Run Among Thorns

by Anna Louise Lucia

  Alice shifted a little closer, her hip pressing against him. “Oh, come on,” she purred. “We’re so rarely in the same place.”

  “Alice, no.” He felt light-headed.

  Her hand shifted to rest lightly on his right forearm.

  “Please?”

  His muscle locked tight; his head swam. Suddenly he found himself on his feet, standing over her, the sound of his own voice ringing in his ears. Her face was white, her eyes, her mouth wide open.

  His teeth snapped shut. He’d been shouting. What were the words?

  Alice blinked at him, curled tight on the sofa. She closed her mouth. She opened it again. “Stop invading my personal space?” Her voice rose shrill on the last word.

  Oh, God.

  “I—”

  “John, what the hell is the matter with you?”

  I have no idea, he thought. He was actually shaking, for God’s sake. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice as stiff as the rest of him.

  Her eyes were still wide. “But … what’s wrong? What—”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  She pressed a hand over her mouth, and he was horrified to see tears well in her eyes. “Alice,” he groaned. “Don’t.”

  She got up and ran upstairs. He followed her, found her in the bedroom standing at the window, her back to him.

  “Is it girl trouble, John?”

  He sat down heavily on the bed. In a manner of speaking, he thought, remembering Jenny’s dark eyes sunk in a pale face.

  He looked up and Alice had turned round, standing there watching him, composed, a little wary. “Are we really in that much trouble?” he asked wearily.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled a little.

  “I thought you were content. You’re so … self-contained.”

  She shrugged. “Defence.”

  “Does this mean that you … have you …?” He couldn’t get the words out, dismayed, in spite of the fatalistic view he’d had of their marriage in recent months, how much the prospect of her screwing another man enraged him.

  She came and sat at his feet, cross-legged, putting a hand on his knee.

  “No, John. I haven’t slept with anyone else. But you need to know I’ve been tempted, and I’m lonely. And you haven’t told me whether your trouble is about … about you having played away from home.”

  “No. I haven’t. It isn’t that.”

  The hand slipped away from his knee, she wrapped her arms around herself, studying him. “You know the scary thing? I don’t know if I believe you.”

  Surely he’d know if she had been sleeping around? But that was male arrogance, wasn’t it? Thinking her body belonged to him, and he’d notice if someone else had used it.

  The thought shamed him, that in this issue of fidelity, he was more concerned with the fidelity of the body than the fidelity of the heart.

  He got up, restless, and so did she, watching as he paced.

  “What exactly is it you want from me, John?” She took his place on the bed, sweeping her new hairstyle back from her cheekbones with steady, neatly manicured fingers. Her voice was steady, too. And somehow different, a jarring difference that was a bitter aftertaste, as if he’d been chewing lemons.

  “You tell me you want to leave your job—the job you’ve never told me anything about, never shared a moment of your day with me. You won’t tell me why you want to leave, and why so suddenly. You want to move, but you don’t say why, won’t share that with me, either. What do you expect me to say, John? How do you expect me to react?”

  He got it then, why her voice sounded so off to him—it was her telephone voice. The steady hands, the wide-open eyes, the careful posture sitting there on the bed, legs smoothly crossed, hands disposed so precisely on a suede-clad knee … it was all professional.

  That was the successful travel journalist, there, not his wife. And the fact that he—and she—could separate them so effectively from each other was another reason why his stomach churned and his back sweated. Not lemons after all. Apparently he’d been eating poison.

  “Well?” she asked, and he realised he’d been staring at her all that time, without answering. Realised, too, that his face felt like a mask, and his teeth ached with clenching.

  “I didn’t expect anything,” he said, at last. “But I hoped for a little blind trust.”

  “Trust!” she gasped a laugh, and snapped her teeth shut on it, clamping her lips over it, too, for good measure. He watched her swallow, watched as her hands smoothed the material over her knee, and settled again.

  “There are a lot of things,” she said, “that I have gotten used to giving you on a daily basis, without any expectation of getting them back. Trust is expecting a bit much, don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t say expect, I said hoped.”

  She tipped her head and slid a look at him that would have frozen lava. “Semantics,” she snapped.

  “What things?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. They’d left the office and were rapidly progressing to the playground.

  “Shared goals and dreams. Affection. Good humour. Passion—”

  “Christ, Alice, I’ve never turned you down before!”

  “Turned me down?” She threw her hands in the air. “It’s not about turning me down, you jerk! When I touch you, it’s not about wanting sex, it’s about wanting you!”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “Say?” she finished for him, and that telephone voice slipped away into derision. “I don’t know, John, why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you talk to me?”

  “I can’t talk about—”

  She got up then, jerkily straightening her skirt and fussing with her hair again.

  “You were never there,” he said heavily, meaning to go on, but the look she gave him was, for the first time, more sad than angry, and the words evaporated.

  “What?”

  “When you stay late at work,” she said, “do you think, I can’t wait to get home, or do you think, what’s the point?”

  He was silenced for a moment. Then, “But if you were home, I’d want to be home.”

  “Little wife waiting obediently for her husband to come home?”

  “No! Alice, I’ve never been that kind of a husband!”

  She shook her head, frowning down at the carpet. “No. I’m sorry. You’re right about that. You’ve always been supportive. But—” This time the hands smoothing the hair weren’t steady at all. “Oh, I don’t know. This dissecting is horrible, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She closed her eyes, and he was struck again by how beautiful she was. In the early days of their marriage he’d stayed awake some nights, just to watch her sleep. Pale lashes washed free of mascara lying on a powder-soft cheek. The quirk of her brows as she dreamed, her lips barely parted, smooth and moist.

  “Do you ever sit down and wonder where we went wrong? What day, what hour one of us thought the wrong thing, did the wrong thing?”

  She didn’t open her eyes straightway. “Why does it have to be one of us?” she asked, and that generosity surprised him.

  “In any case, it wasn’t one thing, you idiot.” Did he say generous? “It’s like unravelling a sweater, I think. The thread just unwinds.”

  “But something has to unpick the thread, break it, to start with?”

  Her lids lifted slowly. “Or maybe it just wasn’t knotted properly in the first place,” she said.

  He turned away. “This is going nowhere.”

  “Then perhaps we’d better call it a day.”

  I meant the argument, he thought. She’d been so quick with that.

  “I’ll go to a hotel.”

  He thought, don’t leave me, and then, how long have you been wanting to say that?

  But he didn’t say anything.

  Jenny woke to the smell of bacon.

  It was among her favourite ways to wake up. The smell wafted up the stairs and seeped under the door to the white room where
she always slept when she stayed here.

  She stretched under the thick, warm duvet. She hadn’t slept at first, for all her exhaustion. She’d heard the murmur of voices downstairs in the living room and could at least be assured they weren’t killing each other.

  But she hadn’t really relaxed until she heard Kier’s step on the stairs. It paused outside her door for a moment, causing her to hold her breath, and then passed on down the hall to the second flight of steep stairs that led to the two rooms under the eaves.

  After that she’d slept. Inexplicably missing the heat of Kier in the bed with her, that sense of latent strength that was comforting and secure. Fitfully at first, and dream-ridden, but then deeply and refreshingly.

  Until Alan had come in. She swept the hair off her neck and rolled onto her side again.

  He hadn’t liked her answer. She wasn’t all that sure she had. And she still had no idea what Alan was talking about—what “friends” did he mean? How could he, how could they, help?

  How were either of them to find out, when neither she nor her brother seemed to be able to tell the whole story? It was stupid; it wasn’t right. She’d thought she would feel more secure, more protected, in her brother’s house. By the time they’d left Scotland she’d been more than glad for the presence of any third party.

  But, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she wanted Alan around to keep Kier away from her, or the other way round.

  The problem was, she hadn’t realised just how much they would need to keep from Alan. He and Kier were spending their time circling like wolves, and, worse, she was lying to her own brother with every breath. She slid out from under the covers and rummaged through the drawers where she always kept a few clothing options. She had no idea where the bags were.

  She always had a few things at Alan’s—clothes, toiletries, a few things that had never made it from her parents’ home to hers. After dragging on jeans and a green jumper, she skipped barefoot down the stairs, so familiar with the uneven steps and the tortured creaks and groans, towards the enticing smell of bacon.

  It was Alan cooking, dressed casually in cargoes and a sandy-coloured long-sleeved T-shirt, with a tea towel tied round his waist. Beside the cooker on the counter was a stoneware dish with sausages, mushrooms, and tomatoes all jumbled together. On the stove was a pan of bacon and fried bread and a saucepan of scrambling eggs he was stirring vigorously. She began to drool.

  He turned as she entered, and gave her a wary smile. “I thought I’d do a breakfast that would just keep warm, so you both could dig in as you got up.” He turned back to the gas stove. “McAllister not up?”

  “I don’t know. I expect the smell of bacon hasn’t risen that far yet.”

  She nicked a mushroom out of the dish, and dodged the flailing eggy spoon. He was still carefully concentrating on the eggs. “Um, Jenny?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Is there really nothing more you can tell me about it?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he probably gave you the bare facts. And left out all the feelings.” He glanced at her then, and she cursed her use of that word.

  “Why is he protecting you?”

  Good question. Her eyes flicked to his face. Kier hadn’t even told him that? She chose her words carefully. “Because he was there. Because he defied them to help me. Because he was offering me safety, and I needed it. Because.”

  “Is there something else between you two?”

  “Oh, no!” she said quickly. Too quickly, because he looked at her again in that way he had when he was trying to read the truth off the back of her skull. “We’re not … suited,” she added.

  He lifted the eggs off the heat and started to spoon them into another dish. Then he flicked the bacon and fried bread out of the pan and turned off the flame. “You bring the eggs,” he said, as he picked up the stoneware dish with the corner of his tea towel and went out to the dining room.

  He’d already laid the table, and there were warmed plates on sea-grass mats. She’d always like the warm, rich rusty red of the walls in here, and the dark wood of the table and sideboard. Pale curtains were held back with curving black tiebacks, and let in a stream of morning light.

  She lifted one wavy-backed chair carefully over the parquet floor and sat down. In silence, Alan dished out what he knew she liked, and she sort of liked the attention, the sense of being home. Which, since the death of their parents, Alan’s place had been, more or less.

  The bacon tasted as good as it had smelled, just how she liked it, salty and succulent with crispy edges. For a few minutes she concentrated just on eating.

  When Alan had cleaned his plate in short order, he looked up at her again. “How did you get back into the country?”

  Ignoring her mother’s voice in her head telling her to sit up straight, she rested her elbows on the table and sighed. McAllister drugged me and kidnapped me. She thought about what Alan’s reaction might be to that, and to some of the other things that had happened to her, some of the things Kier had done.

  Violent conflict wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

  “Alan, I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m not ready to talk about all this yet. I will. I promise you that. I know I owe you an explanation, but not now, okay?”

  He frowned down at his plate, pushing his fork over the ivy pattern. She didn’t blame him for not liking it; she’d be climbing the walls if their positions were reversed.

  He looked up. “Do I have to do the big brother thing?”

  “The ‘I’m older and bigger and I know best, and incidentally if you need anyone beaten up, that’s my job’ thing? No.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “No, but that’s never stopped me before.”

  “Don’t trust him, Jen.”

  “That’s nice advice.” The cool voice from the doorway made Alan look past her with narrowed eyes, but she just closed her eyes and dropped her head between her hands.

  Alan stood as McAllister came in, and drew a chair out for him before sitting back down. “But not unreasonable under the circumstances, I would say.”

  “I would dispute that,” Kier said calmly, hooking the dish of food with his fork.

  “I’m sure you would. However, I would maintain—”

  Jenny slammed her hand down on the polished mahogany table. The cutlery jumped. So did the men.

  “That’s enough!” she snapped. “If you can’t stop squaring off like this, I’m leaving.”

  They both half-rose.

  “Great.”

  “Fine.”

  “Alone!”

  Alan was scowling, but she could have killed Kier for the gleam of wicked amusement in his eyes. He hadn’t shaved, his hair was still mussed, and God, he looked sexy.

  She gritted her teeth together to stop that expression before it formed on her face, and tried to relax in her chair. She took a deep breath.

  “Kier?”

  He looked up at her from his piled-high plate, chewing a mouthful of bacon with strong, slow movements of his jaw that stretched the line of his throat. He licked a scrap of bacon out of the corner of his mouth. He swallowed, and so did she.

  “Will we be here all day?” she asked.

  “No. Maybe most of it.”

  She turned back to her brother. “What are your plans today?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “It would be best,” drawled Kier, “if you resumed your normal routine.”

  Alan’s lips thinned, but he didn’t retaliate, and Jenny laid a hand on his in gratitude. “He’s probably right—”

  “Probably!” Kier raised his brows in mock outrage.

  “For God’s sake!” she snapped, and he ducked back to his breakfast, only a twitch of his lips betraying him. She squeezed Alan’s hand, and released it. “Go to work. We’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

  “I’ll try to get home around lunchtime.”r />
  “It’s okay—whenever you can.”

  “Jen, are you sure?”

  “Yes, Alan!” She took a breath. “Yes, I’m sure. Please go.”

  “Okay.” Alan rose to leave, and came round to kiss her on the cheek.

  Before he left the room, Kier’s voice rose to stop him. “Waring?”

  With one hand on the doorjamb, Alan half-turned, brows raised.

  “Don’t mention to anyone you have seen or heard from your sister. If anyone mentions the situation to you, feign shock.”

  “That won’t be hard.”

  “Don’t goof off, Waring. It’s important.”

  Alan deliberately transferred his gaze to Jenny. “You can trust me, sis.” Was it her imagination, or did he put a stress on the personal pronoun there?

  Then he was gone.

  Silence reigned in the dining room, broken occasionally by the click and squeak of cutlery on crockery. Kier was making short work of a huge breakfast, and, insofar as she was any judge, he seemed to be enjoying it. He put away the last forkful, and glanced across at her.

  “Coffee?”

  “Instant.” She could match Mr. Monosyllabic.

  “Fine.”

  She got up with quiet dignity and went through to the kitchen to boil a kettle.

  Jenny was in a huff again. Apparently it went beyond his role to ask for coffee in the morning. With a sigh, Kier gathered up the dirty dishes and carried them through to the kitchen.

  Jenny was just stirring his coffee, and set it down on the counter near him with a sharp click that made some of the dark liquid slop angrily over the rim of the mug. It had a picture of Homer Simpson on it, saying something about donuts.

  She ran a sinkful of water, squirted dish soap into it, and began to wash the breakfast dishes.

  He unbuttoned the cuffs of his light denim shirt and deftly rolled the sleeves up past his elbows. Snagging a dish towel, he propped his hip against the counter beside her and began to dry what she washed.

  He studied her as she worked. She seemed a little jumpy this morning, but the close-mouthed, shadowed-eyed woman of the night before seemed to have gone. Good.

  She’d let her hair down, and as she worked in vigorous movements it swung back and forth across her shoulder. He caught the suspicion of blue shadows under her eyes and a tightness to the lips that had haunted last night’s dreams, but there was a warm glow of colour, too, rosy on her cheek, and he knew she was aware of him watching her.