‘That’s nice,’ I said politely.
‘Why don’t you wear your blue dress? The one with the sweetheart neckline that we got from Browns. It makes you look quite simply stunning.’
‘That’s a good idea. I will do that.’
She smiled with satisfaction. ‘Right. I had better crack on. It’s been a bit of a nightmare day and there’s so much to do. One of the horses foaled last night. Have to go and check how mother and son are doing. See you later?’
‘OK.’
She turned away and began to walk out.
‘Ivana?’ I called.
She turned around. ‘Yes, darling?’
‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I do really appreciate it.’
Her face misted over. ‘I’d love to do more. You are my daughter. Not of flesh, but of spirit.’
We smiled at each other and then she was gone.
Dinner was a dreary affair. It turned out that Daffy decided not to come after all. She went to a party in Fulham instead. Of course Ivana was a wonderful hostess, but Daddy couldn’t stop talking about the new foal. And Wills kept giving me puppy dog looks, which were irritating at best. It was even possible that he was plucking up the courage to ask me out. I invented a headache and excused myself early.
‘Do you want me to send Bertie up with some hot chocolate for you?’ Ivana asked, her face concerned.
‘No,’ I said, feeling really guilty. ‘Please don’t worry. It’s nothing. I’ll be fine once I take a couple of tablets.’
‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said with such feeling that I almost wanted to blurt the truth out to her. I was fucking Dr. Kane and I was missing him so much I couldn’t even bear to sit beside Wills and put up with his fumbling attempts to court me when I knew all he really wanted to do was crawl into bed with a man.
But I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t understand. Ivana and all the people in my circle placed position and status above silly little things like love and emotions.
‘Goodnight.’
I went to my room and I lay down in the dark. For hours I tossed and turned and in the end I knew I had to go and see Dr. Kane. I got out of bed, dressed, left Marlborough Hall and nervously drove down to London. I hardly ever drove since my accident.
I rang on Dr. Kane’s bell at two in the morning.
Chapter 20
Marlow
I was lying on the sofa, music muted right down, and dreaming of Olivia when the doorbell went. For a second my brain went blank. I glanced at my watch. Who the fuck was ringing my bell at two in the morning? Kids? A drunk at the wrong address? It rang again. I didn’t even think I expected anyone to reply when I said, ‘Yeah?’
‘Dr. Kane,’ she said and I froze. For a few seconds there was silence and then her voice said again, ‘Dr. Kane?’
I came to like a sleepwalker waking up. ‘Yeah, come up,’ I said.
I stood at the closed door and listened to the sound of her heels on the stairs. Then I opened the door. She stood at the second step of the stairs and looked at me with those huge eyes.
‘Come on in then,’ I said softly and she walked up to me. I stood aside to allow her to pass through. She had changed her perfume. It was subtle, expensive, mysterious. Exactly what I would have chosen for her. I closed the door, caught her by the arm, whirled her around and set her against the door. She looked up at me with wide eyes.
‘What are you doing here?’
Her seductive mouth moved. I could feel my blood heating up. My cock stirring, hardening. I stared at her, mesmerized.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.
We stared at each other. I couldn’t sleep either.
‘I can’t,’ I said, my eyes moving from her mouth to her eyes and back to her mouth. Her chest was heaving. ‘Fucking resist you,’ I said, and grabbing both her hands, pinned them over her head.
She opened that plump mouth to say something and I crushed it with mine. She made a strangled sound. I slipped my tongue into her mouth. My free hand found the buckle and the zip at the back of her skirt. I slid my hand across the crotch of her panties.
‘You’re so fucking wet.’
I pushed the material to one side and plunged a finger deep into her pussy.
She moaned and arched her body so her breasts pressed into my chest.
I rammed two fingers in. ‘Is this what you came here for?’
She closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘Yes.’
I took off her top. The little half-cup bra I just pushed down. I bent my head and bit the rosy nipple.
‘Dr. Kane,’ she whimpered.
‘My name is Marlow.’
Her eyes fluttered open. They were dilated and smoky with desire.
I added a third finger into the mix.
She leaned her head back against the door and moaned. I pulled my fingers out and slid my track bottoms down my hips. My cock sprang out hard and ready. I lifted her right leg and draped it around my hips so her sex opened up all swollen and wet and hungry. Her clit was engorged and extended. I pinched the hood, pulled it back and exposed her center, small, white, über sensitive and mine. I wanted to suck it. But not yet. Now I was too riled. Too desperate to be inside her.
I grabbed her right thigh and held it so she could not move and I impaled myself on her. It was urgent and merciless and without warning. She screamed. I didn’t stop. I continued to push myself into her until I was balls deep.
I fucked her so hard her body jerked like a puppet. Watching her utterly powerless as she writhed and groaned and slapped into my body was addictive. I loved to see her in that position. Totally open to me. Vulnerable. Totally dominated. I felt Herculean.
‘Oh fuck,’ I growled.
I could feel my orgasm coming so I reluctantly pulled out of her and jerked off all over her blonde curls. Still panting I looked at my handiwork. Like water droplets caught on a spider’s web the milky white drops were all over her. With my hand I streaked it into her skin and gathering some in my fingers held it a few inches from her mouth.
We stared at each other. Her lips were trembling. She leaned forward and I pulled my fingers back and she leaned farther forward and caught my fingers in her mouth. We stared at each other as she sucked my fingers clean.
‘My turn,’ I said and got down on my knees. I threw her thigh over my shoulder and, burying my face in her pussy, slid my tongue into her and lapped at the dripping walls. She grabbed my shoulders and thrust forward desperately. I moved my head back.
‘That’s right, babe. Ride me,’ I encouraged lustily before plunging my tongue back into her throbbing sex. While I fucking devoured her flesh she rocked her hips on my mouth and teeth until she came with a piercing shriek and a rush of goose bumps.
Chapter 21
Olivia
We went into his bedroom. More like a monk’s cell. Bare walls, a plain double bed, cheap scratchy sheets, a cupboard and two side tables. He sheathed that incredible cock of his and took me while I was on my hands and knees. It was wild and violent and magnificently beautiful. I tried to catch my breath, but our climax sucked us into a vortex of ecstasy. I shuddered uncontrollably. And when it died away my breath was ragged. I fought back sweet tears, but they would not be checked. The carnal smell of our coupling enveloped us like a fog. He touched a tear glimmering on my lashes wonderingly.
‘You’re so beautiful.’
I couldn’t tell him I was sorry he had not deposited his seed in my womb. That it had not coated my insides and grown into something.
I realized it then. He was my journey home.
He pulled out of me. ‘We have to talk,’ he said.
‘No, we don’t. Let it be just sex for a while. I know it will all probably unravel when you tell me whatever it is you are hiding from me, but for now I’m happy with this. I am asking for nothing more than what I have now.’
‘Oh, Olivia. What a mess I have made of this whole thing.’
‘It’s not your fault. I forced myself
on you. And I don’t regret it. Whatever happens I will never regret this.’
He took off his shirt and I saw what I had not noticed the other evening at the office. Located on his fabulously muscular pecs, just over his heart, were two white ink tattoos in the shape of teardrops. They were not beautiful. Not in the least. They reminded me of scars, raised, white and born of pain. I reached out a hand and touched one of them. He flinched, then became still. I looked up at him, my hand hovering in the air. His eyes were deliberately blank.
‘Who are they?’ I asked, but even as the words formed in my throat I already knew.
‘My children.’ He looked down at the tattoos. ‘That’s Roxy and that’s Rick.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about them.’
‘Yes, so am I.’ All the light leached out of his eyes.
‘They were very young, weren’t they?’
‘Yes, Roxy was five and Rick was four.’ And he looked so bleak and wretched I wanted to hold him tight.
‘Oh, Marlow.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It was another lifetime. I’ve learned to live with it now. I’m all right.’ And then he sank onto the bed and, running his hand through his hair, sighed sadly. ‘It’s OK,’ he said again, as if he was not talking to me but comforting himself even though he knew it could never be repaired.
‘Will you tell me about them?’ I asked.
He looked up at me, his beautiful, kind eyes pained. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. Not yet.’
Chapter 22
Marlow
We depart with a thousand regrets in our hearts.
—Omar Khayyam
After Olivia left the next morning I went into the top shelf of my cupboard and brought out the envelope that was there. It was only two years old but it was gray with use. I had read it so many times I almost knew it by heart. Each word burned into my mind and still smoking after all this time. There were four pages to the letter. I opened them. The creases were so ingrained, they were soft and powdery, the ink gone from them.
I stared at the first page.
Her writing: neat, controlled, small and familiar. So familiar. Oh! Maria. I remember she used to write me love notes and put them into the lunchboxes she insisted on making for me. They wouldn’t say much…
I’m wearing no panties. When you come home, come find me, and without saying a word fuck me. xMina
Or it would say…
When you eat these corned beef sandwiches, just remember I thought of you while I was spreading the mustard and I will think of you all day until you return to me and spread my legs. xMina
But she had not left her last letter to be found by me. She had posted it. It arrived a day after the ‘incident’. At that time I was so shocked I read the whole thing twice and could not understand anything.
For days afterwards I had stared at it without any real comprehension. I mean, I understood the meaning of every word and I got each sentence when taken separately, but as a whole, in context: what the fuck was it all about? What the hell was she going on about?
Then I would think of her buying that grenade. I mean, who does that? Who blows themselves up with a grenade? People gas themselves in the privacy of their garage or take sleeping pills or slit their wrists, and the really scary ones launch themselves off buildings, but grenades? Wow! And afterwards, buying all those gas canisters just to make sure that nothing worth saving would come out of her bonfire.
If total annihilation with an audience was her intention she certainly succeeded. I saw it all happen in slow motion: the explosion, red first, then blossoming into orange, the middle turning white, then back to orange and red. Then smoke: thick, black, acrid smoke. I had lain on the ground and watched the car’s doors fly away, the glass shattering outwards and upwards, while all around me fiery debris rained from the sky. Roxy’s shoe was the hard part. The way it landed next to me, charred and heartbreakingly small.
Like a taunt. See, how powerful I am.
I used to stare into the bottom of a glass of whiskey and replay the memory of her, as she was the day before she died, chewing on an apple, laughing, an almost sublime expression on her face, as she watched me playing with the children. How could a woman wearing such an expression be thinking of ending it all the next day?
There had been nothing. Nothing to tell me she was unhappy, upset, or standing on the verge of committing suicide and taking our children with her. It was the most perplexing, shocking thing. Finally, I phoned her best friend.
‘Did you know that Maria thought we were having an affair?’
‘What?’ she had almost shouted down the phone.
‘She thought we were having an affair,’ I repeated.
‘Where did she get that idea from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then why would you think that?’
‘She left a letter.’
‘A letter? Accusing us of having an affair? I can’t believe it. I’d like to see that letter.’
‘No,’ I refused. I didn’t want her to know that Maria had referred to her as that two-faced, long-titted, no nipple, skinny-assed, cock-sucking, cum bucket.
She went silent.
‘Did she seem colder toward you or change in any way?’ I insisted.
‘No. We were best friends. We told each other everything,’ she denied, suspicion creeping into her voice. She was beginning to doubt the existence of the letter. She was like all human beings—she would rather believe a lie than accept that she had been so thoroughly fooled.
We ended the conversation on an uneasy note.
I called her other close friends. Did she say anything to you? The answer was always the same. No. No. No. No. I phoned her brother. He put the phone down on me in disgust.
Often I dreamed of my children. We were in a garden or a schoolroom. There were other children playing there with them. I called to them and they came running to me. I picked them up and held them tightly, relief pouring through my veins.
‘Thank God! Thank God. It was just a nightmare. I dreamed you were both dead.’
‘Like Grandma and Grandad?’ they asked me.
‘Like Grandma and Granddad,’ I told them, laughing and crying at the same.
‘But we are not real, Daddy,’ they told me solemnly. And then I woke up with tears pouring down my face. Wishing I had not woken up. Convinced they were still alive in another dimension.
Weeks later after the furore had died down, and after the hospital foundation had used words like ‘regretfully’, ‘untenable’ and ‘tarnished reputation’, the great thaw arrived. And with it came rage. How I cursed her. Bitch. Fucking stupid cunt.
It was so bad all my breaths became gasps of anger. I had to stop seeing friends. I was seriously at risk of totally, completely, unequivocally and corrosively losing my shit if another one said, ‘God wanted his little angels back so he called them home,’ or some other similar crap.
I wanted to spit at them. ‘Oh right! Is that why he chose to burn them to death? God didn’t do this, you fucking moron!’
During that period I opened the letter often and ended up slamming my fist on my desk so hard I eventually broke the damn thing. I was so furious once I decided to burn her letter in the fireplace, but my hand shook as I tried to throw it in: I couldn’t destroy something I hadn’t yet understood.
Months later I was carefully unfolding her letter and finally trying to understand my part in it. I no longer raged against her or her abusers who had turned her into a monster. The season of guilt had come. It was worse than the rage. Far worse. Oh the guilt. How it ate at my insides! It was all my fault for being so blind and so caught up with my own success that I never saw it. Not once.
Ever seen the way a team of termites can utterly decimate a tree until it is nothing but a shell?
That was what my guilt did to me. I walked around, an empty shell. I walked, I talked, I ate, I worked, but inside I was dead. There was no way to atone for what I had done. Sh
e was gone and she had taken my innocent children with her.
Olivia was gone, but her scent still lingered on my skin. I held the letter in my hand and it felt lighter somehow. Because for the first time I understood.
I held up a page:
When I am gone I will watch you and I will remember us. Our bodies spilled together. The light slanting into the room. The coffee cups with dregs. The croissant crumbs on the plate. One plate. We shared it remember?
Your breath on my skin. Your hand on my breast. Your leg thrown over mine. Your flesh. My flesh. Joined. Stuck. Forever. Forever.
Do you hear me, Dr. big shot Marlow Kane?
Forever. No matter who you touch. Who you fuck with that great, big, dirty cock of yours.
I know what big daddy long dick likes. I know all your secrets.
You think I don’t know how many cunts you have entered. Do they feel as silky as mine? Do they call your name when you are fucking them in the ass?
You like that, don’t you?
You start at the mouth, after a little while you move to the cunt, then when that insatiable cock of yours is nicely coated with pussy slime, you plunder the ass. And then you bring that shitty cock home and put it in my mouth.
You asshole, you! I’m still dripping with your fucking semen.
There was much more, four pages of the same insanely jealous, crude, totally baseless ranting—I was always faithful to her—but I won’t go on. You get the picture. I was a careless, blind fool who never understood that she had loved me with an intensity I did not feel or even guess at. I had loved her, but not the way she had loved me.
Wood only understands what it is to burn when it meets a flame. Olivia was my flame. She made me burn. She made me understand what poor, damaged Maria had felt: that all-consuming passion to possess someone so completely that renders death preferable to not having it. I never had the ability to miss anyone. Until now. Now I missed her the moment she left my presence.
His Frozen Heart Page 45