For Better for Worse

He kissed the side of her neck, her breasts, not with his normal slow tenderness but with an intensity, a savagery almost that fell just short of pain.

In the morning she would be bruised; bruised and just a little shocked by the way they had both behaved. But right now… right now all she wanted was the compelling, urgent thrust of him deep within her body; now… now… not after he had tenderly and carefully aroused her with his loving gentle foreplay, but now!

Neither of them spoke, both of them caught up in the same explosive physical expression of their mutual anger.

They fell across the bed, Marcus rolling her beneath him. Eleanor could taste blood in her mouth. Hers? Marcus’s? From when she had bitten his lip?

As he moved against her, she opened her legs, wrapping them demandingly around him, shivering in her fierce spasm of physical pleasure as he entered her.

Her nails raked his back, urging him deeper, deeper, her abandonment to her own need and to the release of the furies inside her so total that nothing else mattered.

Was it nature, some primeval illogical instinct, that caused this fierce need to feel him so deeply inside her, to experience a penetration so intense that when he came it would be virtually right into her womb? Nature’s way of balancing fate in favour of conception rather than against it?

It was alien to her to want such a deeply physical form of lovemaking—her normal route to orgasm was a much gentler and slower affair; and yet now, fuelled by her anger and by Marcus’s, her body was convulsing in fierce contracting waves so intense that they were almost as much a pain as a pleasure.

She could feel Marcus still shuddering as he held her in his arms, their sweat-slick bodies rapidly cooling. Just like their physical passion, and yet, as explosive as the physical desire between them had been, it had not really resolved anything.

The col

d, unwanted thought crept into her brain that in encouraging, wanting him to make love to her like that, to overwhelm him so that he in turn would overwhelm her, she had perhaps been trying to prove to herself that she was more important to him than anything or anyone else… Anyone else… or Vanessa?

Cold now, she shivered.

‘What is it… what’s wrong?’ Marcus asked her tersely.

She turned to look at him, wanting to explain how she felt and yet at the same time a part of her still feeling angry and resentful that she should need to… that she should feel that she had to somehow justify herself and her feelings, her actions to him.

‘Look, forget about our mutual offspring for a few minutes…’

Irrationally, now that he had recognised what she was thinking, Eleanor felt even more irritated.

‘Forget about them? It isn’t that easy, Marcus. Vanessa is doing her level best to come between us, to—’

‘Vanessa—why?’

‘Vanessa is your child,’ Eleanor pressed on fiercely, ‘Not mine. I can’t…’

‘My child, my creation, my blame, is that what you’re trying to say?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Vanessa, like every child ever created, is an individual, Nell. Yes, in some part her personality, her faults if you like, are genetic, inherited… a gift or a curse depending upon how you look at it. But she is a human being… not a piece of machinery I can programme and control. I don’t like what’s happening any more than you do but we can’t force her compliance. The best we can hope for is that tolerance and awareness will develop with maturity. In the meantime… In the meantime,’ he sighed wearily, ‘it might help if she were offered a little less provocation. Couldn’t you have seen to it that Tom’s posters were removed before she arrived?’

‘Yes. Perhaps I could,’ Eleanor agreed irritably, swamped by her own anger and sense of ill-usage. ‘If you had stuck to our original arrangement and picked Vanessa up, then I might have had time to get the bedrooms properly organised. I might have had time to spend with the agent as well… and time to finish the translation I’ve been working on all week…’

The dark mobile eyebrows lifted slightly, the cool grey eyes suddenly cold and hard. ‘All that in less than an hour. What a marvel you are, Nell. You must teach me how you do it.’

* * *

They made it up later, of course… on the surface at least; but underneath… Eleanor sighed under her breath. What was the matter with her? She was behaving almost as much like a teenager at times as Vanessa.

Tonight when Marcus came home she would talk to him, try to explain. Perhaps if she could persuade the boys to have supper early and watch television in their own room she and Marcus could eat alone… She could make his favourite pasta dish, open a bottle of wine… wash her hair and put on something special… that red jersey dress he had bought her from Jean Muir, the one he had once whispered that he preferred her to wear without undies.

Suddenly feeling a lot more cheerful, she started humming. If she was going to cook she’d better check the fridge… a little bribery for the boys might not be a bad idea either. After all, burgers once in a while weren’t going to mean the end of the world.

‘What’s that?’ Tom demanded suspiciously, pulling a face over the sauce on the hob.

‘It’s not for you,’ Eleanor assured him. ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘Nanna rang this morning. She and Grandad are going to come and pick you up on Saturday morning for half-term, so anything you want to take with you… It will just be the two of you, by the way. Daddy will probably call round to see you, but Karen and the baby…’

She broke off as she saw the look they were exchanging, her heart sinking a little.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked them.