Reckless

by Amanda Carpenter

  Only a few inches away, his eyes were looking into hers hard, face calm and relaxed, and yet something quivered through him at her question, something that made her stare, the embers of a murderous rage remembered. He said uncompromisingly, “Yes.”

  She pressed on. “You would have rather died than leave me, or anyone else, on that island while you left freely, wouldn’t you?”

  His eyes glittered. She caught her breath at the leaping emotion in those expressive eyes. “Yes.”

  “Your earlier silence betrays you,” she murmured, watching him with very bright, keenly intelligent eyes. “Was there something illegal on that plane, something that you haven’t the freedom to discuss, something for which the People’s Revolutionary Republic was only a front?”

  Deadly serious. “Yes.”

  “This is incredible. You and Jarred—Scott,” she asked unsteadily, “who do you work for?”

  Sudden, vivid amusement. His shoulders quivered with mirth. “Only the newspaper, Les. I didn’t tell you that I’ve taken a promotion offer while you were in the hospital, did I? You’re looking at the newest editor on the Times staff.”

  She felt stunned. She sniffed the air like a hunting hound. “I can’t be that wrong,” she muttered, staring at him thoughtfully. “You and Jarred stayed, only you two. Wayne would have tried to stay. I mentioned something to him, and he had been furious for some reason. He wouldn’t have left me either, any more than you would have, but he did because he was forced to. You forced him, didn’t you?”

  He was still laughing silently, watching her, no reply.

  “Your silence betrays you again,” she mused, propping her chin on one hand and regarding him. “If I was off target, if I was that wrong about you two, your natural reaction would be to expostulate, to tell me ‘Of course not, don’t be ridiculous!’ But you aren’t saying it, and yet you don’t talk. It must have been the way I asked the question.” She thought and then phrased her next question carefully. “Were you ever at one time employed by the government in a capacity that you are not at liberty to discuss?”

  Scott didn’t lie. He smiled and said nothing.

  Chapter Nine

  Instead he asked her a question, as he reached out a forefinger and traced her cheek lightly. A shiver tickled down her spine. “Are you changed by what happened on the island?”

  She jerked. “You understand me that well?” was her reply. She sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “Yes, I think so. I…it all happened so fast! I was scared, threatened, repulsed, exhilarated, dismayed…I was so many things with so many people in such a short space of time! It was most unsettling.”

  “You were beaten, shot, hijacked,” he continued for her gently. “You had to fight for your life and for other people’s lives. You had to act under terrible pressure, and you were horribly alone—”

  “And in some ways I’d never felt so violently aware in all my life,” she finished, with a strange laugh. He watched her carefully. “Do you know, there for a while I was racing along, my mind working at a fantastic speed, the adrenalin flowing, my pulse pounding. I could have died several times, but I was so alive!”

  “Some people collapse under those kind of circumstances. You rose to meet the occasion and survived. It’s a theme replayed throughout mankind’s history. Man—meets the elements and survives them, and sometimes surpasses all expectations.” This was a new side to the man that Leslie was coming to know, a contemplative, deep side. He looked oddly ageless, sitting there so quietly in the armchair, hands still, eyes attentive, mind active. As she watched him, she was struck by the physical beauty in the harmonious blend of dark golden brown tan and lighter shade of hair, with the chocolate of his eyes and the silver flashing highlights at the edges of his head. She had a fleeting, strange impression of a young man with the same irregular features, minus the mature lines, with a more reckless gleam in his eyes. Then she also saw an older man, a quieter man, with the silver blond hair becoming more silver than blond, with his strong, gentle hands gnarling, and his eyes even more compassionate. She saw and realised that they were all the same man, what he was and what he was capable of becoming. She wondered that Dennis had only seen her for what she’d been in the past, too blind to see what she was becoming, herself. Then grief hit her briefly, as she knew again that she would never see Jenny as a beautiful, mature young woman.

  “Why,” she asked suddenly, “did you accept the promotion, Scott? What made you quit your other job, your journalistic work with Jarred? You are such a talented writer, and you had such a gift for finding information!”

  He looked beyond her, to the shadows in the corner of the living room. The summer heat still brooded in the night. She wiped a trickle of sweat from her hairline and shifted in her suddenly cramped position. He noticed, stood, and helped her to the couch. She was grateful for his thoughtfulness, as her leg had stiffened up. Just as she was getting miserable, wondering if he meant to rebuff this question also, he sighed. She tensed. It was so terribly important.

  “I’m older, Les. I’m thirty-eight, I have been galloping all over the world for eight years, and before that I’d fought like a mad dog in the business game, thrashing to get to the top,” he said quietly. He was still looking away from her, into something that only he could see. She felt a sharp pang and then sudden fierce tenderness. He wasn’t getting old. He was young still! He was strong, upright—she felt a constriction in her throat as she realised that she wasn’t the only one to see the future. “I’m no longer so very young that I feel an endless abundance of vitality and arrogance. I see—sometimes—the consequences of my actions.” He eased himself down on the couch beside her and absently took her hand, caressing it and looking down wryly at the fingers he fondled. “I killed a man last week,” he said, as if he were talking about the weather. The feeling in her throat went to her chest and the tightness got even tighter. “I won’t pretend that he is necessarily the first man I’ve ever shot. You would only disbelieve me if I did, and there’s no point in it. But this time it was different. I knew that morning that everything was going to be all right, when we found one of the men who said that the commander was still questioning you. You were alive, and he was going to die. Oh, yes, I was very sure of that. I exploded into the room, and drew up the machine gun.” The constriction in her chest was a leaden thing, and she covered her mouth to hide her trembling lips. Memory was bright and blurry, and it all was real, the sickness, the rage, the fear, the big blond man who crashed into her life just when she had thought it over.

  Scott turned his head and took in her discomposure. As she looked up at him he smiled such a sweet and tender smile of compassion for her unpleasant memories that she couldn’t contain the wet drop that trembled a moment on spiked brown lashes before slipping away. “You see,” he told her softly, “I pulled the trigger with such a savage, destructive joy, I could barely see. It was all so wonderfully glorious, his bleeding body slumping against the opposite wall, and my surging feeling of triumph. I’d saved you; he was dead; I had won. I have to live with that. Not really that he was killed, mind you: the man was in a corner. He would have fought before surrendering, and he would have lost. And it wasn’t even that I was the man who killed him. No, Leslie, what I have to live with is that one, overwhelming moment of unholy joy as I took the man’s life away from him forever. I did it with no regrets—if faced with the same situation, I would do the same, with as much primitive, amoral glee. I still feel that distant haze of red rage when I think of how I found you, bloody, beaten, hopeless and helpless—so vulnerable that I could have crushed you with one hand, and so like a battered child. It’s done, finished, to my great and intense satisfaction. But never in my life will I hold a gun again.”

  She felt so stricken; she felt so utterly shaken, she didn’t know if she would ever feel steady again; she looked at him, eyes huge, mute. She didn’t understand why, but she suddenly knew that in some way she didn’t yet quite comprehend, this man had brought her entire life
to a standstill and nothing would ever be the same again.

  He looked at her, and he didn’t say anything. He let her see, without prevarication, what was deep in those dark, shadowed orbs. He was steady, unashamed of what he was, and it was Leslie who looked away first. She didn’t see the look of both pain and deep emotion that invaded those steady eyes, for she was looking down at her hand, clasped so tenderly in his own stronger ones. She watched him raise her hand to his lips, quivered as he pressed a soft kiss to her palm, watched as he stood and whispered, “Sleep well, Leslie.”

  He let go of her hand and it fell to her lap, quite unnoticed. She watched him turn and walk silently to his room, shutting the door behind him, such a quiet man, so deep and philosophical, and accepting of himself, what he was.

  He was a better person than she, for that. The sanctimonious, self-righteous guilt she had whipped herself with for the one night of indiscretion, that mistake that had been a mistake simply because of her outlook and attitude—she had besmirched a night that should have been a good, rare memory, for the tawdry morality had been in existence in her mind only, never his. She now understood his anger and underlying hurt at her behaviour stemming from that night, and his bafflement. He wouldn’t understand what she’d been doing, couldn’t understand because she hadn’t explained. Her hypocritical morality that told her she could enjoy sex with a husband she might not have loved, but not a man with whom she had shared a night of love but not a lifetime commitment—it all flashed through her mind as she listened to the silence from without and heeded the voices within.

  The beast had stirred and whispered, and she had heeded its prodding. The beast was not necessarily bad and not particularly good, though sometimes, violently, both. To be human meant to merely bear the burden of the self, with dignity, if possible.

  For a long, long time she sat there and felt the weight and the wonder that was herself.

  She stood, and her leg had stiffened again, which made walking awkward and painful. Somehow, though, the pain was something she could revel in, a physical part of the life she was experiencing. She shut the front door, turned off the living room light, and leaned against the wall for a long moment while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Everything was in shadow, dark upon dark, but she need not have any fears for what lay ahead of her. It was all in the same place as in the light, only seen and felt differently.

  Her eyes soon could pick out the various shapes of things. When she could discern, she walked haltingly to the closed door that was his. Her hand went out, grasped the doorknob, turned it silently. The door opened; there was no lock. She slipped quietly to the side of his bed and looked down on his sleeping form. His chest was bare, sheets tangled roughly around his hips, one dark leg thrown out from under, his head turned away to the wall. She thought she could see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, but she wasn’t sure in the enveloping darkness. It didn’t matter, for she knew with every breath she took that he also breathed, and that was a good feeling. He was so large as he lay there sleeping, and so strong and still, and so vulnerable underneath the strength and determination. He was a man, a splendid man, who lived a sincerity in his code of life that was wonderful to see.

  Leslie sat very gently down on the side of his bed, and as the mattress shifted to take her weight, his head moved and she knew that he was awake. He stayed still and waited, silently. She reached out a tentative hand and placed it on his chest, feeling the warmth and the silk of his skin that covered hard bone and sinewy muscle and keen personality. She touched him, and the touch became a stroke as he stiffened and became rigid, unmoving. She thought she saw a faint glitter from his eyes. Then she reached down and touched her lips to him, and her lips were warm on his warmth, soft skin on skin. She caressed him, and he drew a sharp, shaking, audible breath. Her hand heaved in movement with his chest, and she lifted it to lean over him and put her fingers lightly against the side of his cheek, trailing them down to his jaw, slight prickling roughness against sensitive fingertips, and then to his mouth, the edge of her fingernail catching on his lower lip. He opened his mouth to say something, but she hastened to put her hand over his mouth to still whatever it was.

  She whispered, a soft sound in a silent place, “I don’t want to have sex. I am a mature woman and know how to control my bodily urges. I want to make love, beautiful, warm, passionate, sharing love. I want to make love to you.” She hesitated, fingers sliding away. Silence, a sheet rustle, a sigh. She wasn’t sure who had sighed. Then she trembled, as he made no move but stared at her, head half lifted off the pillow, dark gold hair falling on to stark white, “Please—do you want me to go?”

  Paralysed moment, and then sudden, surging movement. He came up, his arms coming out and overwhelmingly surrounding her, drawing her to that silken hard warmth, bare against her cheek. He drew her down and rose above her, and removed her clothes. She held his head to her.

  Chapter Ten

  A week passed. The sun disappeared behind a horrendous wall of lowering clouds for a time and then came out to smile again. Leslie limped less, felt better, her bruises faded, and her energy returned. The summer air brooded, heavy and ominous, and the silence became oppressive. Scott was quiet, always there, always in her consciousness. They didn’t talk much. They made love sometimes, leisurely. Leslie slept a lot. Once Scott went out in the car for food supplies. She didn’t bother accompanying him. He wouldn’t have accepted help from her anyway.

  Instead of basking in the permeating serenity of the silence shrouded forest, Leslie was tensing up, becoming restless, feeling constricted. Scott’s silent attitude was wearing on her nerves. She found herself watching him: noting the film of sweat on his silken brown chest when he went without a shirt in the summer heat; studying his firm lips as he tilted his head back for a long cool drink from a tall iced tea glass; watching his neck muscles work. She was intensely aware of his body, and this increased as time went by, instead of dissipating.

  Scott wasn’t quite as good natured as he seemed, either, she found, when he snapped at her for no apparent reason. She stared up at him, feeling astonishingly hurt, as tears welled up in her dark blue eyes. He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck as if it pained him, and then apologised lowly.

  Now she sat out on the porch and absently swatted at a mindless winged creature that repeatedly batted against her arm, and she pondered. The evening was well advanced, and she was in deep dusky shadow, for though the living room door was open, the light was off. Scott was in the lit kitchen, drinking coffee and reading. The faint glow thrown through the picture window was all the illumination she had. Funny, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she just sat, by herself, and listened to the sounds of night.

  Thoughts welled up, and shouted at each other. You’re crazy to be here, something whispered. Something else murmured, he’s just inside. Another voice asked, where are you going next? She shied away from the thoughts and lifted her cotton top away from her chest. She was so warm. Something rumbled darkly, off in the darkness. Trees swayed in the rising wind, and the breeze felt oddly cool against her damp skin. It would storm.

  Why do I feel so tormented? she asked the dark.

  Scott looked up as she walked into the kitchen’s circle of light, and he smiled. He was leaning back in his chair, legs propped on the one other chair, with faded denim shorts on and nothing else. She knew now how he managed to stay so brown, for he spent time outside nearly every day, either jogging or cleaning away fallen branches from the cabin’s clearing or doing some kind of physical exercise. His smile faded and a faintly questioning look came into his eyes as she walked slowly up to him, took away his book and put it on the table. He cocked his head whimsically and looked up at her.

  Her eyes utterly serious and oddly desperate, she regarded him silently. Then she reached down and placed her hands on his shoulders, bending forward to kiss him on the mouth. He tilted his head back and willingly responded. She pushed past the barrier of his lips and d
eepened the kiss erotically, while her hands strayed, feather light, down his bare chest to caress the flat muscles of his stomach.

  His hands went to hers, but whether he meant to push her away or press her hands to him, she never knew, for she suddenly dragged away from him and sat down in a slump across the table from him, in the chair his legs had been on. They stared at each other. His gaze was arrested, but not surprised, she noted.

  “It’s no use,” she sighed, weary, rubbing at her eyes. He was receptively still, only his eyes moving, on her, attentive, masked.

  “What’s no use?” he asked her.

  “This, you, me—everything.” She shrugged, a helpless movement. Then, before she could help herself, the question welled up again, born of frustration. “What do you want from me?”

  “Will you stop asking me that question?” he suddenly exploded, wrathfully. “Why are you always so worried about what I might ask of you?”

  The sigh she emitted was gusty, bitten off. She just stared at him, eyes widened. “My whole life, everyone has wanted something from me. Be this, don’t do that—be my wife, be a good daughter, don’t, for God’s sake, do anything foolish! Well, I can handle that. I know what they want from me, and I know what I can give them. But you! This! Oh, I knew what to expect from you at the very first, and I could handle that too, but so much has happened and everything’s changed. I don’t know the rules to this game, and I don’t know what you want!”