Another Paradise | T Shelby

TWENTY THREE - MEMORIES

"Do you remember the day we met?"

Blair's lips fell into a soft smile. She shivered as a breeze swept through the room from the window they'd left open a crack. Summer was turning into early Autumn and that afternoon, she and Tommy had found themselves tangled beneath the bedsheets while their home was prepared for guests to arrive later that evening, their engagement party planned for that night.

She lay on her back, one hand on her stomach and the other lazily above her head, her pale eyes staring up at the blank ceiling, though she didn't see the carved white trims of the walls. Her mind played back the first moment she noticed Thomas Shelby, projecting it in vibrant, vivid detail as if she was reliving the past in a lucid dream above her bed.

Tommy lay on his side, staring at Blair. His lips were sealed, his eyes narrow and sleepy, though happiness and comfort radiated through the warmth of his touch on her skin, brushing stray hairs from her shoulders as he admired the way she fell into a memory.

"I do." Blair replied in a whisper, her smile tempting to grow.

A sixteen year old Blair O'Hara had walked past the Shelby brothers plenty of times in her life. She kept her head down each time, avoiding drawing attention to herself in the street as she rushed home from school, her siblings in tow.

It was a sunny afternoon when Blair and Kiera were sat in the field. They'd been out since before midday, summer heat burning the back of their necks and bare arms all day as they played in the grass and down by the streams.

Two hours of making daisy chains seemed to pass by quicker when the boys turned up to play football. Blair rolled her eyes at the way her younger sister's attention to detail fell away from the daisies and clung to the boys in shorts with the leather ball, boots with studs on and caps shielding their eyes from the sun.

"That's John Shelby, isn't it?"

Blair followed her sister's gaze, her eyes landing on a short boy with blonde hair and a loud laugh. He pushed another boy to the ground, pointing a finger at him before a different boy jumped on his back, all three of them ending up in a pile on the floor.

"I think so," Blair replied, "I can't say for sure, I don't know them."

"I like him," Kiera was smiling as she spoke, pulling tufts of grass from the ground absentmindedly as she watched the boys continue their game, "Don't you?"

Blair shrugged, "Like I said, I don't know them."

Kiera let out a frustrated sigh, throwing the handful of grass back onto the ground before tucking a single daisy behind her ear.

"Oh come on, Blair," she tilted her head, narrowing her eyes, "If you had to pick one of them to marry, which one would it be?"

"How can I pick when I don't know them, Kiera?"

"You are so boring, do you know that? Just pick, it's only a game."

Under the weight of her sister's disapproving death stare, Blair shifted her gaze over to the boys. There was a group of eight of them, though she recognised three of them to be Arthur, Thomas and John Shelby.

She knew of the Shelby family, knowing only what she'd heard from other people's mouths, but had never said a word to any of the brothers.

Blair watched for a while longer, her face straight and unimpressed at the way they all shouted at each other, pushing and shoving one another around. Arthur grabbed one of the boys by the scruff of the neck, shouting something obscene in his face before the boy began to apologise profusely.

She looked to the side, noticing Thomas Shelby laying on the grass, propping himself up on his elbow as he drank ale from a bottle, a thin smile on his face as he watched the other boys argue amongst themselves.