Fiona Harper - The Chatsfield Short Romances 11-15

Cristian holds me firmly, stopping my retreat. He waits until I meet his gaze again. ‘Don’t we?’

My heart starts hiccupping inside my chest.

I close my eyes. I want so badly for all of this to be true, for this to be the key that releases me from the prison I’ve been trapped in. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I really could just take Cristian into my bed and make everything else disappear? I know it would be amazing.

I also know all we can have is this one night.

But will that make it better, or worse? Suddenly I am second-guessing myself again, poisoning the atmosphere of promise clinging around us with my doubts. I step back and this time he doesn’t stop me. I start walking and realise I am heading for the bathroom. I wave a hand. ‘I just need to…you know…’

And then I bolt, running through the bedroom until I am back in my porcelain mausoleum, the door shut firmly behind me.

Chapter Eight

I stare in the mirror. I don’t recognise the woman staring back at me. She isn’t grey and weighed down. She’s flushed and her breath is coming in short pants. She looks alive. I know I can’t walk back into the other room and grab this chance with both hands, but she looks as if she could. She looks like a woman who knows how to take a leap of faith.

I try to smile at her, to ask her what she’s going to do, but the image shifts and flickers. She’s still there, but now there is someone else there too, like a ghostly shadow.

It’s the woman with the hollow eyes. Her face gets clearer the more I look, swallowing up the other me, absorbing her. I want to shout out to call her back, but I know my voice will carry to the living room.

Now Hollow Eyes is all that is left. She looks back at me sadly. Knowingly.

I brace my hands on the sink and drop my head. I can’t bear to look at her any more. Her work is done, anyway. She’s woken me up from this temporary insanity. Truth has come rushing back into my evening like a cold draught.

I could sleep with Cristian tonight, but it wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make me free. The ghosts are still here to haunt me. My friend in the mirror is proof of that. Tomorrow I would feel cheap and dirty. Instead of remembering this wonderful short time together, I would want to pretend it had never happened.

And Cristian is not a faceless man fit only for a meaningless fling. He’s right—I do know him. In a way I can’t articulate and don’t understand. How can I use him like that after all he’s given me? It would make me no better than Gareth.

I turn and rest my bottom on the sink, stare at the tiles on the wall. They blur and swim into a sea of white.

I don’t want to forget Cristian. No matter how great the pleasure could be in this moment, I don’t want to rob myself of those future memories. I want to treasure the moments—my first tango, the way he looked at me…as if I was special, as if I was worth something. I need these things to hang onto if I’m ever going to banish that sad grey creature who looks back at me in the mirror.

I take in a breath, stand up and walk towards the door.

Chapter Nine

When I re-enter the living room, Cristian is about to walk out the door into the hall. ‘No!’ I shout and he turns. He looks at me, but he doesn’t let go of the door handle. I walk over to him. Tears begin to stream down my face.

I know I brought him up here under false pretences. I know I have no right to ask him to stay. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say hoarsely as I come close.

He turns to look at me. ‘For what?’

I give a little shrug. ‘Because I don’t think I can…you know…’

He shakes his head. His eyes glitter in the soft light and I see his jaw tense. ‘You think I leave because of that?’

His accent is thicker, stronger. He is angry.

‘I…’ I shake my head. I can’t deny it. It’s exactly what I thought. Exactly what I still think.

He pulls himself up taller. At once I am taken back to the evening before, to not just the grace, but the power and control with which he danced. ‘I was leaving because you are not ready for this, Sophie. Not any of it. Not even the little we have shared.’

The tears, which must have stopped briefly, halted by shock, start up again. I nod and my lips crumple. I look at the floor.

He swears in Spanish and then I feel his arms around me again. I just cry on his jacket, making a big soggy mess of it, but I’m too far past caring to stop.

When the tears finally run dry, he leads me back into the room, sits me down on the sofa. ‘You are grieving,’ he says.

I look up, swiping my eyes. ‘No I’m not,’ I say firmly. ‘It’s nothing like that. Nobody died it was just…’

I trail off, look at the clock on the mantelpiece.

‘Oh.’

It’s exactly like that. Okay, no actual person died. There hasn’t been a funeral. But my hopes and dreams? The future I’d planned for myself? It’s all gone. Nothing is left but an empty space. And that’s what death is, isn’t it? The hole left behind when something you love isn’t there any more, something you can never get back.

He sits down on the other end of the sofa. I can see understanding and sympathy in his eyes. And knowledge.

‘You know what this is like, don’t you? You’ve done this too?’

He nods.

Hope flares inside me. Cristian seems so grounded, so solid. Not the wavering mess I feel I might dissolve into at any moment. I realise that maybe it won’t always feel this way, that one day I might reach that state too.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

He blinks slowly. ‘I was engaged to be married a long time ago, but the wedding never happened.’

I butt in, far too eager. ‘She ran out on you?’ I know I shouldn’t sound so excited, but something inside me wants confirmation of this feeling that we’re a matching pair.

He shakes his head. ‘She died. A stupid accident that made no sense…still makes no sense.’

I look at him. Those hints of sadness I’d only been half aware of become clearer now. He wears them like scars. But where mine are raw and weeping, his are faint and silvery. Not erased. They will never be erased, I suspect. But they have become bearable.

‘I’m sorry.’ This time I say it for the right reason. I see gratitude in his eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to be crass earlier…with the running out thing…’ I know I’m babbling, but I can’t seem to stop. I feel as if I’ve been holding it all in for so long and Cristian isn’t scared by this side of me, not the way Mel and Vikki are. ‘But that’s what happened to me.’

I stare up at the plasterwork on the ceiling, look round my opulent suite. Not the one-bedroomed one Gareth had booked—Mel had seen to that the moment we’d checked in—but close enough. ‘This…’ I say, and my voice breaks, underlining nicely just how not ‘over it’ I am ‘…was supposed to be my honeymoon. I should have got married eight days ago.’

I see in Cristian’s eyes that he knows where I’m going, but I say it anyway. I don’t know why, but I need to.

‘He left me standing at the altar. No explanation.’

Everyone else has been looking at me with pity since it happened, but not Cristian. For a moment his eyes flare with a hint of the anger I saw at the door to the suite, but then I see both admiration and acknowledgment. ‘And so you ran away,’ he says softly, with no judgement.

I stand up and laugh. I don’t know why. This last twenty-four hours has been surreal enough as it is and I seem to have lost the ability to surprise myself any longer. I fling my arms wide. ‘Does it look as if I’m running away? I came on my own honeymoon, for heaven’s sake!’

Cristian just looks at me.

‘Oh, shut up,’ I say and pace away in the other direction. I go to stare out of the window. Even though it’s late the city is still alive, busy like an ant hill, but populated with taxi cabs and red buses instead of insects.