Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
took her plate away, and her cup. The fire had settled into a red glow. He knelt in front of her for a moment and they looked at each other. Then Josh took her hand, turning it over very gently, as if to ask, Well?
Julia leaned forward and kissed his mouth.
‘Julia,’ he said softly. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
There was no need for her to answer. In the fireplace a log fell, sending up a scarlet fountain of sparks.
Josh was very gentle, and very deliberate. He unbuttoned her clothes, understanding the hooks and fasteners, and laid them gently aside. In the past, in her awkward grapples with boys, Julia had wondered why it was all so uncomfortable and undignified. It was different with Josh, of course. He made undressing seem simple and natural. Yet when she felt the cool air on her skin, she was suddenly embarrassed. She wrapped her arms around herself, to defend her nakedness.
‘I would like to look at you,’ Josh whispered. ‘May I do that?’
Slowly, Julia let her arms drop. She faced him, innocence overlaid with boldness. The firelight brought a glow of colour to her pale skin. Josh heard his own breathing in the stillness.
He looked at her, greedy, but holding himself back.
Josh loved women, but Julia wasn’t like the girls he usually chose. He liked full-breasted girls with rounded hips and peachy flesh that he could bury himself in. For Josh, ever since he had turned twelve, the varied appeal of women’s bodies had depended on their utter difference from his own. But Julia had no opulent curves, and her hips and stomach were as flat as a boy’s. She was tall and he was surprised now, seeing her naked, by her fragility. Her bones looked fine enough to snap under his hands, and her breasts were tiny, with pale pink nipples. The separate parts of her were like a boy’s, and yet they added up to nothing like a boy at all. Just in the way that her legs crooked, in the way that her shoulders sloped, and the way she looked at him under her dark eyelashes, she was more female than any woman he had ever seen.
And just as knowing. She had picked him out, after all, with total conviction. There was an added charge in that.
Josh breathed out, a long breath. He couldn’t hold himself back from her any longer. He put his mouth to one of her small, hard breasts. Her skin tasted faintly sweet, like honey. He felt her breath warm in his hair, and then he pulled her against him, she was supple, like a sappy willow wand.
Josh took her hand, guiding it.
‘You could take off my clothes, too.’
Julia drew back a little, and undid the buttons of his plaid shirt.
She saw the curling blond hair on his chest, the sun-reddened hollow at the base of his throat, and then the developed muscles of his shoulders and arms.
‘Go on,’ Josh ordered her.
She undid the buckle of his belt.
When Josh was naked too he laid her against the sofa cushions, very carefully, as if she was precious. Over his shoulder, through half-closed eyes, Julia watched the fire’s glow. The silky feel of bare flesh against her own was surprising, exciting. She had though that when the moment came she might be afraid. She wasn’t afraid, at all. She felt hot and clear-headed at the same time, and there was a pleasurable painful knot inside her.
‘Julia,’ Josh said.
On the table beside the door, the telephone began to ring.
Under his breath Josh swore, very comprehensively.
He wrapped his shirt around himself and went to answer it. At the other end a girl said, Josh? It’s Stella.’
‘Uh, hello. Hi there.’
He glanced round. Julia was lying where he had left her, hidden from him now by the sofa back.
‘Josh, I’ve got something to tell you. You won’t like it much. I’m pregnant.’
He stared down at the angular black lines of the receiver, blinking, trying to take the words in. ‘You what?
‘I’m pregnant. I’ve been to the doctor. It’s all quite certain. I’m sorry, Josh.’
Josh was usually very careful. His boyhood hero, Bim Hassell the sawmill manager’s son, had told him always to carry rubbers in his wallet. That was long before Josh had needed anything of the kind, but Bim’s muttered warnings had sunk in. Josh had developed his own code in the years since then. He wasn’t faithful, or reliable, but he wasn’t callous either. And yet, in the bed upstairs with Stella’s legs round his waist, he had let her whisper, ‘Don’t use that thing. I want to feel you inside me. It’ll be all right. It’s my safe time.’
Josh remembered. He had come like a dive from thirty thousand feet.
He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. Look, don’t worry. We can fix things up. It happens you know.’
‘You don’t understand, do you? You don’t know what it’s like.’ She was almost screaming now. ‘Ring me, Josh. Ring with a doctor’s name.’
Stella hung up.
Joshua put the receiver back in its cradle. He unwrapped his shirt and put it on properly, buttoning the cuffs. He was thinking about a baby. Not a baby yet. A mysterious sliver of life, like a tadpole, inside Stella. He had put it there, on an evening like this.
He saw that Julia was sitting up, her arms folded on the back of the sofa and her chin resting on them. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Some bad news.’ It wasn’t nothing. Only nothing to do with this Julia. He walked round the end of the sofa and stood looking down at her. Her arms and legs suddenly seemed childlike and her face had lost its dreamy, feminine mystery. She was hardly more than a baby herself.
What had he been doing?
Josh bent down and picked up the tidy pile of her clothes. He held them out to her. ‘Here you are,’ he said gently. ‘Put them on.’
Julia was bewildered. Surely a telephone call couldn’t change everything so disastrously?
‘What’s wrong? What have I done?’
You asshole, Josh repeated to himself. You stupid jerk.
‘You haven’t done anything.’ He stooped down so that their faces were level. ‘Listen. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?’
She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters. Don’t give yourself to me. Stay the way you are for a bit longer, okay?’
‘I want you. Josh, I …’ She held her hand out to him. He took it, and replaced it in the shadowed fold of her lap.
‘Do what I say.’
There was a note in his voice that stopped her even trying to argue. Julia stood up with her cheeks burning. She turned away from him and dressed herself, her fingers stiffly fumbling with the buttons that Josh had undone so deftly.
When they were both ready he said lightly, ‘Good girl. Now I’ll take you out and buy you some dinner. You must be hungry after losing your breakfast on the airfield.’
Julia fought back her humiliation. Obediently, she followed him out to dinner.
They went to a pub, with oak settles and beams and another log fire in the welcoming dining room, but the spontaneous happiness of their day together was gone. Julia talked as brightly as she could but she felt awkward and miserable, afraid that she had disappointed him in some way that she didn’t understand.
And Josh was preoccupied with thoughts that didn’t concern her.
At the end of the evening Josh took her back to the cottage at the end of the track. Courteously he showed her the bathroom, and the bedroom opposite his at the top of the stairs. There was a single bed in it that