Beyond Repair (7 page)

“Kind of,” she said, but she needn’t have.

His excitement was now so enormous it was actually starting
to suck her in. He clapped his hands and called her a sweetheart, and once he’d
added
I tell you what—you do me and then I’ll do you
, she knew she was
done for. She came close to standing just because of his expression, all sin
and grin. But the words
do you
really finished her off.

Suddenly she was by the tub, with almost no idea how she’d
gotten there.

“Want me to lean forward, or are you happy with me just like
this?”

She couldn’t answer him, and not just because he was being a
rotten tease. He was almost biting one corner of his lip and there was a laugh
brewing inside him, she could see it. But that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem
was that she didn’t want him to lean forward at all, and just couldn’t say.

If she said, he’d know what she meant. He’d know that she
was just trying to work up the courage to look over him, and if he leaned
forward she wouldn’t be able to see anything. He’d be covering the best bits,
and dear God, she really wanted to see the best bits. Her curiosity practically
demanded satisfaction on that score.

And that just left her silent and stiff, unsure of what to
do.

Should she kneel? Kneeling would probably be the best move.
It would answer his question without using words, but might also seem quite
innocent.

“Oh so you’re just gonna get right in there.”

Fuck fuck fuck
, it did not seem innocent at all. She
looked as if she’d bobbed down to get a closer look. She felt as though she’d
gotten out her goddamn magnifying glass—even though she hadn’t so much as
glanced yet. She’d fixed her gaze on the left side of his head, and was
currently refusing to accept that any other body part existed.

He was just one big ear.

He didn’t even have a penis.

“Well, I need to be here if I’m going to do this.”

“You make it sound so ominous. And kind of like a dangerous
job.”

“It is dangerous. I might fall and bludgeon myself to death
on your shoulder.”

“I’d turn just in time and catch you on my pillowy bosom.”

“I don’t think ‘pillowy’ is the word I would have used,” she
said, but even as she did her mind was comparing his chest to something she
could rest her head on. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, all
broad and plump. It looked just as inviting as it had in
Swan Song
, only
here in reality he had chest hair.

He had all of this lovely, rough chest hair that she
couldn’t remember ever seeing in any of his movies. And she would have noticed
too, because it wasn’t just rough. It was pretty thick and very dark, and it
reached all the way down to his insanely hard stomach and the jut of muscle
arrowing down from his hips and, and, and—

“Want me to pose for you?”

“What? No, no, God, no—sorry. Sorry, I just—”

“I’m teasing.”

“It wasn’t… I didn’t—”

“Alice, Alice, I’m teasing you. I asked you to come in here,
remember? I wanted you to wash my back. It’s fine for you to look at whatever
you want to look at. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s kinda giving me goose
bumps.”

He showed her his bristly arm to prove it, though that
didn’t really explain anything to her. What exactly was it about her gormless
expression that was giving him goose bumps? She felt like an explorer who’d
just discovered man, and he seemed to agree. She asked him why before she could
stop herself, and his answer made her entire body burn with embarrassment.

“I don’t know, I don’t know. You’re just so…intense about
it. So curious—like you’ve never seen a guy’s body before.”

There was probably a non-humiliating way she could have told
him here that she hadn’t, but if there was she couldn’t think of one.
Twenty-year-old women were supposed to have seen naked male bodies—and she knew
“movies” and “one time when I accidentally walked in on my dad as he got out of
the shower” did not count.

In fact they probably counted against her.

Adults did not tell stupid naked-dad stories.

“You say that as though your body is typical,” she said, and
almost nodded in satisfaction. There—that got her off the hook. Of course it
also got her into a very thorny area in which she had to explain
why
his
body wasn’t typical, but she would deal with that hurdle when she came to it.

As in right now.

“You think it’s not?”

“I think you’re very…big.”

“And that’s a bad thing.”

“I didn’t say bad.”

“So it’s good then, huh?”

He knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard. She could
actually see him trying to suppress his teasing grin, as she worked on a way to
say no without seeming like a total liar. And just when she was sure she’d come
up with the perfect answer, he caught her gaze with those sparking eyes and she
was lost again.

“I wouldn’t say it was awful.”

“Well that’s kind of you.”

“It has some positives.”

“Such as?”

She didn’t answer him with words. It seemed best not to
answer him with any words. She couldn’t trust them to behave once they were
close to her vocal cords, so instead just went with shoving the bunched-up
washcloth against his left shoulder blade. He’d get the gist then and even if
he didn’t—this was what she was supposed to be doing. She was supposed to be
washing his general back area.

He couldn’t make her feel weird about that.

“So you like it there, huh?”

Christ, she’d really misjudged what he could make her feel
weird about. Not only that, but she’d misjudged
how
weird he could
possibly make her feel. She’d imagined a simple answer that maybe veered into a
joke, and instead he’d just said something that sounded pretty close to sex
talk.

It sounded so close that she found herself flushing from
head to foot. Random parts of her tingled too intently the second the words
were out, and they carried on for a long while afterward. Too long a while, if
she was being honest. She was meant to be answering him, and all she could
muster was a noncommittal sound and a lot of scrubbing at his broad back.

Unfortunate really, that the latter only made things worse.

She didn’t intend it to. She went at him like a nun briskly
rubbing a pair of underpants against a washboard, full of pure vim and gusto.
But no matter how sexless she tried to be, sex kept slipping in there anyway.
All the vigorous movements just made her realize how hot she was getting, and
how humid this stupid room was, and most embarrassingly…

Her nipples had gone really stiff. She could feel them
chafing against her nightshirt every time she stroked over him, and the harder
she worked the more it seemed to happen. The material just kept catching on the
tips, and every time it did a wave a thick sensation ran right down, down, to
the suddenly swollen and very sensitive place between her legs. Everything just
felt so big down there, to the point where moving around was kind of a problem.
She had to go slower just to stop herself moaning.

Only slowing didn’t help at all.

Now she was practically reveling in washing him. The
washcloth was no longer bunched—though she didn’t know how that had happened—and
her hand was almost on his skin. She could near feel him through the material,
all smooth and slick with soap, muscles bunching and flexing as she worked. It
took a monumental effort to keep any sound in under that sort of pressure—though
even after she’d succeeded at restraining herself she couldn’t exactly
celebrate.

Mainly because he didn’t restrain himself
at all
.

“Mmmmm yeah,” he said, in a way that
could
have been
perceived as innocent. Just like with those words he said—it was
possible
that there wasn’t any sexual meaning in there. But it was also possible she was
pretending that this was the case in order to stop herself from having an
orgasm.

She was already fairly close as it was. Hearing him make
that husky, breathless sound and accepting that it might be a sex thing was
simply a step too far. It was all too much. She had to count to ten and stay
very still just to maintain her sanity, but apparently sanity wasn’t intent on
giving her a break today.

The moment she slumped against the tub he turned and tilted
his head a little, in a way that put his face far too close to her face. She
could almost feel his breath against her cheek—which was bad enough on its own.
But then he went and asked her a question like this one. “Did my groan of
delight accidentally paralyze you?”

After which she just wanted to throw in the towel.

How did he make it sound both suggestive
and
considerate?

How that was even a thing? That wasn’t a thing.

“No, no, I…I’m just resting here for a second.”

“Really? It doesn’t look like you’re just resting there. It
looks much more like you collapsed over the edge of the bathtub.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe my back gave out.”

“Well, that
is
a possibility,” he said, but she knew
he didn’t think it was a possibility at all. She could tell by the way he
touched her hair as he said it—just one little damp curl—with the tips of his
enormous fingers.

It was quite possibly the sexiest caress of her entire life,
and it wasn’t even skin-to-skin. Christ knew what would happen if it was
skin-to-skin.

“Or it could be that I have a rare freezing disorder.”

“I had entertained the notion.”

“And then there’s how close your face is to mine, right now.”

“Is that making it harder to move?”

“It’s making it impossible to move.”

“And you mean that in the bad way.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. What’s the bad way?”

“The bad way is when you’re so terrified by all of this that
you can’t escape, as opposed to not really wanting to go anywhere at all.”

“I think I’m both of those things at the same time,” she
said, but she didn’t quite understand in what quantities until he turned his
head just a little. Barely more than an inch, she thought, but an inch was all
it took. One second they were only talking—in a heated way true, but still only
words—and the next he was actually moving in for something that made her heart
seize up.

He was doing it. She knew he was doing it. She should have
known but somehow she hadn’t and holy crap he was really going do to it, he
was, he was, and suddenly the terrified part of her punched the part that
didn’t want to move
right in the fucking face
. It got it in a chokehold
and squeezed until the excited bit of her passed out.

And that manifested in the worst possible way.

She actually
skittered
back across the floor, in a
manner last seen on a Discovery Channel special about bugs. Her entire body did
things it hadn’t been able to do in years, and it did them just because he’d
been about to do that thing she didn’t want to think about. She didn’t want to
think about it so much that she almost took out the bathroom wall in her effort
to escape, and even after she’d lost her unearthly speed and grace the fun
didn’t stop.

She stumbled into the toilet and flailed around for about
five minutes—and all while he looked too stunned to say or do anything. He
raised a tentative hand in her direction, but that was all.

And she was grateful for that.

Running away from a kiss was humiliating enough on its own,
without adding a naked man charging after you into the mix.

She decided the best course of action was probably
breakfast. Breakfast was normal, breakfast was wholesome, breakfast said, “I
did not just destroy my bathroom because you almost kissed me.” Or at least,
breakfast said that for ordinary people. It was a bit more of a struggle for
her, considering that the insides of her fridge looked like an abandoned
Chinese takeaway.

The only thing resembling normal food in there was a block
of cheese she’d somehow gnawed into a ball, three potatoes that had sprouted
arms and legs and tried to take over the salad crisper, and an aubergine. She
hadn’t the faintest clue where the aubergine had come from, but its origins
weren’t really the problem. The fact that it wasn’t an egg or a slice of bacon
was.

She didn’t even have cereal. Her cupboards were full of
things a three-year-old would buy, if they were given brief control of the
grocery shopping. There were bags of marshmallows and jars of peanut butter
mixed with something unholy—like mint-flavored peanut-butter spread. Why had
she thought peanut-butter-mint spread would be a good idea?

More to the point—why had the
manufacturer
thought
peanut-butter-mint spread would be a good idea? Surely the average American
shopper wasn’t interested in something quite so bonkers. No, no…only someone
who
wasn’t
American would buy such ghastly items. Only someone who went
nuts online shopping at Walmart—drunk on the idea of a thousand things that
shouldn’t exist—would want marshmallows filled with mature cheddar.

She’d unwittingly flagged herself as an insane
three-year-old foreigner.

And any second now he was going to come down and figure that
fact out. He was probably already on his way right now. It had been over ten
minutes since she panicked in the bathroom. Surely he would want an explanation
soon? She was surprised he didn’t want an answer right fucking now—though of
course he
could
have fled out of the nearest window.

She wouldn’t have blamed him.

Hell, she might have thanked him. At least that way, she
wouldn’t have to tape her fridge and cupboards shut and pretend they were full
of spiders.
I have a real insect problem, so I guess we’re going to have to
go out for food
, she pictured herself saying.
Only you know I’m also
physically incapable of walking out my front door, so maybe just imagine
spiders have completely taken over planet Earth instead.

Yeah, that was never going to work.

For one thing, he knew what an actual spider invasion looked
like. He’d battled them in that B movie he’d made before he hit before the
big-time. And for another, spider invasions were not a real thing. He would
know that they were not a real thing. She could have been a lying ninja, and he
would have understood.

But she was not a lying ninja.

She was barely a lying beginner. The first thing she did
when he suddenly appeared in the doorway to her kitchen was jump so violently
she accidentally sprayed the kitchen with mini marshmallows, swiftly followed
by some blurted words.

“I don’t have anything normal to eat.”

She’d blown her own cover. The amateur lying Olympics were
not going to be calling any time soon. Luckily, however, it didn’t matter. It
didn’t matter for two very important reasons—the first being his response, as
sweet as anything she’d ever heard.

“I gotta be honest, I’d have been disappointed if you did.”

And the second being
the thing he was wearing
.

She hadn’t taken into account that he didn’t have any clean
clothes to put on. She’d somehow imagined him coming down in a fabulous outfit
live from the red carpet, as though his skin spontaneously grew tuxedos. At the
very least she’d pictured him in his own underwear, with the same t-shirt up
top.

But he hadn’t done that.

He’d put on her robe. He’d put on her robe, and it was weird
even though she knew it shouldn’t be. The tuxedo-growing thing was the crazy
option. This was perfectly normal and perfectly reasonable, for all sorts of
reasons. The robe fit him very well, for a start. She’d bought it from the
men’s department because she’d liked the way it swamped her. But it didn’t
swamp him.

It was
perfect
on him—not too tight across the
shoulders or too short in the leg, everything all cozy and comfortable-looking.
He’d even put his hands in the pockets, as though to underscore exactly how at
ease he was. It could have been bought for him by his assistant. He could have
been wearing the damn thing all his life.

And
that
was the problem.

He looked too much like he belonged. He looked so much like
he belonged that for one heart-stopping second she could only think one
completely insane and absolutely terrible thing. It forced itself into her head
then flashed over and over, despite her best efforts to oust it. She had to
oust it.

She couldn’t think things like that about him, after a day
and a bit. Not about Holden Stark, not about a movie star, not about anyone. It
was embarrassing.

Yet there it was all the same.

He looks like the husband I don’t have.

And the worst part was…he really did. In fact, the feeling
was so strong she started to worry he somehow was, and she’d just forgotten
him. He died during the thing that had happened, and she’d gone so mad with
grief she’d blocked him out.

And now he’d returned to haunt her.

It certainly felt as if her heart were haunted, seeing him
standing there like every happy movie husband she’d ever seen. Thinking of all
the dreams she’d had of the life she would one day lead, full of all those
wonderful clichés.
Hey, honey, you got the paper
, he would say, and she
would pass it to him. Then they would sit at the breakfast table and eat some
eggs and drink some orange juice while she read the funnies and he read the
sports section. Then afterward, they might go visit a market of some kind.

That was the way it went, wasn’t it?

Or at least, that was the way it went for ordinary people.
The ones who had not had all those things dismantled one by one, along with
their hopes for a happy career in something normal and their plan to maybe
visit other places in the world.
When I’m older I will travel
, she’d
imagined, in that taking-it-for-granted way kids always did.

Oh, how she wished she’d never taken her future joy for
granted.

“You okay, Alice?”

How could she say no? She had to say yes. He would never
understand all that, and even on the off chance he might she wasn’t sure how to
explain it. The whole thing sounded too insane and besides…if she spoke she
knew what would happen. She could already feel that sting behind her eyes.

So she nodded. She nodded.

“I can take this off, if you want,” he said, then seemed to
pause before adding, “if it belonged to someone else, that is.”

No it’s okay
,she thought.
He only died in
my imagination.

“It doesn’t belong to anyone else.”

“You sure? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Of course I’m sure,” she said, but the shock of him echoing
some of her thoughts again made her voice a little shaky. She had to turn her
back and focus on other things, only these other things were just as
ridiculous. She didn’t even have any plates to put her rubbish food on. Instead
she had to use a colander that had been here since she moved in, and it kept
leaking crumbs of crackers and cakes out of all the little holes.

Plus the sides of it were so steep everything kept falling
onto everything else. By the time she got it to the table it was just a big
jumble of squirty cheese and squashed baked goods, with a sprinkling of Cheetos
over the top. No one in their right mind would have eaten it, or even sat down
with someone as clearly unhinged as she.

Yet he did just that.

He dug in as though she’d ordered him a four-course meal
from a Michelin-starred restaurant. And when he finally commented, it was only
to suggest ways of combining all the terrible elements. “If you squeeze the
Ring Ding between two Doritos it’s like having a sandwich,
”
he said, and
relief flooded through her.

He wasn’t going to ask again.

He wasn’t going to ask about anything. Not about her
reaction to the robe or the almost kiss or her lack of correct food and
crockery. He was content to just allow things to go on as they were, as calm
and easy as a summer breeze. Neither of them had to worry about their problems;
their problems did not exist here.

There was only him feeding her crackers covered in
buttercream, with a dozen ridiculous assurances that they would be nice. “I
think the garlic really adds something,” he said, and suddenly everything else
just faded away. He was good at making things fade away—though it was only
after she’d made him laugh that she realized.

She was good at it too.

This was what they were doing.

They were somehow making it through.

* * * * *

It took a couple of days for her to realize she should
probably find him something to wear. She couldn’t fault her lack of social
graces, however. He didn’t seem to give a damn about social graces. He only
cared about hanging out with her, and after a while that was all she cared
about too.

The robe no longer seemed haunted. It seemed like something
comforting. He wasn’t Holden Stark anymore, supreme ruler of the movie
universe. He was Bernie, who wandered around her house in fluffy terrycloth.
And if that terrycloth occasionally slipped a little here or there and she
maybe saw too much—well, that was okay.

She could handle it.

She could sort of handle it.

She couldn’t handle it at all, but everything was so cool
between them she thought she’d better try. After all, he probably hadn’t really
wanted to kiss her. The whole thing was likely just her imagination, and even
if it hadn’t been she’d stuffed it all up. There was a wariness about the way
he reacted to her now—no suggestions that she join him in the bathroom, no
requests for backrubs.

Everything stayed friendly and aboveboard, which was fine
most of the time.

But then that robe would slide off the firm plane of his
thigh, and he would kind of catch her eye and she would kind of catch his and
then suddenly they were in some kind of staring contest. Some kind of really
intense staring contest, where the world around them became all slow and heavy
and she couldn’t seem to breathe. She had to gasp just to get some of this new
and impossibly thick oxygen down, but there was no relief once she had.

The air settled badly inside her—like having indigestion, if
indigestion was something pleasurable and exciting instead of an awful nightmare.
And the longer she let these staring contests go on for, the more this feeling
intensified. Sometimes it got so bad she found herself nearly leaning toward
him, despite his unwillingness to lean back. He stayed right where he was and
she started to sag and dear God she couldn’t have that. What if she went all
the way in and he laughed?

She needed to get him into some clothes, immediately. Ones
that did not make her think of dead husbands, and were not in the slightest bit
sexy. Both those things were combining to make some unholy issue inside her, so
dressing him seemed like a good solution. Or at least, it seemed like one until
she was standing in her closet with him, surrounded by all the clothes she did
not have. He picked up a lonely pair of tights from an otherwise empty shelf,
and it was then that she knew what she should have understood much earlier.

She didn’t actually have any clothes for
her
to wear,
never mind him. Her shoe rack only had two pairs of shoes in it. There was an
entire rail behind him, and on it she’d hung a single pair of jeans. And she’d
only done that because it seemed like
something
should be hung up in
there.

Most people chose suits and fancy dresses though, she knew.

He probably knew too, but if he did he didn’t say.

“I think these will go great with my ensemble,” he said
instead, despite the fact that they were green, had a gigantic hole in them,
and probably wouldn’t make it past his knees. Oh and also they were
tights
.
He was willing to try on tights for her. He’d eaten colander cake concoctions
on several occasions now—not to mention the terrible tea he kept drinking and
the insane conversations he kept having with her about whether Superman could
safely poo. Yesterday they’d actually watched a
Golden Girls
marathon
together, and he hadn’t blinked an eye.

And now this.

Of course he was kidding, but that was okay. The effect was
still the same—one of warmth and acceptance and other cool stuff. He didn’t
mind that she only had green tights, or that her closet looked like something
abandoned at the end of time. He just went with it anyway. She suspected he
needed
to go with it.

Going with it was better than the alternatives.

“Maybe we can fashion you a toga out of a bedsheet.”

“I don’t know. I’m kind of attached to these now,” he said,
and then she watched in delight as he attempted to roll them over one foot. Of
all the things she ever thought she’d see, Holden Stark bent over in a bathrobe
with one stocking almost over his ankle was not one of them. It occurred to her
that she could probably sell this image to
TMZ
for a million dollars,
but she had to be honest.

It was worth a lot more than that to her.

Every bizarre moment with him was worth more than that to
her.

“You’re really not supposed to do it like this.”

“Well where am I going wrong?”

“You can’t…you have to roll it first.”

“So I can’t just drag it on?”