Song - As It Was by Harry Styles
Victoria's Pov
Even before sunlight first began to stream through the thin curtains shielding the Victorian windows, the child in my arms was squirming as she gradually awoke from her deep sleep. Lola had never been a good sleeper; as a baby, she would wake three times a night at least and woke an hour before dawn. Although as she grew older the latter had gradually stopped, she still struggled to sleep past first light. She was so unlike me and her father in that respect. I had always been a deep sleeper, napping late into the morning before I had become a mother. It was the only thing I ever missed about my old life. Well, that and the guy whose arms were wrapped tightly around me and Lola.
As I lay in the large bed, waiting for Lola to finally wake up and stop wriggling about, I took a moment to breathe the scene in, to finally let it hit me just how much had changed in the span of a week. This time last week, I had woken up a single mother, with nobody in the world other than Deaky to help me raise my child, single, and somewhat content with it. By the evening of that fateful day, I had found myself tossing and turning in an empty bed, trying to process the sudden emergence of Roger Taylor in my life again, unsure of what it would lead to, knowing it would either lead to heartbreak for Lola and myself, or to my daughter finally having the father she craved. I had known it would be a hard road ahead, fraught with tension, indecision and bitter arguments, as I tried to discover just where Roger Taylor fit into my hectic life. What I hadn't counted on was how easy it would suddenly become, when we finally listened to one another, when we finally made the effort to understand the other. Just how quickly we could slip into the image of the perfect family. How quickly we could slot neatly back into the people we used to be.
It should have terrified me. It should have terrified me to wake up with him beside me, after so little time. It should have filled me with regret that I had confessed my feelings to him, that I had once more made myself vulnerable to him. But it didn't. Everything felt just right, like this was how it was always meant to be. Perfect, even.
But it couldn't last. Nothing could last forever.
Eventually, me and Lola would have to return back home, to the North of England, so that Lola could start school in the fall, as planned, and so that I could go back to work, back to managing my business and making money to put food on the table. Roger would finish this record, and it would be off on the road again, for weeks, even months at a time. He would be thousands of miles away, a different city every night, the different timezones and the demanding schedule of the band making even talking on the phone a logistical nightmare. Of course, we could, and would, visit whenever we got a chance - I would never deprive Lola of her father now I knew how good he was with her - but even that would be difficult, given Lola's schooling. Touring and constant travelling were no life for a child.
Even if I didn't have Lola to consider, I would have returned to the North, to my old life. I had made something there, something that was my own, something I had poured three years of hard work into. I couldn't just keep chasing Roger Taylor around for the rest of my life, dutifully trailing from country to country as he lived his dream, painfully neglecting my own. I needed something of my own. Consigning myself to an existence based solely around Roger's needs was no life.
I wasn't ready to have that conversation with him. It was clear from our earlier conversations that he thought this week was magically going to change everything, and in some ways, it was; his relationship with Lola was entrenched in stone, having proven himself as a father a thousand times over, and it was also a step in the right direction for us one day figuring something out. But he was wrong if he thought one week could turn back the clock, turn me back into the lonely girl I used to be, so desperate for consolation that she was willing to give up everything without a backwards glance for someone else's dream. Sometimes, it felt like that was the version of me Roger loved best, a version he was still desperately clinging on to. This house, proved it. It was sweet, yet sad at the same time, how he had decorated this house for us and never changed it, not once, in three years. It felt like the house itself were trapped in a different time period, a different lifetime, one that didn't fully fit anymore. Although it had warmed my heart that he had bought it for us, that he had decorated it for us, it also put me on edge how he was already referring to it as 'our house' and 'our room', talking about how we could decorate it in future, so that myself and Lola would be more comfortable here when he was on tour. I had bitten my lip at that instance, not wanting to start an argument in front of Lola. Roger was still living in the past, expecting me to leave my life on pause and become a stay at home girlfriend in a borrowed house, ignoring my dreams whilst he followed his own.
