Song: Now That I've Found You by Liam Gallagher
June 1974
Victoria's PoV
Sleep escaped me. How could I sleep, how could I do anything but laze in bed, trying to calm my breaths as I stared at the ceiling, fighting back bitter memories, anxious thoughts, and hoards of tears, when Roger was downstairs, just mere metres away from me, as though almost no time had passed at all? If I was quiet enough, if I held my breath and really concentrated, I could hear the soft sound of his snores rising through the small house, the thin brick walls distorting the sound slightly. Nothing else stirred, or at least, my mind could find no other sound to fixate on; only him.
After all this time, only him.
It was strange how quickly the feeling of breathlessness had washed over me upon his return, how, even after all this time, after all that we had gone through, he still had the ability to reduce me to little more than an anxious mess, quivering in his presence, craving his attention, his adulation, his touch. As though I wasn't a grown ass woman of twenty two years, a mother, but as though I was eighteen again, and desperately in love.
But I was a mother, and my first thought had to be Lola now. How she was coping, how she was reacting to the biggest change to her young life? She seemed happy now, ecstatic even, her eyes almost bursting from their sockets the moment they had first fallen on Roger, but what happened later? What happened when she had questions, a real desire to know why her father, whom she already loved so much, hadn't been there for the first three years of her life? Would I tell her, a three year old child, the complex truth, a story that she would never understand and would leave her despising both of us? Or would I be forced to take the blame, to become the bad guy who selfishly kept Roger out of our lives?
There wasn't a bad guy, not when you really thought about. He did this, she said that; you could go around in circles discussing the story of myself and Roger, trying to ultimately pin the blame on one person for where it all went wrong, for how we ended up here, but you'd never stop spinning. We gave as good as we got. He shouldn't have been on drugs, hard fucking drugs, and I should have reached out to him sooner.
But maybe, I was too busy trying to keep everything else in my life together to focus on what Roger needed, what he deserved. I was trying so hard just to survive, to take care of Lola, that the last thought on my mind had been what I owed Roger Taylor. Since when did anyone get what they were owed by another person?
Sighing softly, I ran my hands through my thick hair, trying to think of what I was going to say to Roger in the morning, how I was possibly going to explain this whole mess to him. Explain to him my reasonings for keeping him away, without sounding like a heartless bitch. How to make sure this time, when he told me he was in it for the long run, that he really meant it, for Lola's sake. What terrified me was, there weren't any words strong enough to convey how I felt.
Even more terrifying, was the effect he still had over me. Even now, as half of me lay in my empty double bed, terrified lest he should abandon us again, terrified lest he should make promises to Lola he never intended to keep and then disappeared from her life without any explanation, the other half of me was mentally tracing his image in my mind, fixating on his blemish free skin, his silky hair, cropped slightly shorter than it had been all those years ago, the slightly damp glean of his rosy lips. The way he made me feel inside, the tiny electric jolts that had fizzled through my skin at every innocent little touch, every time we inadvertently brushed up against each other, the way he made my breathe catch in my throat when his eyes lit up, blushing like a stupid, loved struck teenager as I struggled, tongue tied, over the words to say to him, the depths of my mind troubled, wondering what he thought of me, after all this time apart.
