Exorcism

She hadn’t understood his anger; not then. She had simply thought he was mocking her and had not understood why. The frustration which someone with more experience might have recognised, was hidden from her by her own innocence.

She could vividly remember the first time he kissed her. He had taken her out for the day in his car—a small sports model; brightly scarlet. When she had admired it, he had laughed, faintly disparagingly.

‘It’s a young man’s car, something he buys before he commits himself to marriage and a family, and the inevitable saloon, but that’s not for me, Christy,’ he had told her, ‘my choice of car will always only have room for the one passenger.’

He had taken her down to the coast, and with her directions had found the sheltered, almost secret little beach she often went to with her mother. She had been wearing her swimsuit under her jeans but had felt shiveringly self-conscious about taking them off, sitting tense and curiously breathless as he removed his shirt and his own jeans. Her lack of father or brothers had not left her with any particular curiosity about the male form. There had been all the usual girlish giggled confidences at school, and her mother had matter-of-factly outlined the intimacies shared by male and female when she was old enough to understand them. There had never been any undue embarrassment between mother and daughter, and Georgina had been frank and explicit with her in their discussions about sex. Even so there was something vastly different about knowing what went to make up the male anatomy and then seeing the reality of it, barely concealed by brief black swimming shorts. Simon’s soft laugh when he realised she was looking at him had reduced her to a mass of guilty blushes, quickly turning her head aside, but not quickly enough apparently. He had turned it back, holding her face between his hands, his palms hard and warm against her skin.

‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to look at me, Christy,’ he told her then. ‘I enjoy looking at you you know … I do it all the time … in fact, I want to do more than look at you. Much more,’ Christy had thought she heard him mutter thickly under his breath as his head descended, blotting out the sun, his mouth moving slowly over hers until her lips lost their stiffness and clung softly to his with shy eagerness.

He had groaned slightly as he ended the kiss, still holding her face as he asked in a rasping voice, ‘I suppose you’re still a virgin?’

Christy had nodded her head, worried because her confirmation did not seem to please him. Surely all men wanted the girl they fell in love with to be virginal … untouched … and Simon must love her, even though he hadn’t said so … otherwise why would he have kissed her? Made suddenly brave by the heady pleasure of knowing he cared about her, she had reached out and traced the line of his mouth with her fingers, and had said softly, ‘Don’t let it worry you … it isn’t important.’

What she had meant was that it wasn’t important to her … She didn’t mind being virginal; in fact there was no one she would rather have to initiate her into the mysteries of love than Simon. Strange, how she had known the moment he kissed her that she loved him and that he returned her love; and how knowing that had made everything else drop into place … Now she could understand why her pulses thudded every time she saw him; why her stomach tensed and her skin coloured hotly.

She hadn’t said anything else, simply smiling shyly at Simon, but his topaz eyes had glittered over her face and then her body and she had felt the tension in his fingers, threatening to crush the fragile bones of her face before he released her to say huskily, ‘Come on, race you into the water.’

Christy was a strong swimmer. It was her favourite sport and she had learned to dive very young. During her final two years at school she had taken advantage of living near the coast to join a sea-diving school, quickly learning to love exploring the underwater environment.

Simon, too, was a strong swimmer, and when she realised that she was not going to be able to beat him she dived quickly, swimming underwater, holding her breath. She was almost at the limit of her lung power when Simon dived down alongside her, grasping her roughly and hauling her to the surface. They broke the water together, mischief darkening her eyes, fury darkening his, as he grasped her, treading water as he shook her roughly.

‘Just what the hell were you playing at?’ he demanded thickly, ‘when I looked round and couldn’t see you …’ One hand was curled through her wet hair, imprisoning her, the other round her waist and she could feel the hectic thud of his heart. He was angry because he loved her, she marvelled, almost giddy with the sudden sensation of joy. It made her brave—and foolish. Pressing herself against him, she kissed his wet throat. ‘I’m sorry …’

His skin pulsed beneath her mouth, a fierce tension emanating from him, his voice unexpectedly rough as he said thickly, ‘So you damned well ought to be. I’m not a man who likes to be teased, Christy,’ he warned her, disengaging himself from her. Tawny lights flickered in his eyes, inciting a fierce heat in her veins, as she sensed that he wasn’t simply talking about her dive.

‘You’re the one who teases me.’ She made a small mou, touching her tongue to her salt-encrusted lips. ‘I wouldn’t know how to tease you even if I wanted to.’

She knew that she was lying, and the delicious, heady feeling of power racing through her body ensured that she didn’t care.

‘You’re a woman, aren’t you?’ Simon’s voice was still thick, but now it was underlined with a vague derision that chilled her. As they swam back to shore she pushed it aside. Simon loved her; she knew that … It could only be a matter of time before he asked her to marry him. As she walked across the hot sand she remembered that she had heard him say on more than one occasion that he had no intention of tying himself down, but that was before he had fallen in love with her, she had assured herself comfortably. Of course he would want to marry her. They could find somewhere to live locally; Simon would write, and she would be his devoted wife. She preened herself mentally, seeing herself in three or four years to come … a baby … perhaps even two … Simon … and a placid, happy existence …

Dear God, Christy thought, groaning to herself as the music stopped. What a naïve idiot she had been. Anyone less cut out for domestic bliss than Simon would have been impossible to find. But all the guilt wasn’t hers. Yes, she had been foolish to delude herself into believing that Simon wanted to marry her, but he had had the experience, even then, to know what was happening to her. He could surely have gently but firmly nipped her feelings in the bud then, instead of letting them flower … instead of encouraging them to flower, and then savagely destroying her? She saw with hindsight that it was almost as though he had hated her, and yet why? All she had been guilty of was falling in love with him. She had not chased him; she hadn’t had the experience for that, and if he had not kissed her … touched her … she would surely never have realised how she felt about him. But he had kissed her … and touched her …

After their swim they had sunbathed. Christy, already healthily tanned, had not bothered to cover herself with any cream. She didn’t need it, but Simon had insisted that he did—a ploy which she should have recognised immediately for what it was.

Willingly she had taken the plastic bottle he gave her, pouring a little of the oil into her palm while he lay on his stomach his head lying on his forearms. She had kneeled beside him, spreading the oil carefully across his shoulders, stroking it in with fingertips that soon became blissfully addicted to the sensation of warm male skin beneath them. Her whole body seemed to tingle as she worked her way over his back, and then at his insistence, his legs. The sensation of the fine dark hairs beneath her fingers was an unfamiliar one, and yet strangely exciting, her pulses reacting as violently as a fairground dipper ride. The pressure of Simon’s hand on her thigh as he raised himself up on his side made her insides melt in a curious surge of heat.

‘Now my chest,’ he commanded softly, and although she had begun to tell him that it was pointless oiling his chest since she had just done his back, the words died unspoken, as he cupped her hands together, and poured the oil into them, guiding her palms against his skin.

The boys she had seen on the beach did not have bodies like Simon’s. It was hard and entirely masculine shadowed by dark body hair which she had always mentally thought distasteful when seen on men on television or films, but which now when touched unleashed a deep-seated excitement that made her insides churn. She had reached his waist before Simon stopped her, pulling her down into his arms, covering her mouth with his own, while it was still parted in a rounded ‘oh’ of surprise.

‘No, don’t close it,’ he muttered to her, stroking her lips with his tongue, and biting gently at her lower one until her senses were inflamed completely beyond her ability to control.

Her mind registered the husky timbre of his voice when he said softly, ‘I don’t think you need this do you?’ his hands sliding down the straps of her swimsuit, but until she felt the harsh rasp of his body hair against her breasts she wasn’t aware of their import, and by then it was too late to protest—she no longer wanted to do so. Her breasts, so full and firm; and always secretly slightly resented in her own heart of hearts, because they were so blatantly curvaceous, seemed to have been designed especially to fill Simon’s hands. Under his skilled caress she felt them swell slightly, her nipples so tight and hard that they almost hurt. It was a totally unexpected sensation, something she had read about but never realised could be completely devastating. She made a small sound at the back of her throat, and as though he understood what she was feeling, Simon had gentled her with soft murmurs, stretching his body so that she was pressed along the length of it. ‘I know … I know …’ he whispered huskily, ‘Feel what you’re doing to me, too.’

The fiercely aroused throb of his body against hers was exciting and yet frightening too. Wild emotions clutched at the pit of her stomach making her ache to move closer to him, to explore the pleasures she had read about and not as yet experienced for herself.

But when Simon made a harsh sound in his throat and bent his head to tug fiercely on her nipple with a mouth that seemed to burn into her skin, fear overcame desire and Christy flinched back from him, unable to cope with the emotions threatening to overwhelm her. She wanted him to make love to her, but the suppressed violence she sensed in him frightened her. When she visualised him making love to her, it was in some romantic setting … on their honeymoon, when he would be a tender, considerate lover … not this driven, almost angry man, who was pushing her swimsuit straps back, and glowering at her darkly, his eyes burning as fierce a gold as the dying sun. She reached out to touch him and he jerked away saying harshly, ‘For God’s sake don’t make it worse than it is … Let’s get back before I really do something I’ll regret.’

His words had made her unhappy, but only for a little while. It was natural that he should be angry, she reasoned with herself. Obviously he regretted his lack of self-control. Loving her, he must respect her … and of course, he wouldn’t want to make love to her until they were married.

Opening her eyes, Christy groaned. How naive and smug she had been. In reality Simon had been very far from loving her and had in fact, merely desired her. His anger had sprung from nothing more than simple frustration but she had not had the wit to see it, and so she had gone on building her ridiculous fairy castles in the air, sublimely unaware of the fragility of their foundations.

If her mother had not been so busy she might have realised sooner what was happening, but even if she had, Christy doubted that she would have realised her daughter’s foolish dreams. Christy had never been encouraged by her own mother to believe that marriage, a family and home should automatically be a woman’s goal in life; no, it was her own unrealistically romantic nature that had led her down that particular garden path. For all that she had known of the physical aspects of sex, she had known nothing of its sheer power … of its intensity, or that a man and woman could simply be drawn together by it in a relationship which had nothing to do with love.

Simon had made some attempt to warn her, she supposed, looking at it from his point of view. Before they left the beach he had turned to her and demanded sombrely, ‘You do know what it is that I want from you don’t you, Christy?’

And she, believing he meant that he wanted her love, replied dreamily, ‘Yes, and I want it too …’ Not realising that in his eyes she had committed herself to a sexual relationship with him that he had no intention of making anything more than extremely fleeting. All the evidence had been there; she had simply blinded herself to it, seeing only what she wanted to see, deceiving herself until it was impossible to deceive herself any longer; until Simon had simply been forced to tell her the truth; that he did not love her; never had loved her and had not the slightest intention of marrying her. Far from it!

Sighing, she roused herself and switched off the record player, making her way to bed.

It was ironic to think that sexually she was very little more experienced now than she had been then, although of course now she was much more aware of her body’s reactions and capabilities. There had been times when she had almost wished she could meet a man she simply desired physically. Someone who could release her body from its virginal bondage but thus far that had not happened, and as the years slipped by her virginity itself became something of a problem. She felt it was slightly ridiculous to be sexually unawakened at twenty-four, and often wondered wryly why nature had been unkind enough to burden the female race with a barrier that proclaimed its own truths and untruths. As she went up to bed she reassured herself that she had made the right decision in refusing to work for Simon. She wasn’t eighteen any more, ready to drop everything to run at his bidding. Let him look elsewhere for his assistance; if the gossip columns she read were only half right, it shouldn’t prove too strenuous a task.

She woke up early, watching the sun stretch lazy golden fingers through her window and knew it was going to be another fine day. She lay in bed, closing her eyes, basking in the heat coming through the glass—a deceptive heat; as deceptive as Simon’s feelings for her.

She could recognise now with maturity that the tense moods that had gripped him during that long ago summer had sprung from sexual frustration. Then she had been alternatively frightened and thrilled by them, skittish as a young foal, shying away from his touch while she entreated it. Images of Simon as he had been then danced behind her closed eyelids; Simon in tennis shorts and T-shirt, his skin bronzed and male; Simon in jeans, powerful and lithe as he worked in the garden and then most potent of all, Simon the night after they had had their quarrel.

She couldn’t remember how it had started; it had sprung up quickly like a summer thunder storm. Her mother had gone away to see a friend who had suddenly been taken into hospital and Jeremy had gone with her. She and Simon were alone in the house. His moods had grown worse and uncertain of him, wanting confirmation that he still loved her, she had used her mother’s absence to confront him that evening, going up to him and twining her arms round his neck, silently begging for his kiss. He had jerked away from her she remembered and had then come back to her, kissing her with an angry hunger that half-shocked her, releasing her to demand thickly, ‘What is it you want from me, Christy? This?’ He had kissed her again, forcing her mouth to part, infusing her with an intense heat as his hands moved seductively over her body. She was trembling when he released her she remembered. ‘Or is there a price attached to your love? Is it me you want … really me …’

‘You know I love you,’ she had cried out. She had seen the change in his expression when she mentioned the word ‘love’ but had not understood it—then!

‘Then come to bed with me now,’ he had responded thickly. ‘Come and show me how much you love me.’

She had hesitated, tense and unsure of him all of a sudden. ‘What’s the matter?’ he had demanded harshly, his eyes derisive. ‘Are you sure it’s me you’re in love with or simply the idea of being in love …? Is it me you want, Christy, or simply marriage, because I’m telling you now that marriage simply does not figure in my plans. I’ve got far too much living to do to tie myself down to one woman,’ he had told her brutally. ‘If you want to be part of that living then fine, but I can’t offer you permanency …’

She hadn’t been able to believe her ears. ‘You don’t want me,’ she had cried out childishly in pain.

‘Oh I want you all right.’ Simon’s voice had been curt, hard; his topaz eyes glittering hotly over her skin.

‘But I love you.’

He had laughed then, a harsh bitter sound. ‘What you feel isn’t love,’ he had told her with cruel astringency. ‘It’s physical desire, pure and simple. You haven’t the experience to love anyone, you’re still little more than a baby. Too frightened to live life alone … wanting marriage as a security blanket.’

She had cried out in anguish, hating him for what he was saying to her; for what he was doing to her fragile daydreams. She hadn’t been aware of him walking away, only of her pain.

The next day she had gone out of her way to avoid him, but that night, driven by the tension inside herself, she had gone to his room after he had gone to bed. He had been lying on his side, his skin exposed where he had kicked the bedclothes aside. She had caught her breath at the sight of him, tears stinging her eyes. She did love him … she did. She had crept nearer to the bed, stiffening when his eyes opened. For a moment they had simply looked at one another and then he had sat up, careless of the fact that he was naked. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he had demanded softly.

‘I want you to make love to me.’ She had said it as calmly as she could, her eyes defying him to reject her. If that was the sacrifice demanded of her to prove her love then she was prepared to make it. No doubt she had looked the complete tragic heroine, Christy reflected sardonically now, and that was doubtless the reason for the alien twist of emotion she had seen blaze momentarily in his eyes.

‘Do you now.’ He had pulled her down on to the bed alongside him, his hard, experienced hands dealing efficiently with her nightclothes, his eyes hooded and mysterious as he studied her trembling, naked body in the light through the open windows.

‘Be still my little sacrificial lamb,’ he had murmured to her as he bent towards her. ‘You wanted this—remember?’

His mouth was hot and forceful on her own, his touch drugging her senses, everything else forgotten as he brought her body burningly alive. A wild elation sang in her veins; an overwhelming compulsion urging her forward.

‘I hope you’re remembering that this is only lust,’ he had muttered the words against her mouth and instantly her blood had chilled, her eyes enormous, frozen pools of pain in her pale face.

‘You really don’t love me?’ She had stammered the words, colour stinging her skin as he mocked.