Connection

‘Are you ok?’ she asks, flatly, swallowing the anxiety that pokes itself into the corners of her voice.

‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’ He doesn’t raise his head from his book. ‘Yes,’ he replies.

There is a long silence where she can hear her thoughts rush together to confer. He raises his eyes an inch over his book and lifts his left eyebrow expectantly.

‘I was only asking,’ she says and shifts in her chair. Defensiveness crawls up her spine and pushes her to sit upright. ‘Why can’t I ask?’ she adds, jutting out her chin and knitting her eyebrows together.

‘You ask a lot,’ he states.

She opens her mouth to fire off a retort, thinks better of it, and closes it shut.

He puts his book down on the arm of the chair, laying it flatly on the pages. She stares at it a while, thinking of the spine which is breaking but her mouth remains firmly closed. He pushes himself with a sigh from the sunken couch and brushes past her to the open fire in the corner of the room. The daylight slips away through the latticed windows as the sun dips lower past the apple tree that shields the garden from spying neighbours. The quiet is heavy, broken only by the crackling of the fire as he manipulates it into life again.

He stokes the kindling, hands clasped around the cold, iron poker, hands that had caressed so gently over her arched, tingling skin. A growing heat fills the small front room of the cottage as he stares intently at the flames. She watches him watching them. His beard is forming again, a three day growth perhaps. She likes it that way, although it scratches her skin when he moves down her body. The thought of their bodies makes her breathe more rapidly. The sleepy-eyed way he rolled on to her that morning, sliding in with such ease had been an arousing awakening, one she had abandoned herself to like a freefalling skydiver, spiralling recklessly into the lust. She longed for that connection again, to reach out and touch and dissolve. But something had changed. Catching her quite unaware again, a mood had settled upon them, brewed from intangibility, the beginning hanging at the tip of an endless rope.

Straightening his knees, he rose stiffly and stood. He turned and caught her eye as he replaced the poker onto the rack meeting her open stare with blankness. He coughed, moved back to the couch, lifted his book back, found his place and began again to read.