by Fox Brison
My world, before rocked by a tsunami of emotion, was now calming to a gentle wave lapping on the shore.
And all because Joanne Cassidy saw me warts, or in my case, scars ‘n’ all.
Chapter 32
Joanne
When I offered to drive Adele home from the opera I wondered if I’d made a humungous error of judgement; she was agitated and uncommunicative to say the least. However, by the time we reached her house she’d regrouped somewhat.
When she began to open up I thought my heart was going to burst. The fact she trusted me enough to share her innermost thoughts was incredibly humbling - perhaps she felt a connection over our commonality, in this case the trauma of our youth. Throughout her heartbreaking soliloquy, all I wanted to do was take her in my arms and hold her tight, but that wasn’t what she needed. She needed someone to listen but more importantly than that, she needed someone to hear her. Her strength amazed me; she’d learnt to cope with so much from such an early age, and whilst some people may have considered her, as I had, cold and distant, now I saw it for what it really was.
Survival instinct.
“Do you think Mackenzie purposely spilt her drink on you?” I asked. It was something that had been playing on my mind since it happened and I couldn’t shake it.
“What? God no.” Adele may have protested, but it was moderate to weak at best.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’m not, not really. Mackenzie is superficial and shallow, yet I don’t believe she’s capable of such cruelty.”
“I overheard her and Aileen talking in the bathroom the night we went shopping,” I confessed.
“And?” Adele sat forward.
“And they were talking about how you were ahead in the promotion race and that Aileen was willing to do practically anything-” it was Mackenzie’s reference to Adele’s scars that made me really suspicious.
“Still it’s a stretch. I’m a cold hearted cow but even I wouldn’t stoop so low.” Pushing her hair behind her ears she hung her head. “Although maybe I would.”
“What do you mean?”
“Orchestrating an incident, the whole purpose of which is to humiliate me, is that any worse than what I’ve put you through?” she asked ruefully.
“For the thousandth time, Adele, you haven’t done anything to me, least of all humiliated me.”
“I’m not an innocent though am I? If Mackenzie did do what she did on purpose I can hardly complain.”
“Yes, Adele, you can, and if it ever comes to light it wasn’t an unfortunate mishap there’ll be hell to pay.” My wrath was met with a yawn of megalithic proportions. “Am I boring you?” I teased.
“Oh God I’m sorry, not at all,” she hurriedly replied. “Emotional upheaval exhausts me, but tonight it’s a good exhausted.” She reached over and cupped my cheek again. I was growing to love her signature move!
“Adele… I know this…” aw shit. I was losing the battle between good sense and attraction, incapable of stringing two words together because… I moved closer and covered her hand with my own admiring its strength and vulnerability. I leaned in and our lips met. I tasted power in the movement of her lips over my own, and when her tongue touched mine, a mere feathering of the tip, I became flushed with arousal. My body craved this, craved Adele’s touch and passion. I reached my hand behind her neck and she froze.
Her head pulled back so sharply I’m surprised she didn’t snap her spinal column in two.
“What are you doing, Joanne?” She gathered her dressing gown and held the collar tightly around her shoulders; however, her eyes were hazy with panic not anger, which I found encouraging for some reason. I laid my cards on the table; the lines of our relationship had grown so blurred I wasn’t sure there were any left, and this was the last barrier to hurdle. She’d given me her emotional self, now I wanted her physically.
“Adele-” I tried to soothe her obvious trepidation.
“No!” She held up both hands and scooted along the sofa. “This is not happening. Christ I thought you were different.”
“Adele-” I reached out my hand.
“No!” she screamed. “Get out. I don’t need this. I don’t need your pity. I don’t want to be your pity fuck!”
Okay maybe I spoke too soon with regard to the lack of anger. “You’re not,” I hurried to appease her.
“I’m not a complete moron!” She jumped up. “Leave Joanne. Now!” The cats had scarpered before I made my move, and now I was wishing I’d done the same thing.
“Get out of your arse, Adele. It wasn’t a pity kiss. It wasn’t out of gratitude. It was because I’m bloody well attracted to you. To your honesty. You are beautiful,” I said forcefully.
“Honesty?” she hissed the word. “We are deceiving everyone I know. And beautiful? Now I know you’re taking the piss.”
“Fuck you-”
“Offered once and declined. Go. Get out of my house.” She quickly tapped on her phone. “There will be a cab outside in two minutes. Get your things and go. This ends here.”
“When you calm down, and you will,” I said picking up my coat from the arm of the chair “call me. I wanted to kiss you, have wanted to kiss you for a while.” My own heart rate picked up. This couldn’t end, not this way, not with her so hurt and me so desperate I wanted to beg.
I tried being angry, but it was sorrow that filled my heart. Sorrow that Adele couldn’t see me for a past that was slowly eating away at her future, no matter how much she pretended otherwise.
“Goodbye, Adele.” I closed the door and when I made it to the street I let the tears fall.
I’d just ruined the best relationship I’d ever had, even if it was fake.
***
The whole way home was spent second guessing my motives. Had I acted out of pity? I shook my head decisively. No, was the immediate and definite answer. I acted out of desire, and the only reason I had to berate myself, was for being an idiot. I leaned back against the headrest. Ashleigh and I joked about Adele being my ideal woman, and on paper she was. Absolutely. However, the initial physical attraction waned when she pledged me to her service. How could you do anything but judge the book by its cover when you were put in that position? And Adele’s cover at that point wasn’t very inviting.
Then I cracked the spine.
Smart, successful, and although she tried to hide it behind a mask of icy indifference, also incredibly kind. In our short time together, her cold heart warmed and her brusque demeanour softened. The locked door to her heart slowly inched open. She was becoming more than a business associate, she was becoming a friend. And I wanted more.
No.
Yes.
No.
Shite. My answers were quick fire volleys at the tennis net and I was willing the umpire to call ‘out’ if only to give my head peace. Yes I wanted more. I tried for more. And was smacked down like a fly in a swatting contest.
“Ash,” I sobbed into the phone when I got home.
“Jo? Doll? What’s wrong?” Her voice was thick with sleep.
“I… can you come round. Please.”
“Give me five minutes, hen.” The light on the answering machine was flashing but I couldn’t cope with listening to heavy breathing, not tonight. I slipped out of my heels and into my slippers. The dress remained. A connection to Adele, to the evening that resembled a mountain stage in the Tour de France. It had started so well, the slow pull at the base of the mountain, the long climb to the summit as she told me of her past, but it was all downhill from there.
Ending with a spectacular crash when I kissed her and she threw me out.
“Jo?” The front door flung open and Ashleigh careered into the kitchen, still in her pyjamas.
“Ash… oh God, Ash, it was brutal!” I buried my head into her shoulder and sobbed.
“What did she do? I’ll murder her!” She let me go and began prowling the room.
“No, this is on me. I think,” I said, still a little unsure as
to what I’d done wrong. “I kissed her for real.”
“You did what?” Ashleigh collapsed into the chair.
“I kissed her. A full on proper kiss.”
“And” she sat down and I handed her a diet coke. “I’m assuming from the midnight call in tears it wasn’t the kiss of fairytales?”
“It was perfect. Until she accused me of only doing it because I felt sorry for her.”
“And did you?” she asked in her indomitably direct manner.
“No of course not. We talked, Ash, really talked. I knew she was special but I didn’t know the half of it.”
“Back up. What the hell happened? I thought you were going to the opera?”
“Long story short Adele had an accident when she was a child and has extensive scarring as a result. She wears the scarves to cover them up but tonight after the opera they were exposed when a colleague spilt a drink on her.” It was an extremely watered down version of the night, but summed it up quite succinctly.
“Scarring?” Ashleigh frowned. “Not from, you know, self-harming?”
“No nothing like that. Anyway, everything was going great until I kissed her and screwed it up,” I moaned and laid my head on the table.
“Why did kissing her screw it up? Have you not been flossing?” I usually appreciated my best friend’s comic relief, but not on this occasion.
“It isn’t funny.”
“Sorry, Jo, but I still don’t get how you kissing her ruined things.”
“Because it was an emotionally charged evening and Adele felt like she was losing control, which she doesn’t like to do,” I explained wearily.
“A kiss isn’t losing control, Jesus she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes at our high school.”
“I’m not sure we can use our school as a benchmark for control, even the teachers were at it. In this instance it was and I’ve banjaxed any chance we may have had.”
Ashleigh waited for a few seconds, preparing, as usual, to cut through the bullshit. This was one of the reasons I valued out friendship. She would support me to the hilt, but wasn’t afraid to give it to me straight. “Okay a couple of points, Joanne. One, she still needs you for this promotion, so I’m guessing you’ll be seeing her again. And two, this may sound harsh, but did you honestly think there was a chance of something permanent with her?”
“I… I genuinely don’t know. It started out so fucking twisted, but how it started was beginning to feel less important than what it was becoming.”
“Which is?”
“I think I…I think I’m falling in love with her for real,” I whispered.
“Christ, I knew this was a bad idea! You’re too fucking soft Joanne Cassidy. But you can’t ignore the facts, the main one being she’s paying you. I hate to say it but that’s not a relationship, it’s a job.” Ashleigh was dead right.
And it killed me.
Chapter 33
Adele
Once Joanne left and I saw the taxi pull away, I closed the shutters and did something I hadn’t done for a very long time; I went into the spare room and removed the white dust sheet draping, not the ‘Mirror of Erised,’ but the ‘Mirror of Rorroh.’ Slowly, cautiously, it slipped sensuously to the floor. The air escaped from between my pursed lips, a rasping hiss of a thousand snakes. Unfastening the buttons on my pyjama top, it joined the dust sheet in a wrinkled heap.
I looked okay front on, seeing only a sliver of what the mirror could reveal. I touched my neck, biting the inside of my cheek and lowering my bottoms, I stepped out of them; still not too bad, my eyes locked front and centre.
I twisted to reveal my back.
It wasn’t as awful as I remembered, but still my skin resembled a coke bottle pulled out of a fire and left to cool. I rotated a little further and saw in more detail the scars that broke me, the scars that made me.
The scars that turned stomachs, that repelled lovers, and reduced me to a quivering wreck.
The scars my family chose to ignore.
I relished the cool night air on my bare skin; it was a rare sensation, but tonight I savoured rather than loathed it.
However, far worse than the visible scars were the scars that lingered beneath the epidermis, the emotional scars that couldn’t be eased with bio-oil or moisturiser. I hadn’t told Joanne everything; the night was short and I didn’t have the stomach to spill my guts any further. So I never mentioned that my father practically abandoned us, leaving once I was out of immediate danger to return to his other family, the army. Only when Gemma was born did he leave the forces.
I blamed myself, of course.
I ran my fingers from my neck, down the side of my body until I reached my lower back. Familiar craters and crevices that were the potholes of my life; one act changed everything. I’d gone from being a solitary yet happy child, to being moody and insular. I spent more time in hospital than at school but I didn’t suffer academically, my father had seen to that. However, that was the only thing he saw to. He couldn’t bear to hug me, to touch me. When your own parents flinch and wince whenever they see you, when they can barely give you a kiss goodnight…
At least my father tried to mask his feelings, my mother possessed no such tenderness, crying and wailing about how awful her life was, that god must hate her for destroying her beautiful daughter. Christ, in retrospect is it any wonder I turned into an emotionally stunted beast…
Unfortunately this isn’t a curse that can be broken by true love’s kiss otherwise I’d be standing here looking at smooth and flawless skin.
Silvery moonlight flooded the room and I peered dejectedly into the back garden where obsidian shadows marked my territory. The cytisus, or scotch broom as it was more commonly known, appeared aflame as it danced in the gentle breeze, the slivers of light peeking through the fence catching the multitude of orange flowers. Joanne, mesmerised by its vibrant colour, even popped out to take a few cuttings for her mother.
Joanne.
Her name was as silken as one of my scarfs on my tongue. I’d welcomed her into my home and now, like a flickering hologram, all I envisaged every time I closed my eyes was her laughing at the kitchen table, or sitting with her legs under her on the sofa listening to music as we talked about growing up in different parts of the same city…
Joanne Cassidy had marked her territory, unconsciously yet curiously effectively; it was marked with her scent, with her laughter, with her smile…
Fuck.
I was now cool enough to hear her words, and recognise her expression for what it was. Her eyes hadn’t darkened through pity, they were bristling with desire. My finger touched my lips. The kiss was as soft as cashmere and as hot as a blistering July sun.
Cowardice made me see what I expected to see. Still it was a bullet dodged; this whole thing was getting way out of hand, way beyond my control.
I returned downstairs to the small room I laughingly called a home office (laughingly because I was never home long enough to use it as such) and picked up the lone sheet of paper on my desk. Joanne’s signature was strong and proud at the bottom. At first glance, the A. R. Jackson appeared as forceful as the one written to its left.
But I knew the truth.
I could still feel the pen shaking as I’d signed another woman in bondage with me. Into servitude.
And all because I wanted a flash office in Manhattan that I wasn’t accomplished enough to earn by myself.
***
The morning was cool, but the promise of another hot one in this year’s rare heatwave was already there; the cobalt blue sky and buttercup sun heated the tiled floor of the kitchen through the large patio doors. Warming up on the doorstep, my tight hamstrings and calves loosened with each repetition and I set off on my run. My feet’s monotonous pounding on the concrete was a welcome relief from the raw emotions pounding my battered spirit. Focussing on my breathing and each cautious stride, I lost myself in the rhythm of my heartbeat.
But I couldn’t run forever.
“D
ell, this is a surprise,” Gemma said when I turned up out of the blue, a very rare occurrence. “Don’t tell me Joanne’s had enough of you already?” She laughed.
“You know me.” And she did – to a certain degree. She’d not only seen me at some of my lowest points, but had been there for me during them. However, I generally kept my deepest, darkest thoughts to myself. Why? Maybe I wasn’t ready, or maybe I didn’t want to appear weak or lose control. “But no, she’s still around, despite my best efforts to run her off. I told her about how I got these last night.” I lowered my scarf and pointed to the scars I uncovered.
“Wow,” she breathed. “And the four horsemen didn’t rain doom upon you?”
I ignored her sarcasm. “Gemma, you know I trust you, right.” I was see-sawing between longing and guilt.
Gemma took a minute before saying, “Dell, you’re making me nervous. Oh god, don’t tell me you’ve traumatised the poor girl and need another ‘favour?’” She gave me her patented one hundred watt smile and air quotes. “The centre’s full.”
“Hardy har.” I rested my ankle on my thigh.
“Look, Donna’s at work. why don’t you come in and have a drink.” For once I accepted her offer. We sat at the kitchen table and she poured me a coffee from the cafetière. “I’m not going to be seeing you on Scotland’s Most Wanted am I?”
“What? No.” When I examined my behaviour over the last few weeks, there was a molehill of good and a mountain of irredeemable actions. “Perhaps Scotland’s Most Contemptable.”