Into My Arms (7 page)
‘My legs are shaking so much I couldn’t run anyway,’ said Skye.
Ben put out an arm to steady her as they turned to climb up to the track, but instead of taking it Skye pulled him to her and kissed him deeply. For a moment Ben resisted. They must both be in shock, he thought. It wasn’t until Skye’s dishevelled hair fell against his face that he realised who it was he’d been dreaming of that morning, and then he gave in to her mouth and kissed her as urgently as she’d called his name just fifteen minutes ago.
She couldn’t stop thinking about him after that. The kiss had ignited something, blew it into being, and afterwards all Skye’s thoughts were of Ben. Ben’s eyes, Ben’s smile, the way his shoulders had trembled as he lifted Jess out of the creek. Perhaps that was why she’d kissed him, she thought, trying to explain it to herself—because she was just so grateful that he’d saved Jess. That would make sense; that was understandable. She’d relax again for a minute, but then she’d remember the day she’d fled school to fuck Hamish on his desk—all that want, and none of it was for him, her partner of two years. Whatever was happening had begun before the creek.
And whatever was happening was taking over her life. It wasn’t like her, Skye thought, but she couldn’t seem to let go. She made excuses to wander past Ben’s classroom to try and catch a glimpse of him. She left a note in his pigeonhole asking him to dinner as a thankyou for saving Jess, and when that failed to elicit a response followed it up with another inviting him to come running with her. She consulted the yard-duty roster, then came into school outside of her regular day in the hope of bumping into him in the playground. She knew she was behaving foolishly but felt powerless to stop, driven in a way that she hadn’t been since her days of competing. It was the same sensation: the adrenalin, the anxiety, the restlessness. Back then, standing before the judges and completing her routine would end the turmoil; now nothing, it seemed, would assuage it.
Skye thought about that kiss, relived it over and over. She thought about it as she stood in front of her class at the gym, trying to teach them round-offs; she remembered Ben’s mouth on hers while she sat on the couch watching TV with Nell, or brushed her teeth in the morning. She thought, too, about what had happened next, how they’d slowly walked back up to the track, wet and shaky, with Jess between them. How Ben had smiled shyly at her when she caught his eye; how her thighs had ached, but only partially from her leap into the water. Then Jess had started to stagger, so Ben had carried her the rest of the way. ‘Get her home, so she can rest,’ he’d told her when they got to the car park, and Skye knew it was good advice, but she suddenly couldn’t bear to be parted from him.
‘We walked here,’ she’d said, knowing he’d offer them a lift. ‘I’m not sure Jess will make it.’ And offer he had, placing Jess gently in the back of his ute, then turning to her to ask directions.
As they pulled up outside Hamish’s flat, Skye prayed he wouldn’t be home. She didn’t want Ben to meet him, didn’t want them sizing each other up or shaking hands. She wanted to keep Ben all to herself.
‘I’ll carry Jess in,’ he’d offered, and Skye had held her breath as she put her key in the lock, but the flat was empty, and felt somehow much smaller than it had when she’d left an hour previously. Ben put Jess down on her rug while Skye fetched the dog a fresh bowl of water. To her dismay, he then turned to go.
‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘I’ll get you a drink! Coffee? Juice?’
‘Orange juice, if you’ve got it.’
While she poured him a glass, hands still unsteady, he’d come up behind her. She wanted to kiss him again; she wanted him to go before Hamish returned. He thanked her and leant towards her as if he might do the former, then abruptly pointed to a photograph stuck to the fridge.
‘Is that Hamish?’ he’d asked, and she nodded. It was a picture of the two of them at a gym fundraiser earlier in the year, a large bunch of balloons jostling between them. He was older than Ben she realised, looking at it closely. At thirty-three, probably quite a lot older.
‘So you’re sleeping with the boss, huh?’
It should have been funny, and ordinarily she would have laughed and made a joke about how it had got her her job. Instead she’d said nothing, and after Ben had left she’d gone and checked on Jess, then sat and stared out the window until Hamish arrived home.
Despite her attempts, she hadn’t seen Ben again after that until two weeks later when she was at school, standing with 5C in front of the bare grey wall at the side of the tuckshop. They were trying to position the contour drawing, a full-size copy of the design for the mosaic that the class had come up with.
‘Move it a bit to the left,’ she told the two boys, James and Hassan, who were holding it up with outstretched arms. They dutifully complied. Skye considered it for a minute, then shook her head. ‘A little higher, I think. Can you reach?’
‘Miss Holt, if it goes any higher you won’t be able to see the birds near the top,’ called another boy, Simon, from the watching students.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Rowena. ‘They’ll just look like dots.’
A few of the class nodded their heads. Zia, she noticed, was among them. Skye sighed. She wanted to tell them that the mosaic would look far better further up the wall, where the perspective would be right, but stopped herself. She didn’t like taking direction, be it from Hamish or a group of fifth graders, but it was their project. She’d be gone not long after it was finished anyway. She wouldn’t have to look at it. ‘OK, let’s try it your way. James, Hassan—can you hold up the drawing again?’
‘Higher,’ shouted one girl near the front.
‘No way! Lower,’ demanded Rowena, glaring at her classmate. ‘And put it back in the middle. It looks stupid there.’
Hassan started rubbing his shoulder and let the drawing fall to the ground. ‘My arm hurts, Miss Holt,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing it anymore.’
On impulse, and because he was on her mind, Skye turned to Rowena. ‘Go and get Mr Cunningham,’ she said. ‘He’s part of your class, isn’t he? He can decide.’
The girl looked dubious but did as she was told. By the time she returned with Ben, 5C had settled themselves on the asphalt to await his verdict.
Skye felt her stomach turn over as Ben walked towards her. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t agree on where to place the mosaic, so we thought you could arbitrate.’ She nodded at James and Hassan. ‘Boys?’
‘I can’t,’ complained Hassan. ‘My arm’s too tired from holding it up before.’
‘Anyone else?’ asked Skye, but no one raised their hands. ‘Oh, I’ll do it then,’ she said, grabbing one end of the paper. It really was a good design, she thought, looking at it again. The class had depicted their school, but instead of buildings and traffic, their inner-city setting, the foreground was filled with animals and trees. A platypus dived into one corner of the drawing; Zia’s soaring birds flapped across the sky.
‘Nice,’ Ben said approvingly as she and James once more hauled the drawing up against the wall. ‘That’s really good, guys. It will look great as a mosaic.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Higher, I think.’
Skye couldn’t resist. ‘That’s what I told them,’ she said, stretching up. James, she noticed, was standing on tiptoes.
‘No, even higher,’ Ben commanded. Then, to show her, he walked across and lifted the corner of the drawing out of her hands, momentarily pinning her to the wall. Skye closed her eyes. She could smell the laundry powder in his shirt, feel the warmth from his hip where it nudged against hers. The students dissolved; her body angled itself towards his.
‘Mr Cunningham, I can’t hold it now!’ shouted James. Skye felt the paper go slack. Ben moved away and she opened her eyes, disoriented.
After school that day she followed him home. She hadn’t planned to—she was due at the gym—but as she saw his car pull out of the gates she fell in behind it without thinking. He indicated, she indicated. He turned, she turned. She didn’t try to be discreet or keep her distance, simply tagged along until she found herself pulling up outside a block of units. Ben parked in the forecourt, then waited as she got out of her car. Without a word, he walked to his front door, opened it, then stood back so she could enter first. Inside, he kicked the door closed with his foot, and his arms went around her. His mouth came down on hers, forced her head back so hard it banged against a wall. It hurt, but she didn’t stop kissing him; held on tighter, if anything, as they slid to the floor, landing in a tangled heap of limbs and skin. And oh, his skin. His skin was intoxicating. Hamish was always doused with deodorant. Working at the gym he had to be—helping out in a weights session, taking a class if an instructor didn’t show, the personal training sessions he ran at least once a day. Skye understood that, but until Ben held her she hadn’t realised how much she detested all those chemicals. Ben, in contrast, smelled of nothing but skin. She lowered her face to his chest and breathed it in. When that wasn’t enough, she slipped her hands beneath his shirt, dimly aware as she did so how much she’d wanted to touch him ever since he’d pressed against her at school earlier that day. His own hands were on her breasts; his erection pulsed against her thigh. She pushed herself against him and was reaching for the waistband of his jeans when the electronic tones of ‘YMCA’ suddenly rang out through the flat. Ben froze. Skye’s eyes flew open.
The guilt flooded through her immediately.
‘What’s that?’ Ben asked. Three buttons on his shirt were undone; his pupils were dilated.
‘My phone,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s probably the gym calling. Hamish. He’ll be wondering where I am.’ She pulled her t-shirt down and struggled to sit up. She had to go. She couldn’t bear to go.
‘What’s happening, Skye? Why did you come here?’
Ben’s voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear him. She glanced at him to see if he was angry, but he didn’t appear to be, only confused. A part of her resented it. She wished he’d yell and rant or even call her a bitch; that he’d order her to leave or push her through the door of his flat. She felt terrible, yes, but she still couldn’t bring herself to go.
‘I don’t know. I don’t do this, Ben,’ she whispered, horrified to find she was close to tears.
‘I don’t either,’ he said, pulling himself up to sit beside her, their backs to the wall. He reached for her hand, and she knew he understood the little of this there was to understand—that it wasn’t planned, and it wasn’t right, but it wasn’t under her control either. Then her phone shrilled again and Ben’s expression changed.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he said, dropping her hand and standing up. ‘Please don’t be here when I get out.’
Skye reached for her bag and turned off her phone. She would leave now, but only because he had told her to. She wished more than anything that he’d asked her to stay.
They were on a ferry, leaning over the rail, the wind flinging spray in their eyes. Charlie was laughing, unconcerned, his arm wrapped around her; she was worried about her camera and trying to shield it beneath her jacket. Every time she looked up the horizon had shifted. The waves were tossing them from side to side and the boat yawed alarmingly, but the sun shone brightly and land, in the form of a green cliff rising from a beach of shingle, wasn’t too far away. They could probably swim if they had to. She would grab Skye, who was so at home in the water. Charlie would have to take Arran, who wasn’t. Nell was just looking around for the children when she heard a dull thump. Had they hit something? Were they breaking up? Her heart began to race and she woke up, shaking.
She lay in the darkness listening to her own ragged breaths.
Make it real
, her mother had told her whenever she had had a bad dream as a child, and obediently Nell tried to do so. She wasn’t on a ferry, she began, reasoning her way out of her panic. She was in her own bed, with her children safe and her husband beside her. That worked for a second, but then it hit her, and her pulse hammered again in her ears. She buried her face in the pillow and waited for the shock of pain to recede. How long would she have to keep remembering like this? How many more times until Charlie’s death became something she knew in her bones, just like she knew her own name or the sun in the sky? Slowly, deliberately, she opened her eyes and started again. She wasn’t on a ferry. No one was drowning, or in danger. They’d never even had a rough crossing, as far as she could remember, never had any trouble at all. Oh, they’d missed plenty of ferries, she thought, allowing her mind to wander, due to a combination of Charlie’s laissez-faire approach to timetables and her wretched map-reading skills, but they’d always got where they were going in the end. Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d had a schedule.
Another thump, only this time Nell realised it was coming from her door. She reached for her bedside light, but before she could switch it on Skye had come into the room and was hissing her name. ‘Mum. Nell. Are you awake?’
‘I am now,’ said Nell, sitting up in bed. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I just wanted to talk. Can I get in?’ asked Skye, already climbing across her to the empty side of the bed. Nell fumbled again for the light, but Skye moaned and threw her arm across her face. ‘Turn it off! I don’t need to see you.’ She burrowed down under the covers, pulling them almost up over her face.
‘Bad dream?’ Nell asked as the room returned to shadow. ‘I had one too. We were on a ferry. In Scotland, I think, though maybe it was Greece. You were about twelve, and there was this storm—’
‘No, I didn’t have a dream.’ Skye cut her off and rolled onto her side, her back to Nell. She was silent for a few minutes, but Nell knew she hadn’t fallen asleep. The whole bed hummed with Skye’s agitation. ‘I want you to tell me something,’ she finally said, ‘but you can’t ask why, OK? There’s no real reason. It’s just . . . hypothetical.’
‘Of course,’ Nell replied. ‘You can ask me anything. I’ve never lied to you.’
Skye sighed. ‘I know you haven’t, but it still feels wrong. It’s none of my business.’ She swallowed, then said in a rush, ‘When Dad was alive, did you ever fancy anyone else?’