Sweet Agony (21 page)

Ahhhh,
yes
, the way his eyes drift closed. It reminds me of everything I’ve been able to feel since he first took that cane to my backside, so simple I took it for granted. I found it easy, but I see in this one look how hard it has been for him. I understand in a way I never fully did before, always assuming that he not only couldn’t but didn’t really want to. Not completely, not wholly – maybe not even on the train or in his bed.

But I get it now.

All this time, and he was just
longing
for this. Everything was theory, nothing was lived. None of it known the way he clearly knows it now, so blissful that his face fills with warm contentment.

But there’s something more than that there. I see it underneath, deep and warm and sweet. I feel it when he raises a shaking hand and touches my cheek. Wonder, I think it is, at the idea that something he feared so deeply could be so easy and feel so good. Because it is, and it does, oh, it does. Even before he moves I want to call out his name. He fills me so completely I can spark sensation through my belly just by tightening around him – and apparently it’s the same for him.

I do it and he jerks as though slapped.

‘Stop, no,’ he says, and oh, it’s the best to hear him do it. It’s the best because he doesn’t mean it in the bad way. He means it in the good way, the I’m-going-to-come way and the second I register that, I just can’t help clenching again. It almost happens on its own, like an involuntary spasm.

And it has the greatest effect. He punches the hay by the side of my head, his gasp so loud and heated it sends me insane. I buck as soon as I hear it, and after that things just snowball. He grabs my arse and takes me hard, pounding relentlessly until I can hardly stand it. I just have to hold on as the pleasure builds up and up and up to some unbearable point, so unaware of anything else that I don’t realise what he’s doing.

Until the very last second, I don’t see how close his face is to mine. I don’t think anything of it, until the thing is almost happening. He’s going to kiss me, I realise, and when I do it hits me harder than all the rest of this. I forget the thick pulses of sensation wavering outwards from my cunt or his cock or whatever is making it happen.

And I focus on his lips. I feel them graze mine, so barely there I could almost believe they weren’t. I could almost believe it, if it wasn’t for what follows that bright and brilliant touch: his orgasm like a barrelling freight train, bearing down until it takes us both alive.

I don’t think anything of it when I wake and he isn’t there. He was quiet on the walk back to the cottage, but he was also quiet when he fucked me up against the wall in the kitchen and then again halfway up the stairs. I still have bruises lining my backside from that last vigorous rutting, as a testament to his eagerness. Not that I really needed them, because he woke me in the night with his face between my thighs. If he was fucked up about it all he probably wouldn’t have licked me with quite so much enthusiasm, considering how sticky and slippery I still was with about ten gallons of his come.

I let it run down my thighs and make a mess of my fur, in part because I was too boneless to do anything else but also because it was a filthy turn-on. It still
is
a turn-on. I get up and can feel the evidence of his pleasure just about everywhere, and I love it, I love it, I want to masturbate just thinking about it.

But I resist. I go downstairs in search of him, and still don’t feel the slightest concern that he’s not in the kitchen or the garden. He couldn’t possibly have freaked out, I tell myself, and I’m right to. I’m just slightly wrong about some other things. Actually, I’m massively wrong about some other things, and I see by how much when I decide to pull on his old wellies and go and find out where he is.

I wish I hadn’t. If I’d just stayed inside I might never have known, but like a fool I pass the empty barn and keep going. I head in the direction of a great cliff-like outcrop that seems to rise out of nowhere, and discover there’s a huge valley on the other side. Or at least I
think
it’s a valley. I stand at the top of the outcrop with my back to a sheer drop, and realise that all this green is the grounds of a house.

A great and grand house, so large it still seems so even when seen at a distance. It sprawls on endlessly, covered in turrets and fancy spirals with swirls of green in between. I have no name for its architecture and no words for the way it makes me feel. I just stand there in boots too big for me, my nightie fluttering beneath an old jumper of mine, hair like a ragged streamer in the wind.

And then I know.

I get it.

The cottage – it isn’t his. It must have belonged to the groundsman or the gamekeeper or some other posh servant. Of course it did, I should have known it did, because he would never have carved those keys into a table where his parents could see. How could I have ever imagined otherwise? He wasn’t a fool. He told me he hid it from his father, yet somehow I let it all slide by until suddenly here we are:

Me hardly able to breathe as I take in the real world he came from.

He must be a lord, I think, or a sir, or a marquis or a count. He will have a title, as I thought he did, though if he does it must be under a different name. I searched Harcroft and came up with nothing, so it has to be made up. It has to be, yet still I hope otherwise. I tell myself I might have got the wrong idea, as I make my way down towards the house. I imagine it’s some stately manor museum, filled with a thousand glass cases stuffed with spectacles and pipes and pretty ornaments.

Because if it isn’t then he not only lied.

He did it so the two worlds wouldn’t collide. That was what the phone call was about, I feel sure. The one where he spoke of not exposing something to someone. He didn’t want Lord and Lady God Knows What seeing me, in my jumpers and my wellies – an idea that seems a touch paranoid, a touch silly, just a bit unreal.

Until I remember the clothes. He bought me the clothes too, didn’t he? All those tweeds and pretty shoes and hats, so generous-seeming before but less so when I see him. I reach the grand old entrance, surrounded on all sides by enormous columns, the great doors standing open enough that I can look inside. I can take in the marble floor and the gigantic double staircase, of the sort I’ve only ever seen in period dramas.

And then finally there is someone-who-is-not-really-Cyrian, standing talking to people.

Three important people, and all of them looking just like I did in that fancy suit.
Better
than I did in that fancy suit, in fact. So much better and so in keeping with him and how he currently seems. They all stand the same way and wear their expensive stuff the same way and when they laugh they look like reflections of each other. It’s amazing, really.

Or hard to take, depending on your point of view.

‘Oh, darling, you must visit more often,’ an incredibly coiffed lady says, and then I just have to walk away. If I don’t I might end up doing or saying something awkward. Something stupid like ‘Well, he would if he didn’t have his clumsy gauche whore to tend to.’
And I
know
it is stupid, too. I get that this life is not something he takes pleasure in. I understand that he stays in the cottage not because of me but because
that
is his real home. The real place he grew up, where he did all the things he loved.

But even so I can’t help the sting of it.

He could have said. I could have pretended. Put on those fancy clothes, and kept my mouth closed. I would have even stomached his embarrassment, and as I wait for him to come back I slowly come to understand why. It’s because I
am
embarrassing. He’s right, I am. He should be ashamed of me really – I can’t even pronounce fancy words correctly, because I’ve only ever read them and never heard them aloud. I don’t know what fork to use at dinner, and can’t discuss the finer points of world economics. I find his massive newspapers dry and dull and last time we ate dinner I did so with a spoon.

And where those thoughts once barely bothered me, I find they do now. I know they do, because when he returns, the smile I attempt won’t stick. My face heats at the idea of what he might really think. It’s a small difficulty, and I can suppress it most of the time. But when he has to be the Lord of the Manor I know it will rise.

It’s there inside, just waiting to tear us apart.

Chapter Thirteen

I do my best not to think about it. Or at least I do my best not to let it show. If it shows he’ll spot it, and the second he does I’ll have to explain. I’ll say that we are from two different worlds, and then he will be practical about it. Too practical about it. I don’t want to hear him be practical about it. I don’t want to hear him say, ‘Well, of course we are’ or ‘What does it matter if you’re embarrassing when I live like a virtual recluse?’

Once he has I can’t pretend he doesn’t care.

And I want to. I would like to, for just a little longer. More than that: I would like to be a different person. A prettier, smarter, more refined person, who knows how to navigate some elegant world without fucking everything up. Who doesn’t have to force herself not to care who’s staring, because no one ever actually is. And if they are, they do it for the very best reasons.

What must it be like to be stared at for the very best reasons? To never worry about holes in your clothes or airs and graces you don’t have? I can’t imagine – but the worst part is, I didn’t want to before. I was strong somehow, defiant in the face of his snooty facade.

Only now it’s not really a facade, is it?

It’s not a game that we can just go on playing for ever.

This is real, this is real life, and real life is almost never what people claim it is in stories. It seems like it might be when you’re a kid, and first read
Jane Eyre
under cover of darkness. But then you grow up and see it all through a different prism – a glass darkly, only the other way around. I look through and see the fantasy as it would really be, so small and mean in ways I do not want to see.

I would rather never know that he locked away a perfectly sane woman and married Jane because no one else would take him. I make jokes about him being an arsehole, but oh, how much better life would be if that were not true. How much better life would be if the truth did not exist, and we could all just pretend for ever without having to face it at all.

I would do it, I think.

In fact I know I would, because when he finds me looking out over the glorious scenery from that rocky outcrop, I smile. And when he says he was worried, I tell him he had no reason to be. I just went for a long walk, and now we can go back. We can return to his Dickensian home and play at being a perfect couple.

While inside I look out from the attic, and wonder if this is really me.

I wonder it so much that when I start back down to the barn I can feel it trying to fight me. I have to brace my shoulder against it, and the effort hurts. It burns behind my eyes, too intently for me to turn when I realise he isn’t following me. He’s still standing on that bluff overlooking an ocean of green, hands in the pockets of his big fancy coat. Gaze like cold fire, searing strips off my back.

Though still I don’t stop.

It hurts too much to – until he speaks.

And then the pain is so vicious it almost feels like a relief.

‘You should know by now that you can never fool me, Molly. Even if I pretend that you have, or let you go without saying a word, I still see almost everything, and every way that you can possibly be. I know when you stay quiet even though you would like to speak; I know when you are sad, even though you smile.’ Every word makes it worse and worse until finally I’m crying. I’m crying so pathetically I can’t possibly turn now, but, by God, I’m glad I don’t. If I had I might have blurted out something stupid, and never got the rest of this heart-shattering speech.

‘I wish I could tell you that I will one day find it easy to be affectionate. That I will hold you easily and with grace, and answer the same when you are generous enough to tell me you love me. But I simply cannot make that promise. I can give you everything else – I see that now. I see how easy sex can be, because of you. Yet still there will be certain things that elude me. I am sorry for them, but there is nothing I can do.’

I turn without even thinking about it. Suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter if he sees me crying, because the pain I thought I should hide is not the one he’s talking about.

He thinks this is all some other thing – some daft thing I never even thought about.

Is it really about some daft thing I never even thought about?

‘You think…you think I’m sad because you didn’t say you loved me?’ I ask, and after I have I can see that this is indeed the case. His expression shifts from the hard line he thought he was taking to a kind of confusion he obviously isn’t used to experiencing. He thought he had the reason down pat, and now that he hasn’t he doesn’t know what to do.

He just nods and waits.

He waits for me to explain.

So I do.

‘I never expect you to say you love me. Not even for a second, not even for the tiniest moment. Why would I, when I know what loving is to you? You told me. You said that he smacked it out of you, and I don’t think that the healing power of my virtuous heart will suddenly bring it back. I know it doesn’t work that way.’

‘And that hardly bothers you?’

‘It bothers me, but only in so far as it affects you. I want you to be happy, Cyrian – as much as you can be, anyway. So the very last thing I would attempt is some love blackmail or love guilting or whatever you think this is.’

‘Guilting is not a word, Molly.’

‘You know what I mean. Or do you? Maybe you really have no idea at all, if you think I would be sad because you never expressed something you’re incapable of,’ I say, sure that this must settle it before we move on to other things. He might even let me skip the other things if it seems like this is all smoothed over – and for just a second that appears to be the case. He goes very still in that way he has whenever I nail him for something. And his expression is one of obviously dawning comprehension.