Rose-Coloured Love

by Amanda Carpenter

  The aromatic smells wafting to her nose told her that Helen had prepared her specialty, a garlic, lemon and honey sauce over pork chops. When Devan had peered over her shoulder, she had been busy with mashing potatoes, and a fresh batch of crusty blueberry muffins had been cooling on the worktop. Devan’s mouth began to water in anticipation, and she registered that fact with some dryness. Helen was traditionally the cook, while Devan washed up afterwards, for her sister found cooking a soothing and comforting pastime. She especially liked to cook for other people, whereas Devan barely took the time to make food edible. Her mouth twisted in self-mockery. Domestic skills were not in her array of talents.

  She was under the table, sitting down while she juggled a piece of typewriter in her hands. Ryan’s head popped into sight as he bent down to look at her.

  “Such a face,” he said, mildly.

  She spun around on her hands and knees and practically screamed at him, “Don’t startle me so!” Astonishment flared in his upside down expression, and then vivid laughter as she leaned against the legs of a chair and pressed a hand to her racing heart. The children peered briefly around the corner and giggled.

  After a moment, he said, his voice laced with amusement, “I wasn’t deliberately trying to sneak up on you.” She shook her head and snorted, and then started to crawl out from under the table. “You’re as sensitive and as jumpy as a cat, aren’t you?”

  Her hands slapped on the floor; when she had cleared the table, he reached down a lazy hand and hoisted her to her feet effortlessly. “I guess I am,” she then said, ruefully. “Thank heavens Helen never complains; Lee always did.”

  He said, very softly, his eyes bright and shrewd, “I was right, then.” Her head snapped up from inspecting her dirty hands, and her eyes widened with the knowledge of what she had just confessed without realising it.

  She stalked for the bathroom to wash for supper, and threw over her shoulder, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He came and leaned against the open doorpost while he watched her scrub fiercely at her hands with the bar of soap. “Your favourite response,” he said drily, with more than a hint of anger. “If I’m always so wrong, why don’t you take the time to correct me? But you never do, you just press your lips together with that God-awful stubbornness. What is it with you, a defence mechanism? What are you trying to hide?”

  Truth slammed in on her, and her hands stilled under rushing water. Her expression grew perplexed, her body quite quiet as her thoughts raced. Why was she so reticent about Lee? Was it that she didn’t want Ryan or Helen to know of her past failures? Was it that she found Lee too painful to discuss? What was she trying to hide? Pulse beat, moments passing by, her breathing suspended. “I don’t know,” she said, at last.

  He then said, in a measured tone, “I lost my temper. I apologise. I shouldn’t have pried.”

  And suddenly she was laughing as she whirled to face him. She threw her wet hands to her hips, seeing his brows shoot up in response. He was at his ease against the post, long legs angled, lean hips slouching, his arms indolently crossed at his wide chest. She demanded, “What is it with you, anyway? I get the distinct impression you’ve been trying to treat me with kid gloves; you’re so meticulously careful about what you say sometimes! Tell me, really. Are you that way with everyone?”

  His eyes lit up, and he started to smile. “Actually,” he said, “no. They tell me I’m quite a roaring slave driver at work. I don’t know about that. There are simply some things I do not allow.” Looking at him and seeing all over again that square jaw and that determined, straight mouth, she could well believe it. His expression grew rueful. “You’ve been on shaky ground,” he said then. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  She blinked, and looked down at her hands, as if noticing their dampness for the first time. She rubbed them together. “And I’ve reacted abominably,” she said quietly. “I apologise.” She glanced up, lightning-quick. He was regarding her with the strangest expression: understanding, even tender. He inclined his head to her, and she smiled.

  Helen called from the kitchen, “For heaven’s sake, will you two come on? Supper’s on the table and getting cold!”

  Ryan laughed as Devan scurried to dry her hands with a towel, and they were soon sitting down to eat. Devan had to grin at how very homey it all was. Gary was drumming his heels against his chair legs and blowing bubbles in his milk with a striped straw. Janie had brought her book to the table. Helen passed to Ryan, who was sitting to Devan’s left, a large bowl of the fluffy mashed potatoes which had a dollop of butter melting in the middle. They were eating off mismatched plates; Devan’s had a chip on the edge of it. There were no pretensions to elegance or sophistication, no formalities, just a well-cooked meal and all of them sharing it, like one big happy family. She reached out and picked up her drink, grinning as she looked down at it. Drinking milk, for God’s sake!

  Ryan had helped himself to the potatoes and passed the bowl to her, which she started to pass by without taking any. His firm grip on her forearm stopped her. He reached over and slapped a substantial spoonful on to her plate. “And like it, too.”

  Janie and Gary watched with bright eyes. Devan took a deep breath, and then let it blow out with a laugh.

  Ryan was grinning lopsidedly, and he said around a bite of pork chop, “Like to share the joke?”

  His light eyes were smiling. He expressed a lot with those eyes, even when he wore an overtly impassive face. She looked around, to Helen’s interested, amused attention, to Gary and Janie, and to Paris blinking distantly at the scene which disguised an avid interest in the meal. She salted her potatoes. “Nope,” she replied.

  For a big man, Ryan held himself neatly, and knew when to be still. His hands wielded his fork and knife with delicacy. While Devan dawdled with her food, he finished his meal and then sat back to talk lazily with Helen. Sometimes he would turn to the children and comment to them. He didn’t talk down and his manner was frank, to which they responded remarkably well. Their table manners were the best that Devan had ever seen from them.

  She managed to finish most of what was on her plate, and when she finally felt the protest of tight stomach muscles, she silently picked up her plate and handed it over to Ryan, who took it with a quick look and a grin. The muffins were deposited on the table, and she couldn’t resist taking one and buttering it lavishly, then nibbling at it until she thought her stomach would burst. The outside was crunchy hard and the inside moist and steaming, and bursting with sweet fruit. It was delicious and she wanted to finish it, but ended up handing over half to Ryan.

  After supper, the children disappeared as if by magic, and Helen went to put up her feet in the living room and watch television. Devan finally rose from the table and began to stack things together absently. She barely glanced at Ryan as he, too, stood and started to help. She started running the dishwater, and let the steamy hot water rush over her hands to turn them red as her thoughts went back. She said quietly, “You seem to fit in well here.”

  He gave her a swift smile as he stacked the plates by the sink. “Are you surprised?”

  She tilted her head as she watched soapsuds explode into frothy existence. “A little,” she admitted. “I’m not sure what I expected you to be like, but somehow this pleasant helpfulness wasn’t it.”

  After a moment, he said lightly, “I’m not sure I like the impression you had of me.”

  She made a disclaiming gesture, and soapsuds flew. “I didn’t mean anything bad by that—I think you just weren’t a real person to me before. You were just a signature and a set of observations.” She took the glasses and started to scrub at the rims.

  Her hair swung forward when her head was bent, and she felt his hand touch at her cheek and then gently tuck it back behind her ear. “And how do you see me now?” he asked.

  Her hands stilled. “You’re a frustrating, exasperating, irritating, wholly likeable man,” she said softly, and a slight smile touche
d at her lips, softening her face. His hand went to her back, trailed down her spine, and rested to rub lightly at the back of her waist as she bent over the sink.

  “At least we seem to be getting along better,” he murmured. “You aren’t throwing water on my head any more.”

  Her mouth straightened, and a trace of grimness crept into her voice. She said briefly, “A week ago, I would have said it was impossible.” Then, with difficulty, “I’m not too keen on starting relationships right now.”

  He laughed, low and deep in his chest, standing just by her and slightly behind, a large tangible presence. “I could have told you that,” he replied drily.

  The back door was open, the night humming with insects. She looked out through the blackness of the rectangular screen door and could see nothing of the lawn. Then she felt her heart quicken, her hands actually tremble. She clasped them together and felt her fingers slip wetly on each other. She said in a low voice, “I met Lee when I was twenty-six. It was a—rather long-standing relationship.”

  Startled, he froze and she sensed him turning to stare at her, trying to gauge the importance of what she was saying. “Romantic?” he said, the flat word a question.

  She tried to shrug lightly, and at least managed the shrug. “We were lovers, if that’s what you mean,” she said baldly. How would he take that? “We were, I guess, much like any other couple. We lived together in a rather cramped apartment. I was sure we would get married one day, but somehow there didn’t seem to be any hurry. Looking back, I suppose the trouble started when I began to work on my first novel, but I didn’t realise it at the time. I thought we were just going through a rough period like everyone does now and then, and I never doubted that things would change. Then one morning, he packed his clothes and—left.”

  She was hot suddenly, with an onrush of blood to her face. Her teeth clenched, her mouth pulled taut, lines on either side. Her hands were bone-white and red as she gripped them together.

  She glanced to her left, up at his face, and his expression was totally, carefully—too carefully—blank. His eyes were shuttered as he looked down at the worktop in front of him. “Why did he leave?”

  Intense frustration. “I don’t know.”

  Sudden weariness, showing through that blank façade. He didn’t believe her. “I see.”

  She spoke through her stiff lips, for she found she couldn’t bear that weary look, “No, I don’t think you do.” His eyes flashed quickly up, blazing hot, and that look burned deep into her. Then it was gone, as he saw the sincerity in hers. “If what you said earlier was true, I don’t understand. You see, he told me he couldn’t take it any more. He said that I was too distant, too wrapped up in my work. He said that he had tried to have p-patience, tried to wait for a change, but it hadn’t come, and that was why he was leaving. He s-said that I wasn’t prepared to give or show enough in our relationship, and that maybe he had expected too much, but it was too late anyway. He said he wasn’t coming back, and he didn’t.”

  She had tried to speak plainly and calmly, but the pain was still there from that last awful scene. When she saw how Ryan’s eyes had begun to blaze again at her stuttered words, she flushed hot with agitation and turned to stare with wide, stricken eyes at the white refrigerator, biting viciously at her lips.

  “No warning?” he asked.

  Her jaw muscle bunched, the spasm marring the slim sleek line of her cheek. “Just like that.”

  “That bastard,” he said thinly.

  Her head jerked around. “He had to have a reason,” she sighed, upset and confusion painfully evident in her voice. “There had to have been—something in what he said. He was a reasonable man. He always made cautious decisions. At first I was stunned and angry, but-but I couldn’t make any other sense out of it all—”

  He surged from the worktop, stalked across the kitchen and then back again. “I don’t buy it,” he said flatly, and for some reason he was furious. She knew it, could see it in every taut line of his big body, but she couldn’t make sense of that either, and she was very weary of her incomprehension. She took the hand towel and wiped her hands dry, and then just bent her head and hid her face. “I just don’t buy it, Devan. He could have left you with something. He could have left without a word of explanation, and it would have hurt, but you would have got over it. Instead, he takes the time and effort to tear your confidence to shreds.”

  “No!” she whispered, appalled. Three years, and her own commitment to the relationship that had been a marriage in all but name. At least, that’s what she had thought it was. Had Lee felt differently? She said, more strongly, “No! He couldn’t have done that—he cared about me!”

  He whipped around, lightning quick. “You’re still hung up on the guy, aren’t you?” he snarled, and his face was frightening to behold. “You’re still pining away for the son of a bitch! Why are you so blind to what he did to you?”

  “I’m not!” she shouted, pushing away from the worktop and stumbling. “I’m not, but there had to be a reason for it; it wasn’t a senseless occurrence, can’t you see that?”

  He jerked over to the sink and started to wash the dishes, piling things into the sink roughly as he ran some rinsing water, and she distinctly heard something break. Then he just put his hands on the edge of the worktop, bent his head and shook it from side to side. “I can’t see anything straight,” he bit out.

  She turned and walked out of the house. Numbness descended on her as she took great breaths of the outside fresh air, but it wasn’t enough to dull the hurting. It was just enough to keep her from thinking any more, for she had exhausted the endless search for answers, reviving old arguments, old scenes, old conflicts until they were worn thin in her mind. No use thinking about it, no use any of it, no use thinking. That was a litany she had come to recognise. She ducked her head and strolled, feet shuffling through the grass, through the back garden and to the path that led to the nearby clearing.

  The light from the house shone out from the windows and the back door. She thought about going back and helping him clean up the supper mess, but she couldn’t bear to be close to him and his inexplicable, intense reaction to what she’d told him. He was another one she couldn’t understand, and her faith in her own perceptions was as shaky as it had ever been.

  Perhaps she could go back inside and play a game with the children. Or maybe watch television with Helen, like they had so many times in the last year. But her heart wasn’t in anything, and she couldn’t even bring herself to go back to the house, to her room. The dark solitude soothed her as she reached the clearing and threw herself on the thick cushion of grass. She curled on her side, her knees tucked up, and she listened to the orchestrated night song vibrating from the bushes.

  Something came to her, a quote she had always loved of Robert Herrick’s. She whispered it gently to the shadows: “‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying, And this same flower, that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying.’”

  Brief life, inconstancy, fragile dreams and hopes, and the flame of ambition she had so delicately fostered. But the fire dies, and the fleeting flame-flower, so moving and lovely, fades to dark ash. Nothing lasts, so nothing matters, and she had simply to take that lesson to heart.

  The problem was that her heart wasn’t in it.

  Chapter Eight

  Purple washed over Devan’s mind in a dark serenity. She fell into a lulled, mindless state, feeling her cheek lie on crushed scented grass, feeling the uptwist of a tree root digging into her side. Then the awareness of another presence came to her in the hint of movement, in the rustle of quiet footsteps under the sound of night. She refused to lift her head, keeping turned away as she willed whoever it was to leave. But she was practising a little delusion on herself; she knew that it was Ryan standing behind her all the time, and she grew rigid with the silence of his throbbing tension.

  The she felt rather than heard the sensation of him coming towards her and coming fast. It frig
htened her into looking up, shrinking down, her heart giving a great leap. Ryan’s large, silhouetted body filled her vision. She struggled to push herself up from her lying position.

  But then she couldn’t do anything, couldn’t move, couldn’t even cry out, for he had reached down with his two strong hands and yanked her by the shoulders, just hauled her right up against him. His hand snaked to the back of her head while his own came down. His lips were blurred in shadow and distorted as he snarled very quietly into her ear, “You’re still thinking of him, aren’t you, lying here in the dark? You’re still grieving; he meant that much to you—”

  He was breathing heavily and hard, his body tight and vibrating. She couldn’t move, for this had been too unexpected, and her hands gripped uselessly at his shirt, his waist. She was off balance and afraid, for her heart was beginning to pound in slow, hard slugs. “No!” she exclaimed, making a sound as his hand tightened in her hair. “I was just tired—”

  He wasn’t listening, and her words faltered to a stunned silence as he turned his head and started to nuzzle hungrily at her neck. Her eyes caught a shadowed impression of his powerful shoulders hunching over her as he knelt by her side, and of the lighter overhead branches swaying over his black head. Then his mouth was slanting across her cheekbone, over to her lips, crushing them and pushing them open as he thrust in deeply with his tongue. Devan moaned, for she was frightened and couldn’t move, with his fist in her hair and holding her immobile, his body holding her off balance, her hands clenching and unclenching in his shirt, against his body. She was frightened, not of him, but of herself, for hotness bolted along her torso, leaping in her loins; he was igniting a fire in her. His head reared back, his chest heaving in a harsh intake of breath, his light eyes glittering in the darkness that was his face. They raked over her, her swollen mouth, her huge and dilated, moon-filled eyes. Then he said, on a low growl, “I can make you forget him.”