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He opened the kitchen door, expecting to find Sally in the kitchen. Cathy had insisted on being dropped off at her best friend’s so that she could relate every detail of her ‘ordeal’ to her, and Joel suspected that Sally would be annoyed with him for giving in and letting her.
Paul was down at the leisure centre, now that the danger to his sister was over returning their relationship to the state of semi-siege which existed between them.
He had shown last night where his true feelings lay, though, Joel reflected, remembering his son’s frightened face.
The house felt disturbingly silent, a small, worrying thread of instinct tightening warningly inside him.
Without knowing why, he took the stairs two at a time. Sally heard him and cowered back against the bed. She couldn’t face Joel now… Not now. Tears filled her eyes and ran helplessly down her face while her body trembled uncontrollably. Distantly her trained mind registered what was happening, had made its clinical diagnosis… Shock… she was in shock… Talk to the patient calmly, reassure her… keep her warm… but she was the patient, wasn’t she, and so how could she do any of those things…?
‘Sally…’
Joel pushed open the door and then stopped abruptly. ‘Sally, what is it… what’s wrong?’
Instinctively he lowered his voice, speaking slowly and gently as he moved towards her.
She was shaking violently, her body racked by intense bouts of shivering, tears flooding silently and slowly from her eyes.
It was like watching someone crying blood. He had never seen her looking so shaken or afraid. Automatically he responded to her need, reaching out for her, taking her gently in his arms, holding her, rocking her, soothing her as he stroked her hair, crooning soft words of comfort in her ear.
This was the Joel she had loved, Sally recognised through her pain, the Joel she had needed and missed so desperately.
This was what she had gone to Kenneth expecting to find. The appalling irony that she should find it now, here in Joel’s arms after what she had done, sliced her with a pain so intense that she cried out against it.
‘Sally, what is it… what’s happened?’
She could hear the concern, the alarm in Joel’s voice but instead of answering him she simply burrowed closer against him. The feel of him, his smell, his warmth, his familiarity were suddenly the only security she had.
Beneath the thinness of her dress Joel’s hand registered the presence of her suspender belt and stockings.
A cold shock of male knowledge numbed him. There could only be one reason for Sally to dress like that.
He had told Philippa that their marriage was over, their love dead, but now the thought of Sally, his wife, in the arms of another man made him realise the truth. It wasn’t just jealousy that seared and burned him, he recognised, it was fear for Sally as well; fear for her and a wild, fierce anger against the man responsible for her grief.
As he started to pull away from her, Sally clung to him. She didn’t want Joel to let her go… not now… not ever… She didn’t ever again want to be that woman whom Kenneth had stared at with such disgust and distaste. She wanted to be what she had always wanted to be; she wanted to be protected by Joel’s love, to be held safe by it and by him.
As he saw how distressed she was, Joel felt his jealousy turn to compassion and pity, his need to reassure her overwhelming his desire to know what had happened.
‘It’s all right…’ he told her soothingly. ‘It’s all right… Whatever happened…’
‘Nothing happened… nothing…’
Sally was shivering violently, her teeth chattering, but as Joel heard the agony in her voice he knew, without knowing how he knew it, that, whatever impulse had led to her dressing so obviously for sex, it had not been desire that had motivated her, and it was not from the arms of her lover or from his bed that she had come back home in such a state of distress.
Unfair and illogical of him to feel relieved that she had not been physically unfaithful to him, he knew…
‘Hold me, Joel… Make love to me… take me to bed… Make love to me…’
Sally was as shocked to hear her words as Joel looked, but when Joel hesitated, watching her, her shock gave way to panic. Kenneth had rejected her; what if Joel did too?
‘Joel… please…’
It hurt him hearing her beg him like this, looking at her and seeing the fear and panic in her eyes… he wanted to take hold of her and wipe it away, to tell her there was no need for her to punish herself like this, to pretend to want him when he could see from her eyes and her body that sex was the last thing she really wanted; but he wasn’t sure he was capable of finding the right words, words that would comfort and not hurt, and so instead he cupped her face in his hands, smoothing back her hair, damp and sticky from her tears, her skin hot and flushed beneath his hands, her eyes more terrified than they had been that very first time she had let him touch her intimately.
But then she had trusted him… and wanted him as well, even though shyness had made her loath to admit it…
‘It’s all right, Sally, everything’s going to be all right.’ He kissed her gently and without passion, stilling the trembling of her mouth with the slow, sure warmth of his own.
A kiss of peace and knowledge rather than one of desire.
