I bit my lip to stop myself touching him. He won’t make the first move – but if I do, then I’ll always wonder whether I forced him into something.
‘Your wife said some terrible things to you. It’s not surprising that you’re questioning everything now, I suppose. But you are a fabulous guy, Phinn. You’re intelligent, wow, yes, I don’t have to tell you that, incredibly intelligent. You’re sensitive and funny and sweet and—’
‘And nice guys finish last. Yeah, I know.’
‘I was going to say, and you’re amazingly attractive, actually.’
‘How can I be? I’m the original ten-stone weakling. In glasses. There’s more muscle on a biology wall chart than on me.’
‘Are you angling for a compliment, Doctor Baxter?’
‘What, another one? No, don’t worry about me, Molly, I know my limitations. And, as a friend, I have to say, thank you. Thank you for being honest, for making me feel – oh, I dunno, less of a freak.’ And he straightened his legs to raise up onto his knees, leaned forward, and kissed me.
Outside the wind howled like a cheated wolf.
Chapter Eighteen
When Phinn woke up he found Molly’s head resting on his chest. They’d managed to make the sleeping bag fit both of them by lying on their coats and using it as a glorified duvet, but this had meant they’d had to squeeze up so tightly together that trying to get comfortable had been a little bit like a dry humping session.
Her hair smelled of strawberries. It was all he could focus on, the sweet fruity smell that made him think of summer and also, incidentally, brought to mind the horrible humiliation of sports days but that wasn’t her fault. He shifted his weight, uncomfortably aware of pins and needles in the arm that Molly was lying on and that he really needed a pee, but loving the feeling of having her so close that he could feel the gentle snores she exhaled into his shirt.
And he’d kissed her. Properly this time, not a fleeting peck on the cheek. A full-on-the-lips kiss that had gone on for longer than simple gratitude dictated, that had softened her mouth under his until he’d felt the light pressure of her tongue. A kiss that had aroused him to the point that he’d had to move back and break contact so that she wouldn’t notice his groin hardening against her.
And now, here he was, waking up with her. Both of them still dressed and his groin still … yep, still hard. Very, very carefully he slid his arm out from underneath Molly’s shoulders, receiving another brush-past of her berry-hair as she muttered and settled deeper into him, nestling her face against his ribs.
He wondered how the knocking of his heart hadn’t woken her. It was leaping up and down and trying to call attention to itself like an under-exercised Golden Retriever inside his chest, so filled with need and want and longing that was only partially soothed by having the object of its affections so physically close. He felt … yes, purged was the only word that fitted. Last night’s very … unusual outburst, so unlike him, had left his mind feeling cleansed. No, not cleansed. In fact, quite a lot dirtier than usual. Phinn twisted his lips to stop himself swearing aloud. Okay, it would have ruined everything if he’d pushed it last night. It would have spoiled their friendship; all the cosy calling round and eating biscuits would have been ended in an explosion that would have made the Big Bang look like a soggy party popper. And maybe she’d have despised him now, looked on him as just another one of those asshole men who directed her life for her, told her where to go and who to talk to.
But sometimes he hated himself for being a gentleman.
Unable to resist, he moved forward, dropped a quiet kiss on her sleeping head and let himself relax for a second into the fantasy that she was his. Sleeping with him, laughing with him, giving him a reason to come home. An anchor in the increasingly unstable seas that theoretical physics was becoming. And they’d live at Howe End – only with heating and more furniture – she’d write and he’d commute to London for filming; they’d snuggle up together on the putative sofa and she’d giggle at his TV persona in its sharp suits and trendy shirts.
Yeah, right. She won’t want that, will she? She’s hiding here from the pain of rejection, the last thing she needs is to get involved with someone whose idea of a happy future sounds like something out of the nineteen forties. She’s used to men who excite her, dynamic men with drive and … all those other things Real Men have.
Phinn was surprised at the sheer physicality of the pain. Suze leaving, yeah, that had hurt but it had been tempered with huge amounts of relief. The marriage may have failed but with its passing he’d lost that confused feeling, the awful sensation that he wasn’t quite keeping up with what was expected of him. Her return had made him happy for a while, she’d changed a little and become softer, more gentle … pregnancy hormones obviously had agreed with her, even if the whole idea of having a baby hadn’t. But then … Had he really been such a pathetic specimen of humanity? He shook his head quickly and, disturbed, Molly gave a sigh which quietened him to almost statue-like stillness.
Don’t wake up. Not yet. Let me lie in this fantasy world for a bit longer. Where I’m in charge of my own destiny and you’re not just sleeping in my arms wrapped in seventeen layers of wool but naked, sated. Happy.
The thoughts of her naked and sexually satisfied drew his attention back to his groin and the knowledge that he really, seriously needed to pee.
* * *
I woke up to a cold foot and a gradual realisation that I was alone. Next to me, where he’d lain, the cover was still warm but there was no sign of Phinn. I gave my hair a quick tidy with my hands and made a furtive check on my cheeks for dribble, knocked the sleep from my eyes and sat up. ‘Phinn?’
The tent flap waved in reply but nothing else moved. The air coming in was chilly but had lost the diamond-blade effect it’d had last night, so I eased myself out from underneath the down-filled sleeping bag.
The previous evening played on my mind. His kiss had, by several orders of magnitude, outdistanced the polite cheek kiss and gone right into the territory of preceding-sex, but he’d moved away just as I’d been about to touch him. Backed off and cleared his throat, changed the subject away from anything personal and made me talk about my cookery lessons, prompted, I think, by the setting concrete nature of the camping food. And I hadn’t dared do anything, although every instinct told me that he wanted me. The way his eyes had become unfocused, the way his hands had moved across my shoulders as though unwilling to let go, the quickening of his breathing – it had all said ‘this is going to end in sex’.
And now I was, to put it mildly, a bit cheesed off.
‘Phinn?’ I burst out of the tent entrance and found him standing a few yards away. The ground was covered with a sprinkling of thawing snow and the air was unnaturally quiet. ‘Why are you out here?’
‘Ssshhh.’ Phinn waved a hand at me. ‘Stand still.’
‘What?’
‘Look up.’ His voice was hushed, almost awed. ‘It’s the lights. You can hardly see them in the daylight, but they’re there.’
I looked. High above us, in the sparkling blue of the clear air, hung a sequence of lights so faint that they looked like facets of diamonds, mere distant winks and sparks. ‘In the daytime?’ I breathed, copying his low tones. ‘Do you think they were there all night?’
Phinn tipped his head right back to look directly overhead. ‘Dunno. Maybe.’
‘Do you want me to get the camera?’
A shake of the head. ‘They are so beautiful. You know, I don’t think I really appreciated that before. What the hell are you, eh? If you’re earthlights then we must be in for one hell of an earthquake.’ His gaze dropped from the heavens and settled on me. ‘Molly, last night—’
‘Phinn, look—’
‘No, let me finish.’
‘I really should go first.’
‘Last night, when I kissed you. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of me, that’s all.’ He spoke quickly, trying to beat me to it. ‘I don’t do that
kind of thing, like I said, I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t know why I … what is it?’
‘Please. If we’re going to have this discussion, can we have it when you’ve done up your fly?’
‘Oh hell.’ He turned away and fumbled with his zip for a moment. ‘Sorry! Sorry about that. I’m a bit … did I wake you?’
‘No, it’s fine. At least it’s stopped snowing.’
Phinn looked around him as though noticing the world for the first time. ‘It’s so amazing. Is that Riverdale down there?’
‘Yes. You can just see Caro’s fields from here.’
‘Can you see my house?’
‘Howe End, you mean?’
He gave me a quick glance. ‘Well, if you can see Bristol I think you just broke a world record. Yes, Molly, Howe End.’
I pointed and then waggled my hand at the end of my arm. ‘It’s sort of round the corner. You can just see the chimney, kind of. Is it your house then?’
Phinn shielded his eyes with one hand from the glare of the newly risen sun, which was catching the snow and glittering and glimmering like some kind of fairy rave. ‘Well, Uncle Peter left it to me in his will. He was my mother’s brother, not that you’d ever have known it, over-intellectualised neurotic that she is.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to make love to you last night, Molly, but I was scared. I don’t want to repeat the experience I had with Suze, falling in love with someone only to end up terrified. And that’s what it would be for me, y’see.’ He turned back to face me and his eyes were huge. ‘I’m too emotional to go down the casual sex route.’
I inwardly cursed the woman that had made him like this, so self-doubting and afraid. ‘I really like you, Phinn. I mean, seriously.’ Several yards of snowy moorland separated us, it felt wrong half-calling sentiments like that, so I moved a little closer. ‘You are so … so … different.’
‘Yeah. And there’s the problem. Where I come from, that’s not different, it’s weird. I’m odd, Molly, even odder than your average physicist, which is saying something. I feel things too much.’
I thought of Tim and his offhand reactions to my fears for his life. ‘Better than not feeling at all.’
‘Maybe. But it makes me – well, half my department thinks I’m gay, put it that way. Look, there’s one last thing you need to know about me and Suze and that night she … She was standing there, screaming things at me. Terrible, awful things about how I was more like a half-set custard than a man, and I—’ He stopped. Hid his face in his hands. I could see the clouds of his breath strained through his fingers.
‘Phinn, it’s okay.’ My heart belted my chest, squeezing me hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. God, this man.
‘No, it’s not. Listen. This is the kind of man I am, this is how pathetic I am. Suze was throwing all this at me, and do you know what I said?’ His words ended half-choked. ‘I told her that if she stayed I’d bring up the baby as if it was mine. That no one ever needed to know what had happened, that we’d carry on as before. She could even go back to work, I’d work from home, look after it. That is how desperate I was, Molly, to keep my home going. I was prepared to take on another man’s child just so that I’d have a home. Something solid, something to hold on to.’
The cold was nothing now. All that existed in the whole wide universe was this man, with his self-doubt and his self-loathing, not seeing that his offer had been the single greatest sacrifice he could have made.
‘You’d have done it? Pretended the baby was yours and …’ I was about to tell him how I really felt about his wife, about the woman that had told him such lies about himself that they’d stained him soul-deep. But then I stopped myself. He’d loved her once. It wasn’t up to me to tell him what he already knew in his heart; that she’d been confused and angry and let down and that she’d taken it all out on him.
He shrugged, and the shrug took in the sky, the earth, everything. ‘That is the kind of spineless guy I am. You needed to know that. To stop me making the ultimate fool of myself by stepping into something new, something with you. I’m sorry, Molly, really I am. I behaved badly last night.’
He was working so hard to hold on to the shreds of his dignity that when he turned away from me and started walking I didn’t have the heart to stop him. I watched him search uncertainly for the path in the newly-melting snow, then set his shoulders and head down over the lip of moorland towards Riverdale and as soon as he was out of sight I flipped the tent down.
It wasn’t his fault that I knew about tents – writing about outdoor stuff in Miles To Go meant I’d had more experience than an outward bound instructor at putting these things up. It’s not your fault, Phinn. You’re sweet and gentle, and nobody should ever have made you feel less of a man for being kind.
I rolled the tent back into its carrier, then sat back into the snow, wondering about Tim. About all my previous boyfriends, who’d been cast in the role of alpha male to my cutesy girlie act. Had they wanted it to be like that? Maybe, just maybe they might have appreciated me being in charge sometimes. Or had I deliberately chosen men who would let me get away with it?
Phinn was so different. But maybe I was ready for that now.
I trailed him all the way down into Riverdale and caught up with him on the bridge, where he was staring with a shocked look on his face down into the racing waters, as though he was terrified but dared not look away.
‘Snow’s thawing, that’s why the river is so high,’ I said, being as matter-of-fact as I knew how. ‘It’s all coming down off the high moors.’
Phinn just jerked his chin at me in acknowledgement. He looked haunted, with the newly emerged stubble breaking out on his chin again and he’d lost that glossy, high-performance polish that London had given him to a kind of dark, inward-looking depth and silence. It was like walking down the road with night.
‘I’ll make some coffee.’ I went to turn up the road and walk towards my cottage, but he caught my arm and stopped me.
‘I don’t think … maybe it’s best if we don’t. I’m going to London, I’ll sell Howe End and the fees from the programme will pay me to—’
My whole body chilled and prickled as though a thunderstorm was about to break. ‘You’re going? Phinn?’
‘It’s for the best. I can’t … you make me want things, Molly. Things that I’m not fit to have.’
I stared up into the war zone that his face had become. His eyes wanted me, they held a heat and a promise that, if things had been different, he’d have been dynamite in bed, with all those repressed emotions pouring out and me there to receive them. But his brain, his mind, was telling him that – what, he didn’t deserve me?
‘This is …’ I was about to say ‘stupid’ but bit the word back, along with the urge to wrap myself around him. It might make me feel better, he might even stay for a while, but it wouldn’t help him. Wouldn’t give him back the self-respect he’d had shot down in flames, it would just delay the inevitable. ‘Sad,’ I finished. ‘And what about the lights? Are you going to leave me alone with them?’
He didn’t return my smile. ‘I have to. I’m sorry.’ And then he turned on his booted heel and walked away from me over the bridge, without looking back.
I watched him all the way to the Howe End drive, where he disappeared into the gap between the flowering currant bushes. Then I waited for a ridiculously long time in case he changed his mind, waiting to see his lanky figure amble back out onto the road again, hands in pockets and mind elsewhere. But he didn’t. Nothing stirred in the village at all, until Caro rode around the corner out of her yard on China, who shied quite dramatically at seeing me standing in the middle of the Green.
There was a moment’s awkwardness, and then the Caro I’d known since I arrived rushed to the fore. ‘Molly? Are you all right?’
I wanted to be cool. To ask her how she dared pretend that she cared, after what she’d said about my mother. But the truth was that I needed her. I needed that steady presence in my life, making up for
the parental one I’d never had, even if she didn’t always understand why I did what I did. It was Caro, she wasn’t my mother, and she didn’t come with the background layer of resentment and disinterest.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I will be fine, I’m just a bit …’ I sniffed hard and blinked harder. ‘Yes, fine. Phinn is … he’s going to London. I don’t think he’s coming back.’
Caro walked her horse over to me and slithered down to the grass. ‘I did warn you about Doctor Sexy. Not the kind you muck about with.’ She looped the reins over her arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with her back to me, fussing with China’s forelock. ‘About yesterday. I stepped over the line and I have no right to tell you how to feel about your own mother, Moll, of course I don’t. Especially after …’ She coughed and rubbed the mare’s nose. ‘After what they did to you. It was a shock. I never thought …’ Her hand hesitated on the pink muzzle, as though the softness of the horse’s lips made her think of something else. ‘You should have told me.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I should have.’ I wiped both hands over my face. ‘I’m sorry too, Caro. I felt stupid, that’s why. Stupid for trusting Tim, for believing the things he said and for letting it happen. She … my mother …’ I remembered her words about her own mother, and tailed off. ‘And now I’ve lost Phinn too.’
‘Maybe not. I mean, he really seems to like you a lot and London is a big place with not much to recommend it.’
I half-smiled. ‘I like him a lot too.’
‘Well, there you go then.’ She rested her cheek for a moment along China’s grey face. ‘If anyone can persuade him to stay, it’s you.’
How I Wonder What You Are Page 19