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‘How can everything be all right?’ Sally asked him wretchedly when he stopped kissing her. ‘How can anything ever be all right again…?’
Slowly trying to feel his way through her pain without adding to the distress she had already suffered, Joel told her, ‘It can if we want it to be. If that’s what we both want. What do you want, Sal…?’
‘I want everything to be the way it used to be,’ Sally told him brokenly. ‘Joel, I’m so frightened,’ she whispered to him. ‘Everything’s changed so much… No one wants me or needs me any more…’
‘I need you,’ Joel told her quietly, and as he said the words he knew, illuminatingly, that they were true. ‘You love her,’ Philippa had told him, and he had denied it… His heart ached with shame and guilt.
It hurt him seeing her like this, afraid and vulnerable, and it hurt him even more knowing that he was partly to blame; that he had punished her for his own sense of inadequacy in losing his job, letting her shoulder burdens he had had no right to expect her to carry, simply because his own ego could not accept the reversal of their traditional roles.
He had blamed her for turning away from him and making him seek sexual consolation with someone else. Did she similarly blame him?
Beneath his hands he could feel her body trembling still.
‘Make love to me… take me to bed…’ she had begged him, and perhaps after all it would be a good thing to do; the making of a new commitment to one another; the acknowledgement that there were things they were leaving behind, things too painful to discuss now but which would have to be dealt with ultimately.
Sally tensed as she felt Joel sliding free the buttons fastening her dress. It had been a long time since he had undressed her like this, she acknowledged, his mouth caressing her skin as he exposed it to his gaze and touch.
Her awareness of his arousal and desire were reassuringly familiar even though her relieved gratitude for them was not.
She tensed momentarily as he slid off her dress, holding her breath while she waited for him to make some comment about her choice of underwear, but all he did was gently remove it and then tell her softly, ‘That’s better—this is how I like you best… with nothing to come between us.’
Sally gazed uncertainly at him. Had he chosen those words deliberately? Had he after all guessed and was now trying to tell her…?
She trembled on the brink of guilt and anxiety, her eyes searching his as she began uncertainly, ‘Joel, there’s something I should tell you…’
‘There’s only one thing I need to hear you say,’ Joel told her softly. ‘Do you still love me?’ he prompted her when she stared at him in confusion. ‘Because that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, Sal… all that should matter? That we love one another… The rest… well, we can find a way of sorting that out later…’
She did love him, Sally recognised as her body trembled with relief and joy… Because this was the Joel she had originally fallen in love with, the Joel who had always loved and protected her.
‘Yes… yes. I love you,’ she told him.
It might not have been the most passionate and intensely sexual lovemaking he had ever known, Joel reflected an hour later as he lay on his side, Sally’s sleeping body curled up back against his as though even in sleep she needed to know he was close to her, but there had been a special quality about it nevertheless, a sense of shared intimacy and awareness of the significance of what they were doing, an acknowledgement of what still lay ahead of them.
Perhaps neither of them would ever discuss fully with the other exactly what had happened, not out of deceit but out of love and the need to protect one another. Some things were far more hurtful to hear than to say. It was enough for him now that he knew Sally was here with him through her own choice, that for whatever reason she had held back from making a sexual or emotional commitment to the man she had dressed so sensually for, and if it hurt him to know that she would never have chosen willingly to dress like that for him, then perhaps he ought to look at his own responsibility for that, instead of assuming that all the responsibility was hers.
Perhaps he had been guilty of focusing too much on the sexual aspects of their relationship in the past, expecting her to know that for him sex and love were two different faces of the same coin.
‘I need to know that you want, need me… that you love me,’ she had whispered to him as he held her. ‘I need it to be more than just a physical thing, just a body for you to use to satisfy yourself, Joel.’
‘You’ve never been that,’ he had assured her. ‘Never… It’s just that sex has sometimes been the only way I could get your attention… I need to feel needed as well,’ he had told her gruffly. ‘I need to feel that I’m loved and not just a useless waste of space who can’t even look after you financ
ially any more… Have you any idea how much that hurts me… how bad it makes me feel?’ he had asked her softly, and he had seen from her expression that she hadn’t.
‘It hurts like hell, Sally… It makes me feel that I’m a failure—that I’ve failed you.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ she’d assured him. ‘It’s not your fault the factory closed, and you never know—this work you’re doing at the leisure centre could lead to something,’ she had added gently.
‘Maybe… but don’t count on it,’ Joel had warned her. ‘We could manage on less, you know,’ he added. ‘I hate seeing you looking so tired all the time… knowing… We don’t need two cars. We could get rid of mine… I could buy a bike and become a real environmentalist,’ he had teased her when she had started to protest. ‘I could advertise and maybe get some more private pupils. A couple of the guys who go down to the leisure centre who are out of work are talking about setting up a sort of self-help group… a sort of trade and barter system with everyone pitching in with what they can do. It won’t bring in much money, but if we’re careful we could manage on less and——’
‘I could go back to working part-time,’ Sally had interrupted him.
‘Not unless it’s what you want,’ Joel had told her quietly after a small pause. ‘I’m not trying to dictate to you what you should and shouldn’t do, Sal. I’ve already made that mistake once. You have as much right to what you want from life as the rest of us. I’ve realised while I’ve been at home with the kids how much of yourself you’ve sacrificed for them… for us. All I want now is for you to have a choice… If you want to work full-time, fine; if you don’t…’
‘Oh, Joel…’
‘Now what have I said?’ he had demanded as she’d collapsed in tears against him, soaking his chest with them as she’d hugged him with fierce joy and genuine emotion.
Some time she would have to tell him about Kenneth, to try to explain, and perhaps, if she was brave enough, to ask him where he had learned that new sexual gentleness and patience that was so unfamiliar to her.
