by Julie Cohen
His eyes and his words got rid of her inhibitions. Jane slid across the couch and put her arms around Jonny’s shoulders and hugged him.
He responded immediately by wrapping his arms around her tight and pulling her to sit on his lap. He buried his face in her hair and Jane felt him breathing deep, nestling in closer to her. Her cheek rested against his neck, where his pulse beat under his skin.
Time reduced to heartbeats and breaths taken, Jonny’s scent and warmth drawn down into her body. She was offering him comfort, she knew, but she had never felt so safe.
An indefinable number of moments later, he loosed one of his arms from around her and stroked his hand through her hair. Long, slow strokes, as if he were soothing her, too, by sifting his fingers through her curls.
She raised her head and did what she’d wanted to earlier. The skin of his face was warm and just rough with stubble, the bones precise and perfect under her hand. With her touch she saw colour come back along with his half a gentle smile.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘I didn’t do much.’
‘You were there. That was what I wanted.’
‘How do you feel?’
He blinked a few times, considering, and she noticed that the colour of his eyes had calmed back into deep blue. He had his father’s mouth, but his mother’s eyes.
‘Better,’ he said, and sounded surprised. ‘My father wasn’t the perfect man I thought he was. But he and my mother had a real marriage.’
Still caressing his face, she remembered the photographs. Jonathan and Naomi Cole’s real marriage had been a part of every day of Jonny’s life. He’d grown up feeling an integral part of his family, wanted and valued not just for who he was and what he did, but because he completed the unit just by existing.
No wonder his flat, which he’d moved into five months before, was already more homelike than any place Jane had ever lived. No wonder he had that warmth in his voice and his smile, that ability to be happy in his honest self and to make her feel special.
He was special himself. He had those gifts she had never been given, that she’d never even known that she lacked.
She hadn’t even learned how to be a friend until a few hours ago.
Jonny was still brushing his fingers through her hair. He let his hand rest on her nape, his thumb making slow circles. The touch on her bare skin made her shiver.
Without planning it, she lifted his glasses off and put them aside on the arm of the couch. He didn’t look that different without them. The same, just more … naked.
As if she’d begun to undress him.
She traced, with a finger, one of his eyebrows. It was soft and glossy. She followed the curve of it downward and then, when he shut his eyes, brushed the skin of his eyelid. Still soothing, still gentle. The skin here seemed somehow exposed, more delicate and sensitive than normal skin. Hot, protecting the precious eye beneath. It reminded her of the smooth skin on his erection, the one time she had held him in her hands and heard him gasp with pleasure.
Only that one time. Only for a moment. Not nearly enough.
She moved her head, lifted and tilted so she could press her lips to that delicate skin. Under her lips she felt the small movement of his eye, and she heard the soft exhalation of his breath.
Touching him was addictive. She kissed the ridge of his eye socket, his forehead, loving how she could feel the bones under his skin. With her lips she could appreciate the texture of his eyebrows. She pushed back his hair and kissed where it began to grow from his head, the roots tickling her.
Jonny’s arms tightened around her. The way she was sitting meant that her right breast was pressed against his chest, and his heartbeat went through her. It was a small rhythmic caress on her stiffened nipple. He slid his hand around her neck, running his thumb now along the side of her jaw, his other hand spread across the small of her back.
His touch was still comforting, but Jane drew in a breath full of him, heard their clothes rustling in the silence and the soft kisses of her lips, and knew that they had gone from soothing each other to arousing. His legs under hers were hard and she could feel his erection, even harder, underneath one of the cheeks of her bottom. He surrounded her and held her and she couldn’t resist touching the skin of his forehead once, just briefly, with her tongue to taste faint salt and Jonny.
She had never yet lain down with him, naked, skin to skin. She wondered whether he would feel like this, comfortable and yet exciting.
‘Jane,’ Jonny whispered.
She was under a spell woven by his body under hers and their closeness and she knew that he had whispered because he couldn’t bear to break it either. ‘Mmm,’ she answered, kissing his cheekbone, the slight hollow underneath it. The line his smile created.
‘We agreed not to do this,’ he whispered.
‘I know.’ She kissed the line beside his mouth again. If she moved slightly to the left, she could kiss his mouth. She knew what it would be like. The hesitation would be gone and she would need to devour his lips, slide her tongue into his mouth and feel everything about him.
Or she could shift her head slightly upwards, and look into his eyes. She knew what that would be like, too. It would be reality returning, and the rational agreement they’d made not to have sex with each other. Because she couldn’t give him what he needed.
Instead she kissed him a third time. He was slightly sandpapery with a day’s growth and when he smiled there would be a groove. Just there, where her lips parted. But he wasn’t smiling now because he wanted her and it was wrong.
The corner of his mouth. So close to a real kiss. She could make him turn to her and kiss her as she wanted him to. She could run her hand down his chest and touch the bulge in his jeans, unzip his flies and take him out and drive them both out of control.
She moved her hand down his chest. He was breathing even more quickly. His belt buckle was cool. She touched the tip of her tongue to the corner of his mouth.
‘Jane,’ he groaned, louder now, and anyone listening would think he was encouraging her to touch him.
But he wasn’t moving. He was waiting, tense, for what she was going to do. Eaten up with anticipation, but not moving.
Because she wasn’t what he really wanted.
Jane bit her lip. Then she bowed her head and quickly, before she could change her mind, she slipped off his lap and to her feet.
‘I should go to bed before I do something stupid,’ she said. She felt the hated flush creeping up her cheeks.
Jonny stood, too. She couldn’t meet his eyes but she could see the grace in his body, and the way his penis strained against his jeans, outlining a shape that fired her memory and imagination.
He touched her cheek and then took his hand away, as if he didn’t trust himself any more than she trusted herself. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She nodded, not looking at his face. ‘No problem. I’m happy to help. Any time you want me to fail to seduce you, just let me know.’
‘You haven’t failed, believe me. But thank you for stopping. It’s better this way.’
She nodded again. ‘I know.’
‘I’m glad one of us was strong enough to stop it.’ She heard him pull in a long breath and let it out. She didn’t feel strong. Foolish and inadequate, yes.
‘Okay, well, I’ll go to bed,’ she said. She turned, straightening her blouse, heading for the guest room where Jonny had put her bag earlier.
‘Jane.’ His voice stopped her, though she wasn’t brave enough to turn back to him. ‘I also meant thank you for listening. And for telling me I should tell my mother the truth. It was the best thing I could have done.’
‘I’m glad.’
She felt his hand tugging at hers, turning her around to face him. She finally looked up into his face and saw his smile and his eyes, so warm with affection. He bent and kissed her on her forehead.
‘Let’s have a proper break tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Just you and me, not worrying about anyth
ing.’
‘As friends.’
‘As friends.’ His face was kind, and she’d never known that kindness could hurt. ‘You told me the other day you didn’t know how to be friends. But you do, Jane. You’re very good at it.’ He squeezed her hand, and then let it go. ‘Sleep well.’
She nodded, yet again, too full of thwarted desire and disappointment and embarrassment to do anything else but murmur ‘goodnight’ and go to the guest room, where she knew she would lie awake and think about friendship as if it were a consolation prize.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘NOW this is what I call a day off.’
Jane made a sound of assent, still gazing down the slope to where Ullswater lay mirror-calm, reflecting the blue spring sky and the crenulated mountains, rich with last summer’s bracken and this year’s gorse. A dry stone wall was cool behind her back and the spring sun was warm on her face. And Jonny was beside her, strong and tall, sitting on the same blanket among the remains of their picnic, with his back leaning against the same stone wall.
She absently took another grape from the bunch in her lap and popped it in her mouth. The sweetness that exploded on her tongue seemed a part of the view, the smell of new grass, the sound of sheep rustling behind the wall and Jonny’s breathing.
They’d spent the morning walking around the lake—nothing too strenuous, because she didn’t have proper boots, just trainers, but enough so that her legs felt pleasantly achy and her lungs felt full of fresh air. She realised something.
‘I haven’t thought about work all day,’ she said. Her mobile phone, which would normally be attached to her body in some way, lay turned off in her handbag on Jonny’s guest-room bed, next to her BlackBerry. It had felt like a dizzying risk when she had turned their power off. Maybe it was the fresh air, but it felt less risky now.
Jonny laughed. ‘I should think not. I can’t think of anything more different from that office of yours.’ He took one of her grapes. ‘I used to come up here when I was in secondary school and I was having a hard time. I’d just sit and look at the lake. It’s simpler. Everything is as it seems.’
‘I don’t think I’ve gone for a whole morning and afternoon without thinking about work for …’ She frowned, and considered. ‘I don’t think I ever have.’
‘You’re joking,’ Jonny said, and then he obviously looked at her face. ‘You’re not joking.’
He sounded appalled. ‘It’s not so strange,’ she said. ‘You work hard, too.’
‘Yes. And when I was in Silicon Valley working for CaliSoft, I took all the fourteen-hour days they could throw at me, and I loved it because I was solving problems. I would go home and write code in my dreams while I was sleeping. There were a couple months when I wouldn’t have spoken to a live person face to face if Thom hadn’t physically dragged me out to the beach.’
She glanced at Jonny. Before she’d met him again she’d been sure his life was exactly like that—days and nights spent bent over a computer. In real life he was so vital that she couldn’t quite imagine him shutting himself away.
‘I wrote my first book proposal when I realised I couldn’t spend my life in a corporation, letting my time belong to someone else,’ he said.
‘But you still have to spend hours on your books.’
‘Yes. But the great thing about being your own boss, more or less, is that if you work hard enough one day, you can play the next.’ He smiled at her ruefully. ‘I haven’t had much inclination to play since moving back to England, though.’
‘I’m not sure I ever have.’
‘You must. Surely you don’t work every weekend, Jane?’
‘Yes. Not always in the office,’ she added quickly. ‘Sometimes at home.’
‘Even when you were with Gary?’
‘Gary wanted to work, too.’
But now she wondered whether she hadn’t used work to avoid intimacy with Gary, because she knew she wasn’t any good at it. And whether he’d only been pretending to want to work, too. He certainly wouldn’t be doing much working in the company of Kathleen.
Jonny was shaking his head. ‘When you were a kid you used to play all the time. Every time I came round to your house you and your brothers had concocted some new elaborate game.’
She sighed. ‘Those weren’t games; they were convoluted tests to make the only girl in the family jump through every hoop to prove she was worthy of not being left behind.’
‘Really? I was always jealous of all the fun you had.’
‘You’re an only child. I love my four brothers, but there was competition for everything. Who was the fastest, the smartest, the cheekiest, who was Mum’s favourite, who got invited to spend time with Dad. It was fun sometimes; sometimes it was pure hell.’ She stood up, and threw a grape with quick accuracy at a tree trunk. It hit it square on. ‘I did learn how to bowl a cricket ball, though.’
Jonny stood, too. ‘You learned more than that. Come on.’
He grabbed her hand and tugged her down the slope. Jane let out a giggle of surprise and delight as they ran, avoiding rocks and tufts of grass and small cairns of sheep dung. Her body moved without needing her to think and she remembered flying down a street in Chelsea, also holding Jonny’s hand.
He stopped them in front of a tree; not the slim one she’d hit with the bowled grape, but a grandfather of a tree, thick-trunked and tall with gnarled, strong branches. Its young leaves were bright green.
‘I bet the view’s even better from up there,’ Jonny said, pointing to a branch far above their heads.
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I haven’t climbed a tree in—’
‘Way too long. Me neither. Let’s do it.’
Jonny grinned at her, the sunlight dancing in his eyes, the breeze ruffling his hair. Pure fun.
‘All right, Tarzan,’ she said, and began to scan the trunk for hand-and footholds. Bole and branches transformed into a ladder. She put her hand on the trunk and fitted her toes into a hole. The bark was rough under her hands, cool and alive.
‘Want a boost up?’ Jonny asked. She glanced over her shoulder at him and, unbelievably, winked.
‘What do you think I am, some sort of girl?’ she asked, and hoisted herself upwards.
It was a dozen years, at least, since she’d climbed a tree, but the rhythm and the balance came back to her immediately. She stretched, reached, scrambled, swung. Everything disappeared but the next branch, and the next, until she hauled herself onto the thick branch that Jonny had pointed to, and straddled it.
From here the view was panoramic: the lake, the mountains, even trees beneath her. The leaves were young enough not to block the view, but instead frame it with slivers of green life. Her breath was coming quickly, her heart was thrumming, and she laughed out loud with joy as she swung her feet in the air.
‘Is it that good?’ Jonny called to her from the ground. From this height he was foreshortened, all head and shoulders.
‘Better,’ she said.
Jonny began to climb. From her perch she watched him. He took a slightly different route than she had, because he was taller and stronger. She smiled, appreciating the strength of his hands and shoulders, the dexterity of his movements. It took him very little time to reach the branch where she sat. She scooted aside, closer to the trunk, so he could join her.
Like her, he was flushed and excited by his exertion and the height. He sat with his legs dangling off the side and pounded on his chest. ‘Ahhhh-ahahhh-ahahhhhhh!’
he Tarzan-yelled to the view. His voice came faintly back to them.
Jonny’s expression was so self-satisfied that Jane laughed and he laughed with her. She rested her head back against the trunk and for the space of several lung-expanding breaths she was simply happy.
‘Penny for them,’ Jonny said, after a little while.
For a second she nearly told him about the dream she’d had, about the two of them in a tree, about how he’d said she was his fant
asy.
‘I was thinking I should do this more often, and wondering if I’d get arrested for climbing a tree in Hyde Park.’
‘Before I met you again, that was exactly what I’d have expected you to do,’ Jonny said.
Her lips twisted at the implications of that. ‘But when you met me again, you realised I wasn’t that type of person any more.’
‘Not exactly. You did act out one of my most amazing fantasies on the very first night.’
‘That was—uncharacteristic.’
‘Was it?’
Being up here seemed to get rid of her embarrassment, her reticence. It was as if by climbing up high, she’d left behind the rest of the world and it was just her and Jonny safely cradled in the tree.
‘I used to take risks,’ she told him. ‘It was one of the reasons I was so attracted to the creative side of advertising. I could come up with wild ideas, hundreds of them, ones that nobody else could think of, and sometimes they would stick.’
‘Has that changed?’
‘Yes. I’m not sure when, exactly. When I started to get promotions, it seemed to be less about coming up with ideas than coming up with the right idea. The one that would sell. Making a success of it. I’ve got people depending on me now, and it’s harder to go out on a limb.’ She realised the aptness of the metaphor she’d chosen, and laughed again.
‘You were always the most exciting person I knew,’ Jonny said. ‘You were exactly what I thought every girl should be like.’
‘Was,’ she said, quietly, glancing away. ‘I’m not like that any more.’
A dark bird alighted on the surface of the lake, spreading ripples. She was too far to see what it was, but she watched it paddle, search, and dive.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’ asked Jonny.
‘Of course.’
‘You’ve made one of my fantasies come true lately. I wonder if you would mind helping me with another.’
She looked away from the ripples the bird left on the empty lake and back at Jonny’s face. He was serious, but there was still a hint of a gentle smile.