‘Okay,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll play.’
4
When Jamie came over a few days later, Sarah knew she had to tell him about Daniel. It would be impossible to spend the day with him and stay silent about something so huge. But before she could even consider talking to him, she needed to get off. Sexual frustration was a new sensation and one she did not like at all. If Daniel wanted to play some bizarre waiting game then that was his prerogative but there was no way Sarah was giving up her greatest pleasure.
‘This is a nice welcome,’ Jamie said, as she pushed him against the wall.
‘I missed you.’ Sarah untucked his T-shirt and slid her hands up over his belly and chest. ‘It feels like a long time since I’ve seen you.’
‘It’s always too long for me.’ Jamie pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it on the floor. ‘I think about you all the time, you know that?’
‘I know. Me too.’ But even as she said it she was thinking about Daniel.
Sarah knew that Jamie had come from nappies and feedings and whingeing, and would not be anywhere near as aroused as she was. She led him to the sofa, finished undressing him, and took him in her mouth. She tried to stop thinking about Daniel, but couldn’t. She let her mind go, imagining this was Daniel in her mouth, under her hands. She was driving him crazy, making him weep with how good she was at this. Making him regret every day she had spent perfecting her techniques on other men.
She was jolted by a hand on her forehead. ‘Stop.’
She looked up, breathless. Jamie’s eyes were half-closed, his skin ruddy. ‘Come here.’
Sarah took off her clothes, keeping her eyes on the erection that could belong to anyone. The dick was what she had to have. It didn’t matter who she was thinking about, or wanting, or missing. She just needed to have that thing inside her, needed her feverish, awkward body to be invaded. She needed to be fucked back to normality.
But it did matter. For the first time ever, it mattered who she was with, and her body knew it mattered and wouldn’t cooperate at all. Jamie was a real trooper. Sarah couldn’t imagine what he was thinking as he endured countless position adjustments, three location changes, and long periods of determined panting broken up by frustrated directives. Maybe he was thinking about work, or Shelley, or something else that would slow him down. Sarah really was very impressed with his stamina and control, but it was futile. Daniel Carr had trapped her orgasm inside her, and only he could get it out.
‘Just go ahead and finish,’ Sarah said, defeated and sore.
‘What’s wrong, Sar? What am I doing wrong?’
Sarah told him he was wonderful, that the problem was with her. His jaw stiffened. ‘We’ll try something else.’ They tried three more positions, at various speeds. Sarah told him again that it just wasn’t going to happen.
‘Fine.’ He withdrew.
‘No,’ she said, pulling him back towards her. ‘You finish, it’s okay.’
‘Let me go down on you.’
‘Jamie, no.’ Sarah considered oral sex as something to give, not receive. She had explained it to him before, how it made her feel as though she was a saucer of milk being lapped up by a greedy kitten. How passivity felt like dying.
‘Please, Sar. Let me try.’ Jamie knelt on the floor between her legs and rubbed the insides of her thighs. His cock was pointing at her, red and angry. ‘If you hate it I’ll stop. Please?’
Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever.’
Jamie pushed his sweat soaked fringe off his forehead and disappeared between her thighs. Sarah was immediately uncomfortable and tried to wriggle away, but he grabbed her hips with both hands and held her still. After a couple of minutes she was wondering if she had been too hasty in excluding this act from her sex life. Another few minutes and Sarah found herself gasping for air and clawing at Jamie’s shoulders. She remembered him telling her that Shelley was very bossy in bed, and that she only ever came from being tongued. Sarah said a silent thankyou to Shelley, and then lost all control of her thought processes. For a brief, blissful time she forgot Daniel, and the fast shrinking possibility of her independent life.
They slept through the afternoon, curled up in each other on the living room floor. Sarah woke to see him opening his eyes, blinking at her and smiling in a disoriented, dreamy way. She smiled back, sat up and lit a cigarette. She could not put it off any longer.
‘I need to tell you something.’
He held onto her waist and pulled himself to a seated position. ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s about the bloke I went out with the other night.’
Jamie’s face hardened. ‘The biter?’
‘Yeah. Well, I think he might be…’
‘A psycho?’
‘…more than a passing thing. I think things could become serious.’
Jamie looked right at her. His expression did not change one little bit.
‘Anyway, I wanted you to know.’
Jamie stared at her for a full five seconds. ‘Right.’ He picked up her cigarettes and lit one. That was a very bad sign. ‘Well, this is a shock.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, I’ve been trying to win you for all these years. Not just me. Heaps of men have tried to win you over. We’ve all been so stupid, running around after you, treating you kindly, showing you respect, never once suspecting what you really wanted in a man was the willingness to beat the crap out of you.’ He drew back on the cigarette as though he was a pack a day man. His voice was deadly calm. ‘I just wish you’d told me earlier, Sarah. Would’ve saved us both a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I kept thinking I was doing something wrong, and it turns out I was. I wasn’t hurting you enough.’
‘That isn’t it.’
‘No. It’s just that I’m not who you want.’
Sarah pressed her lips together because she could not lie and she could not twist the knife in his guts. She got them both a beer. Jamie drained his in less than a minute. Sarah got him another and another cigarette. When she handed them to him she saw a flicker of warmth in his eyes. It was enough to prove that he hadn’t been entirely frozen by her.
‘I wish you wouldn’t be so hostile,’ she said.
‘How am I supposed to be?’
‘You could be supportive. You could be my friend.’
He snorted. ‘You want me to congratulate you?’
‘Look, Jamie. This may not be what you want to hear, but I assure you it is the greatest compliment I’ve ever given. I value you as a friend a million times more than I value you as a lover. As a lover you are part of a very large and not particularly prestigious group, as a friend you’re it. You’re my one and only.’
Jamie’s mask cracked. He bit his lip, swiped at his eyes. ‘But I’m not, am I? Now you have someone else who is more than a lover.’
‘I don’t know what he is yet. But he isn’t you.’ Sarah put her head on his shoulder; he shrugged his arm around her. ‘And besides, you have someone else too. You got married, you have a kid, and a family and a whole… You have this whole life, and I have nothing except dreams and work and sex. Maybe I want to belong to someone.’
‘I just… I suppose I feel that you belong to me. These last few months I’ve felt that we’re a real couple. We hang out together, we’re best friends, we can practically finish each others sentences. And we make love. I mean, what’s the difference between what we have and a full-blown relationship?’
‘You tell me. You’re the one who goes home to a full-blown relationship every night.’
They lapsed into silence again. Sarah had wanted to get it all out at once, but Jamie was so upset at the news that there was someone, that she thought telling him who that someone was would send him over the edge. Besides, it wasn’t like her relationship with Daniel was speeding ahead. If things continued the way they had been, then it would be a hundred years before he had sex with her. Sarah decided that publicly naming Daniel Carr as the love of her life could wait until he’d at least gotten over hi
mself and fucked her.
During the long silence, Jamie dressed himself and Sarah sat below him and watched. When he sat on the sofa to tie his shoe laces she got to her knees and repeatedly kissed his arms and hands. He swatted at her and giggled, and she tied his laces for him while he stroked her hair.
‘So,’ he said, taking both her hands, ‘who is this remarkably fortunate man?’
Shit. Her plan to not tell him depended on him not asking. She couldn’t, couldn’t, lie to him. Shit.
‘You can meet him soon. I promise.’
‘That’ll be fun.’ Jamie brought her hands to his mouth and kissed each one in turn. ‘What’s his name?’
Shit. Shit. Shit. Sarah cleared her throat. ‘Daniel.’
Jamie was quiet for a while. Sarah hoped desperately that he wouldn’t remember, that he wouldn’t make the connection. She held her breath until he spoke again.
‘Daniel who?’
Sarah climbed up beside him on the sofa and lifted his arm up around her shoulders. She wrapped her own arm around his waist and squeezed. ‘Carr,’ she said softly.
Another extended, airless pause. Then, ‘I suppose Carr is a pretty common name, but still, it’s a freaky coincidence.’
‘Jamie.’ Sarah tasted his name as she said it. It tasted like salt. ‘It isn’t a coincidence.’
The arm around her shoulders stiffened. It felt like he was going to stay that way forever. Sarah was held so tight to him that she couldn’t turn her head to see his face. She could imagine it though, frozen and hard like the rest of him.
‘Sarah,’ Jamie said, his bicep pulsing against Sarah’s neck. ‘Tell me that was a joke.’
‘He’s come back for me.’ Sarah felt as though she’d swallowed a mouthful of sea water. The salt in her mouth and her gut made her queasy. She wished she could see his face. She thought about how she had felt when Daniel showed her the photos he’d jerked off to for eight years. She wondered if such a sad, creepy pervert could possibly be worth smashing Jamie over. But it didn’t matter if it was worth it; it just was.
Jamie slid his arm out from behind her. He stood up, walked to the window and put his fist through it. The glass was old and dirty; it broke in lethal looking shards, each one big enough to go straight through a person’s heart. Jamie picked up his jacket and wrapped it around his bleeding hand. Then he picked up his keys and wallet from the coffee table and walked out the door.
5
After Jamie smashed Sarah’s window, he went home and had a fight with Shelley. She asked him the perfectly reasonable question of what the hell had happened to his hand, but even knowing it was a perfectly reasonable question Jamie could not possibly answer her in a reasonable way. He told her to stop harassing him. He told her that he was sick of her always nagging him and looking at him with suspicion. He told her that just because they were married it didn’t mean he had to tell her what he was doing every second of the day. Attack is the best form of defence.
Shelley pointed out that asking why he was bleeding all over the kitchen floor was hardly nagging. She said that she didn’t want to know what he was doing every second of the day; just what he was doing at the time of his injury. Jamie swore at her and went outside.
It’s impossible to win an argument when you know you’re in the wrong. It’s impossible to tell your kind, concerned, endlessly patient wife that the reason you’re a bloody mess is that the woman you adore, the woman who is more precious to you than your own flesh and blood, the woman you’ve spent your life trying to make happy, is in love with another man. How could he possibly tell Shelley that he wanted to die because Sarah loved someone else as much as Jamie loved Sarah? Not just someone else. Not just another man. Sarah loved a cruel, sadistic, manipulative criminal. Sarah loved the man whose damage Jamie had spent the last eight years trying to undo.
Shelley came to him after an hour or so. She sat beside him and unwrapped his clumsily bound hand. ‘I don’t think it needs stitches,’ she said, touching her fingertips to the jagged line of dried blood. ‘It’s stopped bleeding.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie said. ‘I was at Sarah’s.’
‘I know. She called.’
His stomach muscles clenched up. ‘What did she…?’
‘She wanted to see if you’d got home alright. She was worried about you.’
Sarah was worried about him. Well, that was something, wasn’t it? It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t indifference, which was what he’d imagined she’d felt.
‘What happened? She said you had an argument?’
Sarah said they’d had an argument. That was an interesting way of looking at it. An argument. Implying that there was a difference of opinion, that viewpoints could be voiced and solutions negotiated. Calling it an argument diminished it, made it something that could be sorted out and gotten over. Sarah and Jamie were just arguing.
‘Can’t you tell me, please?’
‘Yeah, it’s… she’s seeing this bloke and he… he’s no good for her.’
‘So what? Sarah is always with some loser.’
‘This is different,’ Jamie said, trying hard not to cry. ‘He hurts her.’
‘Oh.’ Shelley stroked Jamie’s hand, carefully avoiding the cut. ‘Like, physically hurts her?’
Jamie didn’t know how to explain Sarah’s bruises. He could describe them in intimate detail, but then Shelley would want to know how he knew, and he could hardly tell her that today he had fucked Sarah for three hours and that whenever he felt himself going over the edge, he changed position so that he could see her beaten up thighs. So while Sarah couldn’t come because she was thinking about the man who’d done that to her, Jamie was holding his orgasm off by thinking about the same thing.
‘She has bruises,’ he said.
‘Bruises? Shit. I can’t imagine Sarah putting up with that. What does she say about it?’
‘She says she loves him.’ Jamie started to cry.
‘Oh, shit.’ Shelley kissed his cheek, stroked his head, held him tight to her breasts. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m sorry. It’ll be okay.’
Jamie knew that letting his wife comfort him over his broken heart wasn’t right. But then, what was?
After a while, Bianca woke up and started hollering. Together they changed her nappy, and then Shelley sat on the bed to feed Bianca and Jamie lay on one side and watched them.
‘I can’t believe we made her,’ Jamie said, stroking the wispy hair that tried to cover Bianca’s still soft skull. ‘I can’t believe she’s ours.’
‘I can’t believe it either. I can’t believe I have this little girl, and I can’t believe I have you. I thank God every day for you both.’
‘Yeah, right. I’m such a blessing.’
Shelley put her hand over his, both of them holding Bianca’s head. ‘Blessings, both of you.’
Later that night, Jamie told Shelley about Mr Carr. After listening to him ranting about what that monster had done to Sarah, Shelley made them both a cup of tea and then started in on why Jamie was wrong about it all.
Firstly, what had happened could not really be considered sexual abuse. Fourteen-year-old Sarah was no innocent child. She used to annoy everyone in Media Studies with her rants about child slavery in African diamond mines, paedophile priests, infant clitoridectomies in Somalia and a thousand other injustices. She was always going on about giving a voice to the voiceless, and defending those who can’t defend themselves and empowering the abused and downtrodden. So, given that, is it fair to say that, if anything, her bias lay towards exposing men who did what Mr Carr had done? That is, if Mr Carr had assaulted her, or even used his position of power to manipulate her, then wouldn’t she have taken great pleasure in bringing him to justice on behalf of all the abused girls who were not as strong and brave as she?
‘Maybe she was too afraid to,’ Jamie said, grasping, and knowing that he was grasping, ‘Maybe she was scared he’d get violent.’
Shelley didn’t buy it. She used to go to the s
ame church as Mr Carr. He taught Sunday school and helped run the Friday night youth group. His daughters boasted about how their dad was a big softy and they could get away with anything. At school, he was the same. He never raised his voice or thumped the desk when the class misbehaved. When he supervised sport he always emphasised the need to play fair and respect boundaries. He was a volunteer counsellor for the student help line. In short, he was one of the gentlest, kindest, least intimidating men she had ever met. ‘He’s as capable of violent sex abuse as you are,’ she said.
Jamie met her eyes. ‘Maybe I am. Is it so hard to imagine?’
‘Yes, it is. You are gentle to a fault. That’s why I love you.’
He held up his bandaged hand. ‘Not so gentle sometimes.’
Shelley looked away. ‘Right, yes, you’re right.’ She sipped her tea, keeping her eyes on the far wall. ‘It’s her then. She inspires violence. She turns decent men into animals.’
‘Shelley!’ He reached across the table and grabbed her chin, turning it so she was facing him. ‘Don’t you dare blame her. And don’t you dare compare me with him!’
‘Why not? She clearly makes both of you crazy.’
Jamie felt like slapping her. He resisted, but held her chin hard. ‘If you saw what he’d done to her… the damage that he… He’s a fucking animal. Her thighs look as though they’ve been through a meat grinder. Bites and bruises from her knees to her hips! If you’d seen it, you would’ve been angry enough to break a window too.’
Shelley reached up and removed his hand. ‘I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,’ she said, standing and turning her back on him. ‘Since I can’t imagine I’ll be in a position to examine Sarah’s thighs in the near future. But then, why would I be?’
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