A Healing Love
Copyright© 2025 by Marc Nobbs
Chapter 4: Just Let Me Pretend
Coming of Age Sex Story: Chapter 4: Just Let Me Pretend - Paul Robertson's journey continues as his past and present collide at a star-studded movie premiere, where a connection that once terrified him reignites with passion that threatens to consume them both. Fighting to forge a new future for himself and stop drifting, Paul must finally become the man he’s always been afraid to be. A beautiful, bittersweet exploration of grief, social responsibility, the healing power of love, and learning that sometimes loving someone means letting them go.
Caution: This Coming of Age Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Romantic Heterosexual Fiction
I got a text from David at breakfast the next morning. It was just after nine.
Paul, the Wintersmith paperwork is back from CH. Give me a call when convenient as I need to discuss a couple of things with you.
I quickly tapped in a reply.
Just having breakfast. I’ll call you when we’ve finished in about half an hour. Is that okay?
The reply came through almost immediately.
Perfect. Breakfast at ten past nine, eh? Oh, to be a student again.
I chuckled after reading the message, then rejoined the conversation about the movie and party from the previous night as we ate. By nine-thirty, I’d settled the bill, and we’d checked out of the hotel. We had planned to catch the train back at eleven, but since I was going to meet Carly and spend the day with her instead of returning to Westmouth like everyone else, I asked the hotel manager if there was somewhere I could leave my bag until later that evening. After I slipped him a couple of crisp twenties, he agreed to keep it safe. I bid farewell to my friends as they headed back to St Pancras, while I called David.
“Hi, Paul. Happy New Year. How was your Christmas?”
“It was good, actually. I spent it with my sister.”
“Good. Good. Glad to hear that. So, like I said, I’ve had all the certified paperwork back from Companies House, so you are now officially in business.”
“That’s good news, I suppose.”
“No suppose about it. It’s definitely good news. It means we can get cracking on making you even more money.”
I suppressed a sigh. Was making even more money really what I wanted? I wasn’t sure. But I guess that’s who I was now. A business owner in the business of making money.
“I’ll keep the original paperwork here at my office, which we listed as Wintersmith’s Registered Office. But I’ll send out copies for you to keep at home as well. You’ll need to start a file for all the official communications. Just an A4 ring binder will do. And we need to ... Well, you need to call the first official meeting of Directors—that’s you, me and Bobby. Your Articles of Association require the company to hold at least one full, official Directors’ meeting every three months—or every quarter—so we don’t have to do it straight away. In fact, we have until the end of March, but the sooner we do it, the better. There’s a lot that Bobby and I need to teach you about how things will work, and we need to officially appoint a Chair—that would be you—and a Company Secretary. I’d suggest myself for that job. I have the right qualifications and do it for a few other client companies too.”
“Okay. So, how do I call a meeting?”
“Just send both Bobby and me an email saying that you want to call a Directors’ Meeting, and then ask me as ‘Acting Secretary’ to arrange it. I’ll coordinate with you and Bobby to find a date, draw up an agenda, and handle all the necessary details.
“Here’s the thing, Paul. As Chair, you have the final say. You basically make all the decisions. Officially, everything is done by a vote, but as both Chair and Sole Shareholder, your vote can overrule Bobby and me, even if we vote against you. But just because you have all the power, doesn’t mean you have to do all the work. In fact, I think it might even be worthwhile appointing someone as a sort of official assistant to you—someone you can call or text with instructions and leave them to sort it all out on your behalf. That’s one of the things to discuss at the meeting.”
“Okay. What— Sorry, I’ve told myself I’m going to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Saying ‘whatever you think is best.’ If I’m going to do this, then I suppose I should start acting like a proper businessman. And ‘whatever you think is best’ isn’t very businessman-like.”
“True. But don’t think you have to start ignoring what Bobby and I tell you, either. Or people like Will, for that matter. It would be a mistake to ignore advice from experts.”
“Yeah, I get that. I just ... I’m trying to take charge a bit more. To be a bit more in control and a bit more responsible for things like this. That’s what I need to do in the long run, right?”
“Quite right. You need to learn to be a leader. But the best leaders surround themselves with the best advisors and listen to what they have to say. So, before I go, when would be a good time for you for this meeting?”
“Well, I’ve got a revision week next week, and none of the classes are compulsory, so if you can find a slot, any time next week would be good for me.”
“Okay. I’ll speak to Bobby and see what we can do. It might end up being an evening meeting, if that’s okay. We’ve got a lot to cover, and it could take a couple of hours. Maybe we can do it over dinner somewhere.”
“Sounds good. Just let me know where I need to be and when, and I’ll be there.”
“Excellent. Now, don’t forget to send that email to get the ball rolling.”
“I’ll do it now.”
I hung up the call and sent the email.
I was officially ‘in business.’
I don’t know why, but I expected Carly to be staying at a fancy hotel. In truth, her hotel was no fancier than the one I’d just stayed in. I guess she wasn’t quite a big enough star for that yet.
She was waiting in the foyer for me, although I didn’t see her straight away. Instead, I went up to reception.
“How can I help you, sir?” the girl behind the desk said. Her nametag read ‘Betty.’
“I’m ... I’m supposed to be meeting Carly Will—I mean Kayla Valentine. Could you call her room and let her know I’m here?”
Betty smiled. “There’s no need for that, sir.” She pointed to my left shoulder. I turned around to find Carly standing there, beaming. Her smile was like ... Oh, man, that smile!
She stood still for a second, then said, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Of course, I was going to come. I said I would, didn’t I?”
She tilted her head. “I know. But ... You know, after...”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry about that, I really am. And I know I’ll never be able to apologise enough to make up for it, but I’m—oooff!” She threw herself at me. It came out of nowhere. She just launched forward and wrapped both arms around me and proceeded to hug me so hard she almost crushed all the air out of me.
She didn’t say anything. She just hugged me.
I was too shocked to do anything except hug her back.
Then she kissed me. A firm, unyielding kiss, just her lips pressed to mine.
Then she pulled away.
“You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to do that from the moment I saw you last night. Sorry, I just had to get it out of my system.”
“It’s fine. It’s okay.” I grinned. “It was kinda nice, actually.”
She grinned back. “Nice? So ... I can do it again?”
“Any time you want.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that. So ... Where are you taking me first?”
I shrugged. “What do you want to see first?”
“Well ... I’m in England, so I suppose the polite thing to do is go and see the Queen.”
“Well, good luck with that. She always spends Christmas and New Year in Scotland. Or is it Norfolk? Doesn’t matter, the point is she’s not in London. At least, I don’t think she is. But we can go and see where she lives when she is in London.”
“Excellent. Lead the way.” She held out her hand and I took it. But before we left, she said, “Oh, hang on, Chloë said I need to ask you for your phone?”
“Why?”
“So that I can put my number in it. I can’t believe we never exchanged numbers before.”
“Yeah, well, we didn’t need to, did we?” I said as I took my phone from my pocket, unlocked it and handed it to her. “We were never really apart for long enough to need each other’s numbers.”
She took my phone and began tapping on the screen. As she did, she looked up at me shyly. “Paul...?”
“Yeah?”
“Are ... you know ... those pictures still in here? The ... Er... ‘Naughty’ ones.”
I smiled. “In a secure folder.”
“Do you ever ... You know ... look at them?”
I nodded. “Sometimes.”
She smiled. “Good.”
“Want to see them? I’ll show you where they are.”
She shook her head. “No. At least, not here. I just wanted to know if you still had them.” She handed the phone back to me just as hers beeped. “I sent myself a message,” she said. “So now I have your number too.”
I smiled and nodded and held out my hand, which she took in hers. And then we strode out of the hotel together.
“Paul,” she said, “Do you think that if we had exchanged numbers back then that ... I don’t know. Would things have been different? What I mean is ... I mean, you just left, and I had no way to get hold of you. But if I’d had your number, then I’d have been sending you a whole bunch of messages. Thousands of ‘em. Would you have responded? Would you have messaged me back?”
I looked at her. “Honestly? I don’t know. At the time ... I think the problem I had was that we were getting too close. And it was my problem. It definitely wasn’t you. It was me. It was all me.”
She nodded. “I know. I mean, I didn’t. Back then. But I realised it eventually.”
“So, honestly, if I’d have been getting loads of messages from you, I don’t know what I would have done. I might have felt guilty for leaving the way I did and tried to explain, or I might have just ignored them and hoped you’d go away. I honestly don’t know.”
“Okay. It doesn’t matter. Not now, anyway.” She tilted her head and smiled. We were on the street just outside the hotel now. She tugged on my hand, which pulled me in close, then stood on her tiptoes to give me a very brief, very tender kiss on the lips. “None of that matters now,” she said, settling back down on her heels.
“So, Mr English Gentleman Tour Guide, how do we get to the Palace to see the Queen?” She giggled, and before I could answer, she added, “I can’t believe I just said that. Me, an Alabama girl from Nowhere-ville, population twenty-five people and a cow.” Her smile, which hadn’t faded since she first stepped back after throwing herself at me, widened, and she giggled a little, shrugging her shoulders as she did so. “You know, when I was growing up, just the thought of going somewhere like Huntsville or Birmingham was beyond my imagination. I mean, they were both the ‘Big City.’” She giggled again. “Crazy to think that now. So, when I went to Nashville, that was...” Her eyes grew wide. “I mean, it’s like three times bigger than Birmingham or something. I’m sure I read that. And now I’m in London!” She waved her free arm in an arc around her. “And I’m going to see The Queen! How big is London, anyway? How many people, I mean?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I took my phone from my pocket. “Let’s look it up.” I tapped the screen a few times and got the answer. I loved the internet. “About fifteen million or so.” I tapped a few more times. “Nashville is about seven hundred thousand, so London is more than fifteen times bigger.”
Carly shook her head. “Wow. That’s ... Wow. So ... How do we get there?”
“Well, the best way to get anywhere in London is usually the Tube, but I think that from here we’d have to change trains at least once, and it probably wouldn’t save us that much time anyway. I think it’s only about a twenty- or twenty-five-minute walk from here.” We’d arrived at the T-junction at the end of the side street where the hotel entrance was. “This...” I gestured to the large road that ran perpendicular to the one we’d just walked along. “ ... is Oxford Street—famous for—”
“Shopping. I know. That’s why I picked this hotel. Glenn gave me a choice of four, and I picked this one so I could do some shopping if I had any free time.”
I nodded. “Yeah, well, over there...” I pointed across the road. “That’s Marble Arch. And behind that is the entrance to Hyde Park. That’s huge. It’d probably take an hour to walk all the way around it, but we don’t need to do that. If we just keep going straight down that way, we’ll end up pretty much at the Queen’s back garden, which is pretty huge too. But we can just walk down the side of that to get to the front gate.”
“Okay. Sounds good. Let’s go, shall we?”
It was almost as if we were still together in Nashville. She held my hand tightly as we crossed Oxford Street. Before we passed under Marble Arch, Carly stopped me.
“Could you take a photo of me standing under it?”
“Sure, but you might have to wait if you want to be the only one under it. And I’ll probably have to do it from the other side of the street if you want the whole thing in the shot.”
“Oh. Okay. Maybe not then. There’s plenty of other places I can take photos, though, right?”
I smiled and nodded. “Tons. Tons and tons of photo opportunities all over the city.”
“Good. Okay, let’s go.”
She took my hand again, squeezing it tightly, and we began our walk through Hyde Park. She was almost skipping along at times. Every so often, she’d pull me in close to give me a light, tender kiss. And we talked.
The conversation was so easy.
She told me about her record deal and recording her first album, and then she told me how she felt the first time she heard her song on the radio.
“It was unbelievable, Paul. I mean that. I couldn’t believe it. I was in the kitchen, cooking for my housemates—there are three of them who all worked in ‘Joe’s’—the café where we met, yeah? I was cooking and had the radio on. One minute I’m singing along to Carrie’s latest hit, and then, boom, they’re playing my first single, and I was, like ... Oh My God! Like a teenager, you know? I was screaming and did a little dance right there in the kitchen. It was an incredible feeling.”
She went on to tell me how well her music had been received on country music radio stations all across America. She asked about my university course and about my friends from the party the previous night.
It was all so... Easy.
But I had questions that weren’t easy. And, I’m guessing, she did too.
We weren’t exactly avoiding those questions. But we weren’t rushing to ask them either.
It took us over twenty minutes to walk through Hyde Park. We went down The Broad Walk at first, then peeled off down Lovers’ Walk. We stopped at the Joy of Life Fountain—two figures cast in bronze holding hands and dancing above the water—because Carly wanted to take photos from different angles. Then she had me take a couple of photos of her standing next to it. Then she insisted on taking photos of me next to it. And then selfies of both of us in front of it.
“What’s that?” she asked five minutes later as we strolled down Lover’s Walk and passed a group of steel columns sticking up out of the ground.
“The July Seventh Memorial,” I said.
“Memorial? To what? What happened on July Seventh?”
“The terrorist bombings in London back in two thousand and five.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I remember that. Sort of.”
I shrugged. “I’d be lying if I said I remember it in any detail. I was twelve. I remember seeing it on the news, but...” I shrugged again.
“Can we see it close up?”
I nodded. “You can walk all around it and through it. Whatever you want. The names of the people who died are on a plaque at the back. Not as many as in New York on nine-eleven, but still too many.”
Carly took more photos before we moved on. It was the same at the Achilles Statue and the Wellington Arch. At least we made it all the way along Constitution Hill at the side of the Buckingham Palace gardens without stopping to take photos. What should have been about a twenty-five-minute walk took us nearly three-quarters of an hour. But we eventually turned the corner at the end of Constitution Hill and came to the front gates of the Monarch’s official London residence.
“Wow, it’s huge,” she said. She looked at me and, with a cheeky grin, she winked.
“Actually, this bit is just like the front porch or something, and it was added a long time after the actual palace was built. The palace itself—you know where they live and where the ballrooms are and stuff—that’s at the back.” I looked around and saw one of those little stalls selling postcards and souvenirs. “Come on. Look, I’ll show you.”
I took her over to the stall and found a postcard with an aerial photo of the palace. “See,” I said, “What you can see from here is like a false front. There’s a big square courtyard behind that and the actual palace at the back.”
Carly bought the postcard, thanked the stallholder and then we went back to the palace gate. One of the guards, who usually stands stock still by the main entrance to the courtyard, was doing one of those regular ‘stretching my legs’ strolls along the front of the building.
“I’d love to get a photo with one of those guards in the silly hat,” Carly said. “But they won’t let me in for that, will they?”
“No chance,” I said. “But there is usually one of them standing at the gates to Horse Guards, so you can get a photo there.”
“Horse Guards?”
“Horse Guards Parade. It’s, like, a big parade ground—where they do Trooping the Colour and things like that.”
“What’s Trooping the Colour?”
“An annual parade where all ... Well, not all, just some, of the army and stuff do a parade with the Queen. Or for the Queen. Or something. I’ve never really understood it. I don’t really understand a lot of the ceremonial stuff that goes on. It all seems mostly pointless.”
“Oh, right. Okay. And we can get a photo of me with the silly hat men there.”
I nodded. “Everyone else does.”
“Okay, so ... Let’s take some pictures here and then go find this Horse Parade place.”
“Horse Guards Parade,” I said, smiling. “You know, because the Guards are on Horses in the Parade.”
“Whatever. Here...” She handed me her phone. “Take some photos of me outside the Palace.”
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