Best Erotic Romance 2014 (2 page)

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“Sleep sex? He attacked you, you mean.”

Charlie said this precisely and immediately, with her strawberry-red mouth perked inquisitively and her bright blue eyes focused sharply on Lucy. Across their shared desk, between file stacks and pots of mini-crocuses and the leaning tower of ring binders, her words spread like a coffee spill.

“No! We both did it. I mean, neither of us was more…we just…I was dreaming, and then we woke up…”

“Fucking?”

George at the window desk lifted his disheveled head and Lucy gave Charlie a kick under the table.

“Yes. If you want to call it that.”

“Well, darling, it isn't crochet. So tell me. How often.”

“Two, maybe three times. Is it bad, do you think? Should we see someone?”

“A doctor, you mean?” Charlie shrugged. “A counselor, maybe. I don't know. It depends.”

“On what?”

She raised one very well-plucked eyebrow and bit the end of her pen with small, square white teeth. “Was it any good?”

The question was immaterial, but Lucy didn't quite know how to say so. Sex with her and John wasn't good or bad, something to award three and a half stars to—one for technique and two for effort and a half for the pillow talk afterward.

When she—well, when she and John
crocheted
—it was a communication. Not a performance. It was how they talked to each other. Or used to, before life got so tangled up and frazzled. They were trying to reach each other, his cock in her and his fingers on her and her hands in his hair—she didn't know if Charlie would understand. The sleep sex wasn't like that. It started in unconsciousness, with deep and dark and hot, meaty
dreams, and she woke to find her body screwing John's, yes fucking it, like animals, silent and eyes shut, their hot mouths pressed together and the sheets pushed roughly aside.

“I don't know,” Lucy said to Charlie, throwing a blue folder onto the pile where she put things she didn't know where to file. “Yes. Better than nothing, I suppose.”

“Ah. Bit of a drought?”

“Not a drought. Some other kind of natural disaster. A long, complicated one with dementia and packed lunches and laundry and shouting.”

“Oh, those. I think they call them life. Always done my best to avoid it.”

Charlie smirked, but Lucy caught the seesaw in her voice and noticed how she put her pen down carefully beside her keyboard, her lipstick slightly smudged.

“I'm not complaining. I know I'm lucky,” Lucy said.

“So lucky it makes you want to weep?”

Lucy looked up. She shrugged. “Only if I could do it somewhere soft and dark and quiet with no interruptions for around three weeks.”

“You need a break,” Charlie said, shaking her head.

“Yes.”

As Lucy watched, a soft stripe of sunlight grew slowly stronger and crawled across the desk.

“When did we last have sex?” John had asked, about six months before when the summer was spoiling outside and they were juggling chores in the falling-apart house.

“Sex?”

“Yeah, you know. When a man and a woman like each other very much…”

“Shut up.” She threw a leek at him. She was cooking lunch,
soup, because it seemed wholesome and soothing, even though nobody ate much of it and it made such a mess. Her mother was sitting next door watching a video with the kids and nobody was screaming yet. She'd almost thought she could breathe. And then he hit her with his absurd question.

“John.”

“Lucy.”

“It's the last thing on my mind. You know, things have been difficult.”

“Since the dawn of time. And yet.”

“Maybe if you didn't have to work.”

“And maybe if we didn't have to feed the kids.”

“Not this again.”

“No. Not again. Not anymore.”

He walked away, his broad shoulders a little rolled forward, his head bowed. She stood there with a knife and a celery stick in her hands and the horrible feeling that something had snapped, something irreparable.

When she first met him, she could hardly believe he'd go for her—an awkwardly tall, mousy-haired girl. She was allergic to the spotlight, and he was so at ease, so bright and strong and vivid, with that dirty-blonde hair and that dangerous smile.

Now, she wondered again why on earth he had chosen her—out of the women that seemed to flock around him, the prettier ones and the richer ones, the clever university girls and the laughing, fast-moving crowd that he hung out with.

And now, years later, she'd watched him that morning taking his tool case out of the van and shifting boxes of cables around. There was a new slackness to his cheek she hadn't noticed before. Shadows under his eyes. His aging shocked her even more than her own. For the first time, the thought hit her with a bump—even he won't live forever.

She wiped her hands and looked at the clock. Time for work.

That had been six months ago, and since then, she'd started to avoid looking at him as much as she avoided the mirror. What was the point? She focused on what had to be done.

Later in the afternoon, as the winter day leaked the last of its meager light into the kitchen, she slipped into a half-formed daydream. Stacking glasses in the dishwasher she thought of being stretched out on a beach somewhere, lying in the icing-sugar-soft sand, nothing but the sound of waves and the sun, her skin slowly turning golden.

“Mum, Nanny's outside.”

“Oh?”

“She doesn't have any shoes on.”

Stephen, still chewing one of the sweets that turned his mouth lurid pink and rotted his teeth, was looking over the wreckage of the kitchen table. Outside the window that framed their frozen back lawn his grandmother stood in a long, white nightgown that was bobbled under the arms and wet at the hem. The old woman's bare feet were shining with melted frost, and she was reaching to the bird table with an enraptured look on her face.

“Oh, shit,” John said, barging past so fast he sent Lucy spinning. “Are you just going to stand there?” A frown was digging its way between his eyebrows and already he was outside, letting the door slam behind him. Lucy stood and gazed out at the garden.

Like watching a film. John took her mother's arm and turned her toward the front door of the granny flat. Sometimes the old woman mistook him for her long-dead husband, sometimes her own father. Now, she was taking tiny steps and frowning at her feet, as if she'd just realized that the cold was hurting. John suddenly bent and scooped her up, lifting her as if she was as
light as a cat. Her hands clutched his shoulders, the blue veins and fine bones showing through paper-white skin.

“Daddy's carrying Nanny back to her house, look!” Robin pointed at the scene and knocked juice into her lap.

“Watch what you're doing, Bobbin.” The child's tiny, pink face started to crumple. “Damn it. I'm sorry. It's okay. It's okay.” Lucy leaned over to lift things away from the spillage, stroked her daughter's glossy hair, apologized.

John opened the back door, knocked the snow off his boots. A draft of cold air blew in with him. Once, she thought, he might have laughed, shivered, rubbed his hands. Turned it all into a silly adventure.

“Close the door, Daddy,” Stephen said.

“Give me a minute,” snapped John, and before she could say anything, Stephen had scrambled down from his chair and run full tilt to his room, high spots of color on his cheeks.

While the kids argued up and down the stairs and Mother went to bed early with a book—she read the same hardback poetry collection over and over—Lucy moved across the kitchen to touch her husband. She reached for his neck, and he flinched.

“It's only me,” she said, pretending to tickle him.

“Not now,” he said, shrugging her off. She felt a blush rise. Ridiculous. How could she blush, this man she'd lived with for a third of her life, who'd seen her give birth twice, who'd dealt with the aftermath? Besides, he had his back to her.

“Can't I touch you?” she asked.

“Seems that way.” His voice was low and quiet. This was all wrong.

“John?”

He stopped brushing the dirt off his boots and let his hands rest on the edges of the sink.

“I can't do this, Lucy.”

“Do what? Clean your shoes? What next—you want me to blow your nose for you?”

She was trying, but her voice was failing.

“This. Us. What we're doing. Or what we aren't.”

She forced a laugh.

“Is this about the sex again?”

He looked down into the sink, at the chips and flakes of mud and grit. His jaw worked.

“It's…just for now. Things will change.”

“That is true,” he nodded, still looking into the sink like he was reading tea leaves. “Lucy, life goes by.”

He looked up at her, then. His eyes, blue as a willow-pattern plate, flecked with gold, his long lashes. Even then, when her heart was starting to hurt quite badly, the beauty of him was stunning.

“Mummy, where are my shoes?” Robin ran into the room and slammed against her mother, hanging from her shirt.

“Not now, love,” she said, pushing her daughter back toward the stairs. “Look in your room.”

“Speaking of rooms.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I can't sleep in there another night.”

“Our bed? We don't sleep anyway, so—”

“Lucy. Please.” He pressed his lips together. The room looked weird. Everything was placed wrong, like a stranger's house. The Dutch-blue walls. She struggled to focus. It hurt to stay present, but something in her was screaming, and she thought that for once, maybe she had no choice.

“I wake up sometimes and I don't know how it all happened. I'm lying there next to you and you're in that fucking dressing gown.”

“In case she wakes up. Or the kids, one or the other. Christ, John, you know why.”

“And I don't even recognize you.” She lifted her head, startled. He was looking at her and it was actually painful, she could feel cold anger in her belly.

This wasn't John. The man who thought he could take on the world, including her mother's snobbish relations, and not only charm them but make them happy at the same time.

“I—I love you.”

“You love everything day in day out without even thinking about it. It's your job.”

“Are you sneering at me?”

He didn't answer. The rage rose in her like something out of control, like an animal finally driven out of its hibernating place. She heard the kids arguing next door and the front door opened and her mother's gentle, bewildered face floated in, looking at her like she'd seen a ghost she didn't quite recognize.

Lucy turned and ran. Ran to the bedroom, and threw herself in among the crumpled sheets and the clothes and the mess. The door opened and without looking to see who it was, she screamed over her shoulder.

“Get out. Leave me alone.”

There was the crack of a door closing, Stephen's voice raised short and sharp. She waited for the wails, and the kids to burst in, and her mother to start saying, “Excuse me,” over and over again, voice spiraling, as she did when she got distressed. They never left her alone. Never had, not for years. She buried her face in the pillow and felt her own hot breath absorbed by the feathers.

And then they did. The house that was never quiet became suddenly, weirdly so. She could hear a voice, murmuring, moving back and forth. Footsteps. Doors closing, gently. Outside the
car's engine started up and she lifted her head. Where was he going? Was he taking the children? She stumbled out of bed, ran to the window, clawed back the blind. Outside it was gathering dusk, the sky stained the color of strong tea.

“John!” She practically screamed it, voice strangled.

“I'm here,” he said, from behind her, and she jerked like she'd got an electric shock.

“The children—”

“Are with Sarah.”

“But she never babysits at short notice.”

“Now she has.”

“My mother.”

“With Missus Sweet, over the road.”

“Is she okay? Her pills.”

He shrugged. “She's as well as she can be, and she can have her pills later.” He looked at her then, and the blue of his eyes was soft and warm.

“Let go.”

She looked at her hands, the off-white curtains bunched in them.

“Let go.” He crossed to her, but instead of bundling her into his arms and holding her, he gripped her shoulders and pulled her to the mirror. She tried to turn, but he held her fast, facing their dual reflection, shadowy and awkward.

“Look at us.”