S K Paisley

by Take a Breath (epub)

  Her big eyes were staring at him, imploring. He looked at her beautiful face and felt a powerful desire igniting inside him. Part of him had always known it would happen with Lena. When the time was right. She leaned on his knee and pushed her lips onto his. For a moment he savoured her soft mouth. It should have been perfect. She climbed up onto him and kissed him harder. He was still too wound up, felt pressure on his chest. He thought of how she’d been the night before in the bar – urbane and sophisticated, too good for him until she’d smiled and suddenly he’d felt anchored, steady. He didn’t feel that now. It should have been perfect, but it wasn’t. He thought of the time in the park, her filled-to-the-brim bags, of the wreck he’d found in the toilets. He thought of his tidied flat and how much it annoyed him. How comfortable she’d made herself. He could feel his chest deflating. She was kissing him, it was what he wanted. But still he pressed her away. Once again he knew it wasn’t right.

  “Where are you living these days?” he asked uneasily.

  “Here and there.” She laughed nervously.

  Her dissembling made his heart ache. “Alone?”

  “With one of the guys from the shop.”

  “One of the ones that left you last night?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  She didn’t answer and looked away.

  With a flare of anger he got up from the couch. “You only had to ask, Lena, if you need somewhere to stay. I didn’t need the charade.”

  “I wasn’t doing that.”

  “C’mon. Don’t treat me like I’m one of them. Is it always that easy? A flutter of the eyelashes and you’re getting drawer space?”

  She was quiet, didn’t protest, a sheepish expression on her face. Paul couldn’t look at her and stood up, turning away.

  “I’m going to turn in, I’m exhausted. You can crash on the couch if you want.”

  Overwhelmed with tiredness, he went into his bedroom and closed the door, feeling wrecked; alone, adrift at sea, wanting something but no longer sure what, except unconsciousness. Flicking off the light, he crawled onto the temporary mattress he’d been sleeping on for the last six months and climbed into his sleeping bag. He lay staring at the blank walls for a while, despite his tiredness, before finally drifting off into a restless sleep.

  The door opening with a creak was what woke him up. At first she was little more than a dark shape. Moonlight shone through the slatted blinds and gradually her full form emerged before him: arms, head, legs, breasts, the light striping across her skin like some exotic cat.

  She padded onto his mattress and curled up beside him. “Please, Paul. I want this. I want to do this right. I’m not looking for anything from you.”

  He ran his fingers through her long, dark hair. “I don’t care about that. I care about you.” He kissed her. “What if something had happened to you? What if it wasn’t me that found you?”

  Unzipping the sleeping bag, he brought her under, into the warmth. She leaned her head on his bare chest, her arms tightly around him. The crushing pain in his chest was gone, replaced by a different ache. A good one. Deftly, her fingers slid down his navel, into his shorts. Her skin was soft and silky, almost slick beneath his touch. Brushing up her thigh, he felt her soft-trimmed strip of pubic hair, like velvet beneath his palm. She moaned softly then got on top.

  They fitted together; no awkward limbs, no struggle for comfort, the right size, perfect match. She kept her eyes fixed on his. While rolling her hips she never looked away. She was there, in the moment. They both were, enjoying their bodies together. He placed his hands on her hips while she moved faster and deeper. He met her rhythm and they worked towards it together. A shuddering moment of intense pleasure and they collapsed in convulsing contentment beside one another.

  Afterwards, in a sated glow, they lay holding each other. He had never wanted to hold anyone after sex before. Lena’s heart beat wildly, next to his.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lena spent the first few days catching up on the sleep she’d missed, on Paul’s mattress on the floor. Only afterwards did she realise how exhausted she’d been. A spare set of keys sat on the radiator beside the front door. She’d looked at them, but they remained untouched. Every day she would wake up sometime in the afternoon or early evening, make some tea then go straight back to bed, under the warm blankets. It was usually after midnight when Paul got home, armed with the best take-away dinners Glasgow had to offer. They ate them on the couch together and watched TV until they passed out. After that first night they hadn’t had sex. It just hadn’t come as naturally as she’d expected.

  A week passed. She hadn’t gone back into work. She hadn’t even phoned to say she was leaving, but doubted any of them would be too upset. She’d left a note for Ali when she collected her things from his flat. A clean break. Each time it became that bit easier to disentangle herself from the ties she’d made.

  She didn’t see much of Paul, apart from those short periods in the early hours when he came home from work. When she thought back to those first days she’d spent with him, four years ago, stoned on the couch in his tower-block flat, it surprised her to find him now a workaholic. But people changed. She certainly had, although she wasn’t sure it had been for the better.

  Every day he left money on the kitchen worktop for food and other necessities, which she made use of once she finally started leaving the flat. What she didn’t spend, she put in a shoebox she had of old letters and photographs. She didn’t think he would mind. He never asked for change.

  She knew it couldn’t go on like that forever. At some point he would ask her for money and for some kind of contribution to their living arrangement beyond ornamentation. But she just didn’t seem to have the impetus to get up and do anything about it. She’d been struck by a bad bout of lethargy, didn’t even have the energy to care. She’d mapped out a triangular territory, from couch to bathroom to mattress, and for the moment she was happy for that to be her world. Her two carrier bags sat in transit in the hall, beside his unpacked boxes, waiting for the disaster, natural or manmade, that would send her searching for other shores. With every day that passed, she could feel it drawing nearer.

  “How’re you settling in?” he asked her one night after work. They were sitting on the couch idling away the night as she’d idled away the day. There was a tightness to his tone that made her ears prick up.

  “Fine.”

  “You’ve found your way around the place.”

  She waited while he finished chewing the piece of pakora in his mouth, wondering what he was leading up to.

  “I suppose.” She prepared herself for disappointment.

  He stretched his arm over the back of the couch, close to but not touching her shoulders. His eyes flickered with the moving images on the TV. “I’ve taken Saturday off. I thought we could unpack together.”

  She tried to understand what he meant by that, if she was missing something between the lines.

  “And then I thought we could go out for dinner – if you haven’t got any other plans.”

  She shrugged her shoulders noncommittally. It wasn’t what she’d been expecting and she breathed a sigh of relief. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him looking at her strangely. She knew her silence hurt him but for some reason that made her feel good in a way that she hadn’t done for a long time.

  On Saturday morning they went to Ikea to get furniture. Lena followed him through the departments, standing quietly while he chose what they needed, answering his questions about which ones she liked with vague mumbles. Eventually, under pressure, she chose a rug with green and red swirls which she didn’t even like, and from his face neither did he, but he threw it in with the other purchases. Now they were both going to have to live with it.

  As they passed through the children’s section, Paul hovered over a small
blue bed shaped like a train.

  Lena came up behind him. “You should get that,” she said, showing the most interest she had all day.

  He nodded. She watched as he made a faint cross on the slip of paper with the small brown pencil. Then he grasped her hand and they moved on.

  When they got home Lena put the new utensils and other bit and bobs in the kitchen while Paul spent the best part of an hour building a chest of drawers with the electric screwdriver he’d bought. The larger pieces – their bed, the wardrobe, the baby’s bed – would be delivered later in the week. When Paul was done they began to unpack. Lena’s stuff fitted into two drawers. She folded her clothes neatly. They looked nice, not bundled in a bag, the colours mixing like a pretty rainbow. But the sad thing about rainbows, she thought, was that they never lasted long.

  “More like a home already,” Paul said as she entered the living room. He had just placed down the rug and was pulling the coffee table on to it.

  “Oh, I forgot…” He wriggled about in the back pocket of his jeans. “I picked this up for you the other day.”

  He took out something small and furry on a chain and handed it to her. She looked down at the black cat keyring in her hand.

  “For your set of keys. It reminded me of you,” he said and smiled.

  She looked down. “Thanks.”

  Her heart swelled, but she wouldn’t let herself show it. She put the keyring down on the table and clapped her hands together. “Time to get ready!”

  Paul had booked them into Coliseum. It was a restaurant, bar and nightclub rolled into one and had only been launched the week before. Every night queues stretched round the block. You had to know someone to get in. Lena knew he’d gone to some effort to get them a table.

  She curled her hair, put in her favourite gold-hoop earrings and dressed in her new salmon-coloured, asymmetrical dress. The day before Paul had handed her a wad of cash and told her to get an outfit. Three hundred pounds. She hadn’t wanted to take it. No gift was ever for free. But he’d pushed her hands back.

  “Go on. So I know I do all the shit I do for something.”

  She promised to pay him back but she knew she wouldn’t. Her first stop was Princes Square, where she went round all the upper-end high-street stores she wouldn’t have gone into before: French Connection, Ted Baker, Moda in Pelle. She bought expensive lace underwear from a shop she’d never heard of, then proudly walked down Buchanan Street displaying her bags.

  The skirt was short and bell-shaped and she wore it with nude heels, six inches high. It was summer and the evening was warm enough not to worry about tights. Her legs were long and tanned, freshly waxed.

  She looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, running her tongue round her teeth, her mouth parted slightly in anticipation. She stole a few under-eye sideways glances, lingering but coy. It was all in the tease. She conducted herself like a dangerously alluring film-noir femme fatale. A little trashy, but there was always room for a little trash.

  War paint on, her glad rags donned like armour, she went in to the living room, where Paul was waiting. He stood up and came towards her. Dressed in smart trousers, shiny shoes and a black sweater over his shirt, he looked strikingly good; until that moment she hadn’t noticed what a handsome man he was becoming. He was almost muscular, no longer skinny, as if his body were only now catching up with what he knew himself to be already. His features fitted well together. Before, she’d always put his appeal down to charisma and it surprised her to find this was no longer his sole charm.

  Looking away as if he could read her thoughts, she reached for her coat on the arm of the couch. Paul took it and held it open for her, so she could slip into it easily.

  “You look beautiful,” he whispered and kissed her behind the ear. Her neck hairs tingled. There was no flick of the hair from her, no fuck-me-if-you-think-you-could glance. The best she could manage was a small smile.

  Pulling away, she hooked her arm in his. “Shall we?”

  Together, they walked out the door.

  Paul shook hands with the bouncer on their way into the restaurant. He nodded to the maître d’, who showed them to their table. They ordered the taster menu, the courses arriving with a certain fanfare. The longer she sat there with Paul, enjoying the way he looked at her, smiled and fussed over her, the more she began to relax.

  “This… this is the kind of place I want to run,” Paul was saying. Lena looked around at the elegantly dressed customers and the maple-wood bar where the barman in waistcoat and tie was spinning a cocktail shaker beneath art deco fittings. Walnut panels lined the walls, intricately designed with mermaids and inlaid shells. An artificial white light shone through the milky glass ceiling above them, making her feel like she was on an old-fashioned cruise liner. Their table was in the corner, in a small alcove. All the tables around them were taken. Every element spoke of class.

  “But your place is going well,” she said, brimming with curiosity. She’d gone down to visit him at The Low Road once or twice, but usually he was too busy to have a drink with her. She got the feeling he didn’t want her there. That for whatever reason he wanted to keep her and the bar separate.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah…” He took a sip from his wine glass. “But I do feel it’s gone as far as it can. I’ve noticed the crowd’s started changing. Getting younger, a bit more mainstream. And it’s good because there’s money to be made. I don’t care who I’m selling drinks to, but in a few months, when the trendsetters move on, word’s gonna filter down and the rest will start moving on too.” He sighed in frustration. “It’s a shame really, because, with a bit of money…” His face grew animated.

  It made her smile despite herself to see how passionate he was about his work. For a second she allowed herself to feed off his energy; his fearlessness made her feel that way too, made her think that she could reach further than she’d ever hoped. But she quickly laid those feelings aside.

  “It could be really something,” he said, glassy eyed, as if the vision was dancing just before him, just out of reach. “It could be something special. Something that wouldn’t go out of fashion. I’ve got so many ideas for it – to make it the kind of place where I want to work, the kind of place I want to run.”

  “Do you think the bank would give you the money to do it up?” she asked.

  Paul cocked his head to one side then the other as he thought about it, then screwed up his face. “But it wouldn’t be the bank I’d need to talk to, it would be the owner.”

  “Do you think the owner would give you the money to do it up?” Lena watched as Paul took a large swig from his glass.

  “Maybe,” he replied, uncertainly. “If it was done properly, presented with all the right numbers, figures. It’s possible…” He trailed off and began chewing the inside of his mouth vigorously, full of nervous energy. “If I really thought I could pull it off. It’d be a risk.”

  In those moments when he was lost in thought, his hand over his mouth, the nails bitten down, she observed him. It wasn’t the first time she’d noticed him drifting into a flurry of agitation, his mind clearly turning stuff over, as if there was something darker and not so comically cocksure about him.

  “What’s he like?” she felt compelled to ask. She’d heard rumours, the name Manny Munroe spoken in hushed tones. For the first time, she wondered what it would be like to work for someone like that. But she doubted Paul had much contact with him. He was just a barman.

  He brushed her off with a laugh. “Don’t worry, you’ll never have to meet him.”

  She laughed too, although she didn’t get the joke. When it faded she found him looking her deep in the eyes, purposefully, as if he had trained himself to do so. He inhaled sharply and dropped his shoulders, trying to force himself to relax. Just as another question was about to form, he interrupted and she lost it.

  “And what about you?
” he said.

  She cringed and began stumbling over her own plans. “I’m gonna start looking on Monday. Get some applications…”

  He stretched back in his chair, a look of mild amusement on his face. “You’ll work it out. Take your time. Maybe you should give college another go. You can stay at mine as long as you want. I’ve got money. And I quite like having you around the place.”

  Paul leaned in and cupped his hands over hers.

  “Every man here tonight wishes they were the one sitting opposite you,” he said and she blushed. She didn’t feel like it was a line. He only had eyes for her and all that he asked in return was that she trust him.

  Disentangling her hands from his, she put them on her lap, smoothing her skirt over her legs just as the waiter appeared with the bill. He placed it on the table in front of Paul. Lena tried to peek over but it was too well hidden inside the leather wallet.

  Paul paid in cash. “Keep the change,” he said to the waiter, who nodded discreetly and walked away. “None of these tight bastards will tip,” he said as he stood up.

  They went through to the nightclub. Like balls in a pinball machine, they bounced from one person to another as they made their way to the dance floor. A couple of people stopped Paul to say hello. She was surprised how many people knew him. On the dance floor girls were eye-fucking him, some of the guys too. He exuded energy and she did her best to feel it too. The dance floor was one of her favourite places on earth but her body wasn’t moving in the right rhythms. She felt rigid, clumsy; self-conscious in a way she never had before.

  A slower song came on and Paul pulled her close. She tried to relax into his arms but somehow she couldn’t. She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away.

  He stopped dancing and stood on the spot, the music blaring, people jostling them on all sides. His shoulders slumped, his face crumpled. “Why’d you push me away?”