Cry Wolf

by Amanda Carpenter

  Nikki stopped dead and felt a sharp stab of betrayal. She and Helena had never managed more than a warm politeness, but she genuinely liked Harper’s mother, and she had thought that the older woman liked her as well. But over and above mere liking was a tangible bitter scent of disapproval.

  She did not move. She projected everything, everything into listening for what Harper would say next. After a moment, harsh and inflexible and like a pronouncement of doom, he said, “Yes, I know. If I’d known she would be that way, I would never have let it go so far. I just didn’t realise how deep her feelings were.”

  The betrayal increased into agony; she covered her mouth, though her outcry was soundless, and the pressure in her head was such that she didn’t hear what was said next, then Helena asked coolly, “I suppose breaking off relations will alienate her family as well. It’s very disappointing. So what do you intend to do now?”

  “I’ve given Nikki several openings, but she won’t even discuss it. She’s got the whole thing under lock and key; she’s very proud, and it’s difficult to get around that.” Harper’s laugh sounded angry.

  They were discussing her life, her future, her love and happiness, as if she had no right of say or choice. Rage began to beat its reddened fists against the interior of her skull.

  “It’s clear that you’ll have to do something. Things can’t go on the way they are,” said Helena, the poise in her voice beginning to reveal fissures of unquiet.

  He snapped, “I’ve already considered what I’ll have to do! In any case, this whole conversation is premature!”

  Well. She ought to be thankful for something. At least that did sound as if he hurt a little. Furious and agonised tears splashed down her hands, and she turned to run back upstairs to her room, wishing she hadn’t started to cry, wishing she had the ruthlessness to stroll in and confront them both, damn them.

  She collided into Charles at the bottom of the stairs, and the boy grabbed hold of her waist. “Nikki!” he exclaimed, his thin, small face shocked. “What’s wrong?”

  She knotted her fingers into his T-shirt and almost shook him as she hissed, “Don’t you mention you saw me, do you hear? Don’t you dare breathe a word of this!”

  “I—won’t!” stammered Charles, half frightened by the violent pain in her. “I promise! Are you OK? Why are you crying?”

  She snarled wordlessly in reply, blue eyes flashing, and hugged herself as if she had nothing else in the world to hold on to. “Tell your grandmother goodbye for me,” she said from between her teeth, “tell them I’ve gone to the studio to work. Tell Harper—tell Harper I’ll see him on Friday.”

  “Nikki—” The boy reached out one hovering hand but in this he was too young and uncertain, and she was as vicious as a wounded animal.

  “Promise me!”

  “Yes, all right!”

  Now she was torturing him, and he was innocent. She threw her arms around him and whispered into his hair, “I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry. I’m just very upset right now and need some time to calm down. It’ll be our secret, all right?”

  He hugged her back, face hidden in her shirt. “OK.”

  In the studio over the garage Nikki threw herself face down on the floor, arms outspread as if she would draw strength from the wooden boards. She did not know how long she lay there. It must have been for ages, for outside the sky darkened.

  There was a quick, strong knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs, sounding so loud in the silence that she jumped. She had bolted the lock when she’d entered the studio and now lay very still, listening. It sounded again, and through the distance and the wood she could hear Harper’s voice.

  She was not surprised. She could not have expected Harper to believe the message she’d sent through Charles, for she had never worked on the weekends while he was there, and she had always made a point of being on hand to say goodbye.

  Rebellion seethed a smoky undercurrent inside, and Nikki turned her cheek into the floorboard as she gritted her teeth. She would be damned if she would go downstairs, put on a pretence, cover over what she was really feeling, and watch Harper do the same.

  That knock again, more a rattling boom, and a shout ripped out of her throat, “Go away!”

  Her reaction shocked even her, for she had never heard herself sound that way before. After a moment, very calmly and distinctly, Harper said, “I only wanted to tell you that I’m not going back to London tonight, and I’ll see you when you’re finished.”

  He had fully intended going back, until she had begun to show the unstable hints of some kind of internal stress. She was so readable; she was so damnably transparent. Nikki shook with anger directed at both him and herself. This time she could not run to Harper, so she would have to try to act with some measure of self-respect instead. It was time she faced some unpalatable facts. She had loved him too soon and too well, and he would never love her at all. It was not the end of the world. God, it only felt as if it was.

  Her face contorted and she lifted her fist to pound it on the floor with such force that she bruised herself up to the wrist, relinquishing control of the emotions that ran their ragged, cutting currents, leaving their passage scored inside her like barren riverbeds that were stony and dry. At the end of it she was once again in command of herself, for she had nothing else.

  She could not stay there forever. Nikki picked herself up, dusted off and calmly went down to lock the studio. It was quite dark outside and deathly quiet so that even the slightest rustle of wind in the tree leaves and grass sounded preternaturally loud.

  She saw the tall figure leaning against the open French doors, outlined in golden light that spilled from the rear lounge and reached long fingers over the green and black shadowed lawn, and, with an ashen sense of the inevitable, she strolled slowly towards him. She felt as if she were under a spotlight, laid open to the bone, knowing without seeing that Harper’s eyes took in every aspect of her appearance and assessed for himself what had happened to her in the studio.

  But her large blue gaze was wry as she came up to him. She learned so fast and loving him had taught her a lot, had widened and deepened, and heightened herself to accommodate all the emotion, the joy, the pain, the understanding. And now she knew that what he saw in her he would relate to other things but never guess the truth, for the first real deception had come between them.

  What he saw was a face at once so young and so haggard, the eyelids as dark smears, the mouth unfamiliar in bitterness. Her body seemed half abandoned, the spirit that lent such vivacious, darting life to it gone. She moved it now as if it were of no more importance than a childhood doll, already outgrown.

  He spoke so simply that she didn’t understand why he used such extreme care. “You didn’t paint?”

  Nikki turned her head and looked over to the garage. He would have known she hadn’t painted, at least after sunset, for there had been no light burning in the windows. “No. I studied my subject and sulked,” she said, with a flippancy that was vicious beyond self-mockery, another new trait. The light fell on half her face, on the bitter mouth that smiled. “But then, learning what one can and cannot have is never easy.”

  “But must you torment yourself?” he asked her wearily, as if she was tormenting him as well.

  She sent him a quick, searching glance and, told him thoughtfully, “In the beginning are sown the seeds of our downfall. Someone said that to me once. A teacher, I think. I don’t know if he quoted someone else. I used to wonder why people were so bent on destroying each other, but sometimes now I think that we tear ourselves apart.”

  Harper turned to lean against the doorpost too carefully, laying his head back and exposing the colourless, harsh set of his features. In the subtle, interwoven complexities of the man, one of his traits that she had always seen and understood was how overriding his protective instinct was, and in the surest possible way she had stabbed
right through him, for the one thing in all the world he could never protect her from was herself.

  She had not known that she could be so cruel in her pain. She had not known before she had spoken that she believed what she said.

  “I blame myself,” he said, and his mouth twisted. This tall, strong, powerful man was totally vulnerable at that moment, and Nikki’s heart twisted as well, for beyond everything else, the moods of the moment and pain of knowledge, she would always love him.

  She said, with a tender half-laugh, “I see you know exactly what I mean.”

  The lines radiating from his closed eyes deepened into a wince, and he breathed through his nostrils hard. “I should never have brought you here,” he said then, savagely. “I should never have posed that damned painting like a challenge and driven you so hard in your work—”

  The ferocious agony lashed her into crying in that light, corrosive voice, “Tired of me so soon, my dear?”

  The expression in his eyes was terrible as they flared open, blazing, eternally dying. He just looked at her and everything bitter and taut and reactive inside Nikki crumbled, and she had nothing left to stand against the lover when she needed the friend so badly.

  She asked him in the saddest whisper, her great eyes wide and stripped and vulnerable, “Harper, how do you stop wanting something you can never have?”

  “Oh, Nikki,” he said in a shaken groan, and he held out his arms. She stuffed her fingers against her mouth at the sob that tore through her throat and blundered forwards to be enfolded by the very arms that would some day push her away.

  It was impossible, unthinkable. How could one mind contain such a vast difference? How could he reach out and stroke her face in such a gentle caress while knowing what future he had in store for them? How could he kiss her with such feeling, such passion and compassion, and not know a pain so intense as to drive one mad?

  She went a little mad herself as he slanted his open mouth over hers with such heedless, violent intensity. She hated him and this desperate physical pleasure, but when he lifted his head she wrapped both arms around his neck wildly and drew him back.

  It was her power for now that he came, driven out of himself by what was both lure and plea, and at first she didn’t understand what was missing as he lifted her into his arms and carried her through the house.

  His long legs flashed swift and unfaltering on the stairs. With each step, Nikki’s mind raced further ahead to what awaited them in his room, imagination flooding her with the fiery, compulsive liqueur of desire, but the reality was nothing like she had ever known.

  Harper’s explosively graceful technique was gone. He was stumbling, his big, naked body uncoordinated as he writhed into her, calling up the deepest kind of atavistic response that was mind-shattering as a whole.

  She saw, felt, perceived in splinters. His broken, incoherent murmuring. The sheen of their sweat. Her fingers, clutched in his hair, raking across his back. The way he knew how she would move. The way he knew her. The maelstrom of sexuality that was bigger than both of them, and sucked them whirling and out of control to the climactic centre.

  He was the best of all teachers, her lover and her friend. She had known lovemaking as a sensual art, the voluptuary exploration, the rip of unleashed passion, sex in tenderness, laughter, gentleness, and now her education was complete as a lesson in humanity, for this was the bitter-sweet, unendurable lovemaking of despair. She knew the end of it as she knew the limit of her strength.

  Afterwards he held her against his gasping chest, and the endless tears streamed out of the corners of her eyes on to her already sweat-soaked skin. She pressed her trembling lips to the frantic pulse-beat in his throat with all the love in her soul, and thought to herself, I will leave him soon.

  Chapter Ten

  Harper had to leave very early the next morning to make up for his extra night in Oxford, and the sky was barely light when he kissed Nikki gently in farewell. She stirred, more than half asleep, and was unaware of her murmuring sob or how his facial features tightened at the sound. He bent over her, soothing the tangled black hair off her face as he breathed something in her ear that stilled the restless fingers twitching on his empty pillow and smoothed away her frown.

  To her it was a lovely dream but like all dreams it had to end, and after it had passed Nikki’s sleep became restless again until she woke to a full, bright dawn, and remembered yesterday. She could not bear another lovemaking like last night, and she could not set aside the despair, so yes, she would have to leave. It was best to go before their relationship descended into further heartbreak and inevitable repudiation.

  Everyone had his or her limits; her own she had only just discovered. If she had been more generous, or had more enduring patience, or could have been more hardheaded, perhaps she still could have fought through to win his love, but she simply hadn’t the emotional stamina.

  There was one concession she could make. She loved and respected Harper so much, and felt such gratitude for the unstinting friendship he had offered to her from the very beginning, that she would tell him face to face that she was leaving. To bolt behind his back seemed cowardly and inappropriate to the good in what they had shared. She owed him more than that, and she owed Charles an explanation for yesterday afternoon.

  She had thought to take the train into London in order to talk to Harper that very evening, but just after lunch his secretary rang to tell them that he’d had to fly unexpectedly to the States for a few days.

  So she schooled herself to patience. A few days was not so long to wait. And, as she had done with every other emotion she had experienced over the last month, she painted her patience on to the canvas in slow, careful brush strokes.

  She told Charles a carefully edited explanation when he got home from school, and that she would have to leave soon; he cried, which moved her very much, and they cuddled and talked late into the evening. From time to time Anne looked in on the two dark heads so close together in the rear lounge. Charles was heavy-eyed and didn’t make it to school the next day, but the housekeeper said not a word.

  The week passed and still they heard nothing from Harper until Nikki thought anxiously late Thursday afternoon that he surely had to come home the next day. She didn’t know if she could wait any longer; for each hour that went by, a little more of her resolve trickled away.

  That week she finished work when Charles came home from school, so that she could spend as much time as possible with him, and as he helped her pack supplies into the boxes in the studio on Friday they both heard the hard crunch of car tyres on gravel and looked at each other.

  “He’s home,” said Nikki and Charles nodded, his head downbent. They both knew it was the end.

  They did not know it would be something else. Nikki followed the boy downstairs and out of the garage on leaden limbs, and as they walked around the corner of the house they both halted in surprise at the sight of two men climbing out of the Jaguar, not one.

  The driver was Harper, of course, grim with exhaustion and casually dressed in jeans and shirt, but Nikki’s blue glance only touched him briefly on the way to inspecting the other, younger man.

  The two standing by the Jaguar saw her. She took a step forward and her heart thudded. “Johnny?”

  Her brother’s face lit up. He said, his eyes laughing, loving, “Hello, stranger.”

  “Johnny!” Her eyes and voice blazed. She ran and did not know it until she hurtled into her brother’s arms, who swung her around just as he used to when they were younger, and she was babbling and laughing at him all at once.

  Johnny stopped, and she caught her breath and managed to articulate her first sensible questions. “What are you doing here? How do you know Harper? Did you get your birthday present?”

  “Stop!” he exclaimed. They were grinning maniacally at each other, but then her brother sobered until he wore a look that was every b
it as stubborn as hers could be, and he cupped her small, upturned face in his hands as he told her, “Yes, I got your present, thanks very much, and, as for knowing Harper, he showed up at my apartment on Tuesday evening and introduced himself. As for what I’m doing here, I’ve come to try to take you back home with me if I can.”

  What Harper had done was at once so simple and yet so staggering that she would have fallen had Johnny not gripped her so tightly. She could not believe the cruel efficiency of it.

  She cast one anguished glance over her shoulder at Harper, who stood silently watching them some ten feet away, his hands in his pockets. Then Charles was beside his uncle, exclaiming in pained incomprehension, “I don’t understand! You brought that man here to take Nikki away? But she was already going to leave!”

  Nikki saw Harper’s eyes go dead.

  She didn’t understand him at all, not any more, not when he could have done something like this to her. She hardly knew she was shaking like a leaf until Johnny forcibly turned her head around to him and said, clear and steady, “Nikki, we have to talk now. Can we go somewhere private?”

  She couldn’t see the expression on her brother’s face, for her eyes were blinded with tears. “Yes,” she choked, making a desperate attempt to pull her shattered self together. “The studio’s empty. We can go there if you like.”

  “Where is it?” Johnny wiped away the wetness spilling down her cheeks matter-of-factly.

  “Around the side, over the garage. I’ll—I’ll take you.” In spite of her words, it was he who led her gently from the scene, for she was in a state of deep shock. Her wavering footsteps automatically guided them to the garage, and somehow they climbed the stairs, though she did not remember doing so. Nikki stood in the centre of the spacious room that smelled of paint and turpentine, and she was lost.