Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission (5 page)

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Daniel said to her, moving towards the kitchen. “I’m afraid this is my retreat
—
no mod cons of any sort here.” His voice was becoming more urbane as the diffident roughness he had displayed outside was being rubbed off.

“Your retreat from what?” Kris asked, but Daniel either did not hear or he chose not to reply. “A lovely place you have here,” she continued as the silence became awkward, but this time he simply laughed, making no response.

As Daniel moved around the kitchen, preparing a drink, Kris took in the details of what functioned as a living room more closely. There was a sofa, chair and table, but no television (indeed, after a few minutes looking at the walls, she realised there were no sockets of any kind, though a few books were scattered across two shelves). Rather, the room was dominated by a large, open hearth, the grate of which indicated that there had been a fire in there fairly recently, with a single, huge squared log serving as a mantel.

Light from the window gave the room an almost romantic feel, but as Kris came towards the fire and looked at the picture in a frame, her heart leaped into her mouth.

The photograph was not particularly large, a snap, showing a
short-
haired man, clean-shaven and smooth-faced. Despite these changes, she clearly recognised it as Daniel. This was not what made her gasp, however.

Her head tucked into his shoulder, the woman in the photograph leaned against the taller man lovingly, relaxed and looking directly at the camera. Her black hair was long and it must have been a cold autumn or winter day, as the woman had the collar of her coat pulled up about her neck, partially obscuring her chin. Nonetheless, her smile was broad and her blue eyes honest and open as she happily beamed into the lens.

For a moment, Kris thought she could have been looking in a mirror.

She had not even felt Daniel come up behind her, and when his arm reached over her shoulder and he took the photograph up in his hand she jumped literally, spinning around. Her head came to his chest, the top buttons of his shirt still undone. She could smell his warmth, droplets of sweat clearly visible beneath his collar bone. The hairs of his beard curled around his lips which were held hard as steel, and as his head bent down his eyes were fixed on her intently.

Father, above her with his belt, her heart beating.

She saw that he had placed the coffee cups down on the table, and he was merely inches away from her now. His large frame intervened between her and the door. She could not move, couldn’t breathe easily.

The first strap across her buttocks. The pain. The pain and... something more.

Daniel was looking down at her with a look she could not decipher, his face in shadows as he stood there, looming over her. His own breathing was a little faster now, and it was as though the room had become suddenly silent
—
all she could hear was her own heart thudding, pumping in her chest.

“Please, please don’t hurt me,” she whispered.

At this, Daniel drew back a step, just one, his frown now creased even further, his eyes full of surprise. And it was to her surprise that Kris didn’t leap up at that moment, run to the door, out of the room of this crazy man
—
for that was surely what he was, with his scars and axe-wielding ways.

“What?” Daniel’s voice was incredulous when he finally spoke.

“Please...” now Kris faltered, unsure what to say next. “Don’t...” The words would not come.

Carefully, silently, Daniel placed the photograph he held face down on the table. When he turned back to her, his eyes were hard and flinty.

“I think you better go,” were his only words.

Kris felt utterly stupid as she ran out to the car. She fumbled and crunched the gears as she turned the Toyota round, but her departure from Comrie was not observed by the taciturn stranger who refused to leave the croft.

Her mind was churning, turning, falling over itself as she drove back, her heart beating and her stomach fluttering. What had she been thinking? What the fuck was she doing? She barely paid attention to the juddering motion of the car as it leapfrogged along the potholed track, and when she hit the main road she gunned through the gears, driving at full speed towards Dalrigh.

Anger now dominated her mood. She had almost been crying in the car, cursing herself but she didn’t know why. Why on earth was she over-reacting this way? Why was she so angry? As she slammed the door to the cottage behind her, she stamped around the kitchen, cursing and shouting out loud, but without a clear target for her frustration she directed her anger entirely at herself.

Climbing the stairs to the bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror. Long black hair, blue eyes, a face slightly rounder, fuller than the one she had seen in the photograph. “Stupid bitch!” she cursed, her blood raging inside her, but she was uncertain as to whether the words were directed towards the unknown female she had seen before or herself. “Bitch!” she hissed again, and this time she slapped herself, hard across the face.

That made her feel better. A little. But the relief was only momentary. What the hell was going on in that mind of hers? She felt the familiar prickling, the coldness covering her limbs, the hackles on her neck rising as though in fear
—
but this time, for some reason, it was not enough to damp down the heat in her blood.

“Fucking stupid bitch!” she almost screamed at the mirror, slapping herself again.

Flash of his naked chest, broad, strong.
The scene shifted.
Arm reaching over her shoulder. Hand closing around the frame of the photograph. His neck when she had turned to face him, just above her head. Curls of his hair over his ears.

Fuck.

Stupid bitch, stupid bitch, stupid bitch. As she fell on the toilet, yanking down the fly to her jeans and thrusting her hand inside, between her legs, this was the refrain of abuse that she was locked into, saying nothing more as she masturbated, more furiously than at any time since she had been a teenager. Her orgasm was quick, spasmodic, and brief
—
but it was enough. She realised
,
as she rubbed her clitoris with a brutal speed that was fast and efficient, she had not been breathing and when she opened her lungs again, her breasts jerking up as though sucking in air after drowning, the relief was almost complete.

Only then did she cry.

She removed her clothes and went through to the bedroom. Lying there, she placed her hand between her legs and pressed her thighs tight about it, not exactly masturbating but rubbing herself on her skin in an effort to comfort herself, the weight of her breasts squeezed on her side by her other arm which lay across her.

She did not understand anything that she was feeling now, but it felt good to cry and when it came at last sleep felt like true relief.

Nor was it dreamless. She was lying naked on the hills, her arms stretched out and a few clouds above her wheeling across the deep blue of the sky. Between the white, floating carapaces there wheeled a darker shape, wings wide and long, like a condor or an eagle, a huge bird far, far above her.

It was late when she finally woke and the room was dark. Without the usual yellowing glow of streetlights, Kris was startled at just how black it was in the room and she fumbled for the lamp. She was still naked on top of the bed, and there was a damp patch half way down the top sheet, evidence of a different type of somnambulism to that which had affected her during her youth. Still, she felt better, and that was what counted.

She could still see the giant bird from her dream. It hadn’t come close enough for her to make it out clearly, but it was still somehow vivid in her imagination. Dragging a dressing gown about her shoulders, she crawled out of bed and sat on the chair next to the table, pulling open the covers of her drawing pad.

Her sketches were crude and rapid, capturing a sense of flight with charcoal in her left hand before it disappeared. None of the pictures were satisfactory, but that didn’t matter for the moment. All that did matter was that she caught something of that motion she had felt in her dream, long black wings spreading out over the virgin white, desecrating the paper but also bringing it relief at last, dirty lines thickening over the all-too-pure surface.

Within half an hour she had dashed off
—
literally
—
some half dozen sketches, all of them a bird, black, massive, threatening that flew across the white pages. Though monochrome,
there was something Matisse-like
in the fluid motion of wings that danced before her, and while she was far from happy at the end result she experienced something close to a sense of relief that, at last, she wanted to create again, would be driven to create. Something inside her, finally, was breaking.

She no longer felt the same urge to draw, but she was too restless to sleep. Still in her dressing gown, she went downstairs and opened the back door of the cottage that led into a small, private garden. Her eyes took a few minutes to accustom themselves to the darkness, and she was a little nervous at being out here in the night, pretty much alone and without the familiar, comforting light that accompanied civilised people wherever they went.

The large, black hump of a hill obscured anything immediately before her, blotting out the sky, but as she raised her eyes up she gasped in astonishment at the night. She had never seen so many stars
—
never, in all her life. While she had been initially resistant to the raw beauty of the highlands, she had been expecting it and, out of some inner perversity, had prepared her defences against it. But this: this was utterly beyond any experience she had encountered before, and it entered through her eyes without any resistance whatsoever.

For the first time she saw the Milky Way, a ribbon of stardust running its ragged course through a sky that was black with fringes of blue towards the horizon where yet the sun refracted through the crystal sky. Brighter points of light glowed and shone, the brightest diamonds she had ever seen made all the brighter for the darkness that surrounded her, and when a shooting star, and then another, pierced the night she thought that her heart would die from pleasure.

Over the next two days, she regularly walked in the open air, climbing to the top of the hill before working on her pictures, sketching frenetically. She was always a little disappointed that she did not see the Land Rover again, and sometimes when she sat down at her table in the bedroom, looking out of the window towards the far off mountains, she struggled a little to banish thoughts of Daniel Logan.

The bird she had seen in her dream on that first night did not return.

She was glad that, at last, after so many barren years, she could at least draw
something
. Nonetheless, her work did not please her. For the first time since she had been at college she tried to draw what was in front of her, to capture something of the landscape
—
but it did not work. Kris was too much a person for whom art was a hammer rather than a mirror, a way for the emotions and turbulence within her to smash their way out. The dam inside her had begun to break
—
but it was, after all, only a beginning. Flotsam and jetsam from the blockage that had too long been flung across her emotions continued to bar the way.

On the third day, she convinced herself that part of her blockage was simplicity itself
—
the realisation of the dreadfully embarrassing
faux pas
she had committed with Daniel Logan. She had, for a few brief moments, thought him a crazy man, but now she realised how she must have appeared to him, babbling and incoherent having only just driven up to his croft.

She had a sensation of dread inside her, but what was happening to her now was far too important to allow for this folly to hang over her, prevent her from getting back in touch with herself after all. As she climbed into the Toyota, she felt a little sick, but still she pushed herself, driving along to the track that led to Comrie.

When she arrived there, her emotions were even more mixed up. There was no sign of Daniel, outside at least (and in response to which she was unsure of her own feelings), but his Land Rover was parked beside the croft. Taking a deep breath, she let herself out of her own car and walked towards the door.

She was dressed in jeans and trainers,
an ill
-fitting T-shirt hanging over her shoulders, her hair loose and long. This was more or less how she had dressed every day since arriving at Dalrigh
—
she gave no thought to her own appearance in particular, but her slender form and unconcerned air was probably more appealing than it had ever been before. Certainly she had no other explanation for the look in Daniel Logan’s eyes when he answered the door.

He had stooped a little when he answered. Indeed, it was somewhat comical how his massive frame filled that doorway, and not for the first
time did Kris wonder why on earth he had bought the croft. When he had last looked at her, his eyes had been cold, dead, shark-like, their expression making her tremble. Now he was cautious but also... again, she could not quite read the look in his eyes.