by Kim Wilkins
This couldn’t be happening.
“Maisie, there’s something I have to say,” Sacha started. And so this is how it was going to be. She had finally crossed the line, tried to claim the kiss that she ached for, and he was going to reject her. Her disappointment dropped like a black stone in her stomach. Her hands trembled and she could barely keep her eyes from becoming moist with frustrated tears.
“I’m sorry, Sacha,” she said, before he could say anything else. She turned, but he caught her wrist.
“No, listen to me,” he said, warm fingers pressing into her skin. She looked up into his black eyes, couldn’t believe how impossibly perfect each eyelash was. “I want to say this. Don’t start with me if you don’t intend to finish.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, don’t kiss me unless you’re prepared to keep going.” He averted his eyes, diffident. “It’s all or nothing.”
At moments like these, Maisie knew, people were supposed to flush, to turn warm with desire. Instead, she felt the blood drain from her face, as though terrified. Even though she had imagined it a million times, in reality the magnitude of his suggestion was overwhelming. Maisie felt her lips move but no words were coming out.
“What is it?” he asked.
“All,” she said, finally, feeling herself take a step into a canyon. “I’ll have it all.”
Going into his embrace was like collapsing, swooning. He caught her with warm, firm arms. Before she had a chance to relish the wait, his lips were upon hers. Everything about him was hot – his skin, his tongue, the inside of his mouth – and the heat was permeating her, saturating her. A stark contrast to the freezing wind outside which was shaking the treetops and driving snow against the windows.
Maisie’s flesh seemed to be alive and moving languidly, meltingly, across muscles and bones. Sacha’s hands ventured down her back, pressed into the curve at the bottom of her spine, lightly across her buttocks, around to her hips. He pulled her hips hard against his own and she could feel his erection beneath his jeans. A long-held breath shuddered out of her, rattling up past her ribs and making her shiver. He caught her breath in his mouth, little kisses on her top lip, her bottom lip, then another full pressing-down of his mouth, his tongue seeking hers.
Hands everywhere, he turned her around, pushed her hips up against the sink. His lips were on her neck, his right hand taking in the weight of first one breast, then the other. His fingers gliding, slight friction from the cotton, over her nipples. She had started to ache, deep and low inside. His other hand was drifting down to her thighs, rucking up her skirt, hot fingers on her skin and then on the outside of her underwear, tentatively touching her.
“You’re damp,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“What do you expect? I’ve been waiting six weeks for this.”
“It’s sexy,” he said, “you’re sexy.” His fingers edged under the elastic of her knickers; one, then two pushed deep inside her. She let her head drop back, her eyes closed.
“Oh, god,” she said.
He kissed her again, his fingers still inside her. Unbearable desire threatened to shake loose every nerve in her body. He was inching down her underwear, but she didn’t want to do it like this, against the kitchen sink. None of her fantasies had involved the kitchen sink.
“Can we lie down?” she said, close to his ear.
“Sure.” He took a step back, reached for her hand, and guided her to the lounge room. His mattress still lay there in front of the fire. They stopped in front of it, reached out to unbutton her blouse. She stood, stupefied – literally made stupid – as he eased her out of her blouse and bra, arms encircling her waist to unzip her skirt and let it fall, pushing down her knickers. She stepped lightly out of her clothes and he pulled her against him; he still fully dressed, she completely naked.
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asked, before she found sense enough to stop herself.
“I think you’re perfect,” he replied, gently pushing her down onto the mattress. She felt the fire’s warmth on her skin, watched him as he stripped down to nothing. Couldn’t get enough of gazing at his flat stomach, the way his skin stretched over his hip bones, the long, hard flanks of his thighs. He knelt over her, laying reverent kisses across her breasts and stomach. She closed her eyes and moaned – it was all she could do. When she next opened them, he had pulled her legs over his hips.
“Ready?”
No. She wasn’t. She and Adrian, after four years, had it all worked out. She came first – she had to, because she wasn’t one of those lucky women who could come through intercourse alone. But she didn’t tell Sacha that. She didn’t know why – perhaps she was embarrassed, perhaps she thought that it would all be different with him, perhaps thinking of Adrian had just struck her dumb. Sacha took her silence as acceptance and slid himself inside her with a loud groan.
“Jesus,” he said. “You feel incredible.” His fingers were pressed into her arms. She pulled him down close and ran her hands over his ribs. His skin was like hot velvet. She pressed her lips into his shoulder.
“Sacha,” she said, the word sinking into his flesh. As hard as she could, she wrapped her legs around him. The jolting thought that he was inside her, that this was actually happening, made her dizzy. She had to catch her breath. The tension in his body was mounting. She turned her face to look at him. A strand of hair fell over one eye, his eyes were closed, his mouth open. He began to cry out, “Oh,” first once, then another time, then over and over. She didn’t want it to be finished, but it was happening. His body started to shudder, as though he was losing control of his muscles. She began to cry out with him, to crush herself harder against him, to call his name. Before she even knew what she was doing, she had perfectly faked a simultaneous orgasm.
Sacha collapsed on top of her, breathing hard. She turned her face to the fire and almost immediately, the guilt hit her. Nearly obliterated her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He rolled off her, turned her face to his. “Feeling bad?”
“A little.”
“I understand.”
They lay in the firelight for a few minutes quietly. After a while he said, “Cathy told me, you know.”
“Told you?”
“That you had a crush on me.”
“She did?”
“But I already suspected. I wasn’t sure, though, what you wanted. You kept talking about Adrian…”
Adrian. God, Adrian. Tears pricked her eyes. “I need a shower,” she said, sitting up and gathering her clothes.
“I’ll finish making that tea.”
She tried a smile. It failed and she burst into tears.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” he asked, sitting up and bundling her into his arms.
“I’m okay,” she said, struggling away from him. “I’m going to take a shower, and I’ll be okay.”
He let her go and she left him there, naked by the fire. Sacha naked, and she was just walking away from him, had to get away from him.
My god, what have I done?
She asked herself this over and over as she sat in the bathtub, idly running the shower nozzle over her body. Outside she could hear the wind in the eaves. If she strained she could hear – or imagined she could hear – the sea pounding at the rocks. That’s what she needed, to get down there to the cliff-top and gaze out and let the sea wash away her guilt and her pain. She needed to wade out there into the huge, grey, crashing ocean, not just to sit here with a warm shower and a bar of Dove. She allowed her legs to fall open and her fingers to creep between them. She touched herself where Sacha had touched her, felt the building tension and the sweet release, giving herself in reality what she had only pretended to have just half an hour ago. She felt stupid, ashamed, disappointed. And miserable.
That evening, Sacha made her cups of tea, and cooked dinner, and chose the television shows they would watch, and didn’t mention that she had laps
ed into a profound and awkward reticence with him. And later, at bedtime, when he fell asleep next to her, she clung to him and sobbed quietly. If he heard her, if her arms were wrapped too tightly around him, he gave no indication.
Sacha had to leave for work at seven the next morning. She took guilty pleasure in the ritual of making his breakfast, sending him off to work with a kiss and a promise. His hands lingered in her hair, his dark eyes lit with longing.
“I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, straight after work,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I could come back tonight, but I think you need some time alone. Am I right?”
She dropped her head, muttered a yes. Then he kissed her on the forehead and headed out into the frozen morning to start his van. She waited until he drove out of sight before closing the door and going inside.
She paused in the doorway to the lounge room, put a hand on each side of the frame and sagged. Alone again, and this time everything was different. This time she wanted to be alone. She wanted to run away to the very ends of the earth and sit in a cold house alone and contemplate what she had done. But how much further could she go? Norway? Iceland? She made it to the chair by the fire and slumped into it. Sat there for an hour reliving yesterday afternoon with sick, guilty pleasure. Sacha was hers now. He kissed her, he called her “beautiful girl,” he told her she was sexy over breakfast. But now he was hers, did she still want him?
She was stuck on this question. Yes, she still wanted him. No, he was not what she wanted. But that made no sense. She only knew that the thought of making love to him again was all that was holding her together, stopping her from feeling panicked and desperate.
“Please, don’t let me be in love with him,” she said. “Anything but that.”
Half-heartedly, she went to the back room and pulled out the last two boxes of Sybill’s things. She went through it all with an expectation of finding nothing – no fourth diary piece, no letter from Virgil Marley to the authorities in York – and her expectation was fulfilled. What did it matter now? Because it was all over. Tomorrow Adrian would call and ask for her return date, and everything she loved and was excited about would become the stuff of the past, just events to muse over when she was old: Remember that holiday I took to my grandmother’s cottage? At the time it all seemed so thrilling and important, but now I see it was nothing, merely a brief few weeks of madness taken out of the relentless sanity of my real life.
After lunch, she burned the last of Sybill’s old papers on the fire, feeding them in one by one, watching the flames eat them. Time to give up. There was no more diary. Whatever Flood had done back in 1794 was trapped forever in history.
One of the things the guilty exchange for their sins is the ability to sleep peacefully, and even a dreamed remembrance of shame can wake them as easily as breaking glass. And so it was that at four a.m., Maisie found herself lying awake, staring at the ceiling. Tabby slept curled up on a corner of the bed. She calculated in her head that it was two in the afternoon back home. What was Adrian doing now? Was he safe and happy? She had started to develop an irrational fear that something awful would happen to him now that she had betrayed his trust – a divine punishment for her. She thought about his eyes and his smile and his hands and she missed him so profoundly it was as though she had been winded. The snow had stopped falling outside and everything seemed very still beyond her window. The world was restful and quiet and she wanted to be part of that quiet world, but she had made a choice that put her beyond its limit somewhere in the dark clutter which the sinful inhabited. Minutes ticked by into hours and when Adrian called at eight a.m. she was still awake.
“Hello?” she said, picking up the phone and falling into the chair.
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Hello, darling.” She became manifestly aware of the pulse in her throat. It seemed to be jumping beneath the skin. Would he be able to tell from her voice that she had betrayed him?
He got down to business. “Have you changed your flight?”
“Not yet.”
“When are you coming home?”
She swallowed, stilled her trembling hands. “Whenever you want me to.”
He didn’t even seem surprised by her sudden willingness. “I want you home, in my arms, two weeks from today. Friday the fourth of February. That should give you enough time to…finish whatever it is you have to finish.”
She pictured a calendar in her mind. To get home by that date, she’d have to leave on the second. Twelve days. Twelve days. And then the rest of her life began. Long and listless, stretching out under the summer sun, all her yearning pushed down inside her. Would it eat her from within? And what of Sacha? Would he just let her go and forget her? She couldn’t stand the thought. But the thought of losing Adrian was twice as painful. I’m just not ready yet.
“Maisie?”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be home on the fourth. I’ll call the airline as soon as I –”
“You don’t need to.”
“Sorry?”
“I’ve already changed it. I phoned them this afternoon.”
“How did they let you?”
“I had your frequent flyer number, your password…they were all in your top drawer. It was Janet’s idea.”
Of course it was her mother’s idea. But Adrian was still unapologetic. He’d agreed with Janet. He thought what he had done was right.
“Okay,” she said again. “It’s all settled then.”
He gave her the flight number and time and she dutifully wrote them down, doodled around them, drawing boxes and bars until she realised what she was doing and dropped her pen. He was telling her about the contract with Churchwheel’s, proposing a weekend in Sydney after she got back, and then he hit her with the bombshell.
“You’ll be back in time to start rehearsals.”
“What do you mean?” Though she suspected she knew exactly what he meant.
“With the orchestra. They start in the second week of February.”
“I don’t want to go back to the orchestra.”
“Well, what are you going to do instead?”
“I don’t know. I’ll decide when I get there.”
“Maisie, that’s not fair to me. I want to buy a house this year – we can’t live with your parents forever. We need financial stability to get a loan. You can’t just go work at McDonalds you know.”
A sob of desperation caught in Maisie’s throat and she remembered the sound of the big double doors at the practice studio closing behind her, the smell of newish carpet and furniture polish, the awful click of the clips that held her cello case together. Then the misery of rehearsals, trying to be nice to people who hated her and whom she hated equally. Impossible to contemplate.
“Perhaps I will.”
“Your mother has already spoken to –”
“My mother…” she started, intending to say something harsh then remembering at the last moment Adrian’s aversion to any word stronger than “shit”.
“I just want the old Maisie back,” he said quietly. “I just want things to be the way they used to be.”
“I’ve changed,” she said.
“You’ll change back. It’s just that you’re so far from home.” A few beats of silence. “So far from me. With other people that I don’t like.”
He meant Sacha of course, though he obviously couldn’t bear to use the name. And because of the awful burden of her guilt she said, “I’ll think about the orchestra. I mean seriously think about it.”
“That would make me really happy. And a bit more…you know…secure.”
“But if I could do something different, something that paid comparable money, you’d be okay with that?” She was thinking of her grandmother, charging forty pounds a throw for fortune-telling advice. Somehow knew that Adrian would find the idea ridiculous.
“Yeah, sure. I just want to put this horrible separation – and all this jealousy and confusion – I just want to put it all behin
d us and get on with our lives together.”
The conversation mercifully ended soon after. She replaced the receiver and purposefully pulled out Sybill’s tarot deck and guidebook, spread the cards around her and determined to commit them all to long-term memory. She was desperate. She needed some way to use her psychic ability before she got home if she was going to foil Adrian’s and Janet’s plans for her. They couldn’t argue if she was earning good money telling fortunes, right? She picked up each card and memorised its face, looked up its meaning, recited it over and over in her head. Knowing what they meant, however, was less than half the ability she needed to read them. She would have to work harder at developing her psychism, spend more time in meditation or psychic exercise, work, work, work. She heard the flap on the front door snap, meaning she had just been delivered mail. It was probably a bill, nobody ever wrote to her. She went on memorising her cards.
She was just finishing off the Major Arcana when Sacha arrived, a couple of hours early. His knock on the door brought her to her feet. The van was parked in the street outside. A tingle of light-headedness washed over her. Not guilt and desire – just hunger. She had forgotten to eat lunch.
“Hi,” she said, opening the door.
“Hi,” he replied. “It was a quiet afternoon so they let me go home early.” He stepped inside, pulled her into his arms. “I was dying to see you.”
He kissed her. Her head swam.
“What’s this?” he said, bending to pick up her mail as she closed the door behind him.
She took the envelope from him. “It’s my mother’s handwriting.” She picked the envelope open as they went to the lounge room. He surveyed the cards laid out all over the floor.
He scooped up Tabby and gave her a scratch under the chin. “You’ve been busy.”
“I’ve learned the entire Major Arcana. Well, I’ve got two to go: Judgement, and the World. I’ll have to practise on you later.”
He shook his head. “Won’t work. You can’t read for yourself or for someone you’re close to.”