Too Much Old Desire

She was lonely. Adele tsked to herself. That was all, she was just lonelier than she had allowed herself to recognize. She leaned her head back in the armchair and looked again at John, who sat splay-legged on the couch, intently studying the laptop while he drummed his long fingers against the coffee table. She knew every inch of his skin, every curve of every muscle, every sharply protruding bone, every deep wrinkle in his brow. She recognized in the depths of her entrails the almost square paunch of his belly, the sleek fall of his straight, dark hair. She followed the shadow along his jaw, a smattering of whiskers that brought memories flooding back. At first flush they were welcome, like old, intimate friends, but after consideration she drew in her breath, and turned away.

‘You are obviously too lonely,’ she told herself. ‘This cannot be.’

She pretended to count back, but she already knew the answer was ten years.

‘It’s been ten years,’ she told herself.

Time had raced past while standing still, and John was living, breathing testimony to that. There were flashes of him that had made her smile from the very beginning - a certain way of holding a knife, of crinkling a nose - but there was also a particular insistence on order and coherence that took her breath away, filling Adele with a longing she would never be able to shake.

Those graceful hands were the same ones that had held and caressed her, that wrinkled brow was the same one she had smoothed and kissed goodbye. He was his father’s flesh and blood alright, so much so that Adele could feel herself falling in love with him all over again.

‘But he’s not Jack,’ she told herself.

Adele patted John on the knee and stood heavily and slowly, her heart aching, her soul disheveled.

"You hungry?" she asked her son. "How about some dinner?"

   gave us quite a choice this week: BLOOD (noun) 3 a :  lifeblood;  broadly :  life b :  human stock or lineage; especially :  royal lineage  blood>  c : relationship by descent from a common ancestor : kinship d : persons related through common descent : kindred e (1) : honorable or high birth or descent (2) : descent from parents of recognized breed or pedigree

[Title taken from Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood]

Trifecta week Seventy-Six Silver!