the hill they were walking up. Strangely, considering the lovely weather and his tanned face and hands, he seemed to be completely covered up just like her daughter, with long-sleeved polo-neck sweatshirt and slacks covering his long, slim legs and pert bum.

‘Damn,’ she thought, thinking about John or Jake’s bum. ‘I’m acting like a frustrated old maid who had gone without sex for far too long. And that’s the honest truth, unfortunately!’

When she reached him, Jake was lifting another pushchair over the gate.

“Looks like you’ve got a job of work there, Jake,” Gill said, noting that as everyone else called him Jake she supposed she should. “There’s a double buggy coming up in a couple of minutes.”

“I know,” Jake grinned back at her in response, “it’s Gemma’s beautiful twins bringing up the rear. If you can just hold on here for a couple of minutes you could help hold one of the twins with Gemma while I deal with passing the empty buggy over the gate.”

“Sure,” agreed Gill with a smile, “by the way, have you seen Clay recently?”

“Yes, I can see him from up here, he’s talking with Clive and Ally, they are using an iPhone app to identify trees and shrubs. He’s pretty handy on the internet.”

“Perhaps I better persuade his father to get him one for Christmas,” laughed Gill.

“Is that so you can get him some school shoes?” teased Jake, looking at her out of the corner of his eye as he lifted over a lunch box and a change bag as a mother carried her toddler through the gate.

“Oh, dear,” replied Gill, remembering telling Jake that her last gift to her son was clothing, while her ex- had bought him a PC game. “You know me so well!”

She laughed, while also thinking, ‘Am I so predictable? Is that why my marriage broke up and my kids are so reluctant to respond to me?’ Her smile faded with these thoughts. ‘Because their father was all flash here-and-now casual with no substance, I have always had to be the strictly practical one, which naturally ends up with me covering all the boring things in life. This left their dad even freer to do all the frivolous stuff that the kids have fun with. It’s so not fair!’

‘Damn!’ she thought, ‘I want to be the “Fun Mum” for a change, not always the sensible boring Frump Mother that I seem to have become. Perhaps I should start dictating what role I play without waiting for everyone else to organise me, live for today and do what I want and bugger tomorrow! Well, not all the time, I can’t help being a bit anally retentive, but perhaps I should loosen up a little.’

Soon the last of the straggler pushchairs had cleared the obstacle, leaving Gill and Jake at the end of the strung out caravan of family ramblers. The gate was at the top of a hill and they could see the rest of the troupe stretched out along the path down into the wooded valley below. Jake waved Gill through the kissing gate and, as Jake pulled the swing gate towards him, Gill on impulse stepped up onto the bottom rail, leaned on the gate, pinning him in the corner, put an arm around his neck, pulled their heads together and kissed him quite firmly on the lips.

One-two-three. She counted the seconds. It was a nice kiss, thought Gill, as she counted the number of seconds into the kiss, intending to give it eight, maybe ten seconds tops. Four-five-six. Now, Jake responded by touching tongue to tongue. Jake’s lips were warm and soft, she noted, seven-eight-nine. Gill’s other hand moved up from the top bar of the gate to cup Jake’s cheek, his skin smooth as though he had shaved carefully and closely early that morning, unlike her ex-husband, who usually sported a rough two- or three-day growth at the weekend in an attempt to appear rugged and tough, not!

Ten-eleven-twelve, Jake’s hand gently supported Gill behind in the small of her back, pulling her into him. Thirteen-fourteen-fifteen, he pulled her head deeper into his returning kiss with his other firm but gentle hand, his thumb wrapped around her pony tail caressing her head. Sixteen-seventeen-eighteen, Gill pulled her lips away reluctantly, but not before kissing Jake’s upper lip, nineteen, and sucking his lower lip into her mouth before slowly releasing it, twenty.

Twenty-one, twenty-two, Gill opened her eyes and looked at Jake, inches away from her face, their hands and arms still holding onto one another. Suddenly both reddened with embarrassment and Gill broke the silence with a smile and the hint of a laugh.

“Sorry,” Gill began, “I wanted to thank you for inviting us along today. You were right; it was absolutely what we all needed. I was going to wait to thank you at the end of the walk but, you know, opportunity and all that ... and I was only going to give you a little thank you kiss but, well, it was just too nice to break off.”

“Well, I must say that it was very nice,” agreed the smiling Jake, “I will have to invite you out to places more often, if this is the level of thanks I get.”

Neither of them had moved since the end of the kiss. Down the path, Gertie looked back to check on her flock and saw the couple at the kissing gates, and smiled happily before cheerfully chivvying on a couple of dawdling youngsters.

“I’d intended giving you an eight-second kiss,” Gill admitted bashfully, “but I haven’t been kissed for such a long time, I suppose I lost count.”

“I wasn’t keeping count, but then I’m not the banker here,” teased Jake. “I’d have to count on my fingers to keep track.”

“I suppose I do count a lot,” Gill agreed with a grin, “That’s why when we are round the table negotiating, I kick off both my shoes!”

They both laughed. Jake swung the gate with Gill still perched on the bottom rail and handed her down onto the path. Looking down the hill they saw that the rest of the group had moved on and left a sizeable gap. They continued holding hands as they moved towards catching them up.

While they were walking, Gill felt a nice warm glow and not just to her cheeks, the first time she had felt this kind of buzz, deep inside her, for a long time. She didn’t think for a second any more that Jake was gay but now that she was on a roll, she didn’t want to be in that predictable groove any more.

‘Well, here goes,’ she thought.

“On the ‘inviting me to other places’ theme, Jake, are you doing anything next weekend?” she asked, looking out of the corner of her eyes at the man keeping pace with her, shortening the stride of his long legs to match her shorter ones. She could see him smile at her question, he really was quite cute when he smiled, she thought.

“You’ve been talking to my grandmother, I assume?” he replied, looking at her out of the corner of his eyes.

“Possibly,” she answered, smiling, knowing that Jake probably knew the truth anyway.

“OK, then, in for a penny, in for a pound. How would you like to go hiking and camping with me next weekend, Gill?” his tongue firmly in his cheek as he squeezed her hand lightly. “A bit of hill climbing, but nothing you couldn’t cope with.”

“I would love to, Jake,” she said, squeezing his warm hand back, “I thought you’d never ask!”

Gill laughed, she couldn’t keep the gushing joy out of her voice. She hadn’t been as giddy about any man as this since she was at college.

‘Gosh, what’s got into me?’ she thought. ‘Him, hopefully,’ she added to her thoughts naughtily. ‘There’s just one more thing I need to get out of the way. I don’t want to rule out friendship with this gorgeous man, but I really want something a little more than a friend eventually and I need to get just one niggling little doubt out of my mind,’ she continued her reasoning. ‘I’ve only got a few seconds before we’ll be up with the stragglers, so it has to be now or never.’

“I’ve never heard of you going out with anyone at work before, er ... do you er ... already have a significant other?”

‘Well, that has left the field pretty well open,’ she thought, looking at Jake. He was still smiling easily, relaxed and happy looking. ‘Jake, Jake Nicholls,’ she thought, ‘how quickly I have become accustomed to thinking of him by that name instead of John’; it was as if she was learning to know a different person entirely. OK, she already knew he was a nice friendly guy, he always had been, all the time she had known him, but he was also bright and sociable; shy, perhaps, but familiar and comfortable around people he knew well. She wanted to know him better and wanted him to know her well too, isn’t that what relationships were all about? No secrets then, if he had feelings about someone else, or for a different sexual orientation, she would want to know about it, even if her relationship with him was only as a friend.

Gill certainly didn’t want another man like Wayne in her life; one lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch was more than enough for one lifetime.

“There’s no significant other,” Jake responded with his gentle slow smile, “Or even insignificant other either, for that matter. Anyway, how long have you been talking to my grandmother?” he grinned.

“Long enough,” she smiled.

They were just a few feet now from the last dawdlers, Gemma and the twins, with Jenny pushing the double buggy and Gemma taking the opportunity to have a crafty cigarette while they were walking along.

‘This is my last chance to get in the 64 thousand dollar question,’ Gill thought, ‘it’s now or never. Deep breath.’

“Talk among some of the younger girls at work, one or two seem to have been shot down in flames by you after approaching you for a date, and there was a suggestion that you ... er ... didn’t like girls. Well, these girls thinking that they were completely irresistible to men, they wondered if you were, well, ... gay?”

‘Damn,’ she thought, ‘I’m sure if I thought about it longer I could have been a bit more subtle. Will he shoot me down in flames like those silly girls, thinking I’m a heartless bitch without feelings? Shit! I should have waited, I could have still have had a great time with him next weekend even if he does bat for the other side. Just a few strides more and we’ll be out of time, and perhaps out of any possible future relationship for us.’

Jake stopped in his tracks and spun her around by her hand so they were facing one another again. This time Jake kissed Gill, after pulling her head gently, inexorably towards his. Their lips met, mashed together with an eagerness, a passion, that quite took her breath away.

Damn it! That kiss was so much better than nice, it was fantastic! No, even better than that, words just didn’t cover it, judging by how fast her heart was racing. She didn’t even think about counting, she let go of his hand and reached both arms around his neck and melted into his firm, lean hot body. She was sure his kiss had already lasted longer than her first effort, twenty-something seconds wasn’t it? She was up on her tiptoes even though Jake was leaning down into her with bended knees. She was sure her toes were curling and her knees desperately close to giving out entirely. If he was gay, well, okay, she could live with that so long as he kissed her like this and she didn’t have to share him with anyone.

“Thirty!” he said as he broke off his kiss with a broad grin on his very warm lips. Gill laughed at his exclamation and Jake joined her with a cheerful chuckle of his own.

“I wasn’t actually counting,” said the formerly reserved banker.

“Neither was I, Gill. I just thought adding a high number would be funny.”

“It was funny. A very nice way of answering an awkward question, though.”

Jake bent and quickly kissed her again to a count of one-and-a-half, not that he was counting at all.

“Perhaps they are partly right, maybe I really don’t like girls,” a teasing smile played on those same lips. “What would they say if they knew I would actually prefer a woman to a girl ... and that preference would apply to one woman in particular?”

“They would probably gossip about who that woman was. You know what they are all like at the bank, more often than not the rumour mill gets more attention than the FTSE 100.”

“We can always say nothing at all to anyone at the bank about our trip to Derbyshire next weekend and keep everyone guessing for longer,” he mused, “I wonder how long we could keep it quiet?”

A wicked thought crossed her mind. Well, she wanted to get out of the predictable groove and so far being adventurous had brought its rewards, two snogs and a gentle kiss in the space of five minutes for the first time in about twenty weeks; and those kisses were among the most enjoyable kisses she had had for more than twelve months, and possibly ever.

“We might find it difficult keeping anything quiet after we have our first baby shower ...” she slapped her hand to her mouth and looked at Jake, searching his face for any kind of negative reaction, as the thought came out of her mouth in actual words.

“Does that mean I need to get some precautions in as soon as possible, then, Gill?” he enquired, still smiling but with an eyebrow raised.

She gave him her version of the one-and-a-half second kiss by way of answer and they started walking again, realising they had fallen some way behind the rest of the group during their exchange, and were back holding hands again.

“I knew you were bright, Jake. You’re wasted in that print room; you could work for me in my department, you know.”

Jake smiled cherubically, reminiscent of that slim Buddha that Gill recognised from back in the print room. “If I worked for you, how would holding hands like this be interpreted by your workmates or,” he hesitated and smiled even more broadly, “your children?”

They were fast closing in on Jenny, who was fortunately occupied in conversation with Gemma, who had finished her cigarette and was presently chewing gum enthusiastically between short sentences.

“Point taken.” She looked at Jake’s smiling face; they both squeezed hands and slowly released their grip, their fingers lingering to their very fingertips until they were walking separately, immediately behind Jenny.