Memory Lapse

by Kathleen O’Brien

  Its only real beauty was the French alcove bed, which nestled against one wall, sheltered from the prying eyes of the ceiling’s cherubs by a canopy. He had hoped it would create the illusion of a safe and separate world.

  But Laura was staring at the bed now, and her eyes were wide, her cheeks as ashen as if she was looking at some medieval torture device. He felt obscurely angry. What did she think was going to happen to her there? Did she really imagine that he would rip those silken ropes from the canopy’s swagged trappings and use them to tie her wrists to the bedposts?

  Never, he said again, silently, savagely. He would never let it come to that.

  He shoved the heavy bedclothes aside, exposing the pure white sheets below. And then he sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here,” he said softly.

  She came slowly, traversing the flowered carpet as if it were a continent that lay between them, each lush rose a mountain or a desert or a gulf that she must fight her way across. His heart pounded against his throat. The moonlight reached through her nightgown, outlining the shifting curves of her body as she walked.

  Finally, her breathing as labored as if she had indeed traveled many dangerous miles, she was in the shadow of the canopy, close enough for him to touch her.

  Somehow he forced himself to wait. It was enough, for now, that she had come to him on her own.

  When her breathing—and his—had returned almost to normal, he held out his hand. “Closer,” he said. Stiffly she gave him her hand, and he tugged her toward him, spreading his legs so that she fit snugly between them. Fighting the natural urges that burned through his thighs, he didn’t tighten them around her. He wanted her to feel protected, not imprisoned.

  Nor did he try to remove her nightgown. It was far, far too soon for that. Instead he leaned in, pressing his lips against the soft heat of her collarbone. As his mouth met her skin through the thin veil of cotton, her muscles clenched, and she drew air in hard, but she didn’t pull away.

  He kissed her lingeringly, then let his lips slide across her, exploring with slow, random circles. He was careful not to be too bold. Not yet. He roamed just low enough to feel the delicate thrust of her breast against his chin, just high enough to feel the underside of her chin against his forehead.

  Even this tiny intimacy made her breath accelerate again, and her fingers dug into his shoulders. Reaching out with both hands, he grasped the backs of her thighs, inching her even closer. With a low groan she bent over him, reaching down his back, and he felt the warm pressure of her breasts against his shoulder.

  Lifting his head, he pulled her erect and looked into her feverish eyes. “Talk to me, Laura,” he said. “Tell me what you're feeling.”

  She didn’t seem at first to understand him. “Weak,” she said after a pause, her voice small. “My legs feel weak.”

  “Come up here, then,” he murmured. Hardly touching her, he inched her gown up to midthigh, then, when her legs were bare, nudged the hollow behind her knee. “Hold on to me,” he said, bending her leg and raising it onto the bed. She lost her balance and grabbed his shoulders for support while he moved the other leg, as well.

  Oh, Laura. She was in his lap, her breasts tantalizingly in front of his lips.

  God, how warm she was. How easy it would be to take her now. When she straddled him like this, with only the fabric of his sweatpants between them, he could barely breathe for wanting her. He shifted, bringing her closer.

  “And now?” He caressed the swell of her buttocks with slow strokes. “Tell me what you're feeling now.”

  Her eyes were shut, her face tight and pale. “You,” she whispered. “I can feel you against me.”

  He pressed her in further, rocking his hips slightly, letting his heat find hers. “Does it frighten you?”

  She was breathing shallowly. “Yes,” she said on a sharp inhale. And then again on the exhale. “Yes.”

  He didn’t stop. He simply matched his rhythm to the rhythm of her breathing, and though she didn’t relax, she instinctively started to work with him. “But you like it?”

  She nodded. She had begun breathing through her mouth.

  “Tell me,” he insisted. He had, somehow, to keep communication open between them. Maybe that way he could hold on to her, maybe he could refuse to let the choking darkness take her. “Tell me.”

  “Yes,” she said between her small, gasping breaths. “Yes, I like it.”

  He inhaled deeply, determined to stay in control, although the rocking heat of her was driving him slowly insane. So far, her desire and her fear were hanging in a manageable balance, but it would take all his powers of restraint and concentration to keep it that way. One false move, he knew from past experience, and she would spiral away from him into a world of fear and blind resistance.

  He had hoped that, because he had already made love to her once, he would be less hungry, less driven, better able to modulate his reactions to keep time with her slower pace. But, if anything, knowing how glorious it could be had only intensified his longings, giving them a color and a scent and a shape. He was like a starving man who had been given one small taste of honey. He had to have more. He would do anything to get more.

  He skimmed his half-open mouth over the tips of her breasts, shivering as they pebbled under his lips. “I want to taste you,” he said, knowing the movement of his lips, the warm misting of his breath, would make her nipples continue to tighten painfully. He licked out, encountering the rough cotton against his tongue. “Will you take this off for me, Laura? Will you unbutton this and let me taste you?”

  Her breath caught, and she stiffened from shoulder to knee, but she brought one hand slowly to her breast, taking the topmost button between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing happened, though he could see her fingernails pressing whitely against the tiny nub of pearl. Nothing. Finally her legs tightened to the trembling point, and as a small cry escaped her lips, her hand fell roughly away.

  “I can’t,” she said, the hint of a sob distorting her words. “I can’t do it.” She began to push against his shoulders with the heels of her hands. “I can’t,” she said, her voice rising.

  “Shh.” He soothed her, stroking her back just as he had done in the conservatory this afternoon. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You don’t have to.” But his mind was reeling in a primitive frustration. Why was nakedness always the insurmountable problem? Why would she let him thrust against her in this maddening simulation of lovemaking but begin to panic when he merely suggested unbuttoning her gown? “You don’t have to.”

  He forced himself to be calm, taking the same deep breaths he was coaxing out of her. Let it go, he told himself. Don’t try to figure it out—just try to get past it. And did it matter, really, whether she was naked? His hands and lips could find her, find the exquisite honey of her, even through this flimsy layer of cotton, and it would have to be enough. There had been a black day, not so long ago, when he had been afraid he’d never be allowed to touch her again. Yes, this was more than enough.

  “You don’t have to,” he whispered again, and without another word closed his hungry lips around her breast, pulling her into him until her gown was wet and molded to her, almost no barrier at all. He groaned as the taste of her flooded through the flat, bleached flavor of the cotton—a warm, wonderful mixture of peach and musk and female mystery.

  She groaned, too, arcing her back as if in pain. Her hands still pushed at his shoulders, but she was breathing carefully... God, how valiantly she was trying, and how beautiful she looked, her face fiercely concentrating, her dark lashes dusting her cheeks, her mouth swollen, panting softly.

  He moved to her other breast, suckling, in and out, in time with her deep breaths, his hips thrusting gently, an erotic counterpoint.

  “Drew,” she said, like a prayer, and against his will his pace quickened, his mouth taking her deeper. A liquid heat poured through him, filling his senses to overflowing. He knew they had reached the danger area. He was ready. Too ready. But if he
pushed her too soon, she would panic, losing her momentum completely. Without taking his mouth from her breast, he slipped one finger between her legs, probing as gently as he could. She cried out, as if his touch was a brand, but he could feel that, in spite of her fear, she was ready, too.

  And thank God for that—he couldn’t wait much longer. This hot need was building inside him like floodwaters behind the wall of a dam. Holding her tightly against him, he shifted on the bed, and then he laid her back gently so that he knelt between her legs. He pulled the pillow under her head, murmuring her name, and then he touched her face. His fingers came away damp, slick with her tears.

  “Are you all right?” He brushed her hair from her cheeks, where it had stuck in a swelter of perspiration. “Laura, do you want to st—”

  “No! Oh, Drew, don’t stop...”

  She dug her nails into his back, arching against him. But it was as if her body and her brain were working at cross purposes, creating an irreconcilable paradox. Even as she ground her hips against his, urging him onward, tears lay in pools under her eyes. Were they tears of some complicated, intense emotion? Or of fear? He couldn’t tell.

  But, God help him, the deliberately sensual shifting of her body inflamed him nonetheless. She fit perfectly beneath him, and he knew she must be so close to her climax that she was floating dizzily in that dark, helpless place that comes just before the light. He was almost there himself. He could barely control his hands to slip off his sweatpants.

  “Laura, Laura...” He wanted to bring her back, to make her talk to him again. He wanted her to tell him how she felt, to assure him that the pleasure outbalanced the fear. He wanted her to tell him it was all right, that she understood he was acting out of love, out of longing, out of a crazed, suffocating need to possess her...

  He hiked up her gown with one hard motion, and the instant she felt the hot maleness of him against her bare skin, she gasped. He stopped, poised to enter her, desperate to enter her, but knowing he had to give her time to adjust. Slowly, with as much restraint as he could muster, he pressed.

  And then it was as if his mind collapsed. He felt the tension, the incredible, monstrous rejection as her body closed in on itself, turning him away. No. No. No. And yet he couldn’t deny it—the truth was there, palpable, like a locked door, a rejection indisputable and unendurable.

  He thought he might die. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to go ahead, go ahead. She was, as she had promised, so much smaller than he, just a little doll-like body of soft, easily rent female flesh.

  Oh, God, he thought wildly, was it really possible that he would even think of doing this terrible thing? He shook his head, desperately trying to clear it. It was like being caught in a riptide, swept along with no control at all. Horribly, the tide was inside him. She clearly thought it was coming, felt it in his legs, in his arms, maybe she even saw it in his face.

  “Go on,” she said in that stranger’s strangled voice, even though her body was shrinking from him, pulling away. She wrapped her hands around the bedposts, gripping with white fingers. No silk cords held them there, and yet suddenly he felt as guilty, as sickened by the sight as if he had tied them to the wood.

  “No!” He had no idea how he wrenched himself free of the tide but suddenly, in one blind move that felt like rage, he shoved her out from under him with a violence that rocked the canopy above them. With another desperate lunge he rolled away from her, and somehow he got himself away from the bed. He stood on legs that didn’t seem to belong to him, and snatching his sweatpants from the rumpled pile of bedclothes, he somehow yanked them up over his body.

  “No, God damn it,” he said savagely, leaning his head against the bedpost, letting the brocade trappings soak the sweat from his forehead. “I won’t do it, Laura. I won’t.”

  His breath was harsh and raw in the silence. She hadn’t moved an inch. She was still crying without making a sound, her nightgown bunched up around her hips, her hands still gripping the bedposts—as if she didn’t yet understand that she was free. Or didn’t want to be.

  “I'm sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I'm sorry.” He tried to think, but all he knew for sure was that his body was aching, throbbing, screaming for the completion he had denied it. His lungs seemed to be made of marble.

  “Laura, get up,” he commanded roughly. He couldn’t stand to see her there, couldn’t stand the reminder of what he had almost done.

  Finally a small, choked sob escaped her lips. “Oh, Drew...why?” She peeled her hands slowly from the posts and, dragging her nightgown down over her knees, curled up on her side, turning her face toward the pillow. “Why?” she echoed, her voice muffled.

  “Because it was wrong.” He turned wildly, wanting to fling the words at her, to flail her raw with the truth. His truth. “Because it was ugly and violent and wrong!“

  “Not if I wanted you to do it.” She made a queer little sound. “And I did want you...”

  “Do you think that makes any difference?” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. How in God’s name could she not understand? “Do you really think I'm willing to become a monster just because you tell me to?”

  “A monster?” With what seemed like a great effort, she sat up slowly, hugging her knees to her chest. Her eyes, swollen from crying, looked confused. “That’s not how it would have been. I couldn’t ever feel that way about you.”

  “Maybe not. But the point is that I would have!” The bedpost shook under the intensity of his clenched hands. Was she really so blind? What could he say to make her see? “Don’t you understand? I don’t want a lover who has to tie her hands to the bed to keep from shoving me away. I don’t want to make love to a woman who’s crying, for God’s sake. A woman who has to breathe deeply to keep from fainting.” He raked his hand through his hair, trying to still the rage and shame that battered against his brain, playing the scene again, showing him what he had almost done, what she had wanted him to do.

  “God damn it, Laura, when I take a lover, I want her to be a willing woman. I want a woman who is as eager to be in my arms as I am to have her there.”

  She looked away at that, her swollen eyes lifeless. “A woman like Ginger.”

  He shook his head. “No. Ginger’s out of my life. But it can’t be like this, either. I would have hated myself, Laura, if I hadn’t stopped. I would have gone on hating myself forever.” His voice thickened. “And eventually I would have begun to hate you, too, for making me do it.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, then dropped her head into her hands wearily, as if it was all suddenly too much for her to endure. As he watched her, her long hair cloaking her face like a mourning veil, what was left of his anger slowly began to die, giving way to a much deeper sense of failure, of what a hopeless tragedy the whole thing was.

  Had he failed her? He didn’t know. He knew only that they had reached their final, heartbreaking dead end. It was, after all these years and all this pain, finally over. He couldn’t promise her that he could live without sex, as he had when he had fancied himself her idealistic young hero. He knew better now. After tonight he knew that it would drive him mad, drive him from her, drive him to other women—or worse.

  And he saw, with a fresh and tragic awareness, that she had probably been right to leave him three years ago. Her only mistake had been in coming back. He wasn’t a miracle worker. He couldn’t set her free.

  Not this way.

  “Laura, this isn’t what you need, not really.” He was almost glad she wasn’t looking at him. He couldn’t bear to see again the smoky darkness in her eyes, where the light of hope had been extinguished. “You don’t need me at all. You don’t need to be here. You need to talk to a professional.” He took a deep breath. “I've got a friend, Spencer Wilkes. He’s a psychiatrist, a good one. Think about calling him, Laura. Think about it.” He hesitated, trying to think of a good way to say what must be said. “I'm sure he could recommend someone in Boston.” His voice sounded odd, even to
him.

  She caught her breath, obviously reading between his lines.

  “It’s all right, Drew. I understand. I'll leave in the morning.” She was still hidden behind her curtain of hair, but he could hear the resignation in her voice. So she must know it was over, too. She must know all those sad and final truths. She wasn’t going to ask him to let her stay.

  “Or I will. I can go back to Springfields in the morning.”

  She didn’t look up. She just shook her head. “No. I'll go.”

  “I'm not helping you,” he said suddenly, avoiding a direct answer. “Any fool can see that. We can’t seem to do anything but hurt each other.”

  She stared at her fingers, which were clasped in her lap. “You didn’t hurt me, Drew. You have never hurt me, never once in all these years.” She took a deep breath. “And I didn’t mean to hurt you, either. I hope you can believe that. As misguided as it may have been, I really thought that we might be able to find our way out of this. I really believed that there was a special kind of heaven waiting for us on the other side of the nightmares.”

  Finally she looked up. “We almost found it, didn’t we, Drew?” She drew in a ragged breath. “We were almost there.”

  “No, we weren’t, Laura.” His voice was flat. “We were halfway to hell.”

  There was no answer for that, and she didn’t try to give him one. He moved toward the door, his bare feet making no noise as he crossed the thick, rose-filled carpet. But when he reached the edge of the room, he turned back. He could hardly see her—the shadows of the alcove seemed to have swallowed her up, all except for the pale, poignant oval of her face.

  “You say that you wouldn’t ever have thought me a monster, Laura, but you're wrong. If I hadn’t stopped, you would have hated me, too, sooner or later. When the nightmares came.”