I gazed down at him for a moment. Water was puddling slowly around him, his boots were caked in mud and the hems of his jeans were ragged where they touched the floor. ‘It’s not like you to be so macho, Phinn.’
He put his glasses back on and looked up at me. His pupils had shrunk back to nearer normal but were still wide, outlined by the deeper black. ‘I know.’ With one smooth movement he stood up. ‘I just needed to know that I could. If I had to, I could.’
I wanted to touch him. To know he was real, not some water-zombie sent to taunt me, no kelpie risen from the deeps. I reached out and laid a hand against his stubbled cheek. ‘Phinn …’ Moved my fingers down to touch his chest. Stopped. ‘Why are you so wet? It’s not raining that hard but you’re soaked to the skin.’
He smiled that smile and I felt my blood press against me. ‘Got the early train, no buses, no taxis, could only get as far as Pickering. Had to walk the rest.’ His hand came up and his fingers cupped mine closer against him until I could feel his heart under that cold, damp T-shirt. It was keeping pace with my pulse.
‘But that’s fifteen miles!’
‘Nine. I came over the fields.’
‘And you didn’t get lost?’
‘There are two ways of looking at that question.’ Phinn took half a step forwards and under my fingers his heart began to gallop. ‘One answer is no, obviously not. And the other …’ He leaned to close the gap between our lips, touching my mouth with his very gently, ‘Is yes.’
The kiss deepened and time stretched. I eased his sodden jacket from his shoulders but wouldn’t go any further. I could sense from his reactions that he wanted to make the running this time, to set the pace. To seduce.
‘Molly.’ He spoke my name against my skin, his breath raising all the hair along my neck. ‘I’m soaked.’
I moved back a fraction to look at him. ‘Yes.’ All my weight felt as though it was in my tongue.
‘Do you know what I need?’ He was smiling down at me with that slightly wicked look in his eyes that I’d seen on the YouTube clip, that look that said he knew what was coming next, and he knew I’d enjoy it.
I took a deep breath and felt the lever move, the switch flick, the pathway change under my feet. ‘You’re the one with the answers now, Phinn. I think you’d better tell me.’
His hands moved, down from where he’d been touching my face, down over my shoulders, brushing down my arms until he took my hands. Linked his fingers through mine and tugged me gently. ‘I need a nice hot bath.’
As though he’d never done anything else, he took the lead. Set the bath running until the room filled with steam, then took his glasses and hooked them, very carefully, over the edge of the sink. ‘Don’t want to break them,’ he said, and the promise in those innocuous words made my legs tremble.
Then he was kissing me again, a fog-ghost in that humid room, almost insubstantial under my hands, but he wouldn’t let me touch him properly, wouldn’t let my fingers find their way under his clothes. Instead he caught my wrists and held them pinned to my sides while his mouth traced lines along my neck and my shoulders and his tongue wrote sentences of fire on my skin.
When he released my hands and stepped back I nearly fell over. ‘Molly.’ He sounded very serious.
I had to calm my breathing just to be able to answer. ‘Yes?’ Even then my voice was high and weedy.
‘I don’t do casual sex. You should know that before we go any further.’
‘Phinn.’
‘It’s important to me. This, everything we do from here on, it means something to me. You mean something to me. I don’t want you to think that it’s all about the sex, it never was, it’s about you and me, Molly, finding out what we want.’ His look held me while his fingers undressed my body, his eyes seeming to reach right inside my head and strip me of all those moments when I’d let myself be undressed by men before. This time I wasn’t letting myself be used, I was letting myself go.
And he made me let go. Made the whole universe burst behind my eyes as he touched me, made my body explode into galaxies of whirling dust clouds and solar flares until I shook and gasped and his gravity pulled me back together. His eyes were all I could see, burning in front of me. ‘Oh, Phinn.’
He scooped me up off the floor, lifted me and placed me carefully into the full bath. ‘I wondered what this would be like,’ he said softly. ‘Never really had the chance to do this seduction thing before, but I think it’s working rather well, don’t you?’
The water lapped at my skin, keeping me warm while he undressed. I watched every move, every second of the unveiling, the body I’d seen naked at least twice but so much more than just a body now. He was gorgeous. So lean, shaped by just enough muscle to define him, long legs and the finest brushing of hair across his chest and down his stomach. I lay back to give him room and he slithered in to lie next to me, our bodies touching, pressed together by the edges of the bath.
‘I am really glad this is a big bath,’ I said, trailing a hand down through the water that sloshed up between us. ‘This would be impossible in one of those hip-bath things.’
Phinn smiled. ‘You think?’ Then his hands lifted my waist, I floated to the surface and discovered that, really, the size of the bath didn’t matter a damn.
Chapter Twenty-One
Phinn woke slowly from dreams of flying. There was a bed, which surprised him slightly, he didn’t really remember much after the bathroom, apart from the sex which seemed to have taken place in most of the rest of the house. ‘Wow. All night, eh?’ He tried to think past the headache. ‘Never done that before.’ Then remembering, a huge out breath. ‘Never done a lot of that before. Didn’t know I had that much imagination.’
They’d stopped for food, or at least slowed down for it. In fact, there was still a slightly squashed grape in his hair, he pulled it out and stared at it, then ate it, turning his head towards his distinct memory of Molly, flat out and tousled, with her face all pink and her eyes very round. ‘You were …’
Gone, leaving nothing but a warm sheet and that scent of strawberries.
The whole of yesterday thundered in and left him shaking, curling around himself in the bed and clutching the duvet as though it could stop that awful plummeting in his heart and that rise of his blood that trumpeted to itself about what a total stud he’d been. Oh God. Please. Please let me wake up … why did I do that? Why did I ever think that anything Link said would be a good idea and why … for the love of the entire Universe … why did I take those tablets?
‘Molly?’ he called, his voice experimental and cracking under the weight of his remorse. ‘Are you there?’
Silence. Without his glasses the room was a series of blurred colours and fuzzy shapes and the glowing face of the bedside clock a collection of lines and angles. He squinted. More angles and lines than he was expecting of a twenty-four hour clock, in fact. All four fields bore a shape … what the hell time was it?
With no one else there and no glasses to hand, Phinn had to pull the clock up almost to the end of his nose in order to resolve the shapes, and when he did he wasn’t sure how he should react. Fifteen twenty seven? Nearly half past three? In the bloody afternoon? He ran his hands through his hair. How much sex did we have? All day yesterday, and then we slept … Wow. I mean, yes, terrible, obviously but she didn’t run off in horror. No, in fact she … More memories, the image of Molly’s face while he made love to her, blurred with need and then relaxing into open-mouthed bliss. Shit. He ran increasingly desperate hands through his hair, the mental images stretching and flexing with the passion they’d shared; the whispered declarations, the brief touches to guide and enhance and …
Oh God. She enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It was … unbelievable. It was soft, it was reciprocal; it was all the obsession and excitement and mutual satisfaction that I always wanted it to be. And her. Molly.
But it was all fake.
So where was she? Careful listening revealed no flushing toilet or running w
ater sounds. No soft footsteps downstairs, or music, or humming. Slowly he peeled back the duvet, wincing slightly at some areas that were more sore than they should be, and padded his way across the floor to the last place he remembered seeing his glasses.
* * *
‘All right, that’s enough walking.’ I stopped, my feet sinking into the riverside mud. Beside us the dark waters bowled along with the sucking, slurping noises of someone eating a difficult boiled sweet, occasionally lapping up over the bank in a cappuccino-curl of froth. ‘If you want to say something, Tim, then say it.’
Tim inclined his head. He’d managed to regain most of his composure today, mostly by putting on a hat so that his bald spot didn’t look so much like a long shot of the rising moon. ‘It’s … difficult,’ he said. ‘Jacqueline asked me to come.’
‘My mother knows you’re here?’ I actually felt a little bit better knowing that. I had been beginning to wonder if Tim was going to work the reverse-affair trick and try to seduce me again, and his overly familiar behaviour hadn’t managed to disabuse me of that idea. ‘All right, so why did you come?’
He stared ahead at the river racing under the narrow arch of the bridge. There wasn’t much clearance now and the darkness of the peaty water running off the moors gave the river the look of bad coffee. ‘You wouldn’t speak to her on the phone, and she … we needed you to know. The cancer is back, Molly.’
My stomach turned. ‘But …’ That terrible time. Diagnosis, me not knowing what to say while my mother kept the stiff expression that she’d had all of my childhood, and then, after she started treatment, after everything seemed to be going well … the betrayal. ‘She was better!’
Tim shook his head. ‘She was in remission, the doctors hoped. We couldn’t talk to you about it, not with, well, everything.’ You wouldn’t listen, ran the subtext. Too busy being selfish, being angry and running off. ‘And now it’s back.’
I felt my feet sink as the world rocked. My mother. She stole my boyfriend. Had an affair with him while I planned our wedding. I looked sideways at Tim. He was frowning slightly and searching with his hands through his coat pockets, a nervous tic of his. My mother. And Tim. And I’d run away, cut my ties, never wanted to see either of them again. But.
‘How is she?’ It must be hard for him too, I thought.
‘Well, chemo and all that, but she’s strong.’ He tipped back on his heels, still staring at that bridge. ‘Yes. She’s strong.’ His voice broke, just a little and for a second the polished shell that was the Tim I’d been engaged to split a fraction and I saw a glimpse of a man I’d never known.
He cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he said again, firmly now as though his conviction was enough to make it so. ‘She’s fighting, but it takes time. Thought you should know,’ he repeated, as though it was important that I appreciated this fact. ‘Thought it was only fair.’
‘What, so that I can worry about her? She didn’t worry about me did she, when she took you away.’
Tim raised his eyebrows. ‘Molly. That whole thing … you and I, getting engaged, it was all a bit of a cock up, wasn’t it? Honestly? We were never really suited, you and I. I wanted … well, I suppose I was flattered really. You were so young, so vibrant, so seductive. And clever. When we won the Anderson … I got carried away by it all. And then, when you introduced me to Jacqueline, she and I just had so much in common …’
‘Well, me for starters.’
‘And then, with the cancer, I realised just how much I truly cared for her. Wanted to be there, to help her through. And I simply never felt that with you, you were always so …’ He seemed to flounder, struggling for the right word. ‘So self-contained. As though you didn’t need anyone, not truly. You liked all the trappings and the accoutrements associated with a relationship, but you were never really bothered about the person that came with it.’
My mother made me like this, I wanted to say. How could I ever care for someone, when she never cared for me? When she treated me like an unwanted impediment to her career?
‘And you must care a little, to have left a phone number,’ Tim went on, still flipping through his pockets, so that the front of his jacket rippled and undulated like a rising tide.
‘That was for emergencies. I never thought you’d track me!’ I heard my voice wobbling and fought to keep it level.
‘I’m a journalist, Molly. It’s what we do.’ Tim sighed. ‘But you seem to have found someone else without too much difficulty, although I can’t say that I liked him very much.’
‘Good. Wouldn’t want you having an affair with him; you don’t get stamps for a full set you know.’
Something inside me was aching, and it wasn’t because of the seventeen hours of nearly non-stop sex. My heart, which had sneakily allowed Phinn inside, was trying to stretch. Trying to make room for another person.
‘She never really loved me,’ I said, almost experimentally. ‘She was always so busy.’
Tim sighed again. ‘Well, of course she was. She was trying to build a career, trying to raise you without help, running a house and studying … she did her best, Molly, that’s all. If you feel she didn’t love you enough or give you enough … she did her best. And you were so totally unexpected, did you know? Jacqueline had … problems, some kind of ovulatory thing, so she didn’t even know she was pregnant until a matter of weeks before you arrived. She never had time to prepare, and there you were.’
And she, aged twenty, had trained, sat exams, worked hard. All with this unexpected baby lurking in the background. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Anyway. Better get back. She worries, you know, when I’m away.’ He turned and began to walk away, his chunky body almost comical in the big wool jacket, like a bad imitation of Paddington Bear.
I gritted my teeth, holding back the memory of his lack of concern for me whenever he’d been on an assignment; his sheer contempt for my anxieties. He’d forgotten it all. Wiped away our relationship as though it had been a fleeting thing, a few quick dates and a few quick romps, not … actually, what had it been? A real thing, or just something I held on to for security in a world where my career was rising faster than I could keep pace with, propelling me from a background where hard work had triumphed over emotional connection?
And then I thought about her. About my mother. Working those long hours into the night, with no company but a sourness-filled child with no empathy, who resented everything. Didn’t she deserve something too? If she and Tim felt just a fraction of how I felt about Phinn, could I really grudge them that, now I’d seen how it could be?
Almost against my will I called after him. ‘Tell her …’ Then I stopped. Words couldn’t do it, they couldn’t fill the gap that ran beneath my relationship with him and with her. Nothing could do anything about the way I felt about my childhood, not now.
Tim turned and squelched back over the grey grass. ‘It was never meant to hurt you, you know,’ he said, and his voice, under the pretention and the officiousness, was gentle. ‘Neither of us wanted to hurt you.’
I looked at him standing there, chubby and bald and so, so not right for me and wondered what I’d been looking at when I’d decided I was in love with him. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. And I hope …’
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t say anything else.
Tim leaned forward and folded me in a damp embrace. ‘I know you’ll do the right thing, Molly.’
Then he released me and walked off without looking back and I watched him until he got behind the wheel of that overpriced car and closed the door with what seemed like a thankful thud. To think I’d once considered being driven around in a car like that as being the epitome of style. And now … now there was a man who cut through me, sliced through the detachment and the self-imposed loneliness. I was in love with a man who gave me the entire galaxy. Wrapped me round with stars and moons and showed me the heavens as though I deserved them.
Phinn.
* * *
With the donning of his glas
ses Phinn felt all the old doubts sweep back through him, as though having the world in focus once more brought it home to him that his place in it was never going to be among the winners. He sat on the end of the bed and put his face in his hands. Last night. Did I really …?
The tattered remnants of a silk scarf, one end still tied to the bedhead, told him that yes, he really had. A riding crop stood in the corner of the room, angled arrogantly towards his hand and he tried to avoid looking at it, shame cascading through him in a hot wash which made the sweat prick under his arms and along his forehead. Oh dear God. I should never have listened to Link.
He’d been someone else last night. The man who’d crashed into Molly’s house yesterday, that hadn’t been him. Doctor Phinn Baxter would have buried himself alive rather than tie a woman to her own bed, wouldn’t even know how to go about using a hairbrush along the contours of bare buttocks to raise cries of pleasure from an unsuspecting throat. I don’t do that. I’m not Link, all leather and machismo like a man who got lost on the way to the rodeo. I’m the quiet one. The gentle one. He sunk his head lower. The wimp. Last night was false pretences on an unimaginable scale.
Unable to sit still with these doubts rushing through him he jumped up and began pacing around the bedroom. Every so often another memory would assault him and he started a kind of ritual of once-around-the-bed-and-groan as each new vision of the past came to him. He resisted the urge to knock his head against the wall to drive them out and instead rested his forehead against the chilly moistness of the window. Condensation ran down, softened the lines of outside almost as if he hadn’t bothered with the glasses; across the road towards where the village green lay in a smudge of greyish green, he could see a figure.
Molly, it had to be. No one else he’d ever seen had hair that seemed to have an independent existence apart from its wearer. Today that hair looked as though it had been to an all-night party and a renewed flush stung at his cheeks as he remembered just a few of the reasons why it might look like that.
How I Wonder What You Are Page 22