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She couldn’t help herself, she started with images. She got Drum as businessman, gob-stoppingly handsome in tailored suits. She got him clean-shaved with a haircut that gave him old school glamour, shaking hands and smiling, behind podiums speaking, and in what looked like staff photos, without his suit coat, with his tie off and his sleeves rolled up, looking relaxed and laughing.
She got him as an A-lister on the town. The suits were different, black tie, his hands were occupied with the shoulders of beautiful women, one in particular who wore an enormous diamond ring. If lustrous was a person, she was the fiancée. And yet he’d preferred to play the field and that field included plenty of action. She saw him on horseback, piloting a small plane, playing golf, shooting hoops, sailing a yacht. Before he’d consigned himself to odd jobs, charity bin clothing and second-hand books, he’d been at conferences and balls, involved in high-level business and expensive sports. He had celebrated his life.
The more photos she looked at, the more disconnected the man who wore op shop clothing and didn’t like to be upstairs in his own home was from his self of three years ago.
She went from photos to news stories, searching his full name. These were business page stories and financial analyst’s reports about board ructions, about shareholder discontent. There was a profile headlined “The Meltdown of an Entrepreneur”. There was a story about him being forced out of the company and then nothing. He disappeared.
When she checked her watch, it was 2am and she was weaving with tiredness. She padded downstairs. Drum sat on the stairs almost where she’d left him. His head was tipped back, resting on the wall. She touched his shoulder and his eyes opened. He was cold and tense.
She didn’t mean to cry but this was the longest, most intense day of her life and she had no idea what to say to him. It wasn’t as though she had the power to help him see this differently, to forget, or to heal him, and her forgiveness would mean nothing.
Silent tears wet her cheeks. He stood up and she fell into his arms. He wrapped around her with the deepest of sighs. It seemed to have been dragged out of his childhood, made of his aloneness and the terrible burden of how he’d interpreted duty and the threats he’d faced.
“Ah Foley, now you know.”
She nodded into his chest, clutching at his arms.
“Now you understand why I shouldn’t be near you, but God help me I don’t want to let you go.”
She lifted her face. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you, not tonight, not tomorrow, not until we’ve worked this out.”
She’d have promised him longer, a fraction of forever, but she didn’t know if that’s what he needed, if that’s what she could give. “We have to talk. But I need to sleep first, we both do. I’ll call in sick, take a few days off.”
He pushed her hair back. Studied her face. He’d see her exhaustion, the raw, fretful emotions she couldn’t smooth out and everything she felt for him. She had to hope that would hold him for now.
He closed his eyes as if it was more than he could bear, his arm at her back going slack. She tugged his hand; they both needed that big warm bed and the consolation of sleep.
He opened his eyes, came back to himself. “Go. I can’t come with you.”
No, no, no. She couldn’t bear it. “You made this rule because of all the people who got hurt.” He nodded, the certainty of that in his eyes, but such weariness too. “Tonight I’m hurting. Tonight I need you.”
He groaned, a wounded sound full of bewildered intentions and dark inhibitions, his head dropped forward, eyes to the stairs.
“Lay with me and sleep, Drum. We’ll work the rest out tomorrow.” She took a step up and pulled his hand.
He was unmoving. “Do you know what you’re asking?”
“To break your rule, like you did for me when I was sick.” It wasn’t too much to ask, he’d already shown he could do it.
“It’s not that simple.”
She pulled on his hand. “We can make it that simple.”
His eyes came up. “What I feel for you, to lay with you. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
He studied her, his eyes roving over her face, his breathing short and he wasn’t cold anymore. He wasn’t an exiled businessman, or an A-list playboy or a hermit squatter. He wasn’t wealthy or poverty stricken. He wasn’t threatened or accused, healthy or sick, or confused. He was man who wanted a woman in all the richest ways possible and didn’t believe he was worthy.
Until tonight’s fevered kisses, he’d never initiated anything more than a longing look. He’d let Foley demand, prod, lead, but in every move since they’d first touched, that desire had been there, reined in, tightly controlled, disciplined. And all that time he’d waited for her to learn something to make her reject him, and in all that time, all she’d done was fall in love with him.
But now the rules had changed. He’d let her see inside him, to all his hateful secrets and unforgivable sins and she was still holding his hand and asking him to come to bed. He had no restraint left to cling to. That’s what she read in his eyes.
If she let him, tonight he’d take.
She wanted him, to the marrow of her bones, needed that physical communication with him after so many weeks of tortured touches, and then this hardcore passion they’d discovered; too lustful to be accidental, too deep to be innocent, but frightening as well, for its intensity.
He mistook her stillness for indecision and released her hand, turning away. He took a step down the staircase, a hand to the back of his neck. “Go, go before I do something we’ll both regret.”
She should go, that was the sensible thing to do. To sleep, pick this up exactly where they’d left it tomorrow, when it might look different, solutions might be more obvious, but she wasn’t leaving him alone in this.
