‘I know,’ he says.
I pull away from his warm shoulder now, wiping my face, my grotty nose, on my sleeve.
‘You’re not shocked?’
M
y eyes search deep into his, but I see that he isn’t. Not at all. ‘Why aren’t you shocked?’
‘Maybe I’m more difficult to shock than you think I am?’ He smiles, then. A smile that could melt this mountain of snow-fall into a summer river, a smile that starts to melt the glacier around my heart. And then I feel him nudge my arm.
‘I think I’ve discovered what’s responsible for those noises you keep hearing.
Look.
’ He indicates with his head towards the snowy slope beneath, and there, barely even visible in the moonlight, is a completely white fox. I gasp. The creature doesn’t move. He just stands there, looking up at us for a good few minutes, all round shiny eyes and pink nose and not much else visible at all. Is this the animal responsible for the footsteps I heard outside earlier? Not an intruder, not the fugitive, nor some roaming spirit, all the scary things my restless mind came up with in the early hours when I was so alone? I feel an instant flood of relief. I imagine the weather has forced it out further from its usual hunting grounds, searching for food.
‘My God. It’s an albino. I’ve never seen one of those before. Have you?’
M
y crushed mood has lifted in an instant. I feel light, and somehow clean and whole inside, as if things make sense again. ‘Have you ever seen anything quite so beautiful?’
‘I don’t believe I have,’ Lawrence says and his voice sounds sad. When I turn back to look at him in wonder, he isn’t looking at the fox, though.
He’s looking at me.
‘You don’t have to say kind things to me, Lawrence,’ I take him in hesitantly. A moment ago, I would have added;
don’t, because this isn’t going to go anywhere and you being kind is only going to make things harder for me.
But since then, when I told him everything I did, things have changed dramatically between us, I feel it.
‘I wasn’t being kind.’ He looks at me helplessly. ‘I know what it is you want, Rose.’ I want to turn away from him now, save what’s left of my dignity because he finds it all too easy to read the naked longing in my eyes, but I can’t.
‘
Rose
,’ he rubs his hands up and down my arms now. ‘My life’s not … not in the right place for me to have a relationship with anyone. You need to know that. I can’t stay. When I finish what I’ve come to do here, I won’t have a job anymore. I don’t even know where I’m headed next.’
‘I understand,’ I say, even though I don’t, and my voice feels thick in my throat.
‘If things were different, believe me, I wouldn’t be saying this. I’d be saying something else. I don’t want to see you waste your life away with wanting, that’s all. It’s just … I’m not …’
H
e kicks at the snow on the ground disconsolately with the tip of his boot. He chuffs it up into a big messy pile. The snow looks blue-grey by the light of the moon. ‘You think you know me but
you really don’t. You don’t know me, Rose.’
‘Tell me, then,’ I say hoarsely.
I just told you all about me
. ‘Tell me what it is about you that I need to know before you’ll accept that I … I care for you.’ Oh God, I said those words out loud. I said them, even though I never meant to. Maddeningly, he shakes his head.
‘Is it - someone else? A girlfriend?’ He said before he didn’t have one, but still … my heart is thudding, my head giddy with his touch but he’s already moving away. He shakes his head again slightly.
‘I haven’t got a girlfriend, Rose.’
‘A
boyfriend
, then?’ He smiles slightly.
He blows on his hands, sticks them back inside his pockets as if he’s scared of what he might do with them otherwise. ‘I’ve been on the go for a long time now,’ he adds as he sees that I’m waiting for more. ‘Never stayed stuck in one place for too long. That’s made having relationships a mite tricky.’
Why have you never stayed in one place for long enough,
that’s the question?
I see him bite his lower lip, look down. When he looks up at me again, I think maybe he’s going to answer me at last but instead there’s a curiosity burning on his face that wasn’t there before.
‘Do you?’ he asks.
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
I swallow, taken aback by his interest. Does he even
care
?
‘No,’ I say and then, without meaning to, I add
.
‘I saw my soul-mate once, though.’
‘You
saw
him? You know him, then?’ He sounds a little disappointed by that but I shake my head.
‘I saw him in my mind’s eye
.
’ I pick my words carefully.
‘Oh?’
‘More
felt
him than saw him. But I knew that it was him and I knew …’
M
y throat threatens to close up but Lawrence nudges me, makes me say the words.
‘I knew that he and I could never be together in this life.’
‘Oh, Rose,’ he breaks into a sad smile.
Superstitious girl,
the expression on his face says. Because of what I’ve just told him about that spell I believed I’d cast, and my mum, no doubt. He might be right about that one, but this is one thing I know I
am
right about ... ‘How can you even say that?’
‘I say it because I know it to be true.’
‘You’d never be together?’ he says softly.
‘We couldn’t. It wouldn’t be allowed.’ Saying the words out loud has made me feel sad, as I knew it would. I have never told that to anyone. Not even Mum. Lawrence’s hand has somehow slipped into my hand. He lifts my gloved fingers to his lips. He has no real idea what that does to me inside, does he?
‘Don’t let that make you afraid to love someone, Rose.’
No idea at all.
He steps in closer to me and the movement is as natural as breathing. Beside me, his face just nuzzling mine, that’s where he should be. It’s where, no matter what I’ve just said about all my disappointments and my hopes and my fears, I want him to be.
‘You
are
beautiful,’ he says thickly. His hand reaches up, tentatively, just touching my cheek and my whole face feels as if it is burning at his touch. ‘You are beautiful and you deserve to have someone special who loves you, never doubt that.’
And now at last, he leans forward and kisses me softly. His kiss is as warm and as light as a breath against my mouth. And just for this moment, as short as a heartbeat, as long as an entire lifetime, there is nothing else. Every other single thing in my entire life melts away. Even me. I don’t know where I’ve gone right now. I’m a soft, downy white feather floating on a warm summer’s breeze. I’m the ripples in the pond the first time I ever skimmed a pebble right to the centre. There is only his kiss, his lips sweet as wine on my mouth, and a slow spreading joy rising up from my belly like the bubbles in a champagne glass.
If only it could have gone on for longer, that kiss - forever, maybe.
I would have been happy to have stayed like that forever,
I think deliriously,
for us to be like two little figures locked together in a Christmas snow globe for all eternity.
Even as he pulls his head back a little, tentative, observing me, all I can feel is bereft that his lips are no longer on my own; at the same time both intoxicated with joy and flooded with sadness because instinctively I know that, without him, I will never be as much again
‘I wasn’t expecting that,’ I murmur.
God, he is beautiful
! I can’t believe he thinks that I am, too. That kiss, I’m thinking it must have been a consolation kiss, because he can’t have a relationship with me. Because he isn’t in the right place in his life right now - whatever else it was that he just said - I don’t know, I can’t remember. He said lots of things just now, didn’t he? Lots of words about how he’s been on the go for such a long time and stuff, how I don’t really know him,
how I am beautiful and I deserve to have someone special to love me.
You, Lawrence. I look at him helplessly. I want to have
you
to love me. Now that I have felt your lips on my own, no other man is ever going to do.
Something out of my control makes me move a little nearer to him now, my fingers pulling at the buttons of his damp duffle-coat, holding him there close to me. Behind him, I imagine I see the dawn just beginning to break, a faint brightness permeating the sky above the trees to the east. The jagged dark line where he said the little angels used to keep guard above the battlements stands out proud. Another day is coming. A day I suddenly feel fearful of, a day that I wish with all my heart would not come so soon.
I wish I could stay here with you forever, that’s what I wish. I wish we didn’t have to go back to the real wor
l
d, our real lives.
As we stand there, the flashing orange tail-light of a plane appears over the horizon and I see that it is not daybreak as I thought, not dawn yet. But I know that it is coming. That it has to come. With the back of his hand, Lawrence is stroking my hair away from my face, so gently, so lovingly, it’s as if he too, understands that these few moments we have together here are precious. They will not come again.
‘I didn’t expect it.’ When I look up at him his eyes are bright, shining with something lovely, something beautiful, and I know he feels as happy as I do at this moment.
‘Or
this
?’ His next kiss is deeper, lasts for longer. When I pull his head down to me, drawing him hungrily towards my own lips for a third time, I hear him give out a gasp of desire, and the sound stirs something in me, too. Something that I’d buried so deep I didn’t even remember it was part of me anymore.
‘
Rose,
’ he’s saying, ‘Rose ... I didn’t mean for us to do this,’ but his voice as he says my name is coming from somewhere deep within his throat and I know that it’s too late: it doesn’t matter what he intended because a deeper, more animal volition has taken over, a physical hunger that will not be so easily subdued. Slowly, we’ve moved back up against the snow-covered wall. He’s pulled off his gloves. He’s unbuttoning my wet jacket. My eyes open wider, slightly disbelieving because out here we are so exposed to the elements but he seems oblivious to that. Now that he has started I do not want him to stop. The air that leaves our mouths turns to icy mist, and I see his breath is coming harder, faster. Despite his impatience his hands must be frozen and the buttons take an age to undo. By the time he’s done and he looks up at me something makes him suddenly laugh out loud.
‘What?’
T
he sound of his laughter catches in my own throat, ‘what’s so funny?’
‘Your nose,’ he leans forward, nuzzling it gently with his own. ‘Is bright red! I’ve let you get too cold,
M
adame.
’
‘What do you suggest?’ I let out a long, icy breath as the words leave my lips and he covers my mouth with his own again. I’m aware that every part of me is suddenly trembling.
‘I imagine we’ll think of something.’ His hand on the small of my back presses me in close to him now, so that I feel him, right along the length of my body, every part of him, lean and muscular and -
hard
. I groan. I’m glad it is dark still, so he can’t see the blush that rises to my face. He can’t see the confusion and the hesitancy mixed in with my desire. I’m not all that experienced at this. Not like he’d expect someone of my age to be and there is a kind of shame in that. It isn’t the sort of thing you want broadcast to the world. Lawrence is going to find out soon enough, though isn’t he?
Oh God, what am I doing
?
I hardly know Lawrence really, do I? He’s a stranger I’ve met in a snowstorm. He’s a kind, sweet, gorgeous stranger who’s warned me since we met - a very short time ago - that I mustn’t do this, fall for him, want him -
expect anything from him?
‘Come,’ he motions with his head for us both to go back inside. We are both shivering, frozen to the core but I instinctively know as soon as I follow him inside that what’s going to happen next is something there will be no going back from.