Taming the Beast (20 page)

Then he lifted his head, looked into her eyes and slapped her hard across the face. ‘Dear God, Sarah! Why won’t you let me do this right? Why won’t you let me treat you with respect?’

Sarah knew that he could not see how ridiculous his question was. He didn’t see that biting her legs and slapping her face was less respectful than a mutually satisfying screw. She didn’t know why that intrigued her when any sane person would be disturbed. She could see the twisted logic, the distorted morality, the dangerous self-justification; it’s just that she didn’t mind.

‘I don’t want respect. I want you to fuck me.’

He opened his mouth wide, as if to roar, but the sound that came out was an injured whimpering. He rolled off her and on to the floor. ‘Shit.’ He was panting and clutching his chest. Pitiful wounded beast. ‘We’re not doing this, Sarah. Not like this.’

Sarah sat up. Her hands were shaking. ‘You’re a bastard, you know that?’

‘It isn’t going to be like this.’ He did not look at her.

‘Fine.’ Sarah stood up and put herself together again. She watched him the entire time, afraid that he would never look at her again. ‘Tell me how it’s going to be.’

‘You’re going to stop sleeping around, stop dressing like a tart, and stop acting as though I’m a novel distraction from your real life. I am going to get answers for all my questions about you.’

‘And then what? Then we can have sex?’

‘When I see that you’re ready to commit yourself properly, you’ll come and live with me.’

Sarah laughed. ‘Will I?’

‘Yes.’ He seemed to notice for the first time that his deflating penis was outside of his pants. He made another noise from his throat, like an animal dying slowly on a country road. ‘Until then there will be no more touching; it’s too difficult.’

Sarah considered him. He was old, pathetic, crumpled, mean. He’d been back in her life for three days, and was ordering her around already. He put conditions on her that were arbitrary and nonsensical. He was contradictory and cruel. She wanted to hate him. She wanted to tell him to shove his rules and orders up his dirty old man arse. No, she didn’t. She wanted to do everything he said, twice as well as he told her to, then he would be delighted with her, and he would love her and touch her forever.

‘Okay,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll play.’

When Jamie came over a few days later, Sarah knew she had to tell him about Daniel. It would be impossible to spend the day with him and stay silent about something so huge. But before she could even consider talking to him, she needed to get off. Sexual frustration was a new sensation and one she did not like at all. If Daniel wanted to play some bizarre waiting game then that was his prerogative but there was no way Sarah was giving up her greatest pleasure.

‘This is a nice welcome,’ Jamie said, as she pushed him against the wall.

‘I missed you.’ Sarah untucked his T-shirt and slid her hands up over his belly and chest. ‘It feels like a long time since I’ve seen you.’

‘It’s always too long for me.’ Jamie pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it on the floor. ‘I think about you all the time, you know that?’

‘I know. Me too.’ But even as she said it she was thinking about Daniel.

Sarah knew that Jamie had come from nappies and feedings and whingeing, and would not be anywhere near as aroused as she was. She led him to the sofa, finished undressing him, and took him in her mouth. She tried to stop thinking about Daniel, but couldn’t. She let her mind go, imagining this was Daniel in her mouth, under her hands. She was driving him crazy, making him weep with how good she was at this. Making him regret every day she had spent perfecting her techniques on other men.

She was jolted by a hand on her forehead. ‘Stop.’

She looked up, breathless. Jamie’s eyes were half-closed, his skin ruddy. ‘Come here.’

Sarah took off her clothes, keeping her eyes on the erection that could belong to anyone. The dick was what she had to have. It didn’t matter who she was thinking about, or wanting, or missing. She just needed to have that thing inside her, needed her feverish, awkward body to be invaded. She needed to be fucked back to normality.

But it did matter. For the first time ever, it mattered who she was with, and her body knew it mattered and wouldn’t cooperate at all. Jamie was a real trooper. Sarah couldn’t imagine what he was thinking as he endured countless position adjustments, three location changes, and long periods of determined panting broken up by frustrated directives. Maybe he was thinking about work, or Shelley, or something else that would slow him down. Sarah really was very impressed with his stamina and control, but it was futile. Daniel Carr had trapped her orgasm inside her, and only he could get it out.

‘Just go ahead and finish,’ Sarah said, defeated and sore.

‘What’s wrong, Sar? What am I doing wrong?’

Sarah told him he was wonderful, that the problem was with her. His jaw stiffened. ‘We’ll try something else.’ They tried three more positions, at various speeds. Sarah told him again that it just wasn’t going to happen.

‘Fine.’ He withdrew.

‘No,’ she said, pulling him back towards her. ‘You finish, it’s okay.’

‘Let me go down on you.’

‘Jamie, no.’ Sarah considered oral sex as something to give, not receive. She had explained it to him before, how it made her feel as though she was a saucer of milk being lapped up by a greedy kitten. How passivity felt like dying.

‘Please, Sar. Let me try.’ Jamie knelt on the floor between her legs and rubbed the insides of her thighs. His cock was pointing at her, red and angry. ‘If you hate it I’ll stop. Please?’

Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever.’

Jamie pushed his sweat soaked fringe off his forehead and disappeared between her thighs. Sarah was immediately uncomfortable and tried to wriggle away, but he grabbed her hips with both hands and held her still. After a couple of minutes she was wondering if she had been too hasty in excluding this act from her sex life. Another few minutes and Sarah found herself gasping for air and clawing at Jamie’s shoulders. She remembered him telling her that Shelley was very bossy in bed, and that she only ever came from being tongued. Sarah said a silent thankyou to Shelley, and then lost all control of her thought processes. For a brief, blissful time she forgot Daniel, and the fast shrinking possibility of her independent life.

They slept through the afternoon, curled up in each other on the living room floor. Sarah woke to see him opening his eyes, blinking at her and smiling in a disoriented, dreamy way. She smiled back, sat up and lit a cigarette. She could not put it off any longer.

‘I need to tell you something.’

He held onto her waist and pulled himself to a seated position. ‘Yeah?’

‘It’s about the bloke I went out with the other night.’

Jamie’s face hardened. ‘The biter?’

‘Yeah. Well, I think he might be…’

‘A psycho?’

‘…more than a passing thing. I think things could become serious.’

Jamie looked right at her. His expression did not change one little bit.

‘Anyway, I wanted you to know.’

Jamie stared at her for a full five seconds. ‘Right.’ He picked up her cigarettes and lit one. That was a very bad sign. ‘Well, this is a shock.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, I’ve been trying to win you for all these years. Not just me. Heaps of men have tried to win you over. We’ve all been so stupid, running around after you, treating you kindly, showing you respect, never once suspecting what you really wanted in a man was the willingness to beat the crap out of you.’ He drew back on the cigarette as though he was a pack a day man. His voice was deadly calm. ‘I just wish you’d told me earlier, Sarah. Would’ve saved us both a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I kept thinking I was doing something wrong, and it turns out I was. I wasn’t hurting you enough.’

‘That isn’t it.’

‘No. It’s just that I’m not who you want.’

Sarah pressed her lips together because she could not lie and she could not twist the knife in his guts. She got them both a beer. Jamie drained his in less than a minute. Sarah got him another and another cigarette. When she handed them to him she saw a flicker of warmth in his eyes. It was enough to prove that he hadn’t been entirely frozen by her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t be so hostile,’ she said.

‘How am I supposed to be?’

‘You could be supportive. You could be my friend.’

He snorted. ‘You want me to congratulate you?’

‘Look, Jamie. This may not be what you want to hear, but I assure you it is the greatest compliment I’ve ever given. I value you as a friend a million times more than I value you as a lover. As a lover you are part of a very large and not particularly prestigious group, as a friend you’re it. You’re my one and only.’

Jamie’s mask cracked. He bit his lip, swiped at his eyes. ‘But I’m not, am I? Now you have someone else who is more than a lover.’

‘I don’t know
what
he is yet. But he isn’t you.’ Sarah put her head on his shoulder; he shrugged his arm around her. ‘And besides, you have someone else too. You got married, you have a kid, and a family and a whole… You have this whole life, and I have nothing except dreams and work and sex. Maybe I want to belong to someone.’

‘I just… I suppose I feel that you belong to me. These last few months I’ve felt that we’re a real couple. We hang out together, we’re best friends, we can practically finish each others sentences. And we make love. I mean, what’s the difference between what we have and a full-blown relationship?’

‘You tell me. You’re the one who goes home to a full-blown relationship every night.’

They lapsed into silence again. Sarah had wanted to get it all out at once, but Jamie was so upset at the news that there was someone, that she thought telling him who that someone was would send him over the edge. Besides, it wasn’t like her relationship with Daniel was speeding ahead. If things continued the way they had been, then it would be a hundred years before he had sex with her. Sarah decided that publicly naming Daniel Carr as the love of her life could wait until he’d at least gotten over himself and fucked her.

During the long silence, Jamie dressed himself and Sarah sat below him and watched. When he sat on the sofa to tie his shoe laces she got to her knees and repeatedly kissed his arms and hands. He swatted at her and giggled, and she tied his laces for him while he stroked her hair.

‘So,’ he said, taking both her hands, ‘who is this remarkably fortunate man?’

Shit. Her plan to not tell him depended on him not asking. She couldn’t,
couldn’t
, lie to him. Shit.

‘You can meet him soon. I promise.’

‘That’ll be fun.’ Jamie brought her hands to his mouth and kissed each one in turn. ‘What’s his name?’

Shit. Shit. Shit. Sarah cleared her throat. ‘Daniel.’

Jamie was quiet for a while. Sarah hoped desperately that he wouldn’t remember, that he wouldn’t make the connection. She held her breath until he spoke again.

‘Daniel who?’

Sarah climbed up beside him on the sofa and lifted his arm up around her shoulders. She wrapped her own arm around his waist and squeezed. ‘Carr,’ she said softly.

Another extended, airless pause. Then, ‘I suppose Carr is a pretty common name, but still, it’s a freaky coincidence.’

‘Jamie.’ Sarah tasted his name as she said it. It tasted like salt. ‘It isn’t a coincidence.’

The arm around her shoulders stiffened. It felt like he was going to stay that way forever. Sarah was held so tight to him that she couldn’t turn her head to see his face. She could imagine it though, frozen and hard like the rest of him.

‘Sarah,’ Jamie said, his bicep pulsing against Sarah’s neck. ‘Tell me that was a joke.’

‘He’s come back for me.’ Sarah felt as though she’d swallowed a mouthful of sea water. The salt in her mouth and her gut made her queasy. She wished she could see his face. She thought about how she had felt when Daniel showed her the photos he’d jerked off to for eight years. She wondered if such a sad, creepy pervert could possibly be worth smashing Jamie over. But it didn’t matter if it was worth it; it just
was
.

Jamie slid his arm out from behind her. He stood up, walked to the window and put his fist through it. The glass was old and dirty; it broke in lethal looking shards, each one big enough to go straight through a person’s heart. Jamie picked up his jacket and wrapped it around his bleeding hand. Then he picked up his keys and wallet from the coffee table and walked out the door.

After Jamie smashed Sarah’s window, he went home and had a fight with Shelley. She asked him the perfectly reasonable question of what the hell had happened to his hand, but even knowing it was a perfectly reasonable question Jamie could not possibly answer her in a reasonable way. He told her to stop harassing him. He told her that he was sick of her always nagging him and looking at him with suspicion. He told her that just because they were married it didn’t mean he had to tell her what he was doing every second of the day. Attack is the best form of defence.

Shelley pointed out that asking why he was bleeding all over the kitchen floor was hardly nagging. She said that she didn’t want to know what he was doing every second of the day; just what he was doing at the time of his injury. Jamie swore at her and went outside.

It’s impossible to win an argument when you know you’re in the wrong. It’s impossible to tell your kind, concerned, endlessly patient wife that the reason you’re a bloody mess is that the woman you adore, the woman who is more precious to you than your own flesh and blood, the woman you’ve spent your life trying to make happy, is in love with another man. How could he possibly tell Shelley that he wanted to die because Sarah loved someone else as much as Jamie loved Sarah? Not just someone else. Not ju
s
t another man. Sarah loved a cruel, sadistic, manipulative criminal. Sarah loved the man whose damage Jamie had spent the last eight years trying to undo.

Shelley came to him after an hour or so. She sat beside him and unwrapped his clumsily bound hand. ‘I don’t think it needs stitches,’
she said, touching her fingertips to the jagged line of dried blood. ‘It’s stopped bleeding.’