Starting Over (9 page)

Arousal gripped in a moment. Jacket off in a shrug, bow tie unknotted, he stepped her into his arms, groaning at the exuberant buffet of her breasts. Glorious hair streamed over his hands that barely-stroked her spine and glided up her sides to her breasts as he nuzzled his lips against her neck. Her fingers dug into his shoulders as she sighed her approval and he swooped almost savagely on her mouth, hot and tasting of sexy woman. Endless, deep, tingling kisses, her nipples firm against his chest, tongue tip running mad inside his mouth. Heart racing, breath catching, sinking to the edge of the bed with her somehow on his lap. Sinking into the white softness of her breasts. Hearing her inhalation as she paused from her dizzy grapple with the dress studs of his shirt to lift trembling hands to cup his head, hearing her whimper ‘
Yes
!
’
when his mouth closed feverishly on her. Struggling his shirt open, hoarse groan as her hot flesh met his. Wonderful, marvellous, lithe downiness beneath his hands, stroking, suggesting, up and down her body. The body that she arched and offered.

His delicate fingers discovering the advanced state of her arousal through the sliding fabric of her French knickers, willingly entering into the rhythm she immediately rocked against his hand. God, she was exciting! Hot as hell, unpretending, undisguised, needing – God what a need.

Spine arching, curving, hands clamped on his biceps, breasts bobbing against him, silky-skinned, her hair slithered over her breasts and his arms, spangling his senses.

Her head fell forward.

And she slumped, boneless, on his shoulder.

Lowering her gently to the coolness of the sheets, he cradled her. Then her breathing slowed.
And.
Every. Inch. Of. Her. Relaxed …

Swearing horribly, he watched as her face slackened, eyes shut and she slithered into unmistakable sleep.

She’d crashed.

Sweeping back her hair from her unconscious face, he tried his lips and tongue up the xylophone of her now unresponsive rib cage. Out cold.

He gave an angry snort of laughter. ‘That’ll teach me!’ A wave of frustration broke over him. What if he flung off his clothes and climbed in beside her anyway? Simply slept beside her, woke with her? Maybe they could take up where they left off ...?

He blew a sigh. It could be better than that.

‘Lovely summer!’ Angel pushed back her hair, turned her kitten face up to a sun which had, untypically, been giving
England
its best for weeks, and held up her arms to admire a milk-coffee tan. Tess glanced at her own arms, spangled with a million tiny freckles, envying Angel her Rich Tea biscuit complexion.

This summer was continental; long days lasting into warm evenings. Everyone spent all their spare time outdoors, the pub gardens filled with kids running between geranium tubs and people going home to barbecues. ‘Are you staying this evening?’ Angel’s hair brushed Tess’s arm as she rolled nearer to watch her trying to come up with new Nigels. Tess had spoken to the card company and they’d agreed to give her the Nigel range.

To sell cards for boyfriends, dads, husbands, brothers, nephews or sons, Nigel now played golf, football or squash. He drove a sports car, he drank pints. For Valentine’s Day he clutched a pulsing heart and wore a soppy look. She tapped her pencil and thought about Christmas. Nigel began to emerge in the bottom half of a Santa suit, braces a-dangle, sharing a beer with a reindeer.

‘Ever run out of ideas?’

Tess shrugged, absorbed. ‘I just go on to something else.’ She avoided committing herself to staying this evening. Would Ratty be joining them?

Ratty.

How the hell was she going to face him? The ball had been bad enough – when Ratty had, apparently, walked her home. In the morning she’d surfaced alone, a wake-up-in-her-make-up number. And half naked.

What had
happened
?

Back of her mind, there was the niggling memory of dancing in the arms of someone. Then nothing. Blank. What next? Maybe she muddled her way upstairs alone, drew the curtains, undressed and rolled beneath the duvet?

Maybe she hadn’t needed hauling to bed. Perhaps the edge-of-the-mind memories of groans and furious curses were some head-trick, some earlier experience her dreaming mind had dredged up.

Maybe. Perhaps Simeon had cursed like that when Tess’s knee found its mark ...? But she thought not.

Anyway, it paled into insignificance beside the latest humiliation. She shuddered and began to sketch Nigel balancing an entire chicken over a barbecue. A week ago, suffering – really
suffering – from a flooding, debilitating period, she’d rung Angel with an SOS to ransack Crowther’s shop for sanitary pads, knowing not to trust her own watery legs to walk that far. When she felt so appallingly drained she knew how easily she passed out. Some months were like this, when all she could do was slump in bed and wait for it to be over.

But, in a dire development, instead of Angel,
he’d
run up the stairs and swung into her bedroom like an intimate girlfriend. ‘Angel has a problem with a pukey Jenna so I’m ... Christ, you look like crap.’

Oh, God-God, he’d gone into the shop and bought them for her
!
And, by his frown, hadn’t particularly enjoyed the experience. Eyes down, what blood she had left staining her cheeks, muttering, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ she snatched the mortifying carrier bag ungratefully, paused on the bedside, plait dangling, to let her ears stop ringing, shuffled off to the bathroom in her Wee Willie Winkie nightshirt. Felt faint. Sick.

Would’ve have stayed closeted forever if she’d realised; realised that when she returned Ratty would’ve stripped the bed of, to her horror, bloodstained sheets.

‘You need a clean nightie,’ he suggested, without looking at her.

Oh no-o-o!
She hid her eyes with both hands. ‘Oh, please!
Don’t
! Just leave me to die! I’ll cope; you
can’t
do this, I can’t bear it!’

As he ignored her outburst and went to search the landing cupboard for fresh bedclothes, she’d no choice but to shuffle back to the bathroom to change. He glanced up when she returned. ‘How
do
you bleed like this without dying?’ Bed remade, efficient and matter-of-fact, he gathered up the soiled linen. Reached for the nightclothes from Tess, who sat with her head in her hands, in the chair.

This was the worst day of her life, worse than when Olly sent his e-mail. She was going to melt away from mortification. ‘Go away!’ she begged, voice muffled. ‘You can’t do my gory washing.’

‘Shut up,’ he suggested, fairly kindly. Following her very reluctant instructions he ran cold water in the bath, added a heap of salt and dumped everything in to soak. She slid under the fresh bedclothes, face averted. He fetched her a cup of tea.

‘Thanks,’ she managed, eyes determinedly closed. Never again, this would never happen again. Never. In future she’d stockpile sanitary towels in towers. Honeybun Cottage would become the official European tampon mountain. Oh, the indignity!

He perched familiarly on the bed, tugging her plait. ‘Do I call a doctor?’

She shook her head. ‘Another day or so and I’ll get over it.’

‘Sure?’

‘Go
away
!’

‘Stop it! What else can I get you? C’mon, sit up, drink.’

Grudgingly, she dragged herself up against the headboard aware of wearing nothing underneath her nightshirt, her frayed rope of hair and a pallor to rival the sheet. ‘Paracetamol would be good, and a jug of water and a glass. Please.’

‘I’ll come back later and load the washing machine.’  He snipped off her protest with, ‘
Just
leave it,
OK
?’ And he’d continued to look after her for a further two days. Abrupt, embarrassingly forthright about her needs, her mess and her condition.

She curled up with mortification whenever she thought of it. How would she ever look him in the eye again?

But then. It was comfortable, stretched on the warm grass by Angel’s foxgloves that were busy with bumbling bees, roughing Nigel surfing, snorkelling, sunbathing. Toby played with two friends and a box of cars and Jenna toddled after them. Angel managed a well-earned doze.

And suddenly Pete and Ratty were wheeling out the barbecue and McLaren, Ratty’s soft dog, was snapping at flies and panting revolting hot slobber. Before Tess could retreat she was surrounded by people flopping down onto the grass, delighted that the day’s work was done, the sun was out and the beer was cold.

And nobody mentioned it, nobody blamed her that her body was treacherous over its simple functions and she’d, humiliatingly, needed help. Except Ratty, rolling over to inspect the sheet of Nigels, enquired, matter-of-factly, ‘Better now?’

On a fresh, scalding flush, she mumbled, ‘Yes. Um, thanks … sorry for, y’know …’

He pulled a strand of her hair. ‘Don’t worry about it. We both survived.’

And that was all.

Tess could relax. She realised she kind of …
trusted
Ratty.

The children did, too, she thought, leaning back on her elbows to watch Toby and his friends examining the tattoos on Ratty’s arms. He shrugged off his shirt to display a tattoo that was new to her on his left shoulder blade, a car wheel. Angel would probably be able to tell her it had five-spoke alloys and a low profile tyre, or some other apparently desirable attribute. Fine dark hair covered his chest in flat whorls. Ratty never sweetened his voice for the children or crouched to their level but it was always him they selected to unknot string, make repairs or replace batteries.

McLaren opened a brown eye occasionally to flick a glance at the children capering round and round him and Ratty, who was by now comparing how-not-to-get-along-with-your-parents stories with Angel, or, in Angel’s case, parents-in-law. Bickering over the rules of the game, the children collapsed to loll in Ratty’s shade. Slowly, Tess pulled her pad close.

Her pencil hovered, and then began. Children. Childish movement, head-heavy proportion, every line a soft curve. Sketches, rough and feathery, began to appear for one of the final illustrations to complete
The Dragons of Diggleditch
; the childish nymphs of
Diggleditch
Forest
frolicking unaware under the ominous and baleful gaze of Farny, half lizard, half man.

Each small head she haloed in wispy curls, eyes almond, ears pointed prettily. Small bodies naked but for artful leaf arrangements.

Farny, Farny, Farny. Lizard below the waist, man above, reptilian features. He had to look as if he was capable of turning nasty in an instant. She said, ‘I need a man’s body.’ And looked at Ratty.

Breaking from his conversation, his brows up, he spread his arms hospitably. ‘Be gentle with me.’

They all laughed, of course they laughed, at her blush and his leer. But she was alight.
Now
she knew exactly how the elusive illustration would go.

‘Would you sit? Just a sketch?’ Dancing with impatience she dragged a stubby stepladder from the shed. ‘Can you just ...?’ She patted the top and Ratty climbed, slowly. ‘On the very top, one foot here ... one there.’ Stood back.

‘Just wriggle back a bit ... each foot up a rung higher ...’ With quick movements she arranged him, elbows on thighs, hands hanging, back curved. ‘Look down at the children.’ She dropped to the grass, shooed everyone else away, sharpened her pencil with a sharpener from her pocket, started rapid work.

After a few minutes Ratty sighed. ‘Pete, pass me my beer.’

Tess glanced. ‘Not just now.’

‘My backside’s numb,’ he mentioned, ‘and my back aches.’

‘Yeah, yeah, just hang on in.’ She kept him half an hour, closed her pad, sighed, ‘Wooh!’ And, ‘Thanks.’

He landed crouched on the grass beside her like an animal, reopened the pad and flipped through to the page of baby nymphs dancing, skipping, adorable and elfin, seemingly unaware of, looming above them, the predatory presence of Farny. It’d worked really well, viewing her models from the level of the shortest, looking up at her baddie.

The stepladder became a rock. Lizard legs bent the wrong way at the knee, clawed feet turning in to clutch the crevices, flesh scaled. Torso – Ratty’s own strong and hairy chest, muscled shoulders developing into extended, corded arms, elongated talons replacing mechanic’s hands. To capture the reptilian essence she’d placed the eyes far back, forehead slanting steeply away into snaky curls, expression meditative, brewing trouble, as if selecting a tasty morsel.

Ratty recoiled. ‘
Shit
! Is this how you see me?’

She stared. ‘’Course not, I just used bits and pieces of you. It’s a kids’ book, fantasy. Obviously there’s no life model for a non-existent being, so I improvise. You’re just a form ...’

Peering, Angel breathed, ‘It’s
so
sexy!’ She touched the pencilled male torso as if feeling the power.

Tess’s attention remained on Ratty. ‘Don’t you like it?’