Undone (13 page)

‘So is that a yes?’

He reached out across the bar for my wrist, clasping me in a pinch of his hand. We froze for a moment on opposite sides of the counter, elbow to elbow as if engaged in an awkward arm wrestle. The possessive threat in the gesture aroused me. I adore having my wrists held. The bones are narrow and the skin on the underside is parchment thin. When a man holds me there, I feel he’s found my weakest spot and has all the advantages. Sol squeezed harder, his thumb pressing into the delicate network of veins below the heel of my hand. Did he know what he was doing? Was he close to a pressure point that could knock me out or kill me? I imagined he was the kind of guy who knew about these things.

‘Be mine,’ he said, his tone deadly serious.

His thumb on my wrist moved in tender swirls, his gentleness even more possessive than his force. My groin thumped in response. His manner suggested this was about more than bluffing the part to inveigle our way into meeting scene players. He meant it. He might be using our conspiracy to cloak his sincerity but he meant it. He wanted me in that role.

I’ve always regarded myself as a woman with kinky fantasies who likes to act powerless in a sexual domain. I’d never wanted to relinquish control to a man for more than the time it took to get off.

For the first time, I began to appreciate that playing beyond the bedroom simply made the bedroom bigger. I knew Sol would push me into dark places if I let him. He would blur the division that tried to keep sex separate, that tried to make it an activity which took place behind the safety of closed doors. When eroticism floods your veins and permeates your everyday, it’s dangerous.

Be mine
.

The words made me tingle. I wanted to be his, to feel both safe and afraid as he called the shots. Yet at the same time, I found the prospect horrifying. Having a fist in my hair and being roughly fucked was one thing. Being controlled, owned and protected was something else entirely. The prospect of him caring for me was the scariest of all. I could imagine him pushing me to my limits, breaking me down, and in the aftermath I’d become soppy and needy for him. I didn’t want to be weak like that, didn’t want to depend on a man to restore me back to wholeness.

When I spoke, my voice was a tremulous breath. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll be yours. But for one night only.’

He let his fingers slide gently down my arm. Sensation fluttered and throbbed in my groin.

‘Good girl,’ he said softly. He traced a single finger upwards to my wrist and drifted patterns over the skin where the pressure of his grip still lingered. ‘One night only.’ He smiled at me, his brown eyes level and calculating. ‘I’ll try not to abuse my power.’

Monday 7th July

I’ve started to fear I might drown when I’m swimming. Before Misha died, I used to swim thirty lengths each morning at Saltbourne’s municipal baths without a care in the world. I don’t bother with private gym memberships because all I want to do is swim. I’m proud to say I haven’t missed a day since Dravendene, although my first return to the pool troubled me greatly. When I pushed away from the edge and put my face in the water, I thought about him dying, about how it might feel to have liquid filling your lungs, crushing you from the inside.

I panicked. I had to stop and stand so I could put my feet on the bottom. I needed to reassure myself the depths weren’t fathomless. I waded back to the poolside, acutely aware of the muffled echoes of other people around me. I’m a good swimmer, I reassured myself. I swim front crawl and have always loved the water. I can’t run to save my life and most forms of exercise bore me. But I slice through the water, smooth and controlled, very low on splash. Every third stroke, I twist my head to breathe. After a few lengths, I’m slipping into a meditative state, going back and forth, relishing the roll of my shoulders and the watery blue world visible through my goggles.

But last week, I clutched the tiled edge, taking long, steady breaths. Supposing that blue world were the last thing I saw? Heaving, coughing, unable to rise. Bubbles whirling like a snowstorm until all the bubbles were gone.

‘Just one length,’ I’d told myself. And I kept telling myself that – just one length – until I’d hit my requisite thirty and my mind was quietened. On the day after that, trying to fight the fear and prove I wasn’t cowed, I swam thirty-two lengths. The day after, it was thirty-four.

Today, for the first time, I swam forty. It’s a nice round number, and almost my age. From now on, this is what I will swim each day. I’ll be stronger, fitter and more disciplined than I was before Misha drowned.

I won’t go under with him. I won’t.

Tuesday 8th July

Sol Miller. Solomon. A good Old Testament name, he’d said. I googled him, of course, but too many others shared the same name and I couldn’t find him among them.

He’d opened up to me about his past though, despite saying he’d rather hold off. On that Wednesday at the bar last week, he stayed for a second drink when Raphael turned up for his six o’clock shift. We talked on the cast-iron balcony, the wings of the blue-green stained-glass doors gleaming in the high evening light. Sol gleamed too, the sheen on his brow catching the July warmth as he sat at the dainty table in his workman’s gear, big, grubby and vital. The afternoon clouds had lifted. How apt, I thought. Sol turns up and the sun comes out. I was grateful for company from someone who knew the situation. I didn’t want to be alone with thoughts of Misha and death, nor did I want to explain my mood to anyone.

Sol told me that his parents – his mother from London, his father from New Jersey – were killed in a car accident involving a drunk driver when he was eight years old and an only child. Mom and Dad had met as students in the early 70s, working as Kibbutz volunteers in Israel. They’d fallen in love; then had married and settled in South Jersey. Sol had dual nationality. After his folks died, he was raised by his father’s sister and family in Queens, New York, but spent every summer vacationing with his mother’s mother, being seriously fucking miserable in Hendon, north of London. His adoptive American parents separated when he was in his late teens and a few years later his adoptive mother died of cancer.

‘I’ve always felt kinda rootless,’ he said, taking a cigarette. ‘The curse of my people, doomed to wander.’

‘Do you still have family back in the States?’

He nodded, cupping a hand around the flame of his lighter, and inhaled. He glanced away towards Saltbourne’s jumble of lichen-coated rooftops and its pink and gold Oriental domes. This place is such an odd mixture of magical and mundane. Like life, I guess.

‘I’ve got family of sorts.’ He released a stream of smoke. ‘Two sisters and their kids. Well, my adoptive sisters. Cousins by blood. We’re still in touch, still close in some ways. We have some distant relatives in Philly on my father’s side. I don’t have much to do with David, my adoptive father. It’s a long story. Short version: he’s a cunt.’

‘And now?’

‘I was living with a woman, Helena, in Manhattan, Lower East Side. We split. Shit got ugly. I left town. Well, I left the continent, to be accurate. Came back to Hendon, my second home, partly because my grandmom was getting frail and I wanted to spend time with her before she died. I needed to take a career break too. I was working in IT, like everyone. Data analysis. Half killing myself for a digital marketing company. They described themselves as “bleeding edge”. Total nightmare. So I was feeling burned out. Needed a change of scene. Anyway, my grandma passed after I’d been here about a week. Sometimes, I swear I’m cursed.’

‘Jeez, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You poor man.’

‘Remember my tattoo?’ He reached around himself and touched his T-shirt under his arm, brushing down his ribs. ‘Every seed head represents someone or something I’ve lost. Even Martha, the family dog, is on there.’

My heart ached for him. ‘Show me,’ I said gently.

He rested his cigarette in the ashtray and crossed his arms, grabbing the hem of his T-shirt. I caught a glimpse of his lean, dark-honey torso; then he halted, casting me a sidelong glance. His shoulders dropped and that cheeky, dirty grin curled on his lips.

‘You’re just trying to get me to strip, aren’t you, Cha Cha?’

I laughed. ‘Would
I
do a thing like that?’

‘I figure you would.’

‘So go on then.’

‘Promise you’re not going to throw me off the premises?’

‘Cross my heart.’

He whipped off his tee and draped the garment, still crumpled, over the arm of an empty chair. His beauty made me catch my breath. His musky, salty sweat drifted on the air. My groin thrummed with longing. He retrieved his cigarette, twisting fractionally as he did so to display the panel of his delicate, botanical tattoo. Dark hair flared in his armpit. Several inches below that was the inked image of a fluffy dandelion clock, its stem curving down his ribs to his waist. The seed heads floated away towards his chest, finely etched pictures of tiny parachutes drifting and twirling. Scattered among the seed heads were single strands of Sol’s own body hair. It seemed as if he were physically emerging into the panel, his hairs becoming wisps of wind-blown meadow grass.

‘That’s a lot of death,’ I murmured. Instinctively, I reached out, as if touching this representation of loss could soothe his pain. I stroked from one feathery seed head to the next and he kept still, allowing me to explore his personal history as embedded in his body. Smoke trickled up from the cigarette in his hand. A car horn honked in a distant street below. His skin was smooth and warm under my fingertips. The cage of his ribs lifted and fell with his breath. Two of the seed heads overlapped, their filaments connecting in a criss-cross patch. I lingered there, circling around the image without touching it.

‘My folks,’ he said.

I exhaled softly, stumped for words. I sat back in my chair and so did he, still shirtless. His dark chest hair glinted in the sunlight, and his lean stomach folded in small creases above his worn, low-slung jeans. The hair across his belly thickened at the centre, running like a seam towards his groin.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For sharing.’

‘Yeah.’ He drew heavily on his cigarette. ‘Not something I do easily.’

I was flattered and pleased he’d opened up. Having to safeguard the secrecy of our involvement with Misha required strong bonds of trust. Together, we had to lie to the rest of the world. And our reasons for doing so were, I had to confess to myself, not honourable. We were lying to save ourselves, to make life easier and to keep others out of our sexual business. At times, I’ve tried to convince myself we’re also doing it to prevent Misha’s name from being dragged through the mud but, deep down, I know it’s about us, the living. I feel guilty that we’ve distanced ourselves from Misha. We’ve effectively abandoned him, have turned him into a lost, lonely soul in his final hours, wandering friendless around Dravendene before going for that fateful swim, no witnesses to his activity. With our false story, we’ve made a restless ghost of him before he actually died.

I don’t feel able to discuss this anxiety with Sol. Instead, I’m keeping my thoughts close.

‘So what are you doing now?’ I asked. ‘Why Saltbourne?’

‘I’m renting in Brighton.’ He leaned forwards to stub out his cigarette and then sat back in his chair. ‘My gran left me a lot of money. Crazy amounts. I’m in the process of selling her Hendon house. Well, it’s a bit of hole so I’m renovating it. I used to do casual labouring as a student, learned some joinery and bricklaying, and I’d dabble back in the States. I was just going to work on the house but, oh man, after a few months, I seriously needed to get out of Hendon. Everyone my gran ever knew wants to marry me off to some nice Jewish girl they know.’

I laughed.

‘It’s not funny,’ he said, grinning. ‘I feel …
used
. Exploited. Can’t even have a conversation without wondering if someone’s got an ulterior motive. So anyway, I’ve put the renovation on hold. Might contract it out later. And now I’m signed with an agency. Had to take a couple of courses to update my skills and get on their books but I’m officially A OK. I’m just taking odd jobs here and there. It doesn’t do to be idle. Bad for the soul. And I like the physical grafting.’ He patted his taut stomach. ‘Keeps me in shape.’

‘Looks good to me,’ I said. ‘And cheaper than gym membership.’

‘So do you work out?’ he asked. ‘Quite a body on you.’

‘Good genes,’ I said. ‘And a tongue that favours sour and bitter rather than sweet and rich.’

He grinned. ‘Tell me about that tongue. I like what I know of it so far.’

I laughed. ‘You have a one-track mind, Sol Miller.’

He twisted in his seat and addressed me in a deliberately creepy voice. ‘I do when it comes to you.’

‘To return to my question,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? Today?’

‘The agency offered me some work yesterday. Bit of a schlep from Brighton but hey.’ He shrugged, sitting back in his seat.

‘I meant here. In this bar.’

‘I wanted to see you.’ His tone was casual and surprised, as if he were responding to a really dim question. ‘That’s not a problem, is it?’

‘No, course not.’

I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to ask him what his feelings were; what this meant to him; if he had any hopes for this burgeoning relationship, or any fears and doubts. But engaging with those very issues entailed putting the relationship on another level, a more emotionally honest level. And that was what I wanted to know: what level are we at? The emotionally honest one? Where are we going, do you think? Are you as infatuated as I am?

The thing to be discussed was affected by the discussing of it. And that potential discussion might bring us to a more mutual understanding or result in us hightailing it in opposite directions. Broaching the subject was too great a risk to take.

‘So are you seeing anyone else?’ I asked. ‘Early days, of course, but I’d just like to know…’

I trailed off. The phrase I’d been about to use was ‘to know where I stand’. But that wasn’t what I meant. Or, actually, it was, to my shame. But I didn’t want him to realise that, as far as I was concerned, the cards were stacked in his favour. A forty-one-year-old divorcee with a cocktail bar might sound like a great catch, but experience had shown me otherwise. I’d tried online dating and had been open-minded when friends had tried to match-make. But it seemed the guys who found my status attractive were either feckless twenty-somethings who regarded me as a cougar with beer-dispensing boobs; men older than me who hadn’t aged terribly well; or men around my age who wanted to cheat on their wives. Basically, all the good ones were taken.