Ransacked Heart

by Jayne Bauling

  ‘Why do you keep on with it, Maria?’ Luke demanded, suddenly wearily contemptuous. ‘Have you forgotten that I know you were involved with him six years ago? I guessed you were from the first, and the fact that you could quite happily and openly go away with him for a weekend everyone would know about confirmed that I was right. Remember that concert in Zimbabwe? You felt absolutely no shame, did you? That’s what we really come back to every time.’

  Maria was silent, digesting it, slightly incredulous but forced to accept it at last. Amazingly, that weekend in Harare all those years ago was the foundation upon which Luke had built his belief that she was romantically and sexually involved with Florian.

  ‘Can I explain that to you?’ she requested quietly. ‘I never have before.’

  ‘It explains itself, doesn’t it?’ Luke countered cynically. ‘His wife was unwell back in Johannesburg, but there you were, the other woman——’

  ‘I wasn’t a woman then!’ Maria protested passionately. ‘I was a girl——’

  ‘And you’ve never grown out of it, have you? No!’ The violence of the denial as she attempted to speak again shocked her into silence. ‘I don’t even want to hear you saying his name again, especially that ridiculous abbreviation you keep using. I can’t bear listening to you.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing more for either of us to say,’ she accepted dully, turning away from him and then halting as the edge of her vision caught the movement he made towards her.

  ‘I would have said we had quite a number of things to discuss, my darling,’ Luke contradicted her, the endearment a taunt and a challenge as always, never meant. ‘You’ve just announced the end of our affair, after all.’

  ‘That doesn’t require discussion.’ Maria was scathing.

  ‘Possibly I used the wrong word. The inadequacies of our language again,’ he allowed dismissively. ‘But your announcement merits a reciprocal one, Maria. I don’t accept it. Yes, I accept that there is this special bond between you and Jones, that he will be first, last and always. I said I accept that. But our affair won’t end until desire ends, and, as I said the other night, we’ve not done with each other yet.’

  He was closer now, and Maria’s eyes darkened, becoming the colour of honey in shade as she regarded him apprehensively.

  ‘Don’t touch me, Luke,’ she warned him in a low, intense voice.

  ‘You still want me,’ he claimed softly—arrogantly.

  ‘If you touch me, you rob me of choice,’ she said achingly, and swallowed emotionally before adding stormily, ‘Damn it, you know that! You know I can’t—I can’t control what’s between us. I never could. You were always the one.’

  ‘If that’s the only way—if it’s all there is…’

  As the words died away, Luke shrugged, and Maria saw the light of recklessness leap in his eyes.

  She knew what was going to happen. She was so vulnerable to him that part of her was already accepting that defeat was inevitable, that only Luke could be the one to end their affair, but at the same time pride was demanding resistance, refusing to submit to the humiliation of a physical surrender to the man who had called her a liar, accused her of infidelity—the man who had hurt her so badly.

  With some wild, unplanned, unfocused idea of shaming him with feminine helplessness, she stayed mute as he drew her into his arms, and remained passive as he gathered her up to him. Then his mouth was covering hers and the hot, fierce thrust of his tongue, plunging deep in shockingly explicit demand, sent a shaft of panic through her.

  Finally she fought, trying to escape that devastating possession, twisting her head frantically from side to side until Luke’s hands came up to still her struggles.

  After that there was nothing she could do, save absorb the impact of the sensual onslaught, and be seduced by it. Luke’s mouth pleasured while it dominated, and his hands roaming insolently about her body were creating havoc, the skilled, confident caresses to which he subjected her a bold proclamation of ownership.

  Loving and aching, her heart recognised it as such. He was making a statement that was demeaning to her, and yet her flesh burned, familiar fire stabbed at her loins and her body stirred against his, jerkily at first and then involuntarily adopting a rhythm that was both sinuous and surging, blatantly erotic.

  ‘No, we’re not ending it yet,’ Luke asserted harshly as he raised his head at last, a feverish glitter of triumph in his eyes as she moaned protestingly.

  He had released her from his embrace, his hands merely holding her by the upper arms, and she sagged against him, trembling too violently to stand unaided, her knees buckling.

  ‘Luke…’ His name was barely audible, an anguished sigh, freighted with despair as she conceded defeat once again.

  He continued to hold her by the arms for a few seconds longer, studying her face. Then, guiding her, he let her drop to a sitting position on the couch that was behind her.

  ‘You’re still mine,’ he stated arrogantly. ‘For now, and for as long as it lasts. If only in this way…’

  Abruptly, he knelt in front of her, pulling her forward into his arms again, his mouth falling to plunder the swollen redness of the lips she offered so helplessly.

  Passion was consuming them. Maria made a tiny whimpering sound as Luke moved a hand to the tautness of one high breast and then let it drop to rest a moment on her lap. Her skirt had ridden up and she clung to his shoulders convulsively as she yielded to the sweet torment of his long fingers stroking over her thighs

  ‘Please!’ she moaned urgently as he lifted his mouth from hers to bury his face against the side of her neck, and excitement leapt as she heard the slight sound of the zip on his jeans being unfastened.

  Devoured by need, she shifted herself instinctively, anticipating his movement towards her, but it never came.

  ‘God, no! Ah, no, Maria!’ Luke seemed to flinch as if hurt. ‘This isn’t the way. I can’t——’

  He broke off and was still, seemingly frozen, for several seconds. Then, incredulously, Maria heard the sound of his zip again.

  ‘Luke——’

  Abruptly he jerked away from her, no longer touching her although still kneeling before her with his head bent.

  For a frustrated moment Maria suspected him of doing it deliberately, to punish her, or perhaps to teach her some sort of lesson. Then he raised his head, and she saw his face.

  ‘No!’ The word seemed to be torn from him, laden with reluctant decision, and he flung her a savage look. ‘You’re right, Maria. This must be the last weekend.’

  Her hands ceased their uncertain fluttering, dropping to her lap as she sat back and then tugging at the hem of her skirt until it was at a more modest level. She expelled a shuddering breath.

  ‘Yes!’ she concurred emphatically.

  A slight ironical smile flickered briefly around Luke’s mouth.

  ‘I suppose your relief is justified,’ he conceded drily.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she explained shakily. ‘I knew…I realised just now that you had to be the one to finish it.’

  ‘Yes. Because, as you’ve said, I was depriving you of choice. It wasn’t fair to you.’ The self-disgust she saw in his eyes wrung her heart. ‘Oh, I might as well tell you that I’ve always known I was being unfair to you, using sex to hold on to you.’

  ‘I think neither of us had a choice for a while,’ she offered, and he made a slight movement of denial, as if he didn’t want to believe it.

  ‘There’s no need to emphasise it,’ he retorted, resentment clearly audible. ‘Or do you think I don’t despise myself sufficiently already? Just sex, that’s all it was, and yet there I was, prepared to—ah, hell!’

  The truth would never lose its power to wound, but Maria lacked any inclination to retaliate, aware that the same truth must be hurting Luke just as deeply, albeit in an entirely different way. It would be a long time before he stopped despising himself for having succumbed to a purely physical attraction, and that towards a woman he des
pised.

  ‘We were both trapped, you once said,’ she reminded him helplessly, with some idea of comforting him, or perhaps easing the process of rationalisation and self-forgiveness he was inevitably going to have to endure. ‘Prisoners.’

  ‘And now you’re free. Congratulations,’ Luke mocked sardonically.

  ‘We both are,’ she corrected him gently. ‘And I’m grateful to you because, as I’ve said, you had to be the one to take responsibility for that. I’m also grateful that you didn’t…you didn’t take advantage of what was between us six years ago. You could have—I know that now, and I also know that I couldn’t have coped with it then.’

  ‘That’s what I suspected at the time, but your damned gratitude is the last thing I want, Maria.’ He was angrily dismissive. ‘Nor do I want to indulge in a post-mortem—although I suppose it’s an appropriate description, if the thing between us is now dead.’

  ‘Quite dead?’ Maria questioned him, aware that his desire for her hadn’t died yet even if the need to respect himself again had dictated that he put an end to their affair. ‘Can we…? We still have this weekend, don’t we, Luke? The last weekend.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather——?’ He broke off, regarding

  her warily for a moment before laughing, a hard, hollow sound accompanied by a shrug that could have been of acceptance, or resignation. ‘Yes, we still have this weekend; if you’re fool enough to offer, I’m not fool enough to refuse.’

  ‘I’m a fool,’ she agreed, saddened by his attitude.

  Still he knelt in front of her, and Maria sat forward, lifting a hand and laying it open-palmed against the side of his face for a moment before tracing the angle of his cheek with gentle fingers.

  For several seconds Luke remained immobile, scarcely breathing, it seemed. Then he jerked his head away.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he instructed her tautly. ‘I can’t stand it when you touch me like that. It’s a travesty—a mockery.’

  The brutality of the rejection made her recoil, but she could accept the distaste he felt. Any tenderness between the two of them would be a sham as far as he was concerned, merely serving to emphasise the absence of love, and perhaps like her he felt that a relationship characterised by so much other feeling ought to be loving as well, that the depth of desire he felt for her should have been merely a facet of love instead of the whole.

  Anger rose unexpectedly. He should have loved her.

  ‘Like this, then!’ she snapped, snatching at him, her mouth seeking his feverishly. ‘In case you’ve forgotten what we were doing a few minutes ago.’

  Luke’s arms came round her. ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘Make love to me,’ she demanded, still angrily, and his hands tightened on her.

  ‘Here, like this? No,’ he muttered, rising easily to his feet and pulling her up with him. ‘That would have been a mistake. The bedroom.’

  Recognising the control he suddenly seemed to have found when she still had none turned her anger to rage. If he had taken her here on the couch a few minutes ago, as he had so nearly done, their abandonment to passion then would have been a mutual—equal—thing, but now he was back to being the dominant partner in what remained of their relationship, controlling it and her.

  It was irrational to be so resentful now when it was so nearly over anyway, but she was too infuriated by his failure to love her to be thinking clearly.

  She wanted to be able to hate him again, and she was looking for reasons.

  She was violent when they came together in her bedroom a short while later. Forbidden to express her love through tenderness, she compensated with a wild, lavish passion that seemed to draw Luke equally deeply into its extravagant madness. He made love to her with a driving desperation that matched the excesses which were to shock her in retrospect, and if his flesh bore the imprint of her nails and teeth afterwards, there were faint reciprocal marks on her body, mostly the legacy of an erotically suckling mouth.

  ‘I hope I didn’t hurt you,’ she felt compelled to say politely when Luke had showered and returned to the bedroom.

  Surprisingly, his laughter rang with genuine amusement.

  ‘I thought you meant to?’

  ‘You didn’t exactly carry on like a pacifist yourself,’ she retorted evasively, mouth reproachful. ‘I’m going to have bruises by tomorrow.’

  ‘They’re all you’ll have, my darling, so count yourself lucky,’ Luke submitted sharply, his humour abating.

  ‘No baby and no broken heart?’ she quipped, hidden hands clenching, the last a lie.

  ‘Exactly,’ he confirmed, so repressively that she was forced to drop the subject.

  They should have guessed that the weekend would fail them. They were both too conscious that it was the last, the knowledge weighing heavily on them, giving rise to complex emotion each time their eyes met, until eventually they started avoiding looking at each other.

  They were also trying too hard, Maria realised quite soon, and she thought Luke was equally aware of it. They were trying too hard to make this weekend a fitting finale to their affair, to match or recapture all that had gone before—to make a memory to cherish.

  They couldn’t ignore the fact that they were to part, and neither of them made any attempt to avoid it in conversation.

  On the Saturday evening, Luke said abruptly, ‘This Hawaiian project, Maria? Are you planning to accompany Jones?’

  ‘No! He doesn’t need anyone to tell him how to be a brilliant jock. He’s always worked without a personal producer.’ Halting, she accidentally met his cynical gaze and was immediately acutely conscious once more of what he believed of her. ‘Nicky will be going with him.’

  Her eyes, threatening to turn from amber to gold as the two of them sat there over a casual dinner on her balcony, briefly dared him to develop the theme, just before she dropped them.

  He didn’t. Instead he asked mildly, ‘You’re content in your job here, aren’t you? No plans to try and wriggle out of your contract?’

  ‘No, but…’ Hesitating, she risked giving him a haunted look. ‘Could…do you think you could stay away from Taipei for a while, Luke?’

  ‘I think I’m going to have to,’ he responded, drenching it in ironical significance, and she winced.

  ‘I’d appreciate it,’ she vouchsafed woodenly.

  ‘So you can start practising pretending it never happened,’ he derided, fleetingly aggressive. ‘It happened, Maria.’

  ‘It happened, and now it’s over,’ she concurred lifelessly.

  ‘And neither of us is handling it very well,’ he added, matching her flat tone.

  ‘Why should I want to remember?’ Irritably, she picked up on his previous point. ‘Yesterday you were the one who didn’t seem to want reminding of…of the whole disaster. No post-mortems, you said.’

  ‘What I want and what I’m going to get are two very different things.’ Luke paused. ‘Are you trying to pick a fight? Quarrels are for lovers.’

  Which they no longer were. Luke stopped trying before she did, barely touching her and becoming increasingly uncommunicative. Sheer misery engulfed Maria. She had known their affair had to end or it would destroy them both, but now that it was about to do so she was terrified of a future in which there would be no Luke, not even Luke causing her unhappiness.

  She had been deprived of him once before, six years ago, before she even knew she loved him, and then she had reacted with an endless rage that she had interpreted as hatred. This time, knowing what she was losing and incapable of hating—what was to become of her?

  By the Sunday afternoon, she had had enough.

  ‘If you don’t want to make love and you don’t want to talk, why don’t we go out somewhere?’ she suggested defiantly, facing him with her hands on her hips, a bitter mockery glinting in her eyes. ‘After all, it can’t matter if someone who knows us sees us together at this late stage, Luke. Any speculation would soon be forgotten or dismissed, because they’ll never again see u
s together, will they? If they remember, they’ll think they were imagining things, jumping to conclusions.’

  Luke looked as if he would like to throw something at her.

  ‘That really bothers you, doesn’t it?’ he derided.

  ‘Do you blame me?’ Maria countered, quietly intense.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he admitted, surprising her, but then he lifted a negligent shoulder, dismissing the question. ‘So where would you like to go?’

  ‘Somewhere public,’ she ventured acidly, ‘where we can look at strangers who organise their lives and affairs more successfully than we’ve done.’

  ‘And envy them, or simply remind ourselves that it can be done? Do you think of us as failures, then?’ he enquired distastefully.

  ‘Aren’t we? When we don’t like either ourselves or each other very much? That doesn’t sound like success to me.’ It was a bitter summary of their unhappy affair, but compunction ensued, because it wasn’t Luke’s fault that he couldn’t love her, even if he had no right to despise her, so she added neutrally, ‘There’s a Chinese tea-house or tea-garden—I’m not sure what it’s really called—not far from here that intrigues me, and I’ve been wanting to go and find out what it’s all about ever since I first passed it. We could walk.’

  ‘Anything you say.’

  Luke was so infuriatingly indifferent that Maria almost told him to forget it. But a perverse urge to take advantage of his rare willingness to be seen out with her made her bite back the words, and she went off to discard her shorts in favour of a slim straight dress, the fine cotton-knit a subtle sage green.

  Being out didn’t help. A terrible, impersonal courtesy had crept into Luke’s manner, and it was breaking Maria’s heart all over again. She would even have preferred more of his contemptuous accusations to this present chilling remoteness. At least when he was condemning her he was reacting to her, personally and subjectively; now he was treating her as if she were a stranger.

  She could have wept. She was losing him before she had to, with their final parting still hours away, but too soon—too soon!