His muscles are rigid under my palms.
‘Jackson had the security team look into Jack. They threw up a load of old cases which had started to be investigated but been dropped, most because the victims were unwilling to testify or there wasn’t enough evidence.’
‘Jack? I just. I can’t believe it. I mean, he’s, he… Jack? I mean, I knew. He could have?—’
‘Jackson was irate when he found out but I think he was worried about telling me, worried about what I would do. He left it a day and asked his friends to get the details of the victims. Then he told me. I wanted to rip his fucking head off. Men like Jack deserve to go to hell. But Jackson kept telling me, and I suppose behind the anger, I knew that I couldn’t deal with it the way I wanted to. We couldn’t trust?—’
‘Me. You thought if you hurt him, I’d know and you couldn’t trust me.’
‘It’s not the way it sounds. I’m in the public eye enough as it is. We have to be careful.’
I try to put this all together. The way Gregory lives and deals. His morally grey, sometimes outright black world. But his reasons are… right.
I lift my palm to his cheek. ‘You can trust me.’
His face contorts and his eyes shift, soften, like that little boy. He shakes his head. ‘Jackson said there had to be another way. He went to see some of the girls, told them about you, us, but they wouldn’t testify.’
‘I can’t believe Jack could do that, that any human being could do that. There were so many times, so many nights when we were working together. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought; I didn’t think. I guess it’s hard to believe.’
Gregory takes my hands in his. I’m instantly protected. ‘We didn’t have a choice in the end. The only way was to make him confess, so that’s what we did.’
He lifts my hands to his lips. I watch as he moves. His usually perfect hair falls forwards, a strand covering his eyes as he gazes at me.
‘What did you do to him?’
‘No more than he deserved. Men like that make me sick. Fucking dregs of society. They deserve a fucking bullet between their legs. I’d never have let him go free once I knew. That’s the choice we gave him. Live in prison or die.’
‘Shit, Gregory, that’s?—’
‘He’d have been dead if he ever laid a finger on you again. He got off lightly.’
‘Kiss me,’ I whisper because I don’t know what else to say or how I feel about his confession.
He does. He kisses me slowly, in a way that liquefies me in his arms. He runs a hand up my right thigh, lifting my gown, then winds my legs around his waist. He lays me back onto the floor and runs a finger from my hip, across my stomach and up to my chest. The feel of his touch through the silk is smooth, elegant, not like the man he just described. I struggle to reconcile the two versions of him: dark, ferocious, tender and safe. But I’ve fallen for both.
I push up to place my knees either side of his hips and slowly pull my dress over my head…
After he’s made me see colours I’ve never seen before, I lie on his chest in front of the fire. As he kisses my brow, I swirl my index finger around the few hairs on his pecs.
‘What was it like growing up in South Africa? I mean South Africa the country, you know, not home life.’
‘Dark. Dangerous. There was a lot of crime and, though I was born right after apartheid ended, there was still a lot of entrenched racism and animosity.’
‘I can’t imagine a place like that.’
‘But South Africa is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen too. The coast is ethereal: high cliff drops, white sand, crashing waves, penguins. The land is lush, the deepest greens. And the animals, they’re proper: lions, elephants, rhinos.’
As he speaks, I visualise the green pastures with zebras grazing and lions bathing in afternoon sun. It’s as if I’m there, walking on the plains. Then the sky grows darker. I pass a cheetah devouring its blood-doused prey. I continue to walk south past two grey-brown hyenas with matted fur, scowling through a menacing laugh. The open plains turn to cliff tops: rocky, lifeless.
The cry of a child startles me. I peer over the cliff’s edge and see the familiar young boy in shorts, a shirt and braces. He sobs, his knees tucked tight into his chest, perched on the edge of a rock. A grey-haired man approaches from my left. I recognise him. He takes the boy’s hand and makes him stand. The boy stops crying and smiles at the man. My dad.
Dad smiles back, ruffles his hair then leads him down to the beach from the rock. I dart my head right to where I hear heavy breathing, almost snarl like. Pearson. He sneaks from rock to rock, moving closer to my dad and the boy. I know he wants to kill them. I try to move but my legs are rooted to the ground. I try to scream, to alert my dad, but nothing comes out. Pearson moves from behind the last rock standing between them and pulls a gun from the back of his stained, stonewashed jeans. I try again to scream, I try with all my might but it’s not until Pearson has his gun to my dad’s head that I’m able to make a noise.
Eventually, I scream, ‘Dad! Dad!’ and Pearson turns his gun on me.
I wake abruptly, panicking and hot. I’m alone in front of the rescinding fire. Gregory is in his jeans and on his phone, his back to me.
‘Don’t leave their side,’ he’s saying. ‘I don’t care, Mother. For once, would you do as I ask?’
