The beauty was largely, objectively, a thing of the past, by then, for Millie. Not that Ben thought that she regretted it greatly: really and truly it probably got in the way of the objectives dearest to her heart, rather than giving her any real assistance in achieving them. Silly men, one after another attempting to drag her all the way to the altar, waylaying her with seductions and affairs, enviously sniping at her publication history and trying to insinuate that it was achieved more by means of her figure and face than her – utterly inarguable – brilliance.
But even without the pulchritude she used to command, the smirk on her lively, wrinkled old face, dear and mischievous as it was, was damn engaging and cutie-pie as all heck. And it filled Ben with the most unutterable disquietude. Her dim grey eyes widened with innocence, as she opened her mouth to say, "Why, darling, what on earth does it look like?" And her tone suggested strongly what an unutterable dim-witted tech-phobic darling of a nephew he was to have the slightest difficulty in identifying the nature and purpose of the natty bit of plexiglass and buffed-sheen matte steel that inhabited the cupboard that used to house a boiler and temperature-sensitive liquids and corrosive alkalis.
She wasn't wrong, when it came to math and science he would have put his hand up to being a moron. But just the same, it wasn't intuitively obvious, and old Millie damn well knew it. He just raised his eyebrows at her, because that was enough. He wasn't going to dignify her provocations with actual speech.
And the wicked twinkle he got in response told him quite enough to know that it was a case of message received and understood and processed with the most limpid clarity, too. She patted his hand with her aged, liver-spotted one, and relented with the learning-difficulty boy she'd favoured these many years. "A time-machine, darling," she told him, in sweetly confidential tones. It didn't matter how confidential she got, though. Dolly chose that moment to appear at their elbows, and shove steaming workman's mugs of brown thick tea in their hands, her sweet heart-shaped face wide-eyed, agog with excitement.
"Has she told you yet?" Dolly enquired of him, in a high-pitched squeaky near-whisper. She was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet with toe-tingling excitement. Ben? He stared down into the brown depths of his mug, and he felt that, honestly Millie, this is about the giddy limit.
YOU ARE READING
Erase You
RomanceMichael is a musician, Cambridge-educated but living in London. He's successful, attractive and has plenty to keep him busy and happy. So why can he still not get over his old college boyfriend, Ben? Fortunately his old Great-Aunt Millie, a notor...
