I close my eyes and let the sun dry my skin. But after a while I find I am unable to relax. I sit up and I can no longer see him. In a panic I rush to the water’s edge. I can just about make him out. My eyes become riveted to his powerful arms as
he goes farther and farther out to sea. When he is just a dot on the horizon my throat constricts with fear. What if a really strong current sweeps him away?
Jake
With every stroke my mind becomes clearer and clearer until it sparkles like crystal. All kinds of scenarios play in my mind. I am sitting at the back of a white transit van, wiping blood from a baseball bat. I am sitting in the dark in someone’s apartment and when he comes in and puts on the light he nearly has a heart attack to see me there. And me smiling at him as if he is a long lost friend. That’s the thing you learn as a debt collector. People are fuckers—they will cry poverty, until they are threatened with physical violence. Yeah, he paid.
Images of Billy Joe Pilkington come into my mind. His cold, empty eyes. Billy’s a legend on his turf. His reputation is one of fearlessness and ruthlessness. His name usually only comes up as a whisper when there is talk of violence and mayhem on the streets, in certain parts of London.
They call him the bat, the bat that came straight out of hell. Nobody has ever dared to cross him. Nobody has dared defy him and lived to tell their story. Nobody except for me. But that was a long time ago when I had nothing to lose.
I know I am never going back to that life. It is clear what I need to do. No turf war. Not while I am alive. Carefully, I weigh all the options open to me, all the situations that could arise. Each one of them calls for a true truce. We’ve had an uneasy truce for too long.
In the distance I can see a yacht. People are sunning themselves on the deck. A woman is standing in a bikini, a hand shading her eyes against the afternoon sun.
She starts waving to me. I stop and turn to look at the beach. I could have gone farther, but I can see Lily standing at the water’s edge. I cannot see her face, but I can tell by the tense and fixed way she is standing that she is worried about me. I turn around and start to swim back toward her. As soon as I am standing on the sand she runs to me. She does not say anything, just hugs me tightly.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ll never put my phone on silent mode again,’ she almost sobs.
I lift her out of the water and lay her on the sand. The sea has rejuvenated me but has made her tense and frightened. Her eyes are wide and bright. I place my wet palms on the insides of her thighs—they are warm and gritty with sand—and part them. The sun shines down on us, warming my back. Droplets of sea fall on her face; it is already a lovely shade of gold. Her nipples taste salty when I bite them. She pulls at my hips and screams for more. I force more of me into her. Our coupling is frantic, urgent and wild. There are no sea breezes, but watched by the sea, the sun and the rocks it is the perfect fuck.
Afterwards, we dress and go up the steps hand in hand. I have never felt closer to another human being. Then Dominic calls and I know that once again I will be wiping blood from my body.
Lily
Evening descends and from every corner night fragrances rise. Every living thing, the grass, the trees, the flowers, the people all bring into the leisure of night their own scent.
And that crowd of odors surrounds us as we sit in the open-air restaurant that Jake has brought me to. I raise my glass of wine and take a sip. It is perfectly chilled. I lick the beads of condensation off the glass. They have their own taste. I look up and he is staring at me. I blush.
‘Tell me about your childhood,’ I say to cover my sudden gaucheness.
‘Until my father…died, I was happy. We never had much money because he was an incurable gambler. I remember that my mother kept debts with everyone, even with the butcher who provided her with the cheapest cuts of meat, but even so we were truly a happy family.’
I look at him with surprise. How accepting he is that his father was a gambler. There is no condemnation, no anger, no feeling that he has been deprived. Only a strange and impressive loyalty to family.
‘What about you? What was your childhood like?’ he asks.
I had it all down pat—an alcoholic father, a downtrodden mother, everything, the whole shebang, at the tips of my fingers—but I found I couldn’t say the words. I didn’t want to lie to him! I blinked in surprise. What the hell? I was going to fuck up my first assignment. Make him suspicious.
‘I’ll tell you about my family another time,’ I say, and wanting to distract him I reach out and touch his fingers. Immediately, they move to clasp mine.
I look at our entwined fingers and an old, tired ache of once when I was insane breaks into me and eats at my bones. Its return makes me angry. How pathetic. Sentimental fool. There is no one here I can call my own. This man will never be mine. He will never share my pain. I am here to do a job. I am here to crush him, not to long for him as one does a beloved. I am here to save other people’s sons and brothers from dying unnecessarily because of men like him. I look up at him.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
This time I won’t allow myself to dissolve in my own grief. This time I will recognize myself. It is simple. It is beautiful. I am not lost. I am strong. I can do this. I smile. Harden my heart and speak.
‘I’m fine. You want to know about my family? Let me tell you about them. My father was an alcoholic. I’m not sure if he is still alive. And my mother was a downtrodden, weak woman. She let him beat her and me. When I was fifteen I ran away.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says softly, and begins to stroke the inside of my wrist. The movement is gentle and tender, and suddenly I feel like bursting into tears.
‘I’m so sorry I asked,’ he says.
I look at him. There is an expression of such caring tenderness in his face. Oh, the irony. He thinks I am upset to remember my past. That makes me feel worse. I shake my head. ‘It’s OK. You said you wanted to come here to think. Have you managed to?’
His eyes darken. ‘Yeah, but I’m afraid my plans have been rather turned on their heads.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My brother, Dominic, you haven’t met him yet, have you?’
I shake my head.
‘He’s a bit of a hothead. He got drunk and went to one of the Pilkingtons’ clubs and challenged Billy Joe Pilkington to a bare knuckle fight.’
‘God! But how does a drunken dare affect your plans?’
‘Billy Joe Pilkington is an animal. If he fights my brother he will do serious damage to him. I cannot allow that. I am the head of this family and they are my responsibility. I will fight on behalf of the Eden family. Maybe that will be the end of this silly feud.’
I stare at him aghast. ‘That’s just barbaric. Nobody fights to settle a dispute anymore. This is the twenty-first century.’
He looks faintly offended, but his voice is calm. ‘Bare knuckle fighting is a noble and proud pastime. For us travelers, family is the most important aspect of life. My mother, my brothers and my wife and children when I have them are the most important things in my life. I will do everything in my power to protect them.’
When he says ‘my wife’ I freeze, my gut constricting with horror. It shocks me to hear him talk about another woman as his wife. The pain is sharper than I can ignore or explain away as a crush or a passing infatuation. How foolish I have been. Of course he will marry some other woman and speak of her possessively. By then I will have ditched all the trappings of this assignment and disappeared into my real life. And then it hits me. Maybe by then he will be behind bars. Because of me.
Because of me this fine man will be behind bars.
And I feel pain in my gut. My body doesn’t want me to betray him. ‘You are a police officer first and foremost,’ Robin’s voice says in my head.
I grip the stem of the wine glass and swallow a mouthful. It goes the wrong way and I start coughing and choking. He comes around and drops to his haunches next to me and asks with great concern if I am all right. I look at him in shock. No other man would do that. They would worry about what other people would think of them. He doesn’t care. He honestly couldn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks of him. And I clench my hands with rage.
By design this man was made for me, yet I cannot have him.
ELEVEN
I come out of the bathroom and stand in the doorway. He is lying on the bed totally relaxed. The illuminated wall behind the headboard creates an intimate ambience and makes him appear as if he is on a stage. I walk up to him and he opens his eyes slowly and gazes at me, as if he has been dreaming and has woken up to find himself still in the dream. What he has been dreaming of is impossible to say: the expression in his eyes is unfathomable.
His warm hand slides between my thighs. A secret smile plays on his lips. ‘Mmmn…’ he says. The sound is low, a hum, an invitation.
The hand moves higher.
I take a quick, sharp breath. I am not wearing panties. His fingers touch the wet whorls of flesh, and tendrils of excitement snake across my body. He drags his fingers through the soft, sensitive layers. My head tilts back involuntarily, my eyes half close.
The expression in his eyes changes: gold-green lust shimmers in them.
He pinches the protruding fleshy nub. Quite hard. My eyes widen. He pulls me by my clit toward him. I follow helplessly. He pulls his knees up so his body makes a seat. Awkwardly, with the most sensitive part of me trapped in his firm grasp, I climb onto his body and sit on his crotch, facing him. His penis is so hard it is like sitting on a piece of wood. His eyes are level with my open sex.
‘Wider,’ he encourages softly.
I comply.
He releases my clit and blood rushes to the numbed flesh making it tingle. For a few seconds he studies the blood-engorged bud while I tremble gently with anticipation. ‘For fuck’s sake, start,’ I want to scream.
He grasps the outer lips of my sex and pulls them apart so the secret, pink inner tissue is exposed, and stares at the glistening flesh. I squirm impatiently. My whole body is hot with desire and excitement. To my disappointment he lets the lips spring closed. His eyes rise up to meet mine.
‘Play with yourself.’ His voice is thick with need.