Chapter 10 #2
He undressed me with the cuff still on – working around it, pulling my shirt over my free arm first, then carefully over the cuffed wrist without unfastening it.
The manoeuvre required his mouth close to my ear and he used the proximity.
He told me things. Ewan talked during this the way he talked during everything – fluently, warmly, with the specific eloquence of a man who understood that his voice was a hand and the hand was everywhere.
He told me what he wanted. He described what he was doing as he did it, a low narration that turned every touch into a sentence and every sentence into a touch, and the double register – the feeling and the telling – made everything twice as sharp.
His mouth followed his hands. My collarbone. The inside of my arm. The soft skin above my hip. He kissed the red line the cuff had left on my wrist and the tenderness of it – the gentleness applied to the mark of the restraint – made my chest ache.
My free hand found his hair. I pulled him up to me.
I kissed him and the kiss was not playful, it was the other thing, the raw thing beneath the charm.
He pressed against me on the narrow sofa and I wrapped my leg around him and pulled him closer and the cuff clinked against the sofa arm and the sound was loud and specific and mine.
He stopped. He looked at me. His eyes were dark in the firelight and his breathing was as wrecked as mine.
“Sure?” he said.
I was sure when he settled between my legs.
Sure when his forehead dropped to my shoulder and his breath came fast against my skin.
Sure when the cuff bit into my wrist as I arched into him and the bite was part of it – the small bright point of discomfort that made the pleasure clearer, the frame that sharpened everything inside it.
His hands held me still and his voice was in my ear – fragments now, not sentences, the eloquence breaking apart into sounds – and I was sure.
I was sure.
Afterwards.
The fire was embers. The room was warm from us, not from the coal.
I was lying on the sofa with my head on his chest and his arm around me and the handcuffs were on the table, open now, the chrome catching the last amber light from the grate.
My wrist had a faint red line from the metal.
I pressed my thumb against it. The mark was real. The evening was real. We were real.
His hand was in my hair. His fingers moved slowly through it, untangling, smoothing, the absent repetitive touch of a man who was content and did not need to perform contentment.
The room smelled of coal smoke and of us – warm skin, the faint salt of effort, the domestic intimacy of two people who had shared a room for hours and had saturated it with their presence.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
He knew who I meant. He did not deflect. He did not reach for the grief mask or the Fixer’s version of processed sadness. He just talked.
“She loved the rain. She made terrible scrambled eggs – genuinely awful, wet and flat, and she made them every Sunday and ate them with a straight face as though they were good.” He paused. “She sent me a postcard two years ago. No return address.”
“She’s alive.”
He nodded. “She’s alive.”
His breathing under my ear was steady. Regular. The breathing of a man who had carried a piece of information for two years and was letting it exist in the room for the first time without trying to solve it.
“What did the postcard say?”
“Five words.” He was quiet for a moment. “Five words and a Glasgow postmark.”
I sat up. I looked at him. The room was nearly dark now – just the embers and the faint light from the corridor under the door and the shapes of furniture and files and two people on a sofa in the late Scottish night.
“Can I see it?”
He nodded towards the desk. His desk – the small writing desk in the corner that he used for Ewan things, not Fixer things. I got up. I went to the desk. The postcard was in the top drawer, face down, beneath a sheaf of papers.
I picked it up. Turned it over. Glasgow postmark. Two years old.
The message was five words: They’re watching me. Don’t look.
I turned the card over. The image on the front was a photograph. A harbour. Boats. A skyline I recognised.
Cairndhu harbour. She had sent it from Glasgow looking at a picture of home.
I held the postcard. The card stock was thin.
The photograph was slightly overexposed, the colours faded the way colours fade on cheap postcards left in a rack near a window.
It was the most important document in this room, more important than three hundred pages of Mackie analysis, more important than the Ledger itself, and it had been sitting in a desk drawer for two years.
I put the postcard back. I went to the sofa. I lay down beside him. I said nothing. He said nothing. The embers died. The room went dark.
Outside, the Clyde. Always the Clyde.
I left the sitting room at one in the morning.
Ewan was asleep on the sofa – his mouth open, his hand still reaching for where my hair had been.
I covered him with the blanket from the armchair.
I picked up the handcuffs and put them in the drawer of his desk, beside the postcard. I closed the door.
Al was in the corridor.
He was standing against the opposite wall with his coat still on and his bag at his feet and his face doing nothing at all, which was how I knew he had been standing there for a while.
He had come back from the Hook. I did not know when.
I did not know how long he had been in the corridor or what he had heard through the sitting room door.
The manor’s walls were stone. The doors were old oak.
Old oak and quiet rooms and the sounds that carried regardless.
He looked at me. I looked at him. The corridor was dark – just the lamp at the far end, the one that stayed on all night, casting a long amber stripe across the stone floor.
In the half-light his face was harder than it was in daylight.
The softness that I found in bed with him, the gentleness that lived in his hands when he touched me – absent.
What I saw instead was the man behind the gentleness.
The man who had run through a container yard with cracked ribs.
The man who cleaned up broken glass alone.
He stepped forward. His hand came up. His fingers found the back of my neck – below my hair, above my collar, the place where the spine meets the skull.
The grip was firm. His thumb pressed against the tendon.
Not a caress. Not the way he touched me in bed.
This was different. This was the grip of a man who had been standing in a dark corridor listening to the woman he loved with another man and had arrived at a feeling he did not have a word for and the feeling had gone into his hand.
I felt my pulse under his thumb. He could feel it too.
I knew he could, because his eyes dropped to his own hand and then came back to my face and in them was something I had not seen before: the line where his control met its limit.
The place where protective became possessive and the two words blurred and the blurring frightened him more than it frightened me.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said.
His fingers stayed. Three seconds. Four. I counted my own heartbeats against his thumb. I did not pull away. Pulling away would have been a concession to the fear in his eyes, and the fear was his to carry, not mine to flinch from.
He released me. His hand dropped to his side. His fingers closed into a fist – not a threat, a containment. He was putting the feeling away. He was finding the leash and reattaching it and the effort of reattachment was visible in the tendons of his forearm and the set of his jaw.
“I know,” he said.
He picked up his bag. He walked past me, down the corridor, toward the east wing.
He did not touch me again. His shoulder passed mine at six inches and the six inches were a decision and the decision cost him and I stood in the dark corridor and I felt the ghost of his thumb on the back of my neck and I understood, for the first time, that Al Rae contained something that was not gentle.
And that the not-gentle part loved me too.
And that the two parts were in a war he fought every day and told no one about.
I went upstairs. I did not sleep for a long time.