Run Among Thorns (20 page)

“John?”

He heard the door slam shut and sighed, setting tin three of six down by the sofa. “In here.”

Alice breezed in, slipping out of her coat and dropping it over one of the straw-coloured armchairs. She collapsed back onto the sofa beside him, and he shuffled sideways, sliding a little farther down as he did. He enjoyed being comfortably slouched—it held a touch of rebellion, knowing how bad it was for his back to be bent like a banana.

He reached for his beer again.

“Hmmm,” said his wife. “Are there any more of those?” Wordlessly he twisted another tin free and passed it to her. She was looking at him sidelong, but if she wanted to pretend their earlier phone call had never happened, he was up for that.

“I drove all the way home craving coffee,” she said. “But this is better.”

He grunted, staring ahead, thinking about the results of his search. The little things he’d found, not important by themselves, only rendered significant by being so utterly out of place. The splash of vermilion in the charcoal sketch. The razor blade in the ice cream.

And, damn it, he wanted out. He closed his eyes, aware of Alice tucking her feet up under her. Her knee bumped his thigh. He wondered where Jenny was, how she was feeling. She was like some sort of catalyst in his life, making changes, making him think. His suspicion of his superiors, his discomfort with rules and procedures being bypassed. Even the dissatisfaction with his marriage. All crystalised, made into action, by one whispered, accented word in an interview room.

Please.

Suddenly he felt brittle, antsy and edgy. He knew, with a kind of held-breath dread, that Alice was going to put a hand on his thigh sometime in the next five minutes and that normally he’d turn to her and smile, and kiss her, and either they’d head upstairs, or she’d skip across and draw the curtains.

Most guys would be ecstatic to have a wife who always wanted them. He
had
been ecstatic, for years after they were married. But lately he’d wondered if her desire was less for him and more for any active penis.

And he didn’t want to.

He set his teeth and waited.

Oh, he’d not wanted to before. He’d not wanted to for months, actually. But he’d been going through the motions, playing the dutiful husband in the adequate marriage.

Alice slipped a hand onto his thigh.

She was beautiful. She was fun, and together, and confident.

And he didn’t want to sleep with her tonight.

Lifting her hand slightly, she drew circles with her fingertips. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her lips curve.

Alice had a lovely smile. She was beaming in all their wedding photos, bright and happy. So was he, come to think of it. He worked his jaw free to take another swig of beer, concentrating on the coldness that almost hurt his throat.

Alice stroked down to his knee with her index finger and began to slowly, slowly stroke back up.

He blinked rapidly. “Alice …”

“Hmmm?”

“Not tonight.” It came out harsher than he’d intended. Her fingers stilled on his leg and he sat rigid in silence.

“Pardon?”

It wasn’t outrage, exactly, in her voice. Just a kind of breathless incredulity. “Are you okay?” Her hand curled on his thigh again, warm and gentle.

“I’m fine.” It was actually difficult not to shout. That brittle tension was winding tighter in him, till he thought he’d shatter with it.

Alice shifted a little closer, her hip pressing against him. “Oh, come on,” she purred. “We’re so rarely in the same place.”

“Alice, no.” He felt light-headed.

Her hand shifted to rest lightly on his right forearm.

“Please?”

His muscle locked tight; his head swam. Suddenly he found himself on his feet, standing over her, the sound of his own voice ringing in his ears. Her face was white, her eyes, her mouth wide open.

His teeth snapped shut. He’d been shouting. What were the words?

Alice blinked at him, curled tight on the sofa. She closed her mouth. She opened it again. “Stop invading my personal
space?”
Her voice rose shrill on the last word.

Oh, God.

“I—”

“John, what the hell is the matter with you?”

I
have no idea
, he thought. He was actually shaking, for God’s sake. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice as stiff as the rest of him.

Her eyes were still wide. “But … what’s wrong? What—”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

She pressed a hand over her mouth, and he was horrified to see tears well in her eyes. “Alice,” he groaned. “Don’t.”

She got up and ran upstairs. He followed her, found her in the bedroom standing at the window, her back to him.

“Is it girl trouble, John?”

He sat down heavily on the bed.
In a manner of speaking
, he thought, remembering Jenny’s dark eyes sunk in a pale face.

He looked up and Alice had turned round, standing there watching him, composed, a little wary. “Are we really in that much trouble?” he asked wearily.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled a little.

“I thought you were content. You’re so … self-contained.”

She shrugged. “Defence.”

“Does this mean that you … have you …?” He couldn’t get the words out, dismayed, in spite of the fatalistic view he’d had of their marriage in recent months, how much the prospect of her screwing another man enraged him.

She came and sat at his feet, cross-legged, putting a hand on his knee.

“No, John. I haven’t slept with anyone else. But you need to know I’ve been tempted, and I’m lonely. And you haven’t told me whether your trouble is about … about you having played away from home.”

“No. I haven’t. It isn’t that.”

The hand slipped away from his knee, she wrapped her arms around herself, studying him. “You know the scary thing? I don’t know if I believe you.”

Surely he’d know if she had been sleeping around? But that was male arrogance, wasn’t it? Thinking her body belonged to him, and he’d notice if someone else had used it.

The thought shamed him, that in this issue of fidelity, he was more concerned with the fidelity of the body than the fidelity of the heart.

He got up, restless, and so did she, watching as he paced.

“What exactly is it you want from me, John?” She took his place on the bed, sweeping her new hairstyle back from her cheekbones with steady, neatly manicured fingers. Her voice was steady, too. And somehow different, a jarring difference that was a bitter aftertaste, as if he’d been chewing lemons.

“You tell me you want to leave your job—the job you’ve never told me anything about, never shared a moment of your day with me. You won’t tell me why you want to leave, and why so suddenly. You want to move, but you don’t say why, won’t share that with me, either. What do you expect me to say, John? How do you expect me to react?”

He got it then, why her voice sounded so off to him—it was her telephone voice. The steady hands, the wide-open eyes, the careful posture sitting there on the bed, legs smoothly crossed, hands disposed so precisely on a suede-clad knee … it was all professional.

That was the successful travel journalist, there, not his wife. And the fact that he—and she—could separate them so effectively from each other was another reason why his stomach churned and his back sweated. Not lemons after all. Apparently he’d been eating poison.

“Well?” she asked, and he realised he’d been staring at her all that time, without answering. Realised, too, that his face felt like a mask, and his teeth ached with clenching.

“I didn’t expect anything,” he said, at last. “But I hoped for a little blind trust.”

“Trust!” she gasped a laugh, and snapped her teeth shut on it, clamping her lips over it, too, for good measure. He watched her swallow, watched as her hands smoothed the material over her knee, and settled again.

“There are a lot of things,” she said, “that I have gotten used to giving you on a daily basis, without any expectation of getting them back. Trust is expecting a bit much, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t say expect, I said hoped.”

She tipped her head and slid a look at him that would have frozen lava. “Semantics,” she snapped.

“What things?”

She rolled her eyes at him. They’d left the office and were rapidly progressing to the playground.

“Shared goals and dreams. Affection. Good humour. Passion—”

“Christ, Alice, I’ve never turned you down before!”

“Turned me down?” She threw her hands in the air. “It’s not about turning me down, you jerk! When I touch you, it’s not about wanting sex, it’s about wanting
you
!”

“Why didn’t you—”

“Say?” she finished for him, and that telephone voice slipped away into derision. “I don’t know, John, why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you talk to me?”

“I can’t talk about—”

She got up then, jerkily straightening her skirt and fussing with her hair again.

“You were never there,” he said heavily, meaning to go on, but the look she gave him was, for the first time, more sad than angry, and the words evaporated.

“What?”

“When you stay late at work,” she said, “do you think,
I
can’t wait to get home
, or do you think,
what’s the point?”

He was silenced for a moment. Then, “But if you were home, I’d want to be home.”

“Little wife waiting obediently for her husband to come home?”

“No! Alice, I’ve never been that kind of a husband!”

She shook her head, frowning down at the carpet. “No. I’m sorry. You’re right about that. You’ve always been supportive. But—” This time the hands smoothing the hair weren’t steady at all. “Oh, I don’t know. This dissecting is horrible, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

She closed her eyes, and he was struck again by how beautiful she was. In the early days of their marriage he’d stayed awake some nights, just to watch her sleep. Pale lashes washed free of mascara lying on a powder-soft cheek. The quirk of her brows as she dreamed, her lips barely parted, smooth and moist.

“Do you ever sit down and wonder where we went wrong? What day, what hour one of us thought the wrong thing, did the wrong thing?”

She didn’t open her eyes straightway. “Why does it have to be one of us?” she asked, and that generosity surprised him.

“In any case, it wasn’t one thing, you idiot.” Did he say generous? “It’s like unravelling a sweater, I think. The thread just unwinds.”

“But something has to unpick the thread, break it, to start with?”

Her lids lifted slowly. “Or maybe it just wasn’t knotted properly in the first place,” she said.

He turned away. “This is going nowhere.”

“Then perhaps we’d better call it a day.”

I meant the argument
, he thought. She’d been so quick with that.

“I’ll go to a hotel.”

He thought,
don’t leave me
, and then,
how long have you been wanting to say that?

But he didn’t say anything.

Jenny woke to the smell of bacon.

It was among her favourite ways to wake up. The smell wafted up the stairs and seeped under the door to the white room where she always slept when she stayed here.

She stretched under the thick, warm duvet. She hadn’t slept at first, for all her exhaustion. She’d heard the murmur of voices downstairs in the living room and could at least be assured they weren’t killing each other.

But she hadn’t really relaxed until she heard Kier’s step on the stairs. It paused outside her door for a moment, causing her to hold her breath, and then passed on down the hall to the second flight of steep stairs that led to the two rooms under the eaves.

After that she’d slept. Inexplicably missing the heat of Kier in the bed with her, that sense of latent strength that was comforting and secure. Fitfully at first, and dream-ridden, but then deeply and refreshingly.

Until Alan had come in. She swept the hair off her neck and rolled onto her side again.

He hadn’t liked her answer. She wasn’t all that sure she had. And she still had no idea what Alan was talking about—what “friends” did he mean? How could he, how could they, help?

How were either of them to find out, when neither she nor her brother seemed to be able to tell the whole story? It was stupid; it wasn’t right. She’d thought she would feel more secure, more protected, in her brother’s house. By the time they’d left Scotland she’d been more than glad for the presence of any third party.

But, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she wanted Alan around to keep Kier away from her, or the other way round.

The problem was, she hadn’t realised just how much they would need to keep from Alan. He and Kier were spending their time circling like wolves, and, worse, she was lying to her own brother with every breath. She slid out from under the covers and rummaged through the drawers where she always kept a few clothing options. She had no idea where the bags were.

She always had a few things at Alan’s—clothes, toiletries, a few things that had never made it from her parents’ home to hers. After dragging on jeans and a green jumper, she skipped barefoot down the stairs, so familiar with the uneven steps and the tortured creaks and groans, towards the enticing smell of bacon.