‘You ran,’ he said, ‘like a rabbit. ‘And, with hindsight, I’m not sure I blame you, either.’
‘You know where you can put your hindsight,’ she snapped angrily. ‘Sideways!’
Again that raised eyebrow, along with a slight shake of his head that implied amused tolerance. It served only to make Ruth even wilder.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she shouted. ‘I didn’t ask you to come; I didn’t want you to come. I didn’t...’
‘You ran like a rabbit,’ he repeated. ‘Which is what I think surprised me more than anything about all this. You’re not a quitter, Ruth. You’ve never been a quitter. But you ran, and from the sound of you you’re still running and I just ... don’t know why.’
Because of you, she wanted to shout. Because you took me into your life like some stray waif and you gave me everything and you said you loved me but all the time you were laughing at me.
But she didn’t say it. Didn’t say anything, because he was looking at her like that, with that curious glimmer in his eyes that had always had the ability to melt her insides, to make her shimmer like summer lightning. In the earliest days of their wildfire relationship, she’d been able to survive the days without him just on the strength of that look.
Unbidden, her mind slid back to her earlier reverie and the slow, leisurely drive back from Marriotts Falls. The entire return journey had been an exploration, a teasing, tantalising foretaste of what both must have known was to come.
Ruth had driven: carefully, almost sedately, trying to enjoy the touch of his fingers on her thigh without giving in to the fierce desire she had had to stop the car and fling herself into his arms. Just occasionally, she would risk a sideways glance, always to find those amazing eyes drinking her in, his gaze as focused as his touch.
His fingers had never stopped in their endless wanderings, sometimes lingering on her knee, sometimes on the soft inner skin of her thigh, from where warm rays had shot to the centre of her being.
‘You must stop that,’ she had protested once. ‘You’ll have us in the ditch.’
‘I can’t,’ he had whispered. ‘And I won’t. You just pay attention to your driving, my lady witch, and ignore it.’
Ignore it? As easy ignore the lowering sun from which they fled. As easy ignore life itself. With all possible attention focused on her driving, she was still, Ruth had thought, a certifiable menace on the road.
And when they had reached her flat, he had somehow managed to maintain that marvellous, astonishing tension of promise. He had insisted she must have coffee, and made her some; he had insisted she must rest her eyes, only to whisper seductively in her ear as she obeyed.
When he had finally guided her to the bedroom, it was as if she floated inches above the floor. When he had carefully stripped away her T-shirt, eased away the rest of her clothing, his lips had followed his busy fingers, laying a path of kisses down her entire body.
There was never a question, now. This was the time, and it was the right time. It had seemed hours, days, while he kissed her, stroked her, tasted her, before he allowed their bodies to merge and begin the build-up to the whirlwind. No shyness had hampered their love-making, no sense of worry or guilt. Ruth had sent her fingers on explorations of their own, allowed herself, gifted herself, with just the sense of adventure and wonder he had created in her.
He had taken her to the heights of release, held her there for an infinity, then plunged with her in a dizzying tumble through ecstasy. And moments later, resting on one elbow but still without leaving her, he had done it again! Simply with that look and the gentlest touch of his fingers beneath her ear. Only the beginning...
~~~
And now he was doing it again! Ruth shook her head as if to destroy the look with pure energy, as if she could thwart its effects by blurring her own vision.
‘Stop that! Stop it,’ she cried, lurching from her chair and fleeing to stand staring out of the kitchen window, seeking refuge in the grey skies and rain, refuge from memory, from pain.
‘Only if you stop running,’ he said. ‘But no, not even then. I love you, Ruth; I have from the very beginning and I can’t stop now.’
‘Love!’ She spat the word at him, turning wide-eyed to glare across to where he sat, patient as always, watching. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. It’s all just a game to you, a cruel, evil game! Your letters, your phone calls, everything. Just a game!’
That got to him. She took some small delight in the wave of shock that flowed across his features. Saw him surge to his feet, anger a ripple that surged through his clenched jaw muscles.
‘My letters, Ruth, may have been fanciful and they may have been verbose and they may even have been — heaven help me — too damned prone to hiding my feelings in pretty words. But they were never a game. Never.’
And now he was stalking towards her, crossing the room like some great jungle cat. Ruth scurried in retreat, moving in counterpoint to maintain furniture between them. But when he reached the window where she’d been staring out, he halted, and himself looked out to the rain.
Ruth found herself back beside her chair, her knees so weak she could barely stand. She sank into it with a sigh of relief, only to recoil as he moved to loom beside her.
‘Your coffee’s cold; I’ll make some more,’ he said quietly, and had picked up the cup and gone before she could even decide if she wanted more. Swivelling in the chair, she watched him moving deftly through her kitchen, his every movement so economic and self-contained, and so familiar.
He brought the coffee, returned to his former seat. Then sat, cloaked in silence and staring into the fresh coffee he’d brought for himself. When he finally did look at her, that look was gone from his eyes; they seemed merely sad, almost empty.
‘You used to like my letters,’ he said in a voice that was whisper-soft, yet seemed to leap across the room at her.
Like them? She had literally lived for those letters, both during their all-too-brief courtship and beyond, beyond into the strange new world of marriage with a man who was seldom home, who spent his time in the whirlybird world of corporate high finance, coming home only to recharge his batteries with long walks and lovemaking.
‘Dear my lady witch… The words lay like a brand in her vision as Ruth picked up his letter again, reading the words as if for the first time. She read it, reread it.
‘Are you trying to say I’m not an adult?’ she demanded, her voice hoarse with aggression, fuelled by an anger she had to keep stoking from deep inside her. Had to ... lest she lose all, everything now.
‘I said we have to try and communicate like adults,’ he replied. Calm... too calm.
‘It’s the same thing,’ she insisted. ‘It implies...’
‘It implies nothing,’ he snapped. ‘It says what it says. But for God’s sake, Ruth, look at us. We’re sniping at each other here like children in the playground.’
‘My playground,’ she retorted. ‘And one, I remind you, to which you were not invited.’
Eyes like stone returned her stare. Then he shrugged, shook his head wearily.
‘How about you go put on some clothes, Ruth?’ he asked quietly. ‘We’ll go somewhere and eat — I’m starved if you aren’t. And maybe in neutral surroundings we can start making some sense.’
‘I’m not hungry.’ A child’s sulky response; she knew it and instantly regretted it.
‘You can’t keep putting this off forever,’ Kurtis said, voice bland but his eyes now touching her in tangible caresses at her lips, her throat, the deep opening of her housecoat.
Suddenly she shivered inside, feeling the touch of his eyes as a physical thing, feeling her breasts swelling into his fingers, feeling his lips plucking at them.
The room seemed to shrink about them, closing in by some weird optical effect that brought him closer without moving. Ruth sucked in her breath, feeling again that panic-flight response, and only too aware that there was nowhere to go.
‘I ... all
right,’ she agreed, her eyes flicking past him in both directions as she sought some safe route to her bedroom, as she found herself wishing she’d a lock on that bedroom door.
Kurtis merely sat where he was as she skirted her path to the doorway, casting a cautious glance over her shoulder as she turned and plunged towards the bedroom, fleeing as if the very devil was in pursuit.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kurtis slouched in his chair across the restaurant table from Ruth, who was playing with her food, toying with it as she fought for the courage to meet his eyes.
He’d refused to discuss anything, indeed had said hardly a word since she’d emerged from her bedroom in faded jeans and an oversized, baggy sweatshirt, the least flattering outfit she could find.
In his car, she had forced herself hard against the door, almost cringing in her attempt to maintain all possible distance from him. And on entering the restaurant Ruth had been ridiculously pleased to have the waiter hold her chair for her, rather than Kurtis himself.
‘We’ll talk after we’ve got some tucker inside us,’ was all Kurtis said. ‘Hard on the digestion to argue on an empty stomach.’
Now, with a curious look of ... determination? ... he forced Ruth through sheer force of will to meet his eyes.
‘Right, Ruth the witch; you’ve obviously finished your tea so let’s make a start. Do you want to go first, or shall I?’
‘It’s your party,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t even be here, given the choice.’ And she flinched inside at the pain which flashed across his eyes. She didn’t want to hurt him, and suddenly realised that with a startling intensity. She just couldn’t live with him, cope with him, keep up with him.
‘OK. Question time. Do you suppose you can manage to tell me, in plain, ordinary language, why you ran away? I think I know, in fact I’m morally sure I do, but I’d like to hear it from you.’
‘You ought to know; I left you a note.’
He snorted! ‘You left me the sort of note a child writes when he or she’s running away from home.’
Fingers rummaged through an inner pocket while he held her with his eyes, forcing her to attend. A piece of paper fluttered across the table to land beside her plate.
‘There’s your note,’ he said, and his voice was alive with anger and frustration. ‘Read the damned thing, Ruth. It isn’t going to leap up and bite you, although it should. My very oath, it should!’
Ruth plucked up the note with trembling fingers, but she didn’t need to read it to know the words. She’d sweated blood at the time just finding those few which had a hope of getting her message across.
‘It’s too much for me. I can’t take any more. Please let me go and don’t try to find me because it won’t do any good.’
And Kurtis, it seemed, didn’t need the note to know the words either.
‘Too much what? Couldn’t take any more what?’ he demanded now, and Ruth could tell from his voice that he was very close to erupting. She sat in silence, trying but then failing to meet his eyes, her brain stunned by the fury of his attitude.
‘Well? Damn it, Ruth, I’m surely entitled to more than that,’ he growled.
‘I suppose so,’ she mused, as much to herself as to him. But then she lapsed into silence again, unable even to think of a place to start. She lowered her head, trying to stem the whirlwind of thought that spun uselessly inside.
‘Too fast.’ She heard the words, or thought she did, but only just, and looked up to see Kurtis staring into his empty plate. He looked up as if prompted by her own eyes, but gave no sign of having spoken.
She continued to watch him, absorbing the pain she saw within him, wanting to speak but unable to find any adequate words, unsure if she could find them even to explain to herself; she’d tried often enough since leaving him and never truly succeeded.
‘I loved you,’ she said, and shot upright in her seat at the unexpectedness of those words. It wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all.
Kurtis stayed silent, but his eyes willed her to continue.
‘I ... I just couldn’t cope with the lifestyle,’ she stammered. ‘With the lifestyle and ...with you.’ She stopped, halted by the rising glow in his eyes, by the first hints of that look. Kurtis, as if realising it, bowed his head to stare instead at his plate.
How to explain? How to even begin to explain? Ruth, too, looked down at her plate while she marshalled her thoughts.
‘It wasn’t so much that you were away so much,’ she finally began, knowing this wasn’t the way to start, wasn’t even the issue. They’d already discussed this, had done so before they married.
‘If you married an international cricket player, you’d do it expecting that when you couldn’t be with him he’d have to go alone,’ Kurtis had said. ‘I’m not much different, really. You love your work and don’t want to give it up just now, nor should you; it’s your career and you’re good at it. Of course I’m going to try and restructure my affairs so that I don’t have to travel so much, but that will take a lot of time.’
‘I understand that,’ she had assured him, ‘and it won’t be a problem; there’s no way it should be.’
But it had been! Almost from the very beginning, Ruth had found a vast difference between what she believed and how she really felt about the situation of having a husband who was almost always somewhere else. But that alone hadn’t been the problem.
‘You’re evading the issue,’ Kurtis accused her, glaring at her across the table. ‘We had that out before we even got married, and I know that, while it was difficult for you at first, you weren’t sufficiently upset by that alone to run like you did.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ Ruth retorted. ‘And you never will, if you don’t give me time to finish.’
Kurtis met her eyes with a frank, steady glance, then bowed and murmured, ‘As you wish, my lady witch.’ And again, damn him, his eyes started to sing to her.
Ruth looked away, but it was too late. Her entire body started to yield to his song. Her breasts throbbed at the touch of his eyes, their caress at her throat sent her pulse into orbit. She had to forcibly restrain an urge to fidget in her chair because the pit of her stomach had turned to mush.
‘We’re not getting very far very fast,’ he said, but he was speaking to her back as Ruth dashed for the amenities, certain it was her only possible refuge. If she stayed long enough, she prayed, maybe he would give up and leave without her. Then she laughed at her image in the mirror, an almost hysterical laugh at such hysterical thinking.
But as she emerged from the loo the sight of what could only be an emergency exit spurred her to thinking that was even more hysterical. The decision took no courage, much less outright panic. Anything, she thought, was preferable to facing up to her husband in his present mood and her admitted weakness for him.
It was the work of an instant to thrust open the door and peer into the alleyway behind the restaurant, the work of another to step hesitantly into the darkness, then scurry with increasingly long strides to the main street beyond and the chance of a taxi, a bus, anything mobile to assist her flight.
Ruth hit the footpath running, only to come up short as a male figure stepped out, arms spread to catch her as she ran straight into his arms.
Kurtis! She didn’t question it, didn’t have to. His touch was too familiar, his scent, the very essence of him unquestionable, undeniable. His arms closed around her in an embrace that was more caress than capture, more arousing, and deliberately so, than frightening.
Ruth stopped struggling almost as soon as she began, her body replying to his embrace while her mind screamed silently against it. Strong fingers gripped her shoulders with such gentleness that she should have easily been able to free herself, yet somehow couldn’t. Warm breath touched at her cheek, her ear, as his words insinuated themselves into her consciousness.
‘You’re only fooling yourself, you know. You’re trying to run from yourself, Ruth, and you can’t. Any more than you can run from me now. Your
running’s over and your coffee’s waiting, so make up your mind if you want to come quietly or be carried.’
‘Let me go.’
Ruth said the words, but they emerged as neither a plea nor a demand, merely a whispered emptiness to the night air. She slumped in his arms, defeated by the feel of his body against her, defeated by how easily he’d managed to stay one step ahead of her all the way.
‘Shall we go home instead of having coffee?’ he asked, ignoring her words, keeping her close against him, trapped in his arms and surely just as trapped by her own emotions, by her own fears.
‘No,’ she replied, then repeated herself. ‘No. Let’s have coffee, please.’
Coffee, tea, milk, another meal, anything ... anything but a return to her tiny flat where she would have to be alone with him again, defenceless against whatever weapons he chose to use.
Ruth returned to the restaurant, her eyes downcast, certain everybody in the place must be looking at her, must know of her futile flight, her obvious capture. Kurtis, striding easily beside her, seemed oblivious to the possibility of any embarrassment. He would be, she thought. It was typical of him simply to ignore such a possibility.
As they approached the table, their cooling coffee was replaced by fresh, but it was far less simple to replace Ruth’s feeling of despair at the entire situation.
And Kurtis knew it! He took his place across from her, calmly stirring his coffee as he sought her with his eyes, using them to reach out and touch her, to caress her, to fondle her. His voice he used as a weapon.
‘Are you going to try and keep avoiding this forever, Ruth?’ he asked, voice low but sufficient to carry across the sudden intimacy of the setting.
‘I’m not trying to avoid anything,’ she insisted, lying, knowing it, knowing he knew it as well. ‘I didn’t ask you to come; I didn’t ask you to ... to...’
A Magical Affair Page 7