I only had Amy. And he took her too.
I haven’t seen either of them since. I was hard-up during my training, but I managed it. I worked in bars and scraped along. It was trying but I got through.
I sometimes consider trying to get in touch with Amy but I sense both she and Dad probably know why I left. No doubt, they knew, for me to be there one day and cleared out the next! I really left nothing behind. Took my birth certificate, passport, academic certificates and everything that might have drawn me back. Down to the baby photos my mother lovingly put in an album, I took it. He was asleep in bed as I emptied his house of me and no doubt, Amy had already scurried off back home.
With Laurie still holding me so close and tight, and after everything that happened between us today, I cry into my pillow. At thoughts of having left my family behind and at how lonely I have been all these years. I think about waking him to tell him my woes but can’t. He is sleeping so peacefully.
His large hands are all around me and his hairy arms are tickling my skin. His nakedness is making heat fall between my legs even though he is asleep and dreaming. I hope he is dreaming about me. I want him to be.
I can’t resist. I roll and he falls on his back. I slide across his body and listen to his heart beating. It feels wonderful.
I rub my cheek in his chest hair and his arms loop around my shoulders. He is dreaming but seemingly still aware of being in bed with a woman. I raise a thigh across his body and wrap him within my grasp protectively.
“Jules, what’s wrong?” He’s groggy.
“Can’t sleep. I am used to surviving on very little.”
He pulls me on top of him and I lay against him. Flat out.
“Lay still darlin’, and don’t leave, don’t leave me.”
His eyes are pouring with emotion.
“Laurie…?”
He sits up and I wrap myself all around his body.
“Who knows what tomorrow might bring,” he admits, burying his face in my chest.
I kiss him immediately and before long we are making love without a condom for the first time. I am on the pill and he assures me he is safe. I fall in love that moment. I think I hear him confirm the same with a whisper in my ear when we come in shared, sheer ecstasy, wrapped up together. It’s the first time he’s made me come properly and I wonder if it’s that smidgen of vulnerability he showed me that got me there, finally.
Sweating and gasping afterward, he falls on his back and I fall right on his front. We are a tangle of limbs and hair; my mane and his fur.
“I tink I could love ya,” he says in a breathless, tired voice.
“Me too.”
I slide into sleep with tears drowning my eyes that fail to fall. I won’t let them. Not anymore.
Chapter Seventeen
Warrick
She’s hysterical now and I encourage, “Just cry it all out.”
“I am so sorry, it’s just that I haven’t,” she hiccups, “faced it, until now, you know? I’ve buried it all down.”
She’s on my lap crying her heart out. I am stroking her luscious mane of hair and I still can’t kiss her. Damn it. Why is my body refusing to allow itself a vice or two?
I don’t just want to kiss her, though. I want to do things I had forgotten I can do. Like lick her naked body and hold her tight to me. She’s a sexual woman, alright, from what I’ve gathered from her story. She’s smoking hot, too. I fight to kiss her cheek but it isn’t going to happen. I kiss her hair instead and soothe her, “Shush, it’s okay.”
It most certainly isn’t okay. One wrong move and I am going to have someone’s eye out with this bloody fiend between my legs. It’s just standing there with nowhere to go. I can’t even stop it! Her cleavage is right under my nose and though my eyes flicker every time I go to stare at it, I battle and battle to get a ruddy good look at those puppies. Man, oh man, I thought I just saw a bit of pink nipple poking out.
I cradle her to my chest and tactfully position her so she won’t be jabbed and scared senseless. I rock her to and fro and she calms.
“He left you, after one night? Didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she squeaks.
“I wouldn’t be able to forget you. Not even after one minute together.”
“Shurrup,” she insists, sniffing.
Fine, I will be the sad, unromantic specimen of eunuch that I have obviously been consigned to be for the rest of my charity-giving life. I accept that now… NOT!
“Get it out. I will be here the whole time,” I reassure her.
If I haven’t died from a sore cock…
Chapter Eighteen
Jules’ Past
My eyes open and it almost hurts to break the seal. Sleep has caked them shut. I rub them and look up. He’s not here. Where has he gone?
The sheets are wrapped around my ankles and I struggle to release myself. I sense the burn between my legs and his seed seeping from my groin. We made love in the night and I saw stars. I think I could love Laurie for the rest of my life. He is wonderful. I slam my head back down in the pillow and scream into it. I am so, so happy. But where is he?
I turn my head and see a note on my pillow.
Beautiful Jules,
Gone to get breakfast.
Back in a minute.
Love, Laurie xxx
Love. Oh my goodness! Could he love me? I thought he said it when we made love in the night. I really thought I heard him say it! I scrunch the note in my hands and hold it to my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head in disbelief. Could it be? Could I have found The One? Oh. I feel so sick with happiness. I think when he brings breakfast back, I won’t be able to eat a thing.
I continually wonder whether this is real. When he holds me, though it feels so good, I refuse to believe anything he says or does.
This inability of mine to just live – it all leads back to an event that took place a long time ago. It shattered my heart in two and it’s never really healed. I just popped a band-aid over it. So ever since then, I have held up a barrier to the softest pieces of myself. I have an inability to see beyond my own experience, which is that few people are kind and even those that are find the truth of me difficult to deal with.
My thoughts have carried me off and I look up from the bed to glance at the clock. It’s 10.13a.m. How? I wonder where Laurie is. He must have left a while ago and yet he’s not back. What has happened?
It’s an hour later when I am pacing the floor, anxiously biting my nails. I have no number for him, no address, nothing. Where might he have gone? I don’t have a clue. I decide to take a shower and get dressed. I need to distract myself.
However, the trembling in every fibre of my being does not relent, not when I am showering in boiling hot water and not when I am pulling on my comfort clothes ‒ tracksuit bottoms, oversized jumper and bed socks. I am shaking so badly that I cannot even hold the hairdryer in my hand to blow out the moisture. I just pull it up into a bun and have done with it.
By six p.m. I consider calling the police but I know what has transpired and I am loathe to admit it. He used me. I am indeed the nothing that my father always made me feel like. A workhorse for him to brag about to his mates down the pub. I was never instilled with any self worth and why should I care about myself? Nobody else ever has. The only reason I ever get any attention is because of the way that I look and it is usually the wrong kind. I sometimes wish I was ugly and bland. I wish that I wasn’t clever. I absolutely believe that a more meagre pedigree would have given me a better chance in life. I might have blended in better then. Maybe then people would have congratulated me on surviving the death of my mother and the consequent nursing of my ‘broken’ father for months afterward. No doubt, broken by the guilt.
This is my reality and it is a hurtful, harmful one. The cruellest thing Laurie could have done was give me hope. I would have been better off without him.
***
For six weeks, I have been on a downward spiral. I have lost a stone in weight and I don�
�t even try to teach anymore. I just turn up and tell them to read one book after another. They hand in essays and I randomly assign marks. Laurie left me and never came back. I assume he meant to hurt me and so, I dare not seek him out.
Calling the police might show me up as a sad, lonely spinster who thought she had got lucky. I don’t even have his number! Nor his address, date of birth or middle name. I know he worked at the university but I could not bear to turn up and have him reject me or worse, have him rebuff me in front of his colleagues or his students. What did I do wrong?
I have been pushing my feelings deep down. I refuse to cry. Refuse to even face the thought of him having a girlfriend or a wife somewhere. You know, something. Some kind of betrayal. I am used to that but to face another ‒ and from him. It does not bear thinking about.
Inside, I feel so empty and bottomless. Like my pain, my welling despair, might swallow me up at any time if I allow it to. That might really happen. I might let the gloom cover me like a wraith’s cloak so that I may never be forced to feel again.
It’s summer but it may as well be winter. I feel like the dead, inside. The cold dead. I walk around in my old red duffel coat because it keeps me safe. It keeps me sane. The familiarity of my particular comforts keep me rational. I walk and walk for miles sometimes, feeling so hungry and wan, but only my feet moving one in front of the other keep me going. I have to keep going. I can do it. I tell myself these things though I know I am on the brink of despair.
I find myself in the grounds of his campus. I don’t remember how I got here but I did. It’s dark and a Sunday night. There is nobody about. I wander round in darkness and solitude and I imagine him stretching his long legs around these paths. Lots of girls might have a crush on him. He is beautiful. For six weeks, and for nearly every waking minute of these six weeks, I have replayed every second of our time together over and over and over. I am in total agony. Real, devastating misery. I want the truth. I want answers. Closure. An explanation.
I walk back towards home and I find an answer when I am least looking for it.
The ground catches me when I fall but I still feel like I am floating lower and lower. I feel I may spin down the rabbit hole and never emerge again. The curses of people having to move round me on the pavement almost go unnoticed.
Laurie and a woman emerge from a bar. She has a sparkly ring on her finger. It twinkles in the light of the street and its various bars and shops. They laugh. His arm is around her shoulder. It is as if he never knew me at all. I wonder what I did to deserve this.
I die inside and all that is left of me is the woman who needs to regain his hug. Just that. Only that. I never had a hug like that before, not really. Not a loving hug. A hug that needed no reciprocation. It was so freely given. So gladly taken.
I get home and collapse on the sofa. It suddenly sinks in. All I hear is the howling of some madwoman existing outside of my body. It is distant and unreal. It goes on endlessly. I am floating above looking down on her and I can’t quite make out what is happening. Six weeks’ tension is unleashed.
I know arms are on me. They have uniform on. There’s a struggle as the madwoman tries to escape. She’s yearning for escape from the agony. It’s so unfair. So unfair. I am being punished again.
They take me away and sedate me. I am pumped with drugs and returned home after rounds of questions and examinations. I am booked in to talk to a counsellor and I tell her the story and she understands my reaction. It’s such a relief to know I am not mad. I manage to get back to work without anyone there finding out I spent a few days in hospital. I just tell them a family member died. Someone may as well have done.
The hole is still there though and I need to fill it.
***
The counsellor even seems to pity me. I mean, they’re not meant to, are they? I thought they were supposed to be staunch and resolved to fix people, not look like they might revert to tears themselves? That’s what happened today. It’s been two months since Laurie and a few counselling sessions have done me seemingly no good at all. She’s too frightened to dig deeper. She must have my doctor’s notes and know that when Mum died, I suffered constant panic attacks for almost a year after that. Not because of the death. Because of something else…
My grandmother kept taking me in to the surgery and I repeatedly fobbed them off, saying it was nothing. I didn’t want anyone to know about the bullying. My eight-year-old self was terrified it would make things so much worse.
I read in one of my women’s magazines that lots of people self-medicate these days. They turn to self-help books or whatever. The book stores are rammed with the things.
My devised method of self-medicating is to go back to that corner I met Laurie on and stand outside that building.
To face my demon.
I dress up, I lure, I seduce, with all the intentions of getting laid and getting vengeance. However, the only thing I am still clinging to is that hug he gave me that I never realised I needed. I get that and I chicken out of anything more.
Alone after my first hugger has gone and I am sat on the couch, I find myself actually talking out loud to the walls. In summer, there are no sequins to brighten my Saturday night. There are only the people in the park, crowding the green; lovers, families, the elderly, they’re all there, enjoying the remnants of a warm day.
“They’ll end up getting into trouble,” I say to the wall, noticing a young couple against a tree, getting far too frisky. Let’s say they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if they knew they had an audience. If I had more energy, I’d walk out and pull my Miss Simonovich act on them; reprimand them about the dangers of underage, unprotected sex.
I see an elderly couple walking arm in arm next. She’s struggling, bent double almost with a hump back, and he’s not much better off. However, his thin frame helps hers and they plod on together.
“That’s what life comes to.” Needing someone to be there. In that moment, I don’t believe anyone will ever be ‘just there’ for me.
For so long, people have looked at me like I can take it. I must be able to, because going by the look of me, nothing could harm me. Not when I look like I just walked off a Paris catwalk. But the men and women who say I look this way have no idea of the truth. How can I believe I deserve anything or anyone when I have always been stuck thinking, What did I do to make her leave me?
Mummy.
That’s the worst thing about this whole Laurie thing. It’s easier to deal with a living thing than a ghost they say? I say not necessarily. He’s living. He may as well be dead, however. I have put up barriers around what happened that mean I refuse to let myself think of him as a real entity anymore. I could stalk him and confront him, but why would I? It’d mean facing reality.
Mum’s ghost haunts me. She continually creeps up on me in shops, at bus stops, on the streets. If I see someone vaguely like her, my heart lurches into my throat and every hair on my body bristles for those few moments before I take control, shake my head and the image of her away. She’s dead. My brain knows that because I watched her being lowered into a grave. However, there’s not much difference between she and Laurie. Both of them broke my heart and left without explanation. It’s the legacy of hurt left behind that is worse than any other kind of torture. Now all I can think is, Why did he do this to me?
It’s driven me crazy enough to look back over the years of my life and consider all the naughty/bad/underhand things I did that might mean I deserved this.
Dad always left the fridge empty and on the way home from school sometimes, I’d pile in with the other kids into our local corner shop. My hand might have slipped out to retract something from a shelf, mostly just a ten pence chocolate bar. Big whoop. Ten pence! However, you start small and then that’s it, you’re stealing for your life eventually…
I might have once stolen a skipping rope from the little girl next door but that was only because I didn’t have one. I might have thieved tampons and towels from other girls b
ecause I barely had two pennies to rub together to get some myself. I may have even once resorted to stealing from my grandma’s purse to buy myself shampoo. God rest her soul. She’s better off now she doesn’t have to see what her son amounted to. A middle-aged bastard who screws his daughter’s best friend.
I thought about whether I had ever treated a pupil badly enough to warrant the karma police wreaking their revenge back on me. Though I am firm, I am always fair. I may have once or twice screamed at a child to shut up but only if they were persistently misbehaving.
Now I am listing these things, even now in this very instant, I know I am being unfair on myself. I am just seeking some rhyme or reason as to why Laurie did this to me. Why? If I know that, then I can move on. Maybe I said something he didn’t like. Maybe I had a zit that day. Maybe he prefers blondes or curvier women. I could tally up all the things that have gone through my head but we’d be here for decades.
Both she and he are not dead, not in my heart.
Chapter Nineteen
Warrick
I am taking it all in. My face is burning red with shock. She’s still clutched in my arms and she’s quiet. I wish I could kiss her. Right now, I wish for nothing more. I feel a fierce desire to protect her that I have never felt before. My heart is pumping so hard that I feel light-headed. I want so badly to connect with her and show her how she makes me feel.
“Sorry, that is so sad,” I manage to say.
“Do you think he was only after one thing?”
“I can’t put myself in his place.”
“I suppose, I just had a meltdown because I got myself so worked up over the course of those six weeks. I was all over the place. The truth was unbearable. Unfair. That was something I found difficult.”
He was an absolute twonk Julianne, is what I wish to say.
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