Page 21 of The Affair
They’d walked only a short distance before he pulled her into a little recess between two buildings – not an alleyway, just a niche, really. Then his mouth was on hers, hot, breathless, insistent, as if he had waited a lifetime for that moment.
She had no idea how long they kissed. She wasgathered up in his desire, her body matching his, ready to fly into a million pieces as she felt his hand between her legs, his fingers pressing up inside her. She had no consciousness of her surroundings, no shame as she gave herself up to his urgent touch. Small, rapid gasps, then the world paused for a second, before release overtook her in a delicious surge. She moaned softly, heard Jared chuckle. Opening her eyes, she saw him smiling down at her. But she couldn’t speak as she leaned against him, suddenly exhausted.
‘What on earth are wedoing?’ she whispered, drawing back from his embrace, biting her swollen lips as she attempted to adjust her crumpled dress. She was suddenly acutely aware that they were in a public place, pressed up against a cold wall, making out like teenagers in a bus shelter. But the realization could not erase the intense pleasure of Jared’s touch.
His hand pressed into her back as they stepped onto the deserted street. But the spell was broken. Connie pulled away in panic as she glanced at her watch. ‘Shit!’ She thought of Sandro at the desk.Will he be worried, wondering where I am?‘I’ve got to go back.’ The cold hard fact of what she’d just done made her almost desperate to get away from Jared.
They hurried the five minutes to the hotel in silence, Jared making no attempt to touch her. When they reached the door, it was locked, but a small polished-brass bell push was labelled ‘Night Bell’. Connie had never noticed it before. She looked up at Jared as she pressed it, in trepidation of who might come.
‘Go,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’They mustn’t see him with me. Bianca knew all about Devan and her family, always asked to see the latest photo of little Bash.
‘OK … but will you –’
‘No.’ She pushed her palm flat to his chest, not wanting to hear what he was asking of her, just desperate for him to leave. ‘This was so wrong. I’m sorry, I –’
But he laid his finger gently to her lips. After a moment’s hesitation, he was gone, striding purposefully along the quay. She watched him until he was round the bend of the harbour road and safely out of sight.
No one was answering the bell. Anxiously, she pressed it again, smoothing her tousled hair and tucking it behind her ears, running a finger beneath her eyes to catch any errant mascara, applying lip-balm to her stinging lips. She knew she must look like somebody who’d been doing exactly what she and Jared had just done.What if nobody comes?
After what seemed like an eternity, she heard shuffling behind the wooden door and a gruff voice – not one she immediately recognized in her distraught state – calling, ‘Chi è?’
‘It’s Connie. I’m a guest.’
She tried to remember the words in Italian as the voice repeated more loudly, ‘Chi è là?’
‘Io resto qui,’ she said, as loudly as she dared, ‘in the hotel.’
There was the sound of a key grating in the lock, then bolts being drawn, deafening in the still night. She cringed, wondering if any of her group with the lakeview were awake and listening. Then the door swung open and an older man, whom Connie recognized as Franco, the hotel’s handyman, was peering out at her, dressed in an old sweater and loose trousers, slippers on his feet. He’d clearly been asleep.
‘Franco, it’s me.Mi dispiace tanto…’
He stood aside to let her in, grumbling under his breath as he did so. But Connie didn’t care. She was safe. With a mumbled ‘Grazie … grazie mille,’ she raced up the stairs two at a time, fumbling with the key card until the green light flashed and she almost fell into her room.
Once inside she leaned against the door. The bedroom looked so normal, so exactly how she’d left it before her life had been turned upside down tonight. She began to cry. They weren’t tears of sadness, or even guilt. Connie was crying because the turmoil she was experiencing was so bewildering, so all-consuming, the exhaustion so great, that sobs simply burst from her throat, propelled by the maelstrom inside.
She didn’t know what to think about first: Jared, Devan, her behaviour …Sex against a wall in a back alley? Me, Connie McCabe?It was unthinkable. And she was, indeed, too tired to think. A frantic day lay ahead, including hours on trains with too much silence in which to contemplate what she’d done. When she closed her eyes at last, laying her cheek gratefully against the cool cotton of the hotel pillow, she was aware of nothing else until her phone alarm’s painfully insistent buzzing.
9
Connie opened her eyes to find herself in her own bed again. She looked around, expecting to see her husband, but Devan was not there, the sheets and pillow on his side untouched. She tried to clear her head. Then she remembered.
Devan’s greeting to her the previous day when he had picked her up from the station had been muted, scarcely even friendly. And she was barely through the front door when he announced he was off to the pub.
‘It’s Dix’s birthday,’ he’d said. ‘Come if you like.’
Connie had no desire to sit and watch Dix fall off his stool yet again, even if it was his birthday and he had an excuse for once, so she declined.
‘By the way,’ Devan said, in parting, ‘I’ve moved into the spare room. I’m sleeping really badly at the moment and I don’t want to disturb you. You’ll be exhausted after your trip.’
Connie had stared at his retreating back. Was this his form of punishment for her intransigence? Was his sympathy for her tiredness just veiled sarcasm? She wasn’t sure: he had spoken from the hall – perhaps deliberately – as he was opening the front door, so she couldn’t see his face.
In a sense it was a relief. On two counts. The tensionat bedtime in the past months had been huge – pretty much since the incident with the lilac negligee – Devan always avoiding coming up at the same time as she, then smartly turning his back. She felt like a pariah in her own bed.
And then there was Jared. On that front she deserved more punishment than her husband moving into the spare room. In the rush and busyness of the previous two days – overnighting in Turin and so on – there’d been no time to think. She’d slept on the first train. Against the rules, but no one seemed to notice or care. Then her seat had been beside Cheltenham Martin, as a single traveller, on the day-long leg to Paris and the Eurostar to London. He’d talked non-stop until somewhere south of Paris, Connie having to crane her neck awkwardly sideways as he told her about his plumbing: by some system incomprehensible to her, he’d proudly linked the renewables in his house to the fossil fuels via a clever new widget. Her head bobbed up and down, like that of a nodding dog in the back window of a seventies car, as she dropped in the occasional ‘Wow, fascinating,’ her mind fighting to find space to process what had happened with Jared.
When she’d woken to her alarm in the lakeside hotel the morning after, she felt as if the late-night interlude had been a dream. It still did not seem possible – although she was painfully aware of the after-effects of Jared’s touch: her lips were rough and sore, and she still tingled when she remembered what he had done.
But any hope that her behaviour was a fantasy, or herlate – and dishevelled – return to the hotel might escape censure, was instantly dispelled by Bianca’s level gaze as Connie checked out the group.Franco must have said something, she thought miserably. Bianca looked disappointed, although there was doubt in her kind eyes. Her goodbye hug was tempered, her usually effusive warmth missing, which broke Connie’s heart. She couldn’t meet the handyman’s eye as he loaded the coach with the piles of wheelie-cases.
