‘You’ve got a very, very sexy body,?
?? Holly had told him purringly the first time they had made love. She had used almost exactly the same words, but in a far different tone and with the added rider, ‘Pity all it does is look sexy,’ the last time.
Wryly he reflected how in the end none of her experienced, knowledgeable caresses had been able to arouse him to any real desire, and yet at night in his dreams, and sometimes even in his conscious hours, all it took to make him ache and throb with intense sexual need was the blurred memory of a certain face… a certain voice, her smile, her scent… her memory… the way he was beginning to ache now…
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FOR four days Philippa managed to convince herself that nothing had really happened and that she had safely dismissed Joel and all that she had experienced in his arms to a small sealed container which could easily be buried beneath all the other detritus in her life, and then, five nights after they had made love, she woke up alone and aching in the dark, her face wet with tears.
What was she really crying for? she asked herself as she fought to suppress the sharp clarity of the pain that had woken her, the sense of loss, not just of her present and her future as a sexually functioning desirable woman, but her past as well.
The woman who had responded so passionately to Joel’s touch was not the same woman who had lived so passively for all those years as Andrew’s wife. And now, when it was too late, she could recognise just why she had crouched timidly beneath the protective cover of that passivity and acceptance for all those years; the reality of accepting her needs as a woman was acutely painful.
Now that the euphoria of expressing her sexuality so freely and so uninhibitedly was over, she was left with the cold, raw emptiness of the loneliness which had taken its place.
But Joel was another woman’s husband, a woman who he believed no longer wanted him.
She wanted him, Philippa recognised. She wanted him very badly indeed.
She got up and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Through the kitchen window she could see the first feeble, pale rays of light trying to break through the darkness. It seemed impossible that they would do so, and yet of course they would.
She put down her cup of tea. Was it really Joel she wanted, or just someone to cling to, someone to transfer her troubles to, someone to make her feel that her life had a viable purpose to it? Was she really so weak, so afraid?
Even if Joel were free to form a relationship with her, she was not free to have one with him, she acknowledged honestly; there was too much other unfinished business in her life.
And besides, she mocked herself wryly as she stood by the window and watched the first pale lemon warming of the spring sun lightening the grey sky, didn’t she need to learn to love herself before she could start trying to convince herself that she loved someone else?
* * *
Five hours later, when Susie called round to invite her to go out to lunch with her, she found her halfway up a ladder cleaning windows.
‘Spring-cleaning,’ she commented ruefully. ‘You’re making me feel very guilty; I haven’t touched mine yet.’
‘Mmm. Well, this is more a form of therapy than good housewifeliness,’ Philippa admitted as climbed down the rungs and pushed her hair off her face. She looked tired and thin, Susie noticed, but at the same time there was a new determination about her, a new energy.
‘Therapy?’ Susie quizzed her and then added teasingly, ‘What you need is a new man in your life, not——’
She broke off, appalled by her own lack of tact when she saw the look of pain that crossed Philippa’s eyes.
‘Oh, Pip, I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to be so tactless—I know Andrew was…’
‘It isn’t Andrew,’ Philippa stopped her. She made a faint grimace. ‘Even I can’t be that much of a hypocrite. You know how Andrew and I lived, Susie, what our relationship was.’ She got up and walked over to the sink, keeping her back to her friend as she told her, ‘It never really bothered me that Andrew and I didn’t have much of a sex life; to be blunt about it, I was almost glad.
‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how things change? Ten years ago the worst thing you could possibly admit to was having a low sex drive. Any woman who couldn’t manage to have an orgasm to order, never mind admitting that she didn’t even want to, would have been classed by her peers as an oddity—a complete failure.
‘I was almost grateful to Andrew for not wanting to discuss the lack of sexual desire between us; it made it easier for me to pretend that I was just like everyone else.
‘Fashions change, though, don’t they, and now it’s almost acceptable for a woman to lay claim to a certain amount of loss of libido, provided she can back it up with the combined demands of a high-profile career, motherhood and if possible half a dozen other balls to juggle in the air as well?’
She turned round and gave Susie a smile that was half rueful and half sad. ‘The trouble with me is that I never seem to quite make it in step with fashion…’
Susie digested and unravelled her small speech and then said carefully, ‘If you’re trying to tell me that you’ve met someone else and that you want to have sex with him——’
‘Wanted to and have done,’ Philippa interrupted her, and then added gravely, ‘But that’s as far as it goes. He’s married and if I’m honest with myself I know that at least half the reason the sex between us was so… so explosive was because of our joint need…
‘That’s the trouble with our sex, isn’t it, Susie? We have sex with a man and suddenly we have to invest what is really only a physical act with a full battery of emotional baggage.’
‘You mean he took you to bed and then dropped you?’ Susie demanded angrily. ‘What a rat! He…’