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“Of course I want to talk to you, Mum.”
“Then come over here while I stir this stew and tell me all about him, will you?”
I told her everything I could. Everything I dared. Everything about my bursting heart, and how he made me feel inside and all the wonderful things he said to me.
I told her how special I felt when he looked into my eyes, like he could see right inside me, and loved every weird little part of me.
I told her how lovely it felt when he held my hand and kissed my hair.
I told her how right it felt, and how he’d cooked me breakfast, and made me smell the fresh bread.
I even told her how he’d washed my hair in the shower and wrapped me in towels and given me his socks so my feet didn’t get hold.
I only wish I could have told her his name.
Mark
And just like that, Helen Palmer became my everything.
One night in my bed and the girl consumed me. I could feel her all the way through my house, as though the walls themselves had soaked her in. I could see her everywhere I turned, sitting in my shirt at the dining table, holding her knees to her chest on the sofa as she watched the flames in the grate, the tangle of her limbs in my sheets, her hair on my pillow, the soapy softness of her body as I lathered her in the shower.
She’d forced her way through my skin, through all the barbs and the loneliness and the pain, and she’d found me there, cold and numb, and she’d cleansed me.
But I was anything but clean.
I pottered through Sunday with music on loud and the studio doors open wide in spite of the chill, and I painted. I painted as though I’d been purged by fire, purged by the love of a young girl whose sweet little heart beat life into my own.
I was enjoying a late cigarette when my email pinged, and I was smiling long before I clicked to view live. Helen’s pretty face appeared on screen and she looked different, but it was nothing tangible, nothing more than a knowing twinkle in her eyes, and a confidence, such a beautiful new confidence. She was a picture of radiance in a thin pink dressing gown, hair still shower-damp as she arranged herself on her bed with her laptop to her side. One single weekend had changed her as much as it had changed me, I could feel it, feel the sexual little nymph inside her unfurling and stretching her limbs. She held up her sketchpad to the camera.
And we were there, in abstract. A watercolour interpretation of my stained sheets, pinks and reds and creamy whites. Human, and stark, and beautiful, in exactly the way Helen’s beautiful creative soul interprets the world.
“It’s called ‘First’.”
I opened the chat box.
It’s beautiful.
She smiled at the message ping.
“I hoped you’d be there. Do you like it?”
It’s perfect. I love it.
“And I love you.” She leaned towards the camera, her voice a conspiratorial whisper, animated and irresistible. “I can’t believe I can say it, and it’s real. It’s all real.” She took a long, slow breath. “I feel so different. Like everything’s different. I’m different.” She dropped the sketchpad at her side and shifted onto her knees, and the fabric of her robe fell open, just enough to see the promise of her soft breasts. “I can still feel you, inside me… I feel like you’re still there, like you never left… and I can’t… I can’t stop thinking about you, about how you felt…” A flash of nervousness swept across her face. “Maybe I shouldn’t say, maybe you don’t…”
It was so easy to type the words.
Always say it.
And I do.
“You feel it, too?”
I feel everything.
She sighed in relief. “I feel like I might burst, like my heart might explode, like they could cut me and I’d bleed you, because you’re all the way inside. And I want to touch you, and feel you, and I want to do everything there is to do, and I want to do it all with you. And then I want to paint it all, and bring it to life and preserve it for all time, so that one day people will look at my paintings and they’ll say she knew love, and that man, that incredible man, he took her heart to the stars and she flew so high she never came down.” She smiled. “I don’t think I’ll ever come down…”
It made me laugh, a kind laugh, the kind of laugh that starts in your belly and tickles you.
You flatter me, Helen.
“I don’t. It’s all true.”
You’ve plenty of time ahead of you to come down and tire of all this, I promise.
But I didn’t want her to. The thought of watching her leave was a brand new terror to me, and it came with a fresh wash of guilt.
