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TWENTY-THREE
Excerpt from The House on Willow Street
In her head, she knew what she was doing was wrong. She lay, open-eyed in the dawn, feeling the length of his naked body next to hers, warm despite the chill of the room. She’d never slept naked before, and now wondered how there was any other way.
Of course, you needed another body beside yours; a body like his, hard with physical exercise, taut and lean, not an ounce of flab on him, and fiercely strong.
Yet he was so gentle with her. His hands with their tender pianist’s fingers had drawn whorls on her pale skin the night before, his eyes shining in the soft light of the dim bulb.
With his hands on her skin, her body became like nothing she’d ever known before: a treasured thing made for being wrapped up with his and adored.
‘You’re so beautiful. I wish this moment could go on for ever,’ he’d said in the low voice she loved. There wasn’t anything about him she didn’t love, really.
He was perfect.
And not hers.
Their time was stolen: a few hours here and there, holding hands under the table at dinner, clinging together in the vast hotel bed like shipwreck survivors on a raft. For those hours, he was hers, but she was only borrowing him.
The awfulness of separating rose up again inside her. It was a physical ache in the pit of her stomach.
He’d wake soon. He had to be gone by seven to get his train.
If she had been the one who had to leave the hotel room first, she knew she simply couldn’t have done it. But he would. Duty drove him.
It was dark in the room and only the gleam of the alarm clock hands showed that it was morning. She nudged her way out of the bed and opened a sliver of heavy curtain to let some grey dawn light in. It was raining outside; the sort of sleety cold rain that sank cruelly into the bones.
There were early-morning noises coming from the street below. Doors banging, horns sounding, traffic rumbling. Ordinary life going on all around them, like worker ants slaving away in the colony, nobody aware of anybody else’s life. Nobody aware of hers.
He moved in the bed and she hurried back into it, desperate to glean the last precious hour of their time together. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend it was night again and they still had some time.
But he was waking up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, rubbing his hands over his jaw with its darkening stubble.
Soon, he’d be leaving.
She was crying when he moved hard against her, his body heavy and warm.
‘Don’t be sad,’ he said, lowering his head and kissing the saltiness of her tears.
‘I’m not,’ she said, crying more. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to. I’ll miss you, I can’t bear it.’
‘You have to, we both have to.’
She’d never known that love could be so joyous and so agonising at the same time. Every caress took them closer to his leaving. Each time he touched her, she couldn’t block out the thought: Is this the last time he’ll ever do that? Will I ever see him again?
She could barely stop the tears. But she did, because she had to.
In the end, she lay silently in the bed watching him get ready. Just before he left, he sat beside her, pulled her close and kissed her as if she was oxygen he was breathing in.
Her hands clung to him, one curved tightly around his neck, the other cradling his skull. They kissed with their eyes closed so they’d never forget.
‘I have to go. I love you.’
She couldn’t speak in case she cried again.
‘Goodbye.’
He didn’t look back as he left and she wondered if that was the difference between men and women. Men looked forward, warriors focusing on the future. Women’s eyes darted everywhere. Searching, wondering, praying to some god to keep the people they loved safe.
She lay back in the bed still warm with the imprint of his body, and wondered if she would ever see him again.
The New Mexico sun was riding high in the sky when the Zest catalogue shoot finally broke up for lunch. Izzie Silver stood up and stretched to her full five feet nine inches, glorying in the drowsy heat that had already burnished the freckles on her arms despite her careful application of Factor 50.
Truly Celtic people – with milk-bottle skin, dots of caramel freckles and bluish veins on their wrists – only ever went one colour in the sun: lobster red. And lobster red was never going to be a fashionable colour, except for early-stage melanomas.
It was her second day on the shoot and Izzie could feel her New-Yorker-by-adoption blood slowing down to match the sinuous pace of desert life. Manhattan and Perfect-NY Model Agency, who’d sent her here to make sure nothing went wrong on a million-dollar catalogue shoot involving three of their models, seemed a long way away.
If she was in New York, she’d be sitting at her desk with the rest of the bookers: phone headset on, skinny latte untouched on her desk, and a stack of messages piled up waiting for her. The office was in a sleek block off Houston, heavy on glass bricks and Perspex chandeliers and light on privacy.
At lunch, she’d be rushing down to the little beauty salon on Seventh where she got her eyebrows waxed or taking a quick detour uptown into Anthropologie on West Broadway to see if they had any more of those
