Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  He fell silent for a long moment, then turned around and faced Hope. He only half saw her. He was straddling two worlds. “She spoke to my mother. ‘Katia,’ she would say, looking over my shoulder. But when I turned to look, my mother wasn’t there. When I asked her, ‘Where is my mother, where is Katia?’ sometimes she heard me. She would say, ‘She is in a prison cell.’ ‘Why doesn’t she come out of the prison cell, Grandma?’ I would ask. And then she would say, ‘She can’t come out, little one. She can’t open the door.’

  “I remember I thought I was also in a prison cell. I also could not escape, I could not go outside because I couldn’t open the door. I sat all day with my grandmother and prayed for my mother to open the door, until my father came home.”

  Tears burned her eyes and spilled down her cheeks as she listened. “Oh, Jude, what a horrible thing for a child so young.”

  He focused on her. “Was it? Was it worse than other children experienced?” He really did not know.

  “Yes, of course it was. Spending all day every day with a woman in the grip of senile dementia? My God, Jude, that would be hell even for an adult!”

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said in some surprise. “Senile dementia. that’s what it must have been. It’s funny, I never put a name to it before. But my father was worse. He was not insane, but he trusted no one after that. He would tell me, ‘What do you tell your friends? Be careful what you say.’ And he would look at me—Christ! the way he looked at me!”

  Hope stood up and crossed to where he stood. Gently she removed the glass from his hand and set it down, then put her arms around him. “I’m sorry you had such an awful time. I wish I could make it better, Jude.”

  He saw with astonishment that she was weeping for his pain. He looked down into her face.

  “How can you make it better? You made it worse. The next time I saw that look in someone’s eyes, suspicious, as if I—they were your eyes, Hope.”

  She sobbed once and bit her lip, and his next words were torn from him.

  “Why did you look at me like that? That look in your eyes, that was how my father used to look at me, as if I might have betrayed him to the same people who had taken away my mother! Why should he think that? I loved him! Sometimes when he looked at me I thought—I saw him wonder if it had been I who betrayed my mother, whom I loved more than anyone! And then you, wondering if I had betrayed you! How could you imagine it?”

  He closed his eyes and tried to take her arms from around him, but she resisted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It came at the worst possible time, and I know you can’t forgive it. But Jude, remember that we didn’t know each other very well...”

  “Didn’t know each other?” He pushed her away and glared at her in furious disbelief. “I loved you as if you were my own heart! You were what I loved and my own ability to love at the same time! Because of you I knew that God existed and that God is another word for love! And for you we didn’t know each other?”

  His voice was raw, ragged, cutting her heart like a jagged piece of tin. “Jude, I loved you, too,” she cried. “I was weak, but please remember that I did love you!”

  His heart seemed torn from a thousand directions. Feelings and memories long dead buffeted him, washed through him, tried to tear him adrift and fling him headlong into the storm.

  “Did you?” he asked bitterly. “Did you love me, Hope?” He snorted one breath of mirthless laughter. “What a rock your love was, eh? Or perhaps you were confused about what love is! Perhaps for you it was only physical! That should have been enough, shouldn’t it?” He smiled cruelly down into her tear-damp face. “Yes, I shouldn’t have asked for the moon! Sex like that doesn’t grow on bushes! Why should I ask for your heart when I had your body and it was so good!”

  Suddenly the desire that he had been so easily able to resist two days ago boiled up in him, deep and overwhelming, and his blood shouted that now was the time and here was the place. Wildly, desperately, he fought it, because this was not the woman, this could not be the woman.

  She felt how desire flooded his being, felt how he resisted it even as he wrapped her in his arms, and then his mouth was cruel on her own. Then he understood that what he had believed was violence in him was desire. Whatever he had imagined, whenever and for whatever reason he put his hands on her, it could only have changed into this.

  Her head fell back under the savagery of his lips, and she moaned as his hands pressed her and his tongue plunged hungrily into her. His body was hard everywhere it met hers—hands, arms, chest, thighs, sex.

  He pulled his mouth away, held her head, and forced her to meet his eyes. “It’s not you!” he warned with a low growl, wanting to make her turn away, to resist this thing that was now unleashed again between them, because if he could not resist, she must. “I have not had a woman for a year, Hope. So if I take you now it’s because of that, because you are a woman, any woman! Don’t imagine anything more!”

  Her skin was awash with sensation, shivering along her arms, down her back, over her breasts. Inside, a deeper sensation, a hot, slow melting of stomach, womb, sex, and beyond that the deep, spiritual hunger of need for him. She thought she should resist the clamour, should not give in to him in this cruel mood. But her body ached for him, her soul cleaved to him. Her blood rushed in her ears, she was weak with yearning. She was the beggar at the feast, hungry for any crumb.

  “I don’t care!” she cried. “Oh, Jude, touch me! Hold me!”

  The last straw of his resistance was washed away in the flood that her words unleashed. His tortured cry of submission rose to heaven, railing at its failure to give him strength to resist in his hour of temptation. He pressed his mouth to her throat, then swung her up in his powerful arms and carried her to the same sofa where he had first made love to her, a long lifetime of suffering ago.

  She knew, as he lay over her, naked now, his muscled arms holding his body above her—in the moment that he thrust into her, hard and burning against her flesh—in that moment she knew that she had been waiting for this, nothing but this, for all of the past year.

  She cried out with the exquisiteness of the pain as his flesh found its home in her for the first time in an endless series of agonized, yearning nights. She could not remember anything now, not the pain of his betrayal, nor the agony of hers, not the thought of his anger—she knew nothing now, except that the waiting was over.

  And then she knew nothing at all, because he drew out of her and then rammed home again, and everything went black with pleasure.

  She cried his name. She was in another world, fainting, dreaming, lost. Her arms were around him, her hands pressing against his muscled back, his tightly clenched buttocks, pulling him in towards her again and again, thrusting up to meet him if he delayed for a second.

  “Open your legs,” he cried hoarsely once. “I can’t get at you.” He groaned aloud. “Oh, how I have wanted this!”

  The wild hunger in him melted her. Everything melted her. She bent her knees and tilted her hips to make room for the full length of him, and whimpered as she felt him reach his depth in her at last. The cry of his satisfaction at being there ricocheted through her.

  “I can’t last!” he cried. “Too long, it’s been too long!”

  The hoarse cry was enough to send her over the edge, and the pleasure billowed up in her, its tendrils gripping muscle and sinew, brain and bone till she shuddered and wept with reaction. It was too much for him. Jude thrust hard into her and, with another cry, gave her at once the seed and fruit of his own pleasure.

  They lay in silence, their bodies heaving for breath. Then his hand buried itself in her hair and he turned her head to look at him.

  “Jude,” she whispered.

  He was appalled at what he had done, what he had allowed to happen. He did not know why it had happened, now, with Hope, when he had wanted it to happen two days ago with Rita and it had not. He did not understand why he had told her those things that no one knew, or why the telling had re
leased such a torrent of uncontrollable feeling in him.

  “It means nothing, Hope,” he warned fiercely. “It changes nothing. Don’t imagine that anything has changed between us. It’s only because there was no other woman,” he said, pretending to himself that it was not a lie.

  Hope’s heart clenched with pain. Tears burned her eyes and she closed them and tried to turn away. His hand in her hair prevented her.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded, almost angry. “Did you hope this had changed something? What kind of change did you imagine?” He did not understand what he wanted from her, what kind of admission he was driven to hear.

  “I don’t know,” she said, opening her eyes and gazing at him without shame now. “I only know we nearly touched something, and now we haven’t.”

  At these words he was struck by a deep, primitive fear, nameless but menacing. He drew back physically and mentally. “There was nothing we nearly touched, Hope, not if you mean some hidden emotion in me. That is not hidden but dead. It was killed at the root.”

  “Jude,” she protested, pushing herself up on her arms and looking down at him, “it was a momentary doubt, a momentary weakness, instilled deliberately by that woman—Jude, she’s an expert in the manipulation of witnesses! What did I know? Anybody can be made to doubt anything for a moment!”

  He swung away from her abruptly and sat up. He reached for his shorts, then, methodically, his jeans, and pulled them on. Then he turned to her, barefoot, bare-chested, but his eyes shuttered. “That was no momentary doubt, Hope. Why are you lying now? What good can it do you to lie? I already know the worst, have suffered all that I am going to suffer at your hands. What can be saved now by a lie?”

  She felt the contempt in him strike her hard, like cruel hands beating her. She shivered and sat up, reaching for the clothes that he had torn from her body and tossed aside in his anguished passion. Now she needed clothes as armour against what was coming. She pulled on briefs, shorts, then the long T-shirt to cover her breasts that still ached and sang with his kisses.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jude. You’d better tell me,” she said then.

  He was already at the drinks tray, dropping another ice cube into his whisky. He turned, eyeing her as if she were lying and they both knew it.

  “Come on, Hope, we were both there. Why do you ask me to tell you what you know?”

  She didn’t know what was coming, but she thought suddenly that clothes were insufficient armour. Alcohol seemed like a good idea. The white wine she had been drinking was in an ice bucket. Not knowing where she had put her last glass, she crossed to his side and filled a new one.

  “Tell me.”

  He shrugged, but his angry pain could not turn away from the invitation. “Hope, when your father said those words to you, what did you think? Did you believe in me then, or did you think it was of me that he spoke when he said, He’s lying about the letter?”

  She could not meet his eyes as despair settled around her. “Jude—” she began. Her breath came out in a sigh as she shook her head. “Ah, Jude—how was I to know what my father suspected?” she said helplessly, hopelessly. She heaved another sigh of despair and tried to explain. “Jude, it was the middle of the night, I was at a pitch of despair because of you and thinking my father was going to die the next minute, and suddenly—he was looking at me, speaking to me.” She set down her glass and pressed both hands to her eyes. “I was completely emotionally destabilized by that point. I don’t know what I thought just in that moment, Jude.”

  “No?” he asked ironically.

  “Why do you say it that way, as if I doubted you?”

  “Because of one little factor, Hope. Because you did not tell me or Nicholas Harvey, or anyone, about that moment. That’s why I look at you as if you had doubted me.”

  “Jude, don’t you understand that I really never thought of it again? What came after just drove it out of my mind. Maybe I wondered for one second if he meant you, but that wasn’t why I kept quiet. I didn’t think it was important, I didn’t think anyone could ever know what he had meant, so how could it be important? That’s why I never mentioned it.”

  “But because of that, because you doubted me, it became important, didn’t it, Hope?”

  She could not deny it. She looked at it squarely for the first time and saw that he was right. If she had really, fully believed in Jude’s innocence, she would have gone running to Nicholas Harvey or Jude to report her father’s words, because if her father was so certain that Bill Bridges was lying, that might have meant there was some clue somewhere, something he had seen...but she had not been sure. She had wondered whether he meant Bridges or Jude.

  “You’re right,” she said, and her eyes overflowed with tears. “I’m sorry. I was weak at all the wrong moments, and you paid the price.”

  “Now maybe you can understand why that moment in the court was the end for me. Don’t ask for it back, what we had, Hope. Don’t wish for it. It’s dead, finished.”

  She looked at him without speaking. “Yes?” he urged, wanting to make her admit it, to submit and accept what he had just said, as though then he would know that it was the truth. But she only returned his gaze gravely, and made no answer.

  Chapter 15

  “Jude, this is Gig Young,” said Roger Beatty.

  The draughts man and the detective were sitting on the same side of the table in the cheap cafe that still had the old-fashioned kind of enclosed booths with bench seating. It was a place Roger Beatty was used to patronizing. He sometimes found it useful to have whoever was doing the grassing locked in against the wall by his own body. It made sure they didn’t bolt without warning, and often the very lack of an easy escape resigned them to staying to spill their guts.

  Jude stood tall and bulky beside the table, in a thin T-shirt. Gig Young was grateful for the presence of the detective that separated and therefore protected him from Jude.

  “He’s got something to tell you,” said Roger.

  Jude raised one eyebrow without saying a word, and Gig Young trembled.

  “Hi,” he said. “I guess you remember me.”

  Jude sat down on the opposite bench, in the middle. Still he said nothing.

  “He wanted to talk to you,” said Beatty. “He’ll tell you, no one else.”

  Jude’s mouth moved. “Good,” he said.

  “I guess you wouldn’t have had a detective on me if you didn’t already know most of it,” Gig Young babbled. “But I, uh—” He put both hands up and rubbed his face. “Hell, I’ve been wanting to tell someone, to confess, ever since it happened. I felt like hell when you got a conviction.”

  “But you managed to restrain yourself,” Jude said.

  “I got a wife, I got kids,” he said sullenly. “He got me into it without me knowing what it was about, see? It wasn’t supposed to be anything except covering his ass! That’s what Bill told me. That was all it was! If I’d aknown, nothing would’ve...but it was too late by the time I found out. I didn’t know the building was going to go like that, kill someone!”

  Roger Beatty laid both his hands flat on the table and examined them. “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” he suggested without heat.

  “Yeah.” Gig Young sniffed and wiped his nose with his hand. “My wife’s uncle gave me a job when Fairmax went under—you remember that?” he asked Jude.

  “Ninety-one,” said Jude.

  “Yeah. So many of us out on the street looking for work at the same time. I knew nothing about glass, but it was easy enough to learn. It wasn’t hard to make the transition.”

  He paused, lost in his thoughts. “Go on,” ordered Jude.

  “Something went wrong with that order we were making up for you on the Rose Library. I never knew what, I didn’t have anything to do with that project, I just—well, you could feel there was trouble.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe a half, two-thirds of the glass was poured and shipped? Anyway, ails
I knew was, Bill was suddenly sending them all off to be tested again. That was alls I knew until he called me into the office one day and showed me an ad you were running for a draughts man and said he wanted me to answer that ad and get the job.”

  “What made him think you would be able to?”

  “I got the idea he felt he could ask Hal Thompson for a favour and get it. Not that he was owed or anything like that, just, he could say to Hal Thompson, ‘Give him a break, Hal, he wants to get back into architecture, he’s bored here, my niece is nagging me to find him something,’ something like that, you know, and he’d do it. That’s what I figured, anyway. And I went and got the job, still not putting two and two together. I just did what I was told.”

  “And what were you told, in the end?” Jude asked in a flat, unemotional voice, as if he had heard it all before, the story of the failure of a conscience.

  “That was the weird thing, it seemed so simple. He told me to get into our file—that’s the Environmental Glass file—at the Thompson Daniels offices and remove the test results we sent you on that glass for the Rose Library. I couldn’t figure what was happening at all.”

  “And you did that.”

  He sniffed again. “Yeah, I did it. It wasn’t so hard. You know, I could say I was looking for some specifications if anybody asked me what I was doing in the filing cabinet, but I did it at lunch when hardly anyone was there. Nobody said anything. It was a little harder making sure there wasn’t another set of the figures in some other file. You had a set in your office, but they were right there with all the Rose Library paperwork, you know, and I told Bill that was all I could do. I couldn’t go snooping everywhere, or somebody would notice.”

  “Is that it?” said Jude, dropping his hands down onto the table. The detective made a quick warning signal, and he relaxed again. “What else?”

  Gig Young stared down at the tabletop in shame. “Then he asked me to plant that other set of figures, and I don’t know why, but it wasn’t till then that I started to see the light. I argued with him, but hell, he’s my wife’s uncle! He said nothing would ever happen, it was just like an insurance policy that would never be paid. So I did it.”