Double Bind

by Karen Bell

  Slipping her dress over her head and checking in the mirror, Mila was grateful that she still had no trouble getting by without a bra. She could hear music coming from the living room and smiled. It was a well-known song, Fly me to the Moon but it but it wasn’t the popular Frank Sinatra version playing. Mila recognized the buttery tones of Nat King Cole, a favourite of her parents. The song, accompanied by the comforting crackle of the record player transported her back to her childhood, bringing up a range of bittersweet emotions all at once.

  She walked into the kitchen where Ryan was opening a bottle of red wine. Laid out on the round kitchen table was a breadboard with a small selection of cheeses, meats, semi dried tomatoes and avocado slices. He had torn off chunks of sourdough bread and scattered them around a small dish of butter or maybe aioli. The kitchen clock showed it to be 11 p.m. and normally Mila wouldn’t have dreamt of eating at this time but suddenly it seemed like a great idea.

  Ryan looked at Mila with approval. He liked the way her skin glowed in the light. She had a natural beauty that was better without make up. Her long lashes were so thick that he imagined they weighed down her eyelids, which went some way to explaining why she seemed to exude that come-to bed expression even when she was wide awake. The colours of her eyes reminded him of Lake St Clair, when he’d gone trout fishing at sunset. At that time of day, the surface turned a glassy green but beneath it, danced a spectrum of colours running infinitely deep.

  Occasional droplets of water ran over her skin and he followed the path of one with his fingertips as it ran from her collarbone towards her breast. He stopped short, lifting her chin and noticing the way his thumb found the divot in the centre before bending in to kiss her.

  She tasted sweet. He was still salty.

  Eventually he drew away and cleared his throat. ‘I’d better go and take that shower. Normally Jack and I would eat here in the kitchen, but I know you’re accustomed to more formal settings…’

  ‘I’m happy in here, or out there,’ she replied.

  ‘I know it’s officially the middle of Summer but since the temperature’s just dropped fifteen degrees I’ve put the fire on and cleared the coffee table a bit so why don’t you head in there with a glass of wine and I’ll be in and out of the shower in a minute.’

  Mila carried the food and their wine glasses into the other room and seated herself first on one lounge and then the other. She was more used to sitting on the floor and despite both sofas being incredibly soft and inviting, it wasn’t easy to get comfortable without underwear.

  Eventually she settled herself, legs tucked under her on the velvet sofa in the corner closest to the fire. She still felt a little like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears and nervously picked up a book from the coffee table, flicking through the pages, but taking in nothing.

  A flash of lightening lit up the room and Mila gauged the distance of the storm by counting the seconds until the following crack of thunder. It was not far, and loud enough to make her jump. As if on queue the rain began to fall in heavy drops, bringing a cold wind through the open windows that made Mila shiver and draw closer to the fire.

  ‘Nothing like Australian weather is there; four seasons in one day.’ Ryan was out of the shower, back in the room and closing the timber shutters outside the windows. He was wearing loose black cheesecloth pants and a fresh, soft white t-shirt. ‘It looks like we’re in for the perfect storm. I hope you weren’t planning to leave me any time soon.’ His eyes were twinkling but there was a low seductive resonance to his voice that made Mila tingle all over. Between the fire, the music and the man, she would have been eternally happy if she could have stopped time and stayed in this place forever.

  Ryan settled himself beside her, feeding the two of them with little open sandwiches while regaling her with stories of his family and childhood. She noticed that he was sensitive not to ply her for more than she was prepared to divulge regarding her own past. The whole situation felt very grown up to Mila and she quickly finished one glass of the smooth red wine and then another as much to keep her hands occupied as to give her Dutch courage.

  The storm was in full force outside, punishing the slate roof but inside they were cosy and cocooned. She felt her cheeks glowing, a combination of the warmth from the fire, the wine and the heat stirring within. He reached forward and drew her closer to him so that she was nestled with her back against his chest and her feet on the lounge.

  With the urgency of their first union assuaged, there was now no hurry. Mila felt the soothing repetition of his hands and fingertips absentmindedly caressing her bare skin as they shared stories, but soon the conversation fell quiet and Mila closed her eyes to let her other senses take over. She heard his breath within the melody of the music and the rain. He wasn’t wearing aftershave but he smelt fresh and powdery, making her want to nuzzle further into his embrace. He traced lines over her as if memorizing each contour and Mila felt like warm putty beneath his touch. She tilted her face to his and he kissed her forehead and nose before finding her lips. Their kiss was long and tender as his tongue searched the insides of her mouth and Mila felt his hand lazily glide from her knee to her inner thigh as her dress slipped easily away.

  She was confident that he knew his way around a woman’s body but he seemed in no hurry to get there. He was lost in the journey, slipping first one strap off Mila’s shoulder and later the other. His hand cradled one breast, his thumb eventually finding the peak now achingly aroused. All the while, his tongue searched the inner recesses of her mouth, alluding to further intimacies. Mila felt her body respond and rise to meet him at every turn. She was acutely aware of her desire, pooling within, as he stroked over her belly, along her hipbones, following the groove to her inner thighs. She was practically begging, her whimpers muffled by his mouth on hers by the time his hand closed over hers and guided it down to feel her own softness and the heat down there. Mila’s breath caught as his fingers found her waiting, and his thumb playing its first seductive note. She spontaneously drew in her knees to keep him there as he caressed and teased, and her need increased.

  She desperately wanted him inside her again and drew herself up, turning her body to face him fully. He caught the pleading look in her eyes but made her wait, continuing with a harmony of actions that brought Mila to a point, just short of no return. Sensing her place viscerally, he stopped and lifted her so that she kneeled, straddled over him. From this position, she could feel that he was more than ready and Mila helped him to slip out of his clothes.

  He held her against him, kissing and caressing, his way down her body, a symphony of sensations on her breasts and her belly and then further down as his tongue found that sweet spot below. Mila curled her fingers through his hair and arched her back as she pressed in to him.

  She was already on the verge, and struggled to hold back as he lowered her, easing into her at first exquisitely slowly and then with more passion.

  Kneeling over him, Mila felt none of the fear she was used to, only the intense pleasure of his fullness inside her. She leaned back in his hold, increasing a pressure within, that was both urgent and sublime, the repetitious motion creating a vibrato that sang through her entire body as they moved in a rhythm growing in intensity and pace.

  The thunderstorm continued to crash around them, almost drowning out their moans as they came together. For Mila, the sensations rolled on and on, and well after he was finished she could not let him go. She held onto him tightly as they collapsed together, beads of perspiration forming between them.

  They laughed, when she was gripped by a cramp in one leg and pins and needles in both feet. It was still too soon when eventually he lifted her off and placed her on the sofa beside him to massage the blood back into her spent limbs.

  They lay together, Mila sprawled on top of him until the fire died down and without asking, he carried her to his bedroom, and slipped with her between the cool cotton sheets. Ryan lay on his back, one outstretched arm about her, Mila using
the groove between his shoulder and chest as a pillow. She felt a rightness about this place and this time that frightened her.

  Don’t spoil it, she told herself. Savour this moment. You don’t know how long it will last. In his half sleep he stroked her hair and kissed her sweetly. Mila almost dropped off too but those small voices wouldn’t allow it and instead of drawing closer to sleep, she felt it slide further away. She lay awake well after she heard his breath become slow and rhythmic. Her body was calm but her mind kept telling her that this was too good to be true. That he was too good to be true and that she was setting herself up for a major fall.

  So far her intimacies with Ryan had been the polar opposite of her experiences with Robert. Of course, the physical language was miles apart, but more so, in Mila’s head. Ryan’s presence was big and the thrill of something new and reciprocal had managed to keep the demons away, but Mila recognized a new fear lurking, chewing the insides of her stomach.

  It was not a fear that he might turn into Robert, but a fear that she, at some point might ask him to.

  Even as he’d carried her into bed, and out of the corner of her eye she’d noticed his handcuffs winking in the moonlight, she’d felt a thrill, an idea that he should use them – and the baton that she could see nearby.

  Ryan was unarguably an Alpha male and Mila recognised intellectually that he could be gentle because he didn’t have anything to prove. His was not a conscious control but a quiet strength that engendered respect. But what would happen if she asked him for something more than he was prepared to give? Would he be repulsed? Conversely, if the idea came from him, would Mila be able to deal with it or would she have the same panic response that had ambushed her on the cruise-ship. She imagined that many, if not most of the women turned on by the sight of him in uniform would have asked for it.

  At the thought of it, her body experienced that same Pavlovian, muscle memory response. She hated herself for having those thoughts, but her recently aroused insides twitched none-the-less.

  Mila’s entire experience of sex had been inextricably linked with violence and submission. That territory was far more familiar to her than what she was exploring now with Ryan. Her brain had never been able to make sense of it, in the eighteen years of Robert, the anger, terror and guilt that overrode the pleasure of orgasm, and yet she had climaxed all the same. In the most degrading of situations her body had betrayed her.

  If Ryan were to go there, or if she asked him to, would she be able to reconcile the two kinds of sex and still call it lovemaking? She didn’t know if they could coexist or if it would break their porcelain thin trust, tip her over, into a dark place from which their relationship might not recover.

  She lay there, mulling it over in her exhausted mind. Eventually she dozed off but her dreams took her to a dark place, a foreign land, where she was lost and alone. She was looking for home and her parents, but she knew that both were a long way away. All night she searched, waking only when she heard the distant sound of a ship’s horn. They were on that ship. ‘Don’t leave.’ She was calling. ‘Wait for me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mila woke to the sound of the kettle whistling in the kitchen. The bed was empty but the early light through the window told her it was about half past six. The storm had passed but Mila was aware of the loud crashing of the surf as though it was right outside the window.

  Her bikini now dry, Ryan had laid her clothes over a bedroom chair, so she dressed and made herself decent, smoothing her bed-hair before going to look for him. She felt as though she’d hardly slept and wondered how she’d front up to the bank in just a few hours.

  He was in the kitchen making breakfast and was fully dressed in his uniform. How did he do that? Mila by comparison, felt underdressed and awkward.

  ‘Good morning,’ she whispered, ‘did I wake up late?’

  ‘Not at all, but I have work today and I couldn’t trust myself to stay in bed with you a minute longer.’

  ‘You could have woken me,’ she replied, feeling the stirrings of lust again, despite her fatigue. Damn, he looked sexy in uniform.

  ‘I’d like to say you looked too peaceful to wake, but in fact you were dreaming and thrashing and I thought I might get a quick right hook if I woke you.’

  Mila laughed but remembered her thoughts and then her nightmare. He must have seen a troubled expression run across her face because he lifted her up and put her before him, on the kitchen counter.

  ‘What were you dreaming? I wasn’t that bad last night was I?’

  Mila was incredulous. Was this man really fishing for compliments?

  ‘I was having abandonment dreams I think. Not about you, but about my parents… and no you were not that bad… far from it.’ She changed the subject. ‘Where’s Jack this morning?’

  ‘He’s out the back in the garden probably digging up my veggie patch now that the soil is soft after the rain.’

  Mila turned to look out the window. Veggie patch was the understatement of the century. She was looking at a market garden. Most of the huge backyard was given to it. Every conceivable edible plant appeared to be flourishing within a New York grid of beds; some dedicated to climbing vines, where cucumbers, tomatoes and passionfruit grew as if on steroids; while other were burgeoning with Popeye quantities of salad greens and herbs. Mila could see fully grown butternut pumpkins, eggplants and zucchinis and as her gaze followed the meandering paths she identified a variety of fruit trees along the back fence.

  ‘Wow, are you sure you’re not Italian?’ was initially all she could muster.

  He grinned. ‘You can take the boy from the country as they say, but never the country from the boy.’ He said it casually but Mila could see he was flattered by her loss of words and just a smidge proud of his achievement.

  He handed her a steaming cup of coffee and they continued talking while he cooked.

  ‘So how did you end up living here?’ she asked when there was a lull in the conversation.

  ‘Well that’s an interesting story,’ he began. ‘Do you have time to hear it?’

  ‘Of course, I’m all-ears.’

  Ryan breathed deeply, wondering where to start before launching into it. He decided to omit the one full year when he’d taken stress leave after the shooting and gone home to the farm with his tail between his legs. His wife had travelled with him initially but she was a city girl through and through, and the change of scenery had done nothing to fill the cracks in their marriage that were starting to show. After three torturous months she’d returned to Sydney and Ryan had thrown himself into working the land with gusto.

  His parents, and particularly his father had set their hearts on it that Ryan would stay. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the rural lifestyle or feel at home there, but his head was totally screwed up and by then he had a foot in each camp and didn’t know where he belonged. The constant exposure to his sisters and brother, all happily married with children only served to emphasise what he was missing. He’d owed it to Caroline to try and sort things out and had followed her back down to Sydney nine months later, only to watch what little connection they still had left, dissolve into the abyss of his self pity.

  But Mila didn’t need to know any of that now.

  ‘When my wife and I divorced, we sold the apartment we’d been living in and I started looking for share accommodation, so as not to blow too much of my salary. I couldn’t afford to buy anywhere and of course I could have gone back to Mihael and Irina’s but that would have felt kind of like going backwards.

  At first I shared for a few months with some mates from the force but as it turned out, they were such party animals, and so poorly house trained that eventually I got sick of cleaning up after them. So I went back to the local paper and noticed an ad for a room in Bronte in exchange for helping a pensioner with the shopping, cooking, gardening etc. I was looking to be near the beach and it sounded like the perfect arrangement.’

  Mila nodded as though she approved of th
e idea. ‘I could imagine you in that role, you’ve got that nurturing thing going on.’

  ‘So I turned up here one Saturday morning and she opened the door, waving me in with her walking stick. She was a tiny little thing but very bossy. She introduced herself and then smartly sent me to the kitchen to make tea. She’d lived here in her family home for eighty-seven years when I showed up, most of them with her twin sister Daisy who’d passed away a few years before. The two spinsters, Dorothy and Daisy, had been local celebrities and quite the photographers. Many of the old photos of Bronte you see in the local library and at council chambers were taken by them. After her sister died, Dot, as everyone knew her, became physically pretty frail, but she was still sharp as a tack and not happy to give up her independence.

  She’d taken on dozens of developers who’d wanted to get their hands on her property and she’d sent them running with their tails between their legs. She could be as cranky as hell but we got on like a house on fire and between us managed to get council to put a heritage listing on the home so that she could feel confident it would be preserved after she was gone.

  Over the next eight years we replanted the garden, went to concerts and movies together, she’d come with me to Mihael’s occasionally and even hosted Christmas for my extended family right here one year when they all came down to Sydney. She really was a fantastic person.’ He looked into the distance, reminiscing.

  ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, when she knew her health was failing, she offered to sell me the house. I explained to her that it was worth triple what I could afford, but she said that whatever I had would be just fine. I was blown away. I took my long service leave and we spent her last few months down in the sun-shelters of Bronte Park helping her to write her memoirs. I had it published a year after she died. It’s kind of a local history of the area as well as a colourful read.