Now or Never

The others considered her to be a perfect mother, a role model, but what was a ‘perfect’ mother?

‘Where did you eat?’ Stuart was asking her.

‘The new wine bar. The food’s Italian,’ Alice replied.

As Stuart kissed her he smiled. ‘And you didn’t have garlic! Good girl!’

Good girl! Alice could feel her jaw tensing and her body chilling. But Stuart was as oblivious to the signals her body was sending out as he was to the fact that he was patronising her, Alice recognised.

‘No, leave the light on. Please,’ Oliver demanded softly as Maggie swung her legs out of their bed and at the same time reached out to dim her bedside lamp.

It had been Dan who had encouraged her to sleep naked, but, despite the praise Oliver heaped on her body and their lovemaking, she was still self-consciously uncomfortable about him seeing her unclothed in a way she had not been with Dan. Because she was older than Oliver and her body was no longer that of a young girl?

‘I’m only going to the bathroom,’ she told him.

‘Why is it that you always want to hide yourself from me, Maggie?’ Oliver asked her quietly. ‘I love looking at your body. I love looking at you.’

He watched as she veiled her expression from him, dropping her lashes. She had so many small endearing habits that entranced him. She called herself old, but she wasn’t. Her body was slender but softly curved, her skin creamily pale—as a redhead, she had told him ruefully, she had never been able to sunbathe successfully. The natural curves of her body aroused him in a way that shrunk, dieted-down, or unnaturally enhanced supposedly ‘perfect’ female figures never could.

When they had first become lovers he had tried to persuade her to wear soft loose clothes—and no underwear. Although she had tried to hide it, he had seen from her expression that he had shocked her. A little grimly, he had reflected then that at least there was something that she had not experienced with her ex-husband. His request had not been motivated by anything demeaning or controlling, but simply by his overwhelming feelings of love for her. Just to watch her move, just to see her lift her hand and grab at her wild curls—a habit she had—and to see her body move naturally and sensually flooded him with appreciation and desire. And now knowing that her body was holding and nurturing their child added a dimension to those feelings, to his love, that ran so deep and so powerfully that it went way beyond anything he had ever imagined he might experience.

In the bathroom Maggie looked silently into the mirror as Oliver’s reflection joined her own. Standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her, bending his head to breathe in the scent of her skin.

‘I love you, Maggie,’ he murmured to her as he turned her round and kissed her. A slow, gentle, gifting kiss that melted away her hesitation.

‘I love you too,’ she answered, and meant it. How could she not love him? She closed her eyes as he stroked her skin. His hands cupped her breasts, his mouth caressing her throat. Desire ran through her veins, hot, heavy, drugging. In the mirror she could see her breasts swelling and lifting, her nipples taut. This pregnancy would change her body for ever. In about eight months a baby would be suckling greedily on the nipples Oliver was now gently plucking. The thought made her tremble with awe and excitement.

Here, protected by Oliver’s love and desire, she could ignore the outside world, but she knew that Nicki wouldn’t be the only person to criticise her.

There had been an increasingly antagonistic reaction to pregnancies like hers in the press over recent months, a passionately attacked and defended debate on the moral implications of such situations.

The irony of what she was doing was not lost on Maggie. As a girl, her generation had made full use of the contraceptive pill to prevent and delay pregnancy, thus interfering with the cycle of nature. And now that same generation was interfering with nature once again, only this time …

She heard Oliver groan as he reached for her hand and placed it against his body.

His erection was hard, his penis bulging and full, the veins standing out against his skin—a young man’s erection. The sight of it made her shiver with sensuality. Slowly she caressed him with her fingers, fiercely barricading her mind, her memory against the intrusion of another life and another man.

Without releasing him she knelt down and took him slowly and skilfully into her mouth, caressing the head of his penis with her lips as she savoured the taste and feel of him before sliding her tongue along its stiff length.

Above her Oliver groaned out loud, burying his hands in her hair without constraining her, allowing her the freedom to dictate their intimacy.

Still holding him, Maggie licked teasingly around the distended head of his erection, using her lips and tongue to deliberately make him shudder with need before she took him back in her mouth. Holding him in its wet warmth, she caressed him with increasing intensity, taking him deeper and deeper, relishing the feel and taste of his flesh in this the most intimate of lover’s ways. As she had known he would, he withdrew from her before he came, finding her own wetness with gentle fingers before he eased himself carefully into her.

No matter how often they made love it always surprised her that she climaxed so quickly and easily with him. Somehow it was as though the deepest part of herself and her body refused to accept the shackles of inhibition imposed by a society that said that she ought to feel ashamed of the maturity of her body.

Oliver had gathered her up before he entered her, supporting her body, and now as he let her slide back down to the floor he paused for a moment before finally releasing her to kiss her mouth with deeply tender passion.

In the early days of their courtship when she had often refused to allow him to give her oral sex, he had demanded, ‘Why won’t you let me?’

Somehow she couldn’t explain to him that for her generation such an act from a man to a woman had been a much rarer pleasure than it was for his generation; a gift given on special days, at heightened moments of desire, rather than an accepted part of a familiar lovemaking ritual.

‘I love the taste of you, the feel of you, the desire of you,’ Oliver had told her passionately. ‘Please don’t deny those pleasures to me, Maggie.’

Hand in hand they went back to their bed, Oliver insisting on tucking her carefully beneath the duvet before joining her.

‘Forget about Nicki and the others,’ he whispered to her as he kissed her goodnight.

Forget? Maggie wished that were possible!

‘Stuart …’

In the darkness of their bedroom, Alice tried to reach for Stuart’s hand, but he pulled away from her, turning over, his back to her.

‘Leave it, will you, Alice?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not have an in-depth inquest. So I lost a bloody erection! So what? It happens all the time. You making a drama out of it isn’t going to alter anything.’

Her making a drama out of it? Alice suppressed her desire to point out to him that she hadn’t particularly wanted to have sex in the first place and that he had been the one to suggest it.

But she could feel Stuart’s tension, and instinctively she wanted to comfort him. To reassure him, to reach out and hold him; but just as instinctively she knew he would not want her to. She could feel how shocked and disbelieving he was.

On his own side of the bed, Stuart lay staring into the darkness. Never once in all the years they had been married had he suffered an erection failure. Never. Ever.

His eyes burned as though they were filled with grit, his body gripped by tension and a sickening sense of powerlessness. He knew why it had happened, of course. Of course! How could he not? It didn’t need a series of expensive counselling sessions with a shrink to tell him. The miracle was perhaps that it hadn’t happened before!

From his childhood he could hear his father’s voice exhorting him, ‘Be a man, Stuart.’

Be a man! His father had been a man. A very special man. Stuart had known all the time he was growing up that he could never hope to rival him, that his father belonged to a rare and exclusive club whose doors would be for ever barred to him. His father was, after all, a hero and he had the medals to prove it; the medals, and the stories, the reminiscences and tales of comrades who had not possessed his own luck and who had perished.

Stuart could still vividly remember how different his father had been when he had got together with his ex-comrades. At home he had been a distant, commanding figure, constantly exhorting Stuart to live up to his maleness. He had died shortly after the twins had been born.

‘A man needs sons, Stuart,’ he had pronounced approvingly after their birth. Sons … another marker of a man’s maleness.

It was all rubbish, of course, and his views would be ridiculed now—Stuart knew that. Men and women were equal now. Equal …

Stuart closed his eyes against the burning pain seizing him. Just for a second he longed to bury himself against Alice’s sleepy warmth, to take comfort from her and be comforted by her, but how could he, when he knew …?

What was she going to say when she found out? Would she despise him? Reject him? Blame him for letting her down?

Could he blame her if she did? He had tried to prevent it happening, but all the time, from the first moment he had met Arlette Salcombe, he had known it was inevitable. That single look between them, that meeting of glances. He had known then. And now there was no way out and no way back!

5

‘What do you mean, a man telephoned asking for me?’ The anger in Laura’s voice made Joey cower away from her.

‘What man, Joey?’ Laura demanded. ‘What did he say?’ She could feel the heat in her face. Her heart was hammering against her chest, driven by anger. Anger and not excitement, no way was she going to allow it to be excitement.

Her fingers curled into her palms, making tight fists. It had to be Ryan. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. He must have got the number from Human Resources. He had no right to ring her. No right to …

‘What did he say? Did he tell you his name?’ Her voice rose, sharpening with each word, frightening Joey even more. He had intuitively picked up on Laura’s antagonism towards his mother and that increased his fear of her.

‘Did he tell you his name?’ Laura was shouting now, too wrapped up in her own fear to be aware of Joey’s. Right now he was just an irritating child who, through either malice or stupidity, was refusing to give her the information she so desperately needed.

‘Joey?’ Laura exploded, grabbing hold of him and giving him an impatient little shake before she could stop herself. Almost immediately she released him, but it was too late. Just as she did so Nicki walked into the kitchen.

‘Let go of him! Let go of him, Laura!’

Furiously Nicki rushed to protect her son, kneeling down to gather him up in her arms as Laura released him.

‘How dare you? How dare you touch my child?’ she blazed. ‘Joey, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she comforted her son, rocking him in her arms as Laura looked on in a mixture of contempt and bitterness.

‘That’s right!’ she threw at Nicki. ‘You rush to protect your precious child—but you can’t always be here to protect him, Nicki. After all, I haven’t forgotten that there was no one to protect me from you!’ Instinctively Laura tried to defend herself and her actions.

‘What? I never did anything to hurt you!’ Nicki denied immediately.

‘You’re lying,’ Laura spat out, giving her a thin-lipped, acid smile. ‘But then you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t hurting Joey. And if I were you, instead of treating him like a baby, I’d spend a bit more time making sure he knows how to take a telephone message properly.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Joey protested from the comfort of Nicki’s arms. ‘The man didn’t say any name. He just asked if you were here.’

Laura had been terrifying her son half to death simply because of a phone call? Nicki’s mouth compressed.

‘Whoever he is, Laura, if he wants to speak to you enough he will ring back.’

Laura’s face burned even hotter as Nicki made no attempt to conceal the smugly superior tone of her voice. Immediately she reacted to it, saying fiercely, ‘It’s typical of you to think what you’re obviously thinking, but you’re wrong. I don’t want him to ring back. In fact, I don’t want to speak to him at all. To speak to him or to see him. You see, unlike you, I have no intention of becoming involved in an affair with a married man or having sex with him behind his wife’s back.’

As she listened to Laura’s outburst Nicki’s face went white. Releasing Joey, she told him huskily, ‘Joey, go up to your room and watch your videos for a while before it’s time for school, will you, darling?’

Over Joey’s blond head their glances fought, neither of them allowing herself to give way. As soon as the door had closed behind Joey Nicki demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you’re trying to say, Laura?’

Laura shot her a bitterly cynical glare, hating what was happening but powerless to stop it. The words, the pain, the anguish had been dammed up inside her for too long to be controlled, now that she had released them.

‘What do you think I’m trying to say? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. And don’t bother trying to lie about it. I was there! I heard you. They’d sent me home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to tell them that there wasn’t any point because there wasn’t anyone there to look after me.’ She gave a mirthless smile. ‘After all, my mother had only been taken into hospital a few days earlier. To give my father a rest, that’s what they’d said when I went to see her. But it wasn’t a rest he was getting, was it, Nicki? He wasn’t resting on the bed in the guest room at all, was he? No. He was lying there whilst you—’

‘Stop it.’ Appalled and sick with shock, Nicki covered her ears, her shock increasing as Laura flew at her, tearing her hands from her ears as she screamed.

‘No! You will listen, just as I had to listen to the pair of you! Have you any idea how disgusting it sounds hearing your own father sobbing with sickening lust whilst his whore relieves him? I heard every word. Every sound … every sound,’ Laura stressed savagely.

Tears of rage were pouring down her face—a face that was contorted into an expression of fury and loathing, the strength of the emotion emanating from her such that Nicki could almost feel it heating the air between them.

In contrast she felt icy cold with shock. She could feel herself shivering as the nausea churned unpleasantly in her stomach. She tried to defend herself, to stop the flood of obscenity pouring from Laura’s mouth, protesting, ‘Laura, it wasn’t like that! You don’t understand …’

‘No, I don’t!’ Laura agreed furiously. ‘I don’t understand how my father could have possibly wanted to take you to bed in my home, my mother’s home, whilst she was dying in a hospital bed. I don’t understand how he can ever have wanted to touch you, never mind do the things he did to you.

‘You couldn’t wait, could you, Nicki? You wanted to desecrate my home, my mother, so badly that you couldn’t even wait for him to undress you. I heard you begging him, screaming to him to take you, to fill you. I heard him … My mother was dying and the pair of you were shagging each other like animals. You couldn’t wait for her to die, could you, Nicki? You couldn’t wait to take her place. You didn’t wait, did you?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Nicki protested, white-faced. ‘Laura, please listen to me.’

‘Listen to you?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s what he wants me to do! My boss … the reason I have had to come here, the one place where I know I’ll be able to resist the temptation to give in to him, because you’re here, Nicki, and every time I look at you I remember what you did and how much I hated you then and still hate you now for it.

‘A married man with a dying wife. Was it good for you, Nicki, knowing that she was dying? Did that add that extra bit of something to your enjoyment? Did you think of her when my father was—?’

Laura gasped in shock as Nicki slapped her face. The sound ricocheted through the kitchen as her head snapped back.

Her eyes glittering with contempt, Laura ran to the back door, pulling it open.

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