Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
of lacerations over Steve’s arms and chest too. At the top of his leg the flesh had reformed, knobs of it over the old gash, but the muscles were shrunk and wasted. He was thin, and she saw the pull of muscles across his chest and back as his arms encircled her.
The length of their bodies touched together, hard and soft, unfamiliar and imperious.
She kissed the corner of his mouth and he turned his face to meet hers, his tongue seeking hers out. Annie’s hair fanned lazily over his bare shoulders. She felt him arch against her and she put her hand down to touch him, gently at first and then insistently until he breathed sharply and lifted her off her feet. He laid her down across the bed and knelt beside her.
He parted her legs and put his hand between them and then, with infinite gentleness, his mouth. The pleasure was like a knife, turning inside her, and she cried out to him.
They had been slow and patient before, but they were helpless in the current now. Steve lifted himself to look at her and then his mouth touched her thighs and the curve of her waist, then her breast. The waves seemed to break over them, deafening them with their roar. Annie’s mouth formed a word, inaudible, as she reached her arms up to him. There could be no holding back any longer. He came blindly up against her and she guided him until he found the place and joined them together at last.
There was an instant of shivering stillness.
Annie opened her eyes and saw the bare grey walls and the gold threads of sunlight spanning them. The gold light seemed to spill outwards to lap over them. It was hot and sweet over her skin and inside it and she rolled in Steve’s arm, finding him as he found her, question and answer. She was hungry now, ravenous with hunger, as Steve was, and they were the only way to feed one another. If he had seemed strange to her in that moment of stillness, Annie forgot the strangeness at once. He knew her, and he opened recesses within her that she had forgotten, or had perhaps never known. As her body moved against his, as she leaned over him so that her hair brushed his face, or as they lay side by side so that they could look into one another’s eyes, Annie was as supple as a girl again, but she was as knowing as a grown woman too.
At last they had taken each other as far as they could go. Annie’s head tipped back and her legs wound tighter around his. Steve was still for a moment, holding her there, and then he thrust again until she cried out and he felt the butterfly flutter of her muscles against him.
‘My love,’ he whispered. ‘Oh yes, my love.’
He held her with his love like a stone inside him, and when she was quiet again he let his face fall against the hollow of her shoulder and he gave himself up to her.
Annie’s eyes were languorously heavy when she opened them again. She saw the gold-flecked irises of Steve’s eyes, very close, and she smiled slowly. Their bodies were still joined, sticky and sweet, and their arms wound round each other. The room was quiet, and the murmur of traffic from the streets below seemed far distant. She knew that they were happy, here and now in this narrow space and time. She closed her eyes again.
They slept for a little while, dreamlessly, and when Annie woke up the sun had gone and the room was almost dark. She raised herself on one elbow, soundlessly, because Steve was still sleeping. She saw from the clock beside the bed that it was five o’clock, and she must leave in half an hour’s time. She let herself lie down again beside him for a moment, listening to his even breathing.
Something in the shape of the room, or perhaps the quality of the light, made her think of the last time she had seen Matthew, lying in the upstairs room of the house overlooking the square.
Memories stirred inside her, reality quickening again, and she moved sharply, blocking them out. Steve stirred and opened his eyes.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.’
She kissed him. ‘I did too. I must go home soon.’
But he reached up and put his arms around her neck, drawing her down on top of him so that the firm foundation of her resolve cracked wide apart.
‘Not yet. I want to make love to you again.’
His hands touched her and she lay back, protesting and then acquiescent, and at last as her body took her over again she was as demanding as Steve himself. They were slower this time, more calculating because of what they had learned already, but the final shock that took hold of Annie went deeper and burned her more fiercely than anything she had ever known before.
When it was over, Steve rolled away from her and lay on his back, staring up at the shadows over the ceiling.
He reached his hand out to touch his fingers to hers as they lay side by side and the recollection flooded over them at once.
‘Remember.’
She felt the pain of her injuries again, and the momentous joy of having escaped. For a moment neither of them was able to move, as if the weight of the wreckage reared up above them all over again.
‘I remember.’
Annie turned her head towards him then, and saw that there were tears at the corner of his eyes.
‘What is it?’ she asked, bewildered.
‘Now that you’re here, Annie, don’t go away. Don’t go.’
She looked away. ‘I must go. You know that I have to go home to my kids.’
There was a second’s pause, and then Steve sat up abruptly, his back to her. When he looked round again, she didn’t know whether she had really seen his tears. ‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘No. No, there isn’t any need.’ He couldn’t drive her home, of course. ‘I’ll go back on the tube. I bought myself a return ticket.’
Annie pushed back the covers and sat up. She collected her scattered clothes from the bedroom floor and went into the bathroom. When she came out again Steve was dressed too, waiting for her. He kissed her, lightly, on both cheeks and asked her, ‘Will you come to see me again soon?’
‘As soon as I can,’ she promised him.
They rode down together in the mirrored lift and Annie thought that their reflected selves looked sad, and strange.
Out in the street Steve called a taxi and put Annie into it.
‘Safe home.’
She nodded, suddenly distraught at having to part from him. She didn’t speak and the cab door slammed between them. She looked backwards, with her hand lifted, until the taxi turned the corner. And all the way home she sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, looking out at the lurid glow of the city’s evening lights.
Martin was sitting in the kitchen, with the boys eating their supper. Their three faces turned to her as she came in, and Annie felt that her mouth was bruised and burning, and that her hair was wild even though she knew that she had smoothed it in Steve’s bathroom.
‘Where’s all your shopping?’ Martin asked. ‘Shall I carry it in for you?’
Annie stared at them with the blood thumping in her head.
‘I didn’t buy anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all.’
There was a long silence, and Benjy’s alarmed face turned from one of them to the other.
‘I see,’ Martin said, deadly quiet.
Annie knew that he did see. In truth he must have seen all along, while she had pretended to herself that he was blind.
She turned away from the three of them and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She lay face down on the bed, stiff and cold and stony-eyed. She heard Martin putting the boys to bed, and then going downstairs again. She lay without moving for hours, hearing him moving about, and all the little sounds of ordinary life, but he never came up again. At last she fell into an exhausted sleep.
The dream of the bombing came again, redoubling its terror. In her dream Steve wasn’t there and when she woke up, bathed in cold sweat and