Magic Sometimes Happens Part 20

'I want to stay.'

ROSIE.

Valentine's Day, my birthday, all my Christmases in one I felt like I'd won the lottery, the EuroMillions and Olympic gold.

Stop this, I told myself.

My other self said: why? This is all working out. It's going to be all right. Just trust your female intuition.

Or should that be my wishful thinking?

Whatever now I was in far too deep to have any realistic hope of climbing out again.

PATRICK.

She made coffee. She was very good at making coffee. She had a cool black coffee-maker, a machine to froth up milk, and the result was perfect every time.

Guys at JQA who'd been to Europe had told me how it was impossible to get good coffee outside of the States. Those guys had lied.

She sat on the left side of the couch and I sat on the right. I drank my perfect coffee. I knew I ought to leave. I knew I wasn't going anywhere tonight.

'What about some music?' she suggested.

'No music.'

'You like music.'

'I don't want any now.'

'Okay.' She started fussing with a bracelet on her wrist. 'I can't undo the clasp,' she said. 'It's stuck, and if I tug I'm going to break it.'

'Let me help?' I took her hand. I held her wrist. The silver clasp was very small, and so instead of touching just the bracelet, my fingers also found the beating pulse on her warm skin. The pulse was fast, as fast as mine.

I'm not especially clumsy. But tonight my hands would not obey me. I gave up trying to undo the clasp. I held her wrist and checked the bracelet out. I turned it round and round, admired the fine engraving. I watched the burnished silver catch the light. 'This is a lovely thing,' I said. 'Where did you get it?'

'It used to be my grandmother's.'

'She died?'

'Oh no, she's very much alive. But she can't wear jewellery any more. She has bad arthritis and her hands and wrists are very twisted, very bent. This bracelet was a present from my grandfather so it's been in the family for years and she said I should have it now.'

She looked at me, her grey eyes luminous. 'Do you think you could try the clasp again?'

I didn't try the clasp. I crossed the Rubicon instead. I kissed her palm and then I kissed her wrist and then the inside of her arm up to the elbow.

There's nothing quite as lovely as the inside of a woman's arm, where the fine white skin is soft as satin, where the pale blue veins are barely visible but, if you should stroke them, you can feel the blood pulsating through them.

'Pat, what are you doing?' whispered Rosie.

'I guess I'm taking liberties with you.'

'I thought as much.'

'So stop me.'

'What if I don't want to stop you? What if I was hoping you would kiss me everywhere?'

'Do you think you'd like it?'

'I won't know until you do it.'

'Maybe I would like you to kiss me?'

'If I do, you might be turned to stone.' She smiled, her gaze hypnotic, pupils huge, the grey almost invisible. 'When I kissed you at the airport back in Minneapolis you stood there like a statue, like you'd been petrified.'

'I guess I was surprised.'

'You mean you were annoyed, upset, embarra.s.sed?'

'No, I mean surprised.' I stroked her hair back from her face. 'I couldn't figure out why you would want to kiss a guy like me.'

'What kind of guy are you?'

'A guy who's crazy because he thinks, he hopes you like him, who's in love with you.' There, now I said it and there was no going back. Did I want to unsay what I just said? I wanted to repeat it.

So I did and then I took her face between my hands and kissed her on the mouth. Then I kissed her neck and then she arched away from me, inviting me to kiss her throat and kiss her everywhere and so I did.

Mr William Shakespeare, you are an accessory, I thought, as I held Rosie in my arms and it felt like she should be there for eternity. It was where she belonged. I'm holding you responsible, you hear me?

'You must be tired?' she asked, when ten minutes, twenty minutes later, who was counting, certainly not me, she pulled away and looked at me.

'Yeah, I'm tired,' I said.

'You don't have to go and find a cab or get the tube. You could stay here. The sofa is a bed.' She looked at me, her eyes big and transparent. 'Or you could sleep with me.'

'Rosie, are you trying to seduce me?'

'Do I need to try?'

'A girl like you, a girl who is amazing and fantastic and wonderful in every single way, I guess she doesn't have to try too hard.'

'Then shall we go to bed?' She saw me hesitating. 'Pat, I mean like now, before you check tomorrow's lecture notes or file your tax return?'

'Rosie, have you thought this whole thing through?'

'You're married, you have children, there's every chance you'll go back to your wife and break my heart. But I'd still like to go to bed with you because I know that if I don't I shall regret it all my life cards on the table, right?'

I thought I wasn't anything like Ben.

But perhaps deep down I'm just the same? Perhaps I have forgotten what I said in church? Perhaps I never meant it in the first place?

No I'm not like Ben. When he seduces pretty co-eds, it's all about more conquests, more spraying round the district like a tomcat. It's like the man from Laramie more notches on his gun.

What I felt for Rosie wasn't about conquest.

So what was it, then?

I couldn't identify it because I never felt that way before. The nearest I had been was when I was a choirboy in Recovery, when we sang Easter Ma.s.s. But even that did not come close.

ROSIE.

I felt like I was drunk, but I was stone cold sober.

I felt like I was floating, as if I was unreal, but I was in the here and now, and everything I felt and sensed was sharp and cut as deep as knives.

Whenever I'd had s.e.x with men before, I'd watched them and I'd judged them. I'd never wanted to engage with them or as they put it in old-fas.h.i.+oned novels to give myself to them, except in the most physical, emotionally-disconnected, do-it-for-me way. All I'd wanted was to gain some fleeting satisfaction to get laid and I suppose that far from giving, I just took.

But with Pat there was no taking, giving or s.e.xual bargaining. When he kissed me on the wrist, I suddenly knew I was a part of him, that he must be a part of me. We were like a pair of compa.s.ses, two separate points but still connected and although I knew it was irrational or even downright stupid of me to suppose it I was almost sure we always would be.

We lay together in my bed and he played with my hair. He wound it round and round his fingers, clearly fascinated by my curls, perhaps because his own black hair was ruler-straight. 'What are you thinking, Pat?' I asked.

'Your hair, I never saw such wild abundance.' He pushed it off my face and held it back. 'Do you ever wear it up?'

'No, never. Or perhaps I should say hardly ever. There's too much of it. I've sometimes had it up for weddings or events. I look as if I have a puffball on my head.'

'I like it down in any case.'

'I hate my hair. It's uncontrollable. When I was child, I wanted more than anything to be a Barbie blonde. I longed for straight, fair hair.'

'Your hair's perfection and I love it.'

'You're a big fat liar, Patrick Riley, but I'll let you off. What else are you thinking?'

'I don't dare to say.'

'Go on, you can dare anything. I'm giving you a global dispensation, a plenary indulgence.'

'You told me one time you didn't have much history with guys. But you must have kind of known some men?'

'Dr Riley, what are you suggesting?'

'I don't have a clue what I'm suggesting. But I want to know, I need to know-'

'You're asking if I've been to bed with lots of other men?'

'I remember what you said when we were in that restaurant in Minneapolis.'

'What did I say?'

'You've been on dates. But you've never gotten close to one particular guy. You've never been engaged. I'm sure you must have had a ton of boyfriends, though a pretty girl like you?'

'I've mucked around with loads of t.o.s.s.e.rs, yes.'

't.o.s.s.e.rs does that mean-'

'I've known a bunch of w.a.n.kers.'

'You didn't fall in love?'

'I've always known I couldn't love a git, and most of the men I've known were gits.'

'Gits.' He rolled the word around his tongue. 'You mean they were losers?'

'Yes, but git is stronger, more pejorative. I'm surprised you haven't come across it.'

'I lead a sheltered, academic life.' He looked at me. 'Git I like it. I must use it. Okay, then these gits, what did they do to you?'

'Annoy me, try my patience, bore me.'

'They didn't make you care for them at all?'

'Oh, Pat! I think you're jealous!'

'I'm insanely jealous. You can't begin to realise how mad it makes me, not to be your first.'

'I'm not your first.'

'No, you're my second.'

'Yes?' I laughed at him. 'So go on, pull the other one?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'It's another Britis.h.i.+sm. Monty Python and the Holy Grail you must have seen that movie?'

'I don't think so, is it new?'

'No, it must be thirty-five years old or maybe more. I saw it first when I was six or seven. We had the video. So you're telling me that you and Lexie, neither of you-'

'Lex and I, we both have Catholic mothers who believe in h.e.l.l for people who step out of line.'

'I have a Catholic mother, too.'

'You do?' He frowned. 'I thought you British were all Protestants?'

'There are lots of Protestants, but my father's mother that's my Granny Ca.s.sie she's a Catholic. So she was delighted when Dad met and married Mum. But he wouldn't let Mum bring me up to be a Catholic because he's not religious. I was never christened.'

'Your mom, she didn't insist on that?'