Rose-Coloured Love

by Amanda Carpenter

  “No, and that’s all there is to it!” Devan exclaimed, putting her foot down, and bringing to an abrupt halt the children’s expostulations. “I am going by myself. I want some peace and, above all, I want some quiet. There’s no way I’d get either if you two monsters came along. I’ll take you to town some other time. Not today. Definitely not.”

  Janie hung her head, abjectly. “I can be quiet. I’ve got some money I could have shopped with,” she said forlornly. “Even Gary got to go when he went to the dentist. I never get to go anywhere.”

  Gary followed his older sister’s lead. “And I have a dollar,” he said pathetically.

  Devan’s eyes grew harassed. “You think you’re going to sucker me with emotional blackmail,” she accused. “Well, it’s not going to work. Now, for the last time, I said no!”

  Ten minutes later, Devan was carefully backing around Ryan’s parked rented car. She didn’t breathe until she was pulling around its gleaming back bumper. Then she said, irritably, “Gary, if you don’t stop fiddling with that seatbelt and snap it on, I’m going to throw you both out of the car.” She stopped at the end of the driveway until she heard from the back seat a definite snick as the buckle was fastened in place. She nodded, placidly. “That’s better.” Then she pulled out, and started sedately down the road.

  While she drove, Devan brooded from under her levelly held brows at the sunny day. The children’s comfortable bickering floated over the back seat and washed over her and out of the window. She didn’t pay any attention. Her mind was dwelling on that morning’s painful clash with Ryan. She just couldn’t stand being in the house with him; she needed to think, away from the tensions that had dogged her footsteps ever since he had arrived. Already they had had more confrontations than she cared to remember. She was now feeling an overriding desire to experience simple, everyday life, and normal smiles. She wanted to have uncomplicated, shallow interactions with the bookshop assistant, the waitress at the delicatessen, the cashier at the chemist.

  She parked in the street, and then turned to present her most fierce expression to the pair in the back seat of her sister’s car. They looked suitably impressed. Gary even grimaced back. “Now,” said Devan, pleasantly. “You two are going to behave yourselves. You are going to be polite, and say please and thank you to anyone you purchase from. You are going to stick by me. You are not going to run through the stores, and you will not make any bird calls, loud whistles, or otherwise undue noise while we are in public. Got that?”

  They nodded solemnly. Devan smiled. “OK, let’s go.”

  She took them to the bookshop first, figuring that they would behave better at the start than later on, and she was right. Both Janie and Gary browsed quietly while Devan looked over the new publications shelf. She felt a warm surge of affection for the two as she looked over the shelf to observe them reading in the funny card section. Janie was helping Gary with the words that were too big for him, and their heads, bent together, gleamed gold and red. Devan gathered the books she wanted to buy under her arm and made for the cashier. When the children joined her, she looked down. Janie had picked up a book, an enamelled brooch, and a chocolate bar, while Gary was clutching both a chocolate bar and a Snoopy pencil. It brought an involuntary smile to her face.

  “How much money did you say you had?” she asked Gary. He dug out of his pocket a handful of change and presented it as evidence. They counted it over together while they waited in line, and Devan raised her brows. “You do realise that you don’t have enough for the sales tax?”

  He looked crestfallen. Janie said, defensive of her arithmetic as she had helped him pick his purchases, “He must have a hole in his pocket, ’cause he had a dollar twenty when we left the house.”

  Devan sent a quick glance down Gary’s patched and battered blue jeans and could well believe it. “How much do you have?” she asked her niece.

  “Five dollars.”

  “I see.” The customer ahead of them was just paying, so she hurried to say, “Look, we’re going to look around some more. If you’ll put away the chocolate, I’ll buy you two some ice-cream a little later. Then you can look around a bit before you decide on what you want to buy. If you still want these things, we’ll come back for them, all right?”

  “Yeah!” They scrambled to put their purchases back where they’d found them while Devan paid for her books. Then she made Gary hand over his money so that he wouldn’t lose any more, and they trooped over to the drugstore.

  Devan brooded over an expensive shampoo and hair conditioner, and Janie found an enamelled brooch that was much cheaper. But of the three, Gary was the one to lose his heart totally, to a Luke Skywalker Jedi black plastic kite over which he mooned despairingly, for it cost three ninety-five. Devan watched as his stubby little hands touched at the plastic wrapping one more time before sliding it back on the rack, and she couldn’t take it. And so it was that, five minutes later, the three of them were walking out of the store and Gary was the most ecstatic, his fine blond hair positively vibrating with delight.

  He skipped to catch up with his aunt. “Can I put it together now?”

  “No, Gary. It’ll be too big to carry around. Just wait until we get home and I’ll help you assemble it.”

  “Oh, please! I’ll sit in the car with it while you two go to other stores,” he offered magnanimously.

  “No, Gary! You’d get the string tangled up, and the plastic might get holes in it. You’d better wait until we get home. There’s nowhere to fly it here, anyway.” Devan lifted her head to the fresh breeze which was playing with her hair. She waited for him to argue, but he subsided rather amazingly, so she smiled, pleased.

  After they had toured the only department store in town, Janie went back to buy her book. They went next to the delicatessen, which also sold ice-cream cones and, after buying for the children, Devan ordered herself a lemonade. Then the three went to a booth to enjoy their treat. Janie had put on her brooch and was continuously twisting to see what it looked like, and Gary busied himself with pushing his ice-cream scoops into the hollowed cone, with the result that his face became smeared with chocolate. Devan was sitting beside Janie on the outside of the booth, and she swung her legs idly against the black and white tiled floor. As she sipped at her tart, cold drink, she stared at the scarred tiling rather distantly. The rumble of an approaching vehicle sent her preoccupied gaze to the window, and she watched as their postman whizzed by in his ancient, battered truck. She pushed her glossy black hair from her face, and felt the heat of her sun-warmed skin.

  A shiver ran through her body convulsively. Her raw sobbing from earlier, and Ryan’s urgent, physical response. Her hand went to her cheek in wonder, remembering how he had shocked her, and how the shock had been like a steadying slap in the face. The remembrance made her feel acutely uncomfortable, for at the time it had not been a sexual overture, but now, in retrospect, she could recall his hands gripping her, his hard mouth and body, the way he had surrounded and overwhelmed her. She shivered again, and felt an unexpected wave of fierce hunger in her body. She was hungry, hungry to know and experience her own sexuality again, hungry for the give and take of lovemaking, hungry for caresses and murmurings low in her ear, hungry for body rhythms and sweating passion.

  Hungry.

  Somebody asked her something, and she shook free of her acutely uncomfortable train of thought. She found that she had been churning at her drink with her straw without realising it, and she looked at Gary with some wryness as he patiently repeated his question. “Yes, and while you’re in the restroom, wash that face of yours! I can hardly tell who’s underneath all that ice-cream!”

  He slid from his seat and, still clutching his unassembled kite, edged around some people and made for the back of the small restaurant. Janie had finished her ice-cream and was busy looking at her book. Devan watched her for some time in a vague, thoughtful way. She felt again that stirring of her dormant sexuality, and was deeply disturbed. She heaved a sigh and wa
s barely aware of it coming out as a groan. No. This couldn’t, shouldn’t be happening to her. She wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared. Ryan was right. He could see so much of her, so accurately. She was a creature of intensity and emotion, and when she felt, she felt deeply. This dawning of physical awareness couldn’t happen, not between her and Ryan. He had the potential of seeing too deeply into her, and if she gave in to her feelings, she could be lost for ever.

  Her hand clenched into a fist as it lay on the cool table surface. She knew instinctively that she might have the power to hurt him, that keenly intelligent, sensitive, forceful man. She knew that he wasn’t looking for the kind of relationship she had suddenly, vividly imagined between them. He was looking to help her as a friend, an editor, one caring human being to another. She shouldn’t want even that.

  But his simple, nagging concern had touched her deeper than anything else had touched her for a longtime. His careful treatment of her was making her stealthily, sneakily grateful. His persistence was beginning to wear at her, as her breakdown into tears that very morning had revealed. His stubborn faith was weighing her down with the burden of another’s expectations—useless, pressuring expectations. She knew she couldn’t begin to give him what he wanted in the first place, so she had no right to expect him to give her any more of himself.

  After a time, she came to herself and the realisation that her drink was now nothing more than a melted dilution of ice and weak lemonade. She pushed it away with a grimace, and looked around. Janie was absorbedly reading. Gary was nowhere to be seen.

  Devan turned and looked up, then down, the aisle. She couldn’t see her nephew’s blond head anywhere. She turned and nudged her niece, “Janie.” Janie grunted. “Janie! Have you seen Gary come out of the men’s restroom?”

  Janie’s freckled face screwed into a brief frown, and she looked around. Then she went back to her book with supreme indifference. “Nope.”

  Devan began to feel alarmed. She slid from the booth, told Janie to stay put, and made her way to the back of the restaurant. No Gary in sight. She found the men’s toilet and knocked, tentatively. When nobody answered, she pushed the door open gingerly. A man was standing just in front of the sink, zipping up his trousers, and he looked up with a startled, angry expression. Devan went scarlet, and ducked out again. She called through the door, “Is there a blond boy inside, about six years old?”

  The door was yanked open; it was the man, now looking quite amused, which made her redden even more. “Sorry, lady,” he said, and passed her by.

  The man’s response made her forget her embarrassment, and she looked around her in real bafflement, and alarm. There was no way to exit from the back of the small restaurant. Surely that would mean it would be impossible for anyone to take Gary without her knowledge. Her eyes suddenly narrowed. She had been so preoccupied, and Janie had been quite intent on her reading. It would have been impossible for someone to take a protesting Gary past her, but it wouldn’t have been impossible for Gary to sneak silently past. And he had been clutching his kite.

  She started to head grimly back to the booth, intending to get Janie and go and search for her brat of a nephew, when something flashed by the huge picture windows of the delicatessen and made her stop stock still in surprise.

  How Gary had managed to put the kite together without help was beyond her, but that he had was more than apparent as he streaked by with it fluttering, huge and black behind him. Her open mouth shut with a furious and audible snap. “Janie!” she barked, making the girl jump a mile. “Get your stuff. We’re going.”

  Devan flew out of the door and turned sharply in the direction she’d seen Gary sprinting. As soon as she caught sight of the kite, which looked like a giant black moth, she roared for Gary to stop if he valued his life, and she sprinted down the pavement.

  Gary had been flying the kite on a very short lead, but when he heard his aunt’s wrathful voice, he promptly dropped the ball of twine, which rolled along the ground. The day had been windy in gusty spurts, and the kite suddenly shot up, the string slipping completely from his lax hands. Devan watched as he scrambled after it, but the rolling, bouncing ball of twine managed to elude him. She was gaining on him, but not fast enough, as the wind took the kite and blew it right into one of the town’s four traffic lights. The string tangled in the crossbar which held the swinging lights, and the kite rose in altitude, flying twenty feet above the street like a flag. The twine rolled merrily along, right into the path of an oncoming car, which ran right over it. Gary had skidded to a halt at the street and was looking on, horrified at the fate of his beloved kite. Devan caught up with him just as the string snagged on the passing car’s front bumper. They both held their breath as the line pulled taut, and then the kite was yanked free of the pole. Janie then joined them both, in time to watch with the other two as the car, the unsuspecting driver, and the kite flying along behind disappeared in the distance. After staring from her fascinated, open-mouthed nephew to the black fluttering speck in the distance, Devan’s anger suddenly evaporated, and she threw back her head to laugh until she cried.

  It took careful negotiation to pull around Ryan’s rented car, but Devan managed that with more ease than she had managed to back out. The dilapidated garage door was still left open, so she drew smoothly in and switched off the engine. Total silence reigned in the car. “Right,” she said, sternly, and opened her door. “Come on, you two.”

  Janie and Gary followed along behind her, Gary’s steps lagging quite noticeably. They trooped in the back door and found Helen serenely cleaning out the refrigerator. She looked up with a smile as they entered. “How’d everything go?” she asked, glancing to Devan, who stood in eloquent silence. Helen’s face then changed, and she stood to brush off her knees. “All right, what happened?”

  Devan reached back and grabbed Gary’s shoulder as he started to slink away. She thrust her nephew forward, and said grimly, though her eyes were twinkling, “I think he should be the one to tell you.”

  Gary swallowed and said hollowly, “All of it?”

  “All of it.” Devan headed for her library with her purchases, longing for peace. “And Janie, you make sure he tells the truth.” She stopped at the doorway, and turned. “And I’ll tell you this,” she said succinctly. “Never again will I take you horrible brats anywhere.”

  “That’s what you said the last time,” said Janie.

  Devan’s lips twitched before she pulled them into severity. “This time,” she stated with dignity, “I really mean it.”

  She went to the privacy of her library and sank into her armchair with a heartfelt sigh. Much as she acted the part of a disapproving aunt, everyone knew it to be an act, for she tremendously enjoyed her niece and nephew. But they were exhausting, and she was feeling distinctly limp. After a bit, she drew out her new books and looked them over with interest. Then she made room for them on her shelves.

  She wondered where Ryan was, but didn’t especially want to backtrack to the kitchen to ask Helen, as she rather suspected that Gary’s crimes were still being judged, and punishment for his disobedience being meted out. She headed for the stairs, intending to put her bag away in her room. Paris greeted her, stretched across the bottom stair, and she bent to pat his head before stepping over him. As she reached the first floor, she heard nothing but silence. All the lights were off in the light of day, and she glanced into the open door of the guest room.

  Then she stopped. A dark form was stretched out, fully clothed, on the top of the bedcovers. Her fingers loosened on the strap of her bag and let it slide gently to the floor by the door as she looked at Ryan. The sight of him drew her footsteps, slow and quiet and reluctant. She stood by the bed, looking down. He was big, even lying down, his long legs stretched comfortably out, one arm flexed back, the hand tucked under his pillow. His head was turned away from her, his face smoothed, his well-cut hair tousled. Big, and solid, and definitely masculine, from the line of his hips and the length of his legs to the
bulk and power of his shoulders and chest. She noted that he was freshly dressed, and that the shadow of his beard was shaved clean. His hair fell forward on his temple, and she saw her hand go out very carefully. The way he had held her that morning, tight and bruisingly, for he had cared about her hurting. The way he had held her.

  Her fingers very lightly touched at his temple, feeling the warm skin and hair, and then she gently brushed the hair back. And without warning, he turned to look silently up at her.

  For he wasn’t asleep.

  Her hand jerked back as if burned, her face flooding with an appalled realisation, even as his own came vividly alive, his light eyes leaping. For he wasn’t asleep when she had thought he was, and everything had been in her face in that one instant: the regret, the uncertainty, the naked yearning and new flooding tenderness.

  Naked.

  Her face settled into stony lines in rejection of both her own feelings and his swift dawn of understanding, and she stepped back, turning away. “When do you go back?” she asked, a deliberate effort to make him remember the transient position he held in her life, and the fact that he would soon be leaving.

  “I took two weeks,” he said, shifting on the bed. He stood up.

  His reply could have meant anything. It wasn’t necessarily a direct response to her question, she realised, but she couldn’t stay to think of it, as she heard his light footsteps coming her way. She panicked as she thought, an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, of how unguarded her face had been to his penetrating gaze. She bolted for the door, and knew even as she did it that she had reacted in the most foolish way possible, for she already knew that he was quicker, stronger, and he wasn’t about to let her get away. And sure enough, he had hold of her and dragged her around to face him.