Bedtime Confessions (The Chambermaid's Tales - Short Stories) (6 page)

Flo arrives at my house for morning coffee and we go over plans for our holiday. We're escaping just as the book is being published. I do not want to be in the country when he reads it. I am hoping he will read it. I feel it is the only way he will ever understand why I left.

You see, my lover
and I had been together for less than a year when I miscarried a child. We decided to make a life together when we found out that I was pregnant, but for some reason, things went back to the way they were before the miscarriage. In fact, I tell a lie, things went sour after I miscarried. I became depressed and had to take anti-depressants. I refused to see a counsellor. I was in denial about a lot of things.

In therapy, I had a lot to face.

“Are you ever going to tell me why you won't get in touch with him?” Flo asks.

She is looking at a brochure a
nd avoiding my eyes. She breezes that question across the table as if it were everyday conversation! We both know it is really the reason why I ran, why I am still running, and why I am in agony every day I spend without Him.

“
You can't shit a shitter, as they say,” she goads me. She sounds ridiculous saying such words in her voice. I speak with a relatively metropolitan Northern accent, but hers is positively silken. Like a newsreader's, only, hers is a voice so distinct it is sometimes like she speaks a different language. She's tuned like a Steinway piano. She'd sound good with or without a skilful musician at the helm. Maybe her voice is a little bit too sexy for someone as pent-up as I.

“
Why don't you give Mark another chance?” I counteract.

“
You know why,” she says smartly. There really is nothing more we can discuss there. He's too simple, Mark, with his need for debauchery. As long as he gets that, he's fine. But otherwise…

“
Let me help. Tell me…” she asks gently, taking my hand. She squeezes my fingers and I look into her enquiring gaze. It's a stare I trust and she really hasn't ever let me down as a friend.

“
In therapy, I talked a lot about my family. My childhood. My schooldays and all that,” I begin, fiddling with some papers as I begin to muster the courage to confess. “I realised I had a beautiful childhood, despite the cancer. I fought with my brother and sister but we always had one another. I remember the times James would defend my honour at school… he was my rescuer. My big, bad brother. I remember the person I once was. But the thing was, I changed. I grew increasingly cold and distant because I struggled to regain that simple happiness that so many take for granted. You know… just being glad to wake up in the morning. I lived never knowing anything for a certainty. Some of what I went through is unexplainable. Everyone then treated me differently. I built several coping mechanisms. Sometimes, it seemed like I was the only one suffering.”

I take a breath and she encourages me on, nodding and blinking. Waiting patiently.

“Riding a bike is so easy, wouldn't you think Flo?” I ask her quite plainly.

“
Like breathing. You get on and go.”

“
So if I were to say that I once knew a grown man of 37 who couldn't ride a bike, what might you assume?”

She looks puzzled and shakes her head. She takes a few moments.
“I'd assume, perhaps, that he just never liked bikes.”

“
It's easy. You get on, and after a few falls, you peddle. That's it, isn't it?”

“
Yes, my darling.”

“
In therapy, I revisited some of my most intimate moments with Him. I realised something terrible. Perhaps, I would have called him months ago, if I hadn't realised… what I realised in therapy.”

“
Tell me,” she asks in earnest, and I begin to tell the tale…

It was a sunny June day and my lover had been in my life only a few months. However, it felt like years. I felt like I knew him so well already, and yet in other ways, I did not know him at all. We existed so peacefully, together. Yet, neither one of us were brave enough to insist that we take our relationship into the real world. Neither of us were prepared to suggest that we move in together, make ourselves public, or even just put a ring on my finger. That alone might have quelled my yearning for more.

That morning,
he looked sheepish when I asked if he wanted to bike up into the countryside with me. I pried the information from him and he eventually revealed he was unable to ride. I really felt bad but also, I wasn't convinced he was telling me the truth. I begged him to accompany me and so, we threw my Raleigh shopper in the boot and drove to a cycle hire to get one for him.

He took the bike in his hands as if it were alien. I m
ean, the man is in charge of billions of pounds of money. He has about ten cars and ten homes dotted around the world. He has so much power. Yet he could not ride a bike. My instincts were troubled but I refused to acknowledge the warnings.

He held the handle
bars and I could see his knuckles were white. He tentatively straddled the crossbar and I thought I saw him shaking, but I wasn't sure. I laughed a little and took the piss but he took it on the chin with humour, like he always did. He peddled a few yards on the gravel track we were on and he fell, and I wondered,
Is he putting it on? Is this a joke?

I ran to him and he chuckled. I kissed his mouth and we fell back, laughing an
d rolling in the white, chalky ground.

“
Get back in the saddle, big boy,” I joked.

After maybe two or three more attempts of him falling and me laughing, followed by us kissing and embracing
, he rode as if he had never not been able to ride.

“
Good, let's go,” I remember saying, as if it were nothing. He had learnt, just like that. And yes, when you think about it, riding is so easy as long as you can do it.

“When I went over that episode again with my therapist, he asked whether I wondered something that day ‒ whether my lover might have had a traumatic experience with bikes in the past. I hadn't considered it at the time. Either that, or, I hadn't wanted to consider that.

“
I grew up dreaming of the man on the white horse, the man in leathers and breeches, who might throw me on the saddle with him and ride me off into the sunset. I dreamt that if I were to marry, it would be for nothing less than the fantasy I had always wanted. The dream. The man of my dreams.

“
I loved Him. I really did. He set my heart alight, he set my world on fire.

“
But in therapy, there were other things I remembered, as I took my mind back. He never liked whipping me if I asked him to, but he really liked me whipping him. In fact, I disliked how much he liked me to whip him. There was something unnerving about it, but I was in the mode of just trying to please him. He loved me so, so well, oh so well. Yet he couldn't make the commitment for some reason.

“
Whenever I asked him about his family, his divorce, his life before me… he clammed up. He could never tell me. His way of making love was so gentle and still, he could make me scream until I cried. He would tell me the most romantic things I had ever heard. Yet he could not open up about his life before me. But, I needed to get beneath my man. I never did believe he really wanted me. I couldn't until he trusted me enough to tell me things. But my therapist suggested the secrets he hides are just too awful to talk about. So you see, maybe I am waiting for that day. Maybe I want him to read the book, see my truth, and seek help for himself. Of his own accord. It has to be that way otherwise he will never help himself. He has to want to do it, like I did. Maybe I cannot bear to be there when he starts ridding himself of all the bad things that happened in his life before me.”

I stop speed talking and
Florence frowns. She clasps her hands together and purses her lips, thinking it all through.

“
His father was a strange man, Lottie. I could never tell whether he was charming or manipulative. One of the two.”

“
From the outside, people might assume I am cold. I left him behind so callously. But in therapy, you are forced to face all those things you would normally ignore… That day, you should have seem him, Flo. He was like a little child. My huge man like a nervous little boy. It must have been something bad, something traumatic, that made him fear that bike. An inanimate object that could neither bite nor bark back… aroused the fear of something inside him.”

“
Tell me what happened. I mean, when you rode away… what happened next?”

Flo was grinning. She was fishing for more.

“I will tell you… it was good.”

We rode up into Sherwood and locked the bikes up. He had struggled the whole way. He wasn't used to the peddling. I felt a pang in my heart and I really loved him, just a little bit more that day. Seeing him vulnerable made me love him so much more.

He dropped the picnic bag on the ground and raced at me. He was so gorgeous
because I was in love with him. The way he kissed me and touched me had me entranced. I adored his affectionate, passionate soul. Something told me he had hidden depths and his mystery kept me enthralled.

He pushed me against a tree and my back crunched against the dry bark.
I feigned protest but I was desperate for him, though we had made love back at the flat, only a couple of hours before. 

My hands were in his luxurious blonde locks.
He pushed his hard chest against my breasts and I winced. My nipples were so sore, with both the arousal I felt and the sucking I had endured earlier that day.

As I look back, the memories are somewhat blurred. All I
recall is his mouth, rapidly tracing my mouth and throat, seeking solace.

I loved his lips. They had the propensity for so much. I loved him to read to me. To si
ng to me, talk to me and kiss my most intimate parts.

Bite me. Lick me. Suck me.
I psychically urged him on.

I thought he sought to usher away his demons with the molestation of my mouth
; he took me so urgently. I almost lost my breath, he was so rapid. He made me feel light-headed and dizzy. Sometimes I wanted to ask him to slow down and take his time. He had me. I wouldn't leave him.

Yet
I loved his mouth for the way it kissed my own lips. My soul ached whenever he put those plush lips of his against mine. He moved inside my mouth, brushing and caressing my tongue, before smiling and nibbling the plumpest part of my bottom lip.

He claimed me with his kisses, telling me how much he desired me. The kisses were everything. Nothing else mattered. I could survive on his kisses alone, supplementing my soul's need for a mate who had as much capacity for love as I did.

“I just need you inside me…” I remember saying to him.

The longing was spreading throughout my body and I needed him to be within my core as we
continued to rock and writhe, while still kissing.

Soon we were on the ground. Our shorts were dispensed with and I helped him find my insides.

Now I look back, I realise our urge to fuck so relentlessly was born from a need for us to get beneath one another. However, the only way we could really do that was with time, and honesty. He wouldn't open up to me about anything other than what positions we may try next, or how we might make the orgasms better.

I had experienced all the pleasures of the flesh, within the Lodge, but with
Him, I wanted so much more. I wanted his soul.

Nevertheless, that day in the wood, he made love to me and I made love to him too, with my naked breasts bouncing as I rode him. He then licked me
afterwards and he pushed his solid erection back inside me too. He made love to me, while we were both naked, and he kissed me relentlessly, ensuring all my pleasure was attended to. I loved him tremendously. Exclusively and explicitly. He was my entire world.

I wonder whether, that day, his passion intensified after he conquered that bike and the traumatic memories it represented (but which he would never divulge, I knew). I still wonder that now. Did he fall in love with me a little more that day?

I certainly needed him more after that. At the time, however, I had no idea what lay ahead.

“I would give my left arm for a love like that,” Flo says. Her face flushed.

My eyes
pricked with tears.

“
I loved him so much, Flo. It was a love that seemed unreal. It didn't know how to make it real. I didn't know.”

I sob a little and wipe my nose.

“What will be, will be,” she decides.

“
Yes,” I say, hoping and praying that he realises that soon.

He needs to
understand the realities I deal with daily. I need a man so strong, so unbreakable, to hold me up.

I lived so fast. I learnt so much. I lost the man I loved.

I don't think I could say goodbye again, so I will continue to avoid saying hello.