‘No… It wasn’t like that. I… he… I was the one who said that it couldn’t go any further. It shouldn’t have gone as far as it did.’
Her eyes filled with tears as she said softly, ‘He was so tender, Susie, so loving, so giving; he made me feel so… so sexually strong and powerful. He made me realise something that all those years of marriage to Andrew never did. I woke up last night aching for him… wanting him… envying, hating his wife almost, wondering how on earth she could be so indifferent, so unmoved by a man who is such a wonderful lover…’
‘He could be lying to you, Pip,’ Susie warned her gently. ‘Men do, you know, especially when…’
‘When they want to get you into bed. Yes, I know…’
Susie’s expression lightened as Philippa laughed.
‘No… it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t planned or contrived and I already knew, despite his gallant attempts to deny it, that he loves his wife.
‘And even if he didn’t, the last thing I want is to be responsible for the break-up of someone else’s marriage. It’s just… it’s just that it hurts so much knowing how good what we had together was and knowing that it can never happen again. Logically I know that it’s only my body that aches and yearns for him, Susie, but because I’m a woman…’
‘And because right now you’re far too damned vulnerable,’ Susie supplied for her. ‘Oh, Pip, I’m so sorry…’
Philippa shook her head and gave her a brief smile. ‘Don’t be. I’m not. Not really. Even while I was lying in bed crying for him this morning, a part of me was…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘When I was in my teens I had a mammoth crush on a friend of my brother’s. When he rejected me and I married Andrew I thought my sexuality was something that only my first love could arouse. Discovering that I was wrong is like being set free from an imprisoning cage.
‘It’s hard to explain properly, but I feel as though the control of my sexuality, which subconsciously I believed I had handed over to him, has been returned to me. That I am now the one who can choose and decide to whom I do and don’t respond.’
‘It’s all right,’ she assured her friend when she saw the way she was looking at her. ‘Right now I feel bad, but I know that it’s something that will pass, like a bad bout of flu.
‘Even if Joel were free to have a relationship with me, it’s too soon for me. There are things I need to do, problems I need to resolve first, emotionally as well as practically.
‘Don’t feel sad for me, Susie—I can do that all too well for myself—it isn’t pity I need, it’s love. Yes,’ Philippa laughed now, ‘love.’
* * *
‘There, that should be OK now.’
Joel smiled reassuringly at the small tow-headed boy whose bike he had just been fixing, dusting off the knees of his jeans before getting up to watch him ride off.
He was going to be late home—again, he acknowledged as he walked across the leisure centre car park and unlocked the door of his car.
It had felt good knowing that he could afford to pay for things like petrol for his car himself.
‘Where did you get the money for these?’ Sally had demanded when he had taken her home some flowers. Her voice had been full of suspicion, destroying his pleasure in being able to afford to give her the small gift.
‘I earned it,’ he had told her. ‘Remember I told you last week that one of the parents had asked me to give her little girl some private swimming lessons?’
‘Estelle just doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with her swimming,’ the woman had confided to him as she’d stood watching him coach her son. ‘We’ve just become members at the new private health club that’s opened at Deighton Hall, and I hear they’ve got a pool there and I was wondering if you gave private swimming lessons.’
He had bought the flowers on impulse on his way home, remembering how Sally’s face used to glow with pleasure when she arranged the flowers she had occasionally bought herself, confessing that they were a treat she hadn’t been able to resist; but instead of being pleased she had almost thrown the flowers down on to the kitchen worktop, threatening their delicate stems, her face flushed with temper and her mouth tight as she’d criticised him for wasting money.
In the town centre the traffic lights were on red and, as he waited for them to change he glanced to his right and the road which led to Philippa’s house.
‘We mustn’t see each other again,’ s
he had said, and although the firm tone of her voice had told him that she meant it he had seen the way her mouth trembled slightly and her eyes grew shadowed. ‘And Sally—your wife—you love her,’ she had told him.
The lights changed and quickly, before he could give in to the temptation, he drove straight on.
It wasn’t just sex that made his thoughts turn to Philippa at odd times during the day and, even more betrayingly, when he lay awake beside Sally at night. He had liked her honesty and her humour, the way she sat watching him so attentively while she listened to him.
No, it wasn’t just the small throaty cries of pleasure she had given when he had touched her, nor the way she had touched him.
‘It doesn’t mean anything’, she had told him. ‘It was just sex’, and he had known that she was lying, that what was there between them could, if they allowed it to do so, become far, far more than physical lust.
He could feel his throat tightening with pain and an aching sense of loss. It didn’t matter how hard he tried to reach out to Sally these days; all she did was reject him.