Yuletide Reunion

In the end, she was persuaded to go by her mother.

‘You must go, Clemmie.’ Hilary Powers frowned at her daughter. ‘You’re always complaining that there’s nothing to do around here, and now you’re turning down the opportunity to go to a really nice dance!’

Clemmie turned her mouth down. What could she say? That she’d fallen hook, line and sinker for a man who was besotted with someone else?

‘And I’ll give you money for a new dress,’ smiled Dan. ‘How about that?’

Clemmie couldn’t win.

She bought a dress which was absolutely beautiful but left very little to the imagination. A black silk slip dress, beneath which she could wear only the briefest of black lace thongs.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked her mother.

Her mother screwed her face up and looked at her daughter. Pale face, too many freckles, dark hair spilling down like mahogany satin—gorgeous! But the dress? ‘I’m not sure, darling. It’s a bit revealing.’

‘Gee, thanks, Mum!’ scowled Clemmie. ‘You do wonders for my confidence!’ What was it with mothers, sometimes?

‘Are you wearing a bra?’

‘I can’t wear a bra—it shows!’

‘Then I’ll lend you my black chiffon wrap,’ said her mother briskly. ‘You can throw that round your neck and look slightly more decent.’

Clemmie got ready with Mary Adams from her year, the two of them standing giggling and shaking with nerves as Clemmie swept unfamiliarly thick mascara onto her dark lashes. She was so nervous that she accepted a glass of wine from the cask in Mary’s fridge, and then another. By the time she arrived at the dance she was floating, floating—and danced with every single boy who asked her.

Too giddy and too excited to eat, she glugged back a glass of the fruity punch she was given and tried not to look at Alison Fleming, who was demure and stunning in virginal white. While Aleck looked like the only real man in the room, his height and build and bearing making him seem like warm flesh and blood, while the others all looked like cardboard cut-outs.

Clemmie was on her way back from the rest room, moving slightly unsteadily along the corridor with her eyes glittering darkly against the dead-pale of her cheeks, when she saw Aleck.

He was standing with his back to her, standing perfectly still by the window of an empty, unlit classroom. His old classroom.

Clemmie drew in a deep breath of longing. She should go straight past. He wasn’t interested. He had a girlfriend.

But the wine and the punch had loosened her tongue and this was probably the last time she would ever see him.

‘Hi,’ she said recklessly, standing illuminated in the bright light of the corridor.

Aleck turned round slowly, his eyes flickering over her in a way she didn’t quite understand. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it. But then, his face rarely showed anything, and it certainly didn’t now.

‘Hi,’ he said coolly.

Clemmie gulped and walked over to stand beside him at the window, which overlooked the tennis courts and the soccer pitches beyond. She wondered what this school would be like next year, with no Aleck Cutler to gaze at, to think about, to fantasise over... It didn’t really bear thinking about.

‘So,’ she said, and stared out into the night as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. ‘What are you looking at?’

He gave a small laugh, then shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Clemmie felt bold. ‘Yes, you were!’ she teased. ‘I saw you.’

He found himself smiling reluctantly. She was as exuberant as a puppy. ‘Okay, then,’ he admitted. ‘I was just looking out at that old house. See?’

She followed the direction of his eyes but she knew which house he was talking about. The tumbledown house which dominated the town. From her bedroom window in Dan’s house, Clemmie would look down at the overgrown lawns, the flowerbeds which were choked with weeds. In autumn, the fruit fell from the apple and pear trees, lying ignored and rotting on the ground. It was a sad house, she had often thought. A neglected house. ‘You mean the old grey one? Isn’t it supposed to be haunted?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in all that stuff! It’s only spooky because no one’s lived in it for years.’

‘I wonder why?’ she queried softly.

Aleck looked at her, finding her ridiculously easy to talk to and yet sensing some unknown danger in the air. ‘Because it’s big. And it’s run-down—you’d need serious money to update it and run it. People with that kind of money don’t generally want to live in a small town like Ashfield.’

‘But you do?’ she asked perceptively.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

There was silence for a moment, though Clemmie could hear her heart booming out in a muffled thud. She saw the pensive set of his profile. ‘Feeling sad?’ she asked softly.

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, like a man not used to being quizzed about his feelings. ‘Sad?’

‘About leaving.’ She noticed that he wasn’t looking into her eyes any more, just staring very hard at her silky black dress, and that a tiny muscle had begun to work in one cheek.

There was a pause. ‘A little. Closing a chapter of your life is always sad.’ He gave a low laugh, and abruptly turned his attention away. But not for long. He looked back into her eyes then, and Clemmie felt drawn in by the magnetism of that cool, mocking gaze. ‘Though maybe nostalgic would be a better word.’

‘Yes.’ Clemmie giddily swept her fingers back through her thick red-brown hair, so that it spilt in mahogany streams all the way down over her silk-covered breasts. Dizzy with wine and longing, she tried to think of something interesting and original to say, and failed dismally. ‘Will you be sorry to leave?’ She leaned back to perch her bottom on the wide window-ledge and smiled at him.

The movement distracted him as much as the invitation in her eyes, and Aleck found his eyes drawn once again to the pale gleam as her breasts thrust heavily towards him. He felt the slow, insistent throbbing of desire start to build up, felt it begin to pulse powerfully through his veins. ‘Sure, I’ll be sorry,’ he said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like his own at all. ‘There’s a lot I’m going to miss.’

Drunk with the heady delight of his proximity, with the obvious appreciation in his eyes, Clemmie found herself purring like a parody of a sex-symbol. ‘And what are you going to miss most?’

Aleck felt his muscles tense as she lounged back negligently on the window-ledge. She might as well have been naked for all that dress was covering her up, the two inverted vees of the bodice taut and stretched as they struggled to restrain the lush young breasts. The silk lay smoothly against her flesh, except for where he could quite clearly see the outline of some outrageously flimsy G-string. Aleck swallowed. ‘Well, I’ll miss seeing you,’ he told her, in a throaty whisper.

Clemmie opened her dark eyes even wider, her surprise completely genuine. ‘Will you?’

‘Sure, I will.’

‘I didn’t think you’d even noticed me,’ she told him honestly.

He gave a hollow guilty laugh, as Alison’s memory slipped from his mind like sand through his fingers. ‘Not notice you?’ he demanded unsteadily. ‘Oh, come on. You’d need to be blind or pretty stupid not to notice you, Clemmie...’

His face gave him away.

Clemmie could see the fight that was taking place within him, yet she was too trapped by desire to heed it. Too flattered by the look on his face which must have mirrored her own. A look she had dreamed of, night after night, but never thought she would see in the flesh. Compelled by a need she did not recognise, she put her hands up behind her head to cushion her head on her palms, and the action did even more to accentuate her breasts. ‘You do say the nicest things,’ she smiled.

Appalled at his behaviour, and yet unwilling or unable to stop himself, Aleck took a step towards her. Why not just give her what she so obviously wanted? What he so obviously wanted, too. ‘Do I?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t just say the nicest things, Clemmie, I do them as well...’

He moved his lips towards hers, and Clemmie wondered if she had imagined the dark note of warning which had coloured the throaty whisper of his response. But then his mouth was covering hers and the effect was like lighting touchpaper.

He showed none of the finesse of the Aleck of her dreams, just pulled her into his arms and began a kiss which was so shockingly intimate and so unbelievably sensual that Clemmie felt she should have been outraged by it. Yet she found herself kissing him back as though she had been born for just this moment.

He pulled her closer, so close that her lush silken-covered breasts were crushed against his chest. God, he could feel those nipples digging into him like tight little rocks. He couldn’t help himself, and just briefly brushed his fingertips over each straining mound, expecting her to slap his face. But she didn’t.