Her dark eyes widened, her mouth parted. “What do you mean?”
“Ray, I don’t want to ever piss on your parade. I don’t want to be that man that douses your spark and stops you from being you because that’s why I feel the way I do about you.” He couldn’t say the words he needed to. “But I can’t wait here thinking about what we’d do if you didn’t come home one night.”
“Like Grace?”
He nodded. “Like Grace.”
“Jonny, I…”
“I know. Grace wasn’t a risk taker. She’d never jumped into a freezing cold tarn or fell off a tree because she’d scaled it to the top or climbed up the sheer face of Bleak Low. It was a freak accident where she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if it was just me, Ray, I could save you every single fucking time and I still will. But my kids love you. And I can’t put them in a position where they risk losing someone they’re starting to see as being a mother-figure.”
She looked like he’d just hit her.
Jonny rested his back against the kitchen units and watched, waiting for her reaction, knowing that if he touched her now he’d probably break and beg her to choose them.
“You’ve saved me countless times over the years. But I’ve been saving others for just as long. That’s what I do every day when I’m teaching: I look after the kids in my school. I help them with their arguments and fallings out, or when they don’t feel loved because their parents are getting divorced or their dog dies or they can’t learn a spelling. I encourage them to take risks and be brave, but to be safe as well. You don’t want to keep Sadie in a glass house where she can watch the world but never enjoy it, do you?”
He shook his head.
“Me neither. And I won’t do that. I didn’t need to go to Manchester today, although I did buy some very nice new underwear while I was there. I went to Alex first with the pen drive I’d found with all these pictures on of gangsters and people who’d been killed and their murders not solved. Al wasn’t surprised but he hasn’t taken them to Garrison. I met Drew O’Malley and nearly crapped myself. I don’t want to be in that world, Jonny. I get my kicks from swimming in tarns and saving walkers who get lost on the peaks in a storm, not from mixing with the underworld that I’d rather pretend doesn’t exist. I don’t want you to have to keep saving me. I want you to want to save me. Occasionally. Like when there’s a woodlouse in the bathroom.”
He paused, not sure of what to say. Vulnerability wasn’t something he was used to feeling or dealing with. He wasn’t sure what she was offering or what he should be negotiating, or if he should be negotiating anything. Then she was there in front of him, wrapping her arms around him, pressing her breasts into his chest.
He held her because there was no way he could fight the urge to hold her close and scan her body with his fingers to make sure that she was unharmed. He dropped his head to her hair and inhaled, smelling the honey of her shampoo and the smoke from the city and her.
“I don’t know what to do.” It’s was the only thing he could confess.
“Then do nothing. Wait. Things will be clearer in the morning. I’m sorry I worried you. I’m sorry that I take risks. But I had to see because I didn’t trust what was happening.”
He kissed her, tasting her. She was there and at this moment she was his. And he was undeniably hers.
Her skin under her sweater was smooth and warm, the familiarity not curbing any of the need for her that he had. He felt her shiver under his touch, her body responding already. It was a boost every time, this way he could make her feel, knowing that there was no one else who was making her feel this way right now.
He wanted that to continue, for it just to be him. The idea of her being with anyone else tortured him, made him want to make her his in some caveman-like way, but Rayah was too independent to be owned, the way it should be. The way he wanted his daughter to grow up.
Thought became difficult as he became further absorbed into her body, her reading him as if he was a book purposely written just for her. Under her sweater, her breasts were firm in his hands, her nipples already hard.
“I’m sorry, Jonny.” Her words were uttered so quietly he didn’t quite hear them and didn’t understand what she was sorry for, why she was apologising and his mind couldn’t process what the reasons were.
“We need to get to a room.” His response was all he could muster, aware that Charlie might wander down, aware that he should be telling his eldest to quit chatting to his friend who was a girl and go to sleep, but parenting was something beyond him right now. He needed Rayah, needed to be inside her. Wanted that closeness, needed it.
“Downstairs.” It was one word, instructing him.
He didn’t want downstairs. He wanted her in his bed, staying there all night, not worrying about whether his kids found out that daddy was having a sleepover where Rayah stayed with him rather than downstairs.
“My bed.”
“No. Not tonight. Not until you’ve thought about this, Jonny.”
Her words acted like ice.
“Ray…”
“No.” She brought a finger to his lips. “You’ve told me how you feel and there’s more you need to think about. Don’t make this complicated. That’s what we’ve been trying to do all along – not make this complicated. Let’s not start now.”
He dropped his hands from her body and stepped back. His cock throbbed unhappily, release slipping away.
“I don’t want you to go.”
