Chapter 9
Just a month ago, the boy had been quiet all afternoon. Once he got home, he had announced, “I think I need to sleep in another bed, Mummy. I am not a baby anymore.”
And so, the next day, they had managed to find a second-hand mattress from a neighbour and one of Patrick's boys who was back for a holiday had lugged it up the stairs into the tiny closet room and brushed aside her thanks with a flushed face.
They had put up his drawings on the wall and she had moved a small second-hand cupboard into the corner for his books and toys.
There was barely any room but the boy seemed happy.
It had taken two weeks of him turning up to snuggle under her covers before he started sleeping the whole night on his own.
And now, she watched James carefully set him down on his mattress and unlace his shoes.
He took up the entire room and Asha hastened to say, “Here, let me do it.”
She told herself she would send him away after she had settled the boy in his bed. She had told herself many such things over the past months.
She could hear James's movements in the narrow hallway, sensing that particular stillness of him—that quality he had of seeming like an immovable mountain.
She could feel his eyes on her back as she tucked the blanket around the boy's shoulders.
She smoothed the dark curls from his damp forehead and squatted there on the cold floor longer than she needed to in the dim glow of the light streaming through the small window.
Go and thank him and send him home.
Her heart beat like a hummingbird trapped in her chest as she ran out of excuses to face him.
He was standing with his back against the wall, cap in his hands, the familiar posture of a man who had prepared himself to leave.
He hadn't even bothered to take his coat off.
When he noticed her coming towards him, his storm-grey eyes lifted and whatever he saw in her face stopped him from speaking.
Asha stood facing him in her little flat and for the first time, allowed herself to take him in just like he had many times in the past. She studied him for a moment in the weak light—the broad planes of his face, the aquiline nose that had been broken a couple of times and healed crooked.
The dark smudging of coal that never quite left the creases of his knuckles no matter how he scrubbed.
Those arresting grey eyes that pinned a person in place like a moth on the corkboard.
He was watching her with that patient, contained wanting that he had only once pressed upon her, though she had known with a woman’s instinct it was there since the beginning.
It had frightened her then because of what it meant. What she would be considered by the townsfolk, if she allowed it. What she already was, if she was honest with herself. She knew men and their ways.
She was a widow in a foreign country. There would be no approval, no blessing.
Unlike her first marriage when she was only a child, there would be no garlands and no ceremony.
No priest blessing the union between a man past his prime and a girl who was not yet a woman.
There would only be curtains twitching and a landlady with sharp eyes.
There would be a town that already watched her sideways as if waiting for her to show her true colours.
There would be judgement that would stick to her like tar and feathers.
She had known all of this for weeks.
It had not stopped her from surreptitiously watching the swinging door of the pub for him every evening. She had come to enjoy the way he singled her out like she was special. She had never been looked at that way by anyone.
“I know what this would be,” she said. Her voice was quiet and even. She wanted him to understand she was not confused or desperate. That she had thought it through with solemn, clear eyes. “I know there is no future. All I can ask for is respect and secrecy.”
James's pupils were blown as he realized what she was saying, what she was offering. His interest from that first day had grown into an obsession and all he thought about when he lay down at night was holding that sleek brown body beneath him and slaking his thirst.
“An affair,” she said without guile, because the plain word was cleaner than dancing around it. “That is all it could be. I am not a foolish woman, nor am I inexperienced. I have borne a child. I understand what I am saying.”
There was a clenching around his jaw, something that might have been pain, though it moved through and was gone.
Or it might have been that he felt she had stolen his thunder by drawing the line.
Then he nodded once, slowly, as if in a daze.
He couldn't have taken his eyes off her, even if his life depended on it.
Then she took that final step, almost touching now. This close, she had to tilt her head to meet his bright eyes. It was hard to hold them, a little like looking directly at the noon sun.
He did not reach for her. He waited, understanding by some instinct that this last distance had to be hers to close.
And so, she was the one who lifted her hand and set it against his chest, and felt the slow, heavy beat of his heart beneath layers of flannel and a working man's warmth. She felt him draw a careful breath.
“I cannot get pregnant,” she said solemnly. “Can we use those things...French letters? From the chemist.” Her eyes met his steadily so he would know she was not ashamed of having this practical conversation. “You will have to use them.”
His expression—and she marked this—did not flicker with amusement or condescension. He only held her gaze and said in an equally serious tone, “Aye.”
Then, as if her touch had released him from a spell, his rough trembling hand rose slowly and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, callused fingertips grazing her cheek with a gentleness that sat strangely on such a large man. She felt it move through her like warm water.
She took his hand and led him to her lumpy corner bed.
Only once she got there did she realize that to her, what happened between a man and a woman meant pain and to lie still with her eyes screwed shut and hope it would be over soon.
Her husband had been more than twice her age and with one other wife, an infrequent visitor to her bed, by her luck.
She had plotted what would happen carefully in her head, but now, with this man she knew she wanted, she didn't know what to do.
His hands, broad and scarred and still faintly coal-dark at the creases, moved over her as if to learn her by touch alone and to be thorough about it.
He unpinned her hair without asking, unwinding the braids until it flowed in waves.
Then, he ran careful fingers through it and spread it across her shoulders and was quiet for a moment just looking at her, and that silence cost her more composure than anything he might have said.
Then he sat heavily, making the ancient bed creak alarmingly with his weight and pulled her abruptly onto his lap.
This close, she watched as the black of his pupils ate up the blue.
The little flat was cold. He was like a furnace.
She pressed her face against the side of his throat when it became too much to hold his gaze.
She felt his pulse jump beneath her lips, and heard the rough, involuntary sound he made, as though she had caught him off guard.
It pleased her fiercely. She had not expected to feel powerful, to affect him like this.
She had not expected to feel, quite so urgently, that she wanted him to lose control. But she was also terrified.
He took his time parting the layers of cloth, undoing buttons and peeling coverings away.
He kept going until she was completely bare on his lap while his manhood pressed into her bottom like a steel pipe.
It felt massive compared to what she was used to and sent a flicker of alarm through her.
His hands roughly kneaded her bare breasts, fingers plucking and twisting puckered, dusky nipples until she felt an alarming new sensation—a wetness between her intimate folds.
She buried her face once more in his neck as his fingers travelled up her inner thighs and then probed gently at her opening after parting the dark curls.
A single finger played in the moistness and then pushed in.
Her sudden gasp had him stilling while his manhood throbbed underneath her buttock.
Once she relaxed, his finger moved in and out, making the wetness slowly slide down and wet his pants.
A strange ache started to build up in her lower belly which made her sink her white teeth into his shoulder with a gasp.
And then all of a sudden, he was on top of her, looming like a demon.
As his breath sawed in and out, she heard him tear at his clothes as she lay there, wondering what set him off.
He was there on top of her, his man part pressing into her, steadily, unrelentingly.
His warm chest squashed her breasts flat and his lips took hers in a kiss that made all thoughts leave her head.
It was not like all the times before. There was the pain of his man-parts invading her until she thought she could take no more but she needed this pain more than she needed to breathe. Dazedly, she felt him move inside her.
"Open your eyes, love... open those pretty eyes and look at me," he groaned as his hips sped up.
She watched him moan and hold her close as he moved inside her.
She had never felt this close to another human being before.
Then he noticed that she was not moving with him and one of his hands reached between them to press and knead and suddenly, she was flying.
She was vaguely aware of his cries and of him pulsing inside her.
It felt like she had made a momentous discovery, a secret that no one could take from her.
Afterwards, she did not ask him to leave immediately. She was tired of pushing him away. They snuggled in the narrow bed until he started to harden again and he pulled her underneath him and took her slow while his lips played with hers and his tongue invaded her mouth.
Later, he sat on the edge of the solitary kitchen chair and she stood between his knees. He rested his forehead against her sternum, and she looked down at the top of his bent dark head and set her hand there without thinking.
His arms came around her waist. It was not a possessive touch. He was just holding her for one more minute before he had to leave.
Outside, the coal town breathed it’s cold, smoky breath through gaps in the window frame. Her son slept on, undisturbed.
She stood there and let herself have her moment of peace and desire. This one quiet thing that belonged to no one but the two of them, if only for a while.