The Wall: A Vintage Contemporary Romance

by Thea Harrison

  “Ah, don’t tell me you’re one of those kind of invalids. I can see I’m in for quite a time,” he sighed deeply, and Sara felt an upsurgence of resentment. He was in for quite a time! She was the one who was ill!

  He laid her down carefully, but she still couldn’t quite control her wince. For some odd reason she felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to every part of her body, and then taken a truck to run over what was left. A quick blurry glance showed that he had put her in his bed, and she felt careful hands at her blouse buttons. He disappeared, and came back to draw a nightgown over her head. Her body burned with aching heat, and yet she started to shiver with a bone-clattering chill. With teeth chattering so that she could hardly talk, she tried to tell him just how badly she needed a drink, but she couldn’t seem to get her words out right. Greg apparently understood, though, for he brought her a steaming cup of tea almost immediately. When that didn’t warm her up, her brought her a few filled hot water bottles and tucked them in at her feet. She lay curled up as tightly as she could, shivering and shaking and nearly crying, she was so cold. Her joints hurt so that she needed to move them restlessly to provide relief, yet she could barely stand to uncurl. Greg frowned down at her miserable attitude, then pulled back the covers. At that, she cried out in protest, but she soon saw that he meant to get into bed with her. He drew her near and tucked her icy hands into his open shirt to get them next to his warm skin. She sighed from pleasure at that. Eventually, his body warmth and the hot water bottles thawed her out enough so that her muscles could relax, and she fell asleep, held tightly in his arms, his cheek hard against her hot forehead.

  She opened her eyes much later to find herself alone. She hurt, just ached all over, and her skin felt like a furnace. She was so hot, just intensely burning up, that she threw off the covers with a moan and tried to stand. The cool air hitting her skin felt so good that she went to the window and fumbled to unfasten it, intending to throw it wide open.

  A noise sounded behind her and a deep exasperated voice seemed to boom out in the confines of the room. “My God, I leave you for barely ten minutes and you’re trying to kill yourself!” She could hardly stand the loud noise, and covered her ears with a whimper. “Do you want to catch pneumonia, Sara? Come on, get back in bed and cover up. Please!”

  She turned and faced Greg, with her eyes very bright from unshed tears and her cheeks flushed red from fever. Her hair felt like an iron weight on her neck. “You don’t have to scream at me like that!” she whispered fiercely, clutching at the sides of her aching head as it pounded with the effort of speaking emphatically. “And I’m not going to get back in bed, I’m going to get dressed!”

  Greg eyed her warily, and with some amusement. “You know better than that, Sara. You have a temperature of a hundred and four, and you aren’t going anywhere except back in that bed if I have to tie you down to keep you there!”

  The room was distorted slightly, seeming much bigger than she remembered. It looked like quite a long trip to get anywhere, and she felt like sinking down right where she was. It was too much effort to try for anything else. Greg seemed distorted too. He was bigger, somehow menacing, and he loomed over her, frighteningly close. Sara made a pushing movement with her hands, a futile gesture, and whimpered, “Don’t—don’t come any closer! Please, I don’t have any money with me…oh, God, please…” Strong arms caught her as she wavered and started to fall, and she shrank away fearfully from the support. Where was Greg? He had promised her she would be safe, and here was the intruder again. He was going to kill her!

  She fought weakly, tears streaming down her face, and two hands held her carefully. Why was he being careful with her? Was he going to try and take her somewhere else before killing her? She couldn’t seem to understand.

  And then, strangely enough, her father was there. He didn’t really look like she remembered him, but she knew it was he because he treated her with the same tender care that he always had in the past when she had been ill. He held her in his arms and coaxed her into taking soup little by little. She didn’t want it, and she told him so, but he insisted, and she had always done what her daddy wanted her to. She asked him forlornly why he had to go away when she was only five years old. Didn’t he know that she needed him? At that, he held her close, hugging her to him as if he would never let go, but eventually he did, and stood to leave her. Sara cried bitter, weak tears when he went away. He wasn’t ever coming back. She knew he wasn’t. She was afraid, and she wanted to get her mother’s car and go to look for her daddy like she had before, because she just knew he was out there somewhere. But the effort to raise her head was too much, so she closed her eyes with the promise of trying later.

  Someone else was there suddenly, and she started when cool hands touched her forehead with an impersonal kindness. A dark man lounged against the doorpost, his dark face intent and his eyes on her. The man touching her, examining her, pulled back the covers to see her body for some strange reason, and she shivered from cold at their removal. It didn’t last long, and he was soon tucking her back up again, but all her hoarded body heat was gone now, and she shook from severe chills. Two warm bundles were tucked in with her presently and she huddled to their warmth. The two masculine voices were, as before, abnormally loud. She wished they would go away. It hurt her ears to listen to them.

  “Well, doctor? What do you think? I started to worry when I realised she was delirious, and thought you should have a look.”

  A strange voice answered, “She’s pretty sick, of course, but I don’t really think hospital is necessary just yet. It’s that bad virus that’s going around. It’s a pretty typical case: extremely high fever, aching joints, some delirium, dehydration. Try to get her to take these, and keep forcing as much liquid as you can down her. The danger is, of course, if the fever doesn’t break, in which case you can always call me. Also, like I said, dehydration. She’s burning up all the liquid in her body. The cases that I’ve seen in the hospital have been the ones suffering from dehydration. I don’t think she’ll get to be that bad, though.”

  “Thank you for coming, Doctor,” said Greg, shaking hands with him. “I know you don’t usually make house calls.”

  “Well, I owed you one for the legal advice you gave me some time back, so I’d say we’re about even. Give me a call if you need anything, or if she seems to worsen.”

  At the end of her patience with the booming conversation going on right over her head, Sara snapped petulantly, “I wish you’d stop yelling right by my ears! Don’t you know that I’m a very sick person?” She covered her aching head with a pillow to shut out the mild chuckles that seemed to tear through her eardrums.

  Barry woke her gently, and she rolled over to stare fuzzily at him. “What the hell are you doing here, Barry? How did you know where I was, anyway?”

  “Never mind that, sweetheart,” he said patiently, not sounding like himself at all. “Here, I want you to take this pill for me—it’ll make you feel better. I have something for you to drink, too.”

  She rubbed her eyes; she felt so odd. “I don’t want it, Barry. I don’t want to take drugs, dammit! I can make it without that kind of boost, Greg said so. Go away!”

  He sighed, a sound that was torn between affection and amusement. “Sweetheart, this isn’t just a drug, it’s medicine. It will help you get well again. Please, Sara, take it for me.”

  She just looked at him owlishly, somberly, set her jaw and shook her head. He pleaded with her, argued with her, but to no avail. She absolutely refused to take the pill. Finally she told him furiously, “If you don’t get out of my bedroom, Barry, you’re fired for good, and I mean it! Oh,” and she suddenly crumpled into a little girl again, “why don’t you leave me alone? I’m sleepy, Daddy, and I don’t want it.”

  “Pumpkin, you’ve got to take it. I know you don’t like your medicine, but Daddy has to go to work, and he can’t sit around all day arguing with you about it.”

  “I’m not a pumpkin,” she
protested like she always did, and he answered in the same old way.

  “No, you’re a princess, aren’t you? A princess in disguise, and someday the whole world is going to know how special you really are. But for right now, you’re just a sick little girl, and you have to take your pill.”

  “Will you stay longer, Daddy, if I take it? You won’t go away, will you?” She was having the hardest time focussing her eyes. His face kept blurring and becoming somebody else’s.

  “I’ll stay, sweet—I’ll stay.” And he did, slipping into the bed with her after she had taken the pill and drunk the water. He settled back and drew her into his arms, and she snuggled as close as she could get.

  “Momma died,” she whispered, and his cheek came down on top of her head. “She never stopped missing you, Daddy.”

  “I know, love. She’s happy now, though. Forget it for now. Go to sleep now, Sara.” She did just that, content to be held. She wasn’t alone any more. He would take care of her. Just who he was became confused in her mind and the father ghost faded away into darkness.

  She dozed, woke up occasionally to peer uninterestedly around her, and dozed again. Someone was always there, giving her pills to take and liquids to drink, and he was someone different each time and yet the same person deep down inside. He took her temperature, and wiped her forehead with a cool cloth. He held her hand when she cried from the aching in her limbs, and stroked her restless hot hands until she slept again. It seemed to go on this way for ever.

  Then it started to rain inside, and that was the oddest thing of all, because Sara had never seen it rain in a house before. She lay very still and let the wetness soak into her heated body, sighing as it cooled her and soothed away the burning. She fell into the first deep sleep she’d had in what seemed like a thousand years.

  Greg came in and found her drenched with sweat. Her hair was limp and damp and her nightgown was literally soaked. The sheets were wet also, and he went about the motions of changing both the bed and her. He had to wake her up to get her nightgown off, and at this she protested volubly, but she was soon deep asleep in comparative comfort, curled up into a ball and tucked under clean sheets. Greg breathed a sigh of relief at the breaking of her fever, and dropped his clothes by the bed tiredly, crawling in beside her and drawing her close to his side.

  She murmured once and rolled over to tuck her chin under his and reach for his hand. They slept.

  Chapter Eight

  Sara awoke slowly, stretching luxuriously. It felt incredibly good to stretch without that terrible aching in her joints, as if she were rotting away from the inside out. She turned her head lazily and surveyed Greg’s room with interest. It was tastefully furnished, with rich, dark wood coloured furniture, and light blue carpeting. Come to think of it, she thought, everything in Greg’s house was plush and of the first quality. She liked that. It was nice how her taste and his seemed to coincide so often.

  Greg came through the doorway right then, his eyes smiling down at her when he saw the sanity in her clear eyes. “Hello, madam. Are you feeling any better today?”

  “Lord, much,” she said calmly, sending him a sweet smile in return. “I have this horrible feeling, though, that when I try to stand up I’ll be as weak as a kitten.”

  “You were a very sick little girl,” he told her, sitting down on the bed and offering her a glass of juice. She saw that it was orange juice, and she couldn’t stand orange juice, so she put it on the bedside table.

  “I seem to recall very strange dreams,” she mused, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hands. “Did—do I remember a doctor coming here, or was that an hallucination?”

  “No, that was reality. You were very rude,” he told her sternly, picking up the juice and handing it to her. She put it down again. “You told us to shut up.”

  She laughed. “I remember now. You were practically shouting right in my ear, and the sound literally reverberated through my poor aching head. Was that the fever, or were you insanely yelling back and forth for the sadistic pleasure of seeing my pain?”

  “It was the fever. You seemed sensitive to light too, and I had to keep the curtains closed so you wouldn’t cry all over my pillows… Sara, will you drink this juice?” That last was said impatiently as he tried to thrust the glass into her hand, but she refused it with a shudder.

  “No amount of torture will get me to drink that juice, so you might as well take it back downstairs,” she informed him firmly. “I was sick on orange juice as a child, and I can’t abide the stuff. Do you have anything else? I’m parched as dry as a desert, starving too. Got any steaks?”

  Greg drained off the juice with a shrug. “You get soup and toast for right now, until your stomach has had a chance to get used to food again. You haven’t eaten for at least three days.”

  She ogled him. “Three days! You’ve got to be joking! No? I was sick for three days? Lord, what a shock…I’d just assumed that it had been about twenty-four hours or so…I’ve misplaced three whole days!”

  He retorted whimsically, “Seems like three years to me. I’ve never had the misfortune to encounter a patient as terrible as you before.”

  Sara was feeling a little, weak, so she slid down the pillow gingerly, and gurgled, “So sorry about that. I’ve always been just horrible when I was sick. I remember my father very well; he was the only one when I was very young who could get me to take my medicine. My mom used to get just furious at the way I would meekly take my medicine from him after only a little bit of coaxing when she would spend hours trying to get me to swallow the stuff.”

  Greg was looking at her with an oddly tender expression, as if he was reliving some memory of his own, and she stared at him in puzzlement. “When did your father die, Sara?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I think I was around six years old. He did a lot of travelling in his kind of work, and was gone a lot. One day my mother got a call long-distance. He’d been on a trip across in Europe and the airline was calling her to let her know that the plane had disappeared in the Atlantic. It was never found—I remember very clearly. They searched for a long time, and my mother flew to the East Coast. I stayed with my grandparents and played with their dogs.”

  She shook herself out of the unhappy reminiscence and glared at Greg aggressively. “I want a two-pound steak, medium rare, with five baked potatoes and three heads of lettuce cut in a salad. After that, I want five gallons of wine, assorted carbonated beverages, milk, water, and anything else you might have, except orange juice—yuck! Then for dessert, I want twenty-five glazed doughnuts, with chocolate sprinkles on top…” She giggled as a finger flipped her nose.

  “Soup, toast, and hot tea coming right up,” Greg said firmly, and disappeared. She was left alone to stare at the ceiling thoughtfully. Beowulf came into the room and approached her hesitantly, and she watched him with some interest. He looked as if he were committing a major crime by slinking stealthily up to the side of the bed. Sara clicked her fingers at him, and was rewarded with a hearty lick from his long wet tongue.

  “Ugh, you beast! What’s the matter, boy?” she asked, scratching at his ear gently. “You look like you’re about to be beaten to death!”

  “He should be,” said Greg, as he came back into the bedroom with a tray loaded down with enticingly aromatic somethings. She shifted in bed eagerly as he approached, and fell to with a will. “I told him to stay out of this room while you were sick, because I was afraid that in your delirium he might scare you half to death. But I suppose it’s all right now since you’re in your right mind, more or less.”

  She protested at that, around a mouthful of toast. “I resent that statement, counselor. It holds unsavoury implications, and I just may have to sue you for libel…”

  “In which case, madam, we shouldn’t be holding a private discussion before the court date. I need to consult my attorney, and you should do the same…”

  “Oh, baloney!” she snapped elegantly, and glanced at her tray with some surprise. The toast
was nearly all gone, but she couldn’t finish her soup if her life depended on it, and the tea was nearly untouched. “I seem to have filled up rather quickly after all, Greg. I don’t think I can manage any more—I’m sorry.”

  He touched her cheek. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. It’s understandable. Your stomach has shrunk. I’d have been surprised if you’d been able to handle much more. I’ll just get rid of this tray while you settle down for a nice long nap.”

  He whisked away the tray as she argued, “Greg, I’m not sleepy. I want to get up and do something. My hair needs washing and I feel so sticky all over, it—”

  “No,” she was told firmly, and her eyes took on a mulish expression at the autocratic tone. “You’re too weak, and it’s too soon to get your head wet after the fever. It broke only a few hours ago. Just try to relax, will you? I’ll be downstairs in my study if you need anything. Just holler, I’ll hear you.” He kissed her forehead before leaving, ignoring her resentful expression.

  She thought for some time after he had gone. She had resented his ordering tone of voice very much. Nobody ordered her around! She had come to the place in life where she gave the orders, and if she wanted to take a shower, then she would take a shower. It was a free world after all, and her choice. With that firmly and aggressively worked out in her mind, she pulled back the covers and carefully slid her legs over the side of the bed. She couldn’t resist the impulse to look over her shoulder, and that made her very angry. Why should she be worried at what Greg thought? He didn’t own her.

  Her housecoat was draped over a nearby chair, and she picked it up as she made her way slowly to the bathroom. Funny, how really weak she was, and how the distance to the bathroom seemed suddenly much more than she had first thought. By the time she had made it to the bathroom, she was sweating from the effort, and trembling with exhaustion, but she felt sticky and unclean, and she had it fixed in her mind that she was going to take a shower no matter what. Then she eyed the tub doubtfully. Maybe a bath would be better. And, just in case Greg was very angry, she would lock the door.