Rose-Coloured Love

by Amanda Carpenter

  She gave it another shot. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, her face, body, voice quite cold.

  He didn’t even bother to respond, his entire body tight with something, his light eyes intent on her expression, her lips. And it scared her half to death, for he had indeed read the yearnings in her expression correctly, and that intentness had sexuality dark at its back, and determination. He let out his breath slowly, carefully, and then took another in.

  And dropped his mouth on her like a stone: hard, crushing, brooking none of her resistance or her rejection, her repelling manner. He did it with a silent concentration that was completely unnerving, because he was doing it as though he wanted nothing more than to do it, to move his lips roughly on hers in an effort to penetrate deep, hauling her close against him.

  It wasn’t at all like that morning had been. It was worse, it was terrible, it was far better than that morning had been. It was him pushing between her lips, it was her, opening with a sudden shudder, kissing him back. It was his sharp intake of breath at her response as she gave in and slid her hands up the bulk of his upper arms to sink her fingers deep into his hair as he bent her back.

  And he was swamping her, overwhelming, making her lose her reason. This time it was she who said, pleadingly, “Stop!” as she dragged her mouth away from him.

  Of course he didn’t listen; why should he, when she had forgotten to make her hands loosen from his hair, when she was still holding him urgently? His head angled down as he bent her back further, and he nuzzled underneath her hair to kiss her neck, and then to suck gently at the pulse beating at her ear.

  She surprised herself as much as he when she wrenched away. She nearly fell as she tripped when she left the enclosing circle of his arms, but she caught herself up, breathing heavily. She raised her hands to push her hair off her hot forehead, and her fingers clenched. She was going crazy, crazy to have lost her resolution so quickly and so easily. Don’t get involved with him; don’t get near.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin when his arms came underneath hers, wrapping her close to him again, his chest against her back, his hands flat on her slim ribcage. His hips against her buttocks. Heat coursed through her, and she cursed at it viciously, and then Ryan said in her ear softly, his warm breath tickling, “I think I’m now beginning to understand. It’s not what, but who. It’s not something that happened to you, but someone who hurt you. That’s the beginning of it, isn’t it, when you broke down and couldn’t write? That’s why you leap like a scalded cat whenever I try to get near, to get beneath that resistant façade you erect. What did he do to you? Who is he?”

  Tension had quivered through her in many layers, physical and mental, and, when he pressed a featherlight kiss to the sensitive tip of her ear, it snapped, making her sag against his chest, her head falling sideways to his shoulder. He bent further and she felt lips again on her exposed neck. She shrank from it. “Don’t!”

  “Why?” he muttered, biting her skin in a delicate nip, making her shake her head violently. “You’re starved for simple human contact, and I do so want to touch you—”

  “Stop it!” The words came out of her in a hiss as she dragged away, knowing bitterly all the while that it was only because he chose to let her go. She whirled to face him, her body trembling, her face flushed hot. “Don’t you touch me again, do you hear? Don’t you touch me again!”

  “Hiya,” said Janie conversationally from the open doorway. Devan leapt as though struck, and spun to the doorway, the expression in her eyes blinded. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. What’s up? Wanna play a game?”

  Devan tried desperately to get hold of her racing, pounding pulse and breath, realising by Janie’s calm demeanour that the girl hadn’t really grasped the implications of the tension that vibrated between herself and Ryan. “No,” she said then, shortly, amazed to hear the unsteadiness in her voice. She shot a glance to Ryan. “No, I don’t want to play any game.”

  His lids came down over his light eyes, making him seem lazy and insolent. He studied her almost dispassionately, and she turned and stalked from his room, making for hers as fast as she could. Then—and it would have unsettled her very much indeed had she seen it—he smiled.

  Chapter Seven

  Devan rushed inside her room and both shut and locked the door. Then she fell on to her bed and would have wept a storm, except that she was too stunned and frightened of both herself and of him, and of everything that was pulsing to painful life inside of her. This couldn’t be allowed. She had to get rid of him and count herself lucky to have done it.

  She pushed herself off her bed with the force of her teeming, racing thoughts, and then stumbled to her cupboard to draw out her electric typewriter. She dragged it to the door, which she unlocked clumsily, and she clumped down the stairs with it. At the dining room table, she hoisted it up, took the typewriter out of its case, and plugged it in. She raced back up the stairs to scrabble for paper, ribbon, and pencils, and then fell back down to the ground floor, throwing the supplies on to the table in a scatter.

  The noise she was making drew everyone’s attention, and they came from the various parts of the house to stare at her. She ignored them, and was unaware of the puzzled, disconcerted frown that had fallen between Ryan’s level brows, or of Helen’s concern. With practised fingers, she clipped a ribbon cartridge into place, turned on the typewriter, and threaded paper into the carriage.

  Janie and Gary lost interest and drifted away. Ryan said very evenly, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  She jumped, and looked up at him. She said through her teeth, “I’m proving a point.” Heavy, numbing pain ran in her for the futility of uselessly trying what she knew she couldn’t do. She was barren inside, and she couldn’t bear it.

  “Why are you hurting yourself this way?” he asked, gently. “It’s too soon to expect anything like a real effort from yourself. Give yourself time—”

  She cried through his words, “I’m going to prove to you that it’s really gone, so that you’ll go away and leave me alone! There’ll be nothing to keep you here any more—”

  Helen made a sudden movement. Ryan looked to her and slightly shook his head. He then turned his gaze to Devan, pityingly. “Prove what you will,” he replied quietly, and left the room.

  She put her hands to her face and searched dully for meaning to put to words, and found nothing to say. The early afternoon faded to early evening. She tried several times, and ended with tearing the paper from the carriage, wadding it viciously, and throwing it hard with a fling of her arm. Ryan came to the doorway several times from the kitchen, but she never saw him, and he went away again. She looked for themes, rough ideas, for anything to build on, and couldn’t sweat out a single thing.

  She was brilliant; she was bright. She was nothing.

  Everything she had become was wrapped up in her writing. A lonely child and adolescent, she had been paralysed by a cocoon of shyness. Helen and her books had been her only friends, and she had learned to devour stories with greed. They had been her source of enjoyment and fulfilment, the way she had learned about other ways of life. Their mother had died early in Devan’s life; their father had worked very hard at trying to forget, and one of the things he had tried to forget was his children.

  Helen had survived well enough. She’d been slightly older, and graced with a serenity of the soul that drew friends to her like bees homing to honey. Devan’s personality had smouldered within her crippling cocoon, and she had become determined that no one would forget or ignore her again. She was going to be so good, so aggressive, so bright and ambitious; she was going to reach out and awe others with the sparkling enchantment of her wit and wile. She would communicate in the only way she knew how; she realised that, even as a teenager. And so, with burning eyes and a silent, burning determination, she graduated from high school, and blazed through college to attain her goal.

  Everything had been within her sights. Everything had been withi
n her grasp. She’d had a handsome, intelligent lover, she’d had a consuming career, she’d had her youth and health. But Lee had brought it all down around her, had pulled her air castles to shreds, and she had known then how useless it all was.

  All of it. All her conviction, all her insight was false. She—what did she know of relationships, of deep, hidden motivations, of real life characters? She was a failure at real life, a failure at healthy relationships. She couldn’t keep her father’s love, and she couldn’t keep Lee’s. How could she have the colossal arrogance to believe that she could ever write the reality of anything when she couldn’t live it?

  She couldn’t believe.

  Bitterness welled up, and with a violent sweep of her arms, she thrust the typewriter away from herself and on to the floor. The machine broke into splinters. The crash of it resounded in the downstairs rooms, and she heard a dim echo of it shriek up the stairs and bounce off the first floor walls.

  Then there was a concerted rush, and Ryan was in the dining room, standing stiff and tense in front of her, his eyes running over the broken machine, the wadded pieces of paper, the scatter of materials over the table. Gary had appeared from the living room, Janie was behind Ryan, and Helen behind Janie. Ryan leaned over and put his hands on the table. “When will you stop tormenting yourself?” he asked in a low voice.

  She pushed herself away from the table, her slim body taut and trembling, her hands clenching and unclenching. “There,” she said hoarsely, viciously. “You’ve got your answer. Shut the door on your way out.” She kicked the keyboard of the typewriter from her path and heard it skitter along the floor, and then she strode for the front of the house.

  Helen said, quickly and quietly, “Kids, come on. Help me get supper started.”

  “I wanna watch,” said Gary.

  That was all Devan heard, though there was a sudden scurry, and a quickly bitten off squawk from her nephew. She went to the front window in the living room and looked outside stonily. She heard slow, quiet footsteps approaching, and she refused to turn around. She had done it this time, she really had. No one would stay after having put up with what he had in the last few days. This was it.

  “I’m not going,” he said.

  Incredulity held her immobile for a pulsing second. Then she whirled. He looked fresh and alert, although tired lines ran in deepened paths from his nostrils to the sides of his mouth. He was regarding her patiently. “What do you mean, you’re not going? You’ve got to; I’m not attempting to write any more—”

  “Damn the writing,” he said carelessly.

  He was leaning against the open archway, his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze steady on her, his face now expressionless. She felt her heart give a great thump at his words, and she groped over to sit on the sofa, her eyes huge in her face as she stared at him. She repeated, parrot-like, “Damn…the writing…?”

  “Yes. What the hell do I care if you never write another word?” he replied, with a shrug.

  Her brow wrinkled in slow confusion. “But—” she stammered, while at the back of her mind she realised that he had done it to her again, screwed up her reason, upset her understanding, “but, the whole reason you stayed was—was the writing. Wasn’t it?”

  “I’d made up my mind to stay on a misunderstanding,” he said calmly, while his eyes watched her closely. “I thought the writing was the cause of your unhappiness. The real situation is that your unhappiness is the reason why you cannot write.”

  “You’re basing that on supposition!” she flared, her hands in fists. “The real situation is that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

  “Got another explanation you’d care to share?” he asked, sardonically. She didn’t answer, so he went on, “What do you think I want? You seem to think I have this God-like image of myself righting all your woes and then leaving you to your happy ending! I came here on a professional basis, to see if there was anything I could do to help you in your work. I’m staying because I’ve come to care about you as a person. What is it, Devan, have you come to see your writing as the equivalent of your own worth? Sure, you’re good, you’re possibly great. Who cares? The world will be here tomorrow if you don’t write that bestseller you were harping on about. Someone else will make the New York Times top ten list. Why can’t you just try to be content with whatever you are, or are not doing? So what if you can’t drag any themes out of your head. Forget about it!”

  She put her hands to her forehead in confusion. He didn’t know the whole situation, couldn’t know enough to speak accurately. Why did what he was saying affect her so? “But I need it,” she said, on a moan.

  While she had been overwhelmed by an inner turbulence, he had pushed away from the staircase to walk over to her. He sat beside her on the couch, and grasped one of her hands to pull it down and cradle it. “Why?” he asked gently. “Why that badly?”

  She turned her head to look at him, weary truth at the back of her brown eyes. At his waiting, intent face, she bent her head. “It’s my line. It’s how I reach people.” Her hand moved in his grasp. “It’s how I tell what I am.”

  Awareness was dawning in those grey-blue eyes. He then said slowly, “You reach people, you communicate, you touch, through your books. You feel bereft without it.” His face gentled amazingly. She had glanced back at him, and her eyes clung to that look in wide-eyed fascination. “Devan, there are countless ways to communicate. Even silently: a touch, a look, a smile.” His hand reached for her head and stroked, and she quivered throughout her body.

  Her eyes fluttered shut, her mouth trembled, and he had to turn her face away to hide it. “But I—can’t—” she said, strangled. “I can’t seem to communicate well enough, I—”

  “Good God, do you actually believe that?” he asked, astonished. “How could you be so wrong? What about your close relationship with Helen?”

  “Helen,” said Devan, with difficulty, “could make a heart of stone love her well.”

  In spite of himself, he smiled. “She could at that. But what about the kids? I’ve seen how you treat them, how you tease and pretend to be stern. But your love shows very clearly in it all, and they know it. That’s why they’re always flocking around you, and wanting to be with you. As for myself, I’ve been more than able to pick up your emotions very well, ever since I got here. Lady—you radiate!”

  She stared at him, completely bewildered, at a loss, uncomprehending. Suddenly she was very tired, and longing for bed. His eyes, searching her face; his face looking hard, reassuring, supportive. She said then, very quietly, “I don’t understand anything any more.”

  “And there’s a lot more I’d like to understand about you, Devan Richardson.” Her eyes asked him silently what he meant by that, but he just shook his head with a smile. “We’ll talk later, all right? Right now, Helen and I were fixing supper, and it should be about ready.”

  Her face changed swiftly, amusement running over her delicately etched features. She groaned, “Oh, Lord, more food! Just skip it, OK? I’m not—”

  “Hungry. Yes, I know,” he said drily, as he began to smile. “But we’ve all eaten lunch, and you haven’t. You are definitely having supper.”

  “I’ll bet you’re as autocratic at work, too,” she muttered, ostensibly grumpy. But a small smile touched at her lips.

  He wrapped a lazy, loose arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought he was going to kiss her. But he didn’t, merely rubbing lightly at her smaller nose with his as he told her, indulgently, “Always. But it’s not as fun. They rarely argue back like you.”

  A vivid grin splashed over her features. Then she said, composedly, “Somebody’s got to put you in your place.”

  They wandered through the dining room, wading through the mess Devan had created, and into the kitchen. She was secretly amazed at how good he had managed to make her feel after her bitter and passionate outburst. They both found the children putting the finishing
touches to the table while Helen worked at the counter, and, suddenly filled with remorse, Devan walked over to her sister and put her chin over Helen’s shoulder. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry about the mess in the dining room, I’ll clean it up right away.”

  “No problem,” said Helen, with a smile.

  “I’m also sorry I haven’t been much help these last few days,” continued Devan, purging her soul.

  Her sister gave her a damp pat on the cheek. “You’ve had a lot on your mind, and you haven’t been feeling well.”

  Paris galloped from nowhere, and with a magnificent bound landed in the midst of the plates and cutlery. It didn’t ruffle Gary in the slightest, but Janie yowled, and started beating on the cat’s back with a rolled up napkin, which sent him leaping away again. The minor ruckus had attracted the attention of the three adults, and, while Devan frankly laughed, Helen just sighed and said, “All right. Clear the dishes, and set the table with clean things.”

  Blinking with astonishment, Gary looked from the table to his exasperating mother. “But it’s not dirty!”

  “There is no telling from where that beast just came. Reset the table,” ordered Helen implacably. With a grumble, they complied, and Ryan pitched in to lighten their spirits. Devan just watched for a moment and after asking her sister if there was anything she could do to help, and receiving a negative, she picked up the rubbish bin and went to the dining room to clear away the worst of the mess.

  While she scrambled under the table for crumpled papers and bits of ruined machinery, she fell to brooding. It seemed that she hadn’t acted at all like herself today, with Ryan. What had got into her, to rush from his room just because he had made a simple pass at her? And to then throw what was essentially the equivalent of a temper tantrum and wreck a perfectly good machine was unforgivable. This wasn’t like her at all. She was the quick one, always good at quips and snappy returns, always able to handle conversation with at least the appearance of composure. Even with Lee she had been able to appear unflappable if she so wished. Ryan had the irritating, disturbing, alarming, exciting habit of wrecking her composure completely. She thought about that worriedly. She finally came to the conclusion that it was merely that he had caught her on a low ebb, with her defences down. She told herself that she actually believed it, but if that were so, it didn’t explain why she worried around until suppertime.