Love Me

Episode 13

No. No. No. Angrily, Kelly buried her face in her hands, but it was too late;

there was no pushing back the memories now, they were here, surrounding her,

flooding out any kind of denial or rational thought.

She had been at university by then; had, in fact, gone there unwillingly. So

intense and all-consuming had been the ferocity of her teenage love for David, so

burningly immediate and sharp-fanged her desire for him, that she had not been

able to bear the thought of putting any kind of distance between them. Every

spare minute she had, every excuse she could use, she had used—to be with
David. As Jack’s sister it had been easy enough for her to spend her free time

at the estate, joining the group of local teenagers who were helping David with

some of his environmental projects had given her even more opportunity to be

with him. Not that David himself had seemed to be aware of her feelings, even

though she had done everything she could to show him how she felt.

There had been that afternoon she had fallen into the muddy lake they had

been cleaning. David had pulled her out, grinning at her mud-covered clothes and

hair.

‘I need a bath,’ she had complained, grimacing.

‘A bath?’ David had laughed. ‘There’s no way Jack’s housekeeper is going to

let you into the house like that. I’d better take you back to the cottage with me

and hose you down outside before I let you go back, otherwise we’ll both be in

real trouble.’

His cottage... How she had trembled at the thought, imagining not the prosaic

cleaning-up operation David had so teasingly referred to but something far more

intimate, her body soaking in a tub of blissfully hot water whilst David lovingly

soaped her clean...

‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her, frowning at her. ‘You’ve gone very red.

Are you feeling ill?’

Ill... Sick with love, with longing for him, would have been the appropriate

answer, but she had been , too shy to make it. Instead she had shaken

her head and dutifully climbed into his battered Rolls Royce for the drive back to

his small estate cottage.

The sensual intimacy she had so dangerously imagined had proved to be just

that—a fantasy.

David had made her remove her clothes in his small back porch, sternly

admonishing her not to move off the old towel he had put down on the floor and

to give him a shout once she was undressed and wrapped in the towel he had left

her.

‘I’ll put your stuff in the washer—Jack’s housekeeper will kill me if she sees it—and then you can have a quick shower upstairs. You’ll have to go home in

my stuff but at least it will be clean.’

‘These towels are awfully thin,’ she had remarked critically once she was

standing wrapped in the protection of the largest of them, and David had returned

to scoop up her filthy clothes.

‘Mmm... I use them to dry the dogs,’ David had told her unromantically,

grinning at her when he saw her expression. ‘They’re the ones who should be

pulling a face,’ he said. ‘When they come back covered in mud they get hosed

down outside before they’re even allowed in.’

‘I’m not a dog, I’m a...’ A woman, she had been about to say, but then she had

stopped as David had stooped to pick up her white briefs from the stone floor, her

face turning an unsophisticated shade of pink when she saw how small they

looked held in his strongly masculine hand.

The wet had seeped right through her jeans to her briefs, but David’s eyebrows

had risen as he’d studied them and then her.

‘It’s all right... I can go home without them; it won’t matter under...my...your

jeans,’ Kelly had told him helpfully, far too innocent and young then to

understand just how sensuously provocative it could be for a woman to go naked

beneath her clothes—and even more so when the clothes, the jeans she was

wearing, were his and not her own.

‘It’s okay; I think I’ve got something you can wear,’ David had told her

laconically.

She had been young and naive but not so young nor so naive as not to be able

to guess where the tiny pretty lacy briefs David had given her might have come

from, and the knowledge that they must have belonged to another woman had

cast a shadow not just over the whole day, but over everything.

She had once heard Jack joking with David about his taste for older women.

‘I’m not in the market for commitment or marriage,’ David had returned. ‘But

I’m not about to turn myself into a monk either,’ he had admitted frankly.

Neither of them had known that she was listening as she hesitated outside Jack’s

library door on her way past.

‘So a woman who knows what life’s all about, who’s been married and

decided that it isn’t for her, suits me fine.’

She hadn’t been able to hide her massive crush on David before she’d left for

university, in fact had openly offered her love to him, but he had determinedly

pushed it away—just as he had also determinedly pushed her away.

She had noticed it again at Jack’s annual New year party. Her mother had

been there, turning her nose up at such little country pursuits, but Kelly hadn’t been there, turning her nose up at such little country pursuits, but Kelly hadn’t

cared. She’d been determined that David was going to dance with her and that she

was going to claim a New year kiss from him.

She had been wearing a new dress and high heels. She had put her hair up and

worn make-up. Jack had looked at her with tender amusement when she had

come downstairs, but there had been no tenderness in David’s eyes later that

evening when he had removed her arms from around his neck, refusing to give

her the kiss she had begged him for. It had taken three glasses of wine before she

had had the courage to approach him and, horrendously, she could feel her eyes

starting to fill with tears as he’d unlocked her arms from around his neck and

started to turn away from her.

David, please...’ she had pleaded, but he had ignored her, stony-faced and

blank-eyed, as he’d walked away from her.

And, as though that hadn’t been bad enough, to compound the evening’s

heartache and humiliation, she had seen him less than an hour later dancing with

the newly divorced wife of one of Jack’s tenants, holding her tightly against his

body as he caressed her under the dim lights, bending his head to kiss her with

heart-shaking passion before leading her outside.

She had been so jealous, so burned up with pain that even her skin had felt

raw and tender.

Later, naively, she’d told herself that David hadn’t meant to hurt her, that he

probably still thought of her as a child and not a woman, and so she had gone on

clinging to her self-created delusions.

All through her first year at university, as much as she had wanted to hate

David she had also yearned for him, dreaming of him, longing for him, promising

herself that one day it would be different, one day he would look at her and love

her.

She had refused dates from the boys she met on her courses and only attended

the regulation student parties because the other girls had teased her into it.

Naturally gregarious, although no one could ever come to mean to her what David

meant, she had nevertheless made several platonic friendships with various boys

she had met at university. One of them she had particularly taken to; shy and

self-effacing, Hardy had only come to university because of family pressure. As

the youngest of his family he’d been expected to follow in the footsteps of his

elder sisters and brothers, all of whom had graduated with honours.

‘What did you really want to do?’ Kelly had asked him.

‘Paint,’ he had told her simply.

Kelly’s discovery that he was taking drugs had saddened but not particularly

shocked her. They were, after all, a feature of university life, although she

herself had stayed clear of them.

It had been Hardy who had persuaded her to attend the rave party where he

had introduced her to Wayne. She had guessed that Jayne was his supplier but

had naively assumed then that Jayne was no more than a generous-minded

individual who had the contacts to supply his friends with drugs, and that it was

they who pressured him into obtaining them for them rather than the other way

around. Without directly saying so, Jayne had implied that they were two of a

kind, individuals who stood out from the crowd. His street-wise sophistication

had reminded her in some odd way of David. Perhaps because, like David, Jayne

was older than her and the friends she’d mixed with. She had listened half

enviously when he had told her of his plans to spend the summer with a group of

eco-warriors, travelling the country.

Kelly had always been idealistic, and Jayne’s description of the way the

group were dedicated to preventing the destruction of the countryside by greedy

power barons had increased her sense of comradeship with him and with the

group he was joining.

Just as importantly, Jayne had seemed to understand the problems she was

having in convincing her mother that she was now an adult.

‘She’s such a snob,’ she had told Jayne ruefully, wrinkling her nose.

‘She wouldn’t much approve of me, then,’ he had countered, and although she

had shaken her head Kelly had been forced to admit that he was right. She had

confided to Jayne how uncomfortable it often made her feel that she should be

so privileged. Jack gave her an allowance and her mother was constantly

visiting her and fussing over whether or not she was eating properly and wearing

the right kind of clothes. Her mother had never wanted her to go to university.

She had bemoaned the fact that girls like Kelly no longer had the opportunity to

‘come out’ properly, as she had done as a girl. Jack had been the driving force

behind her moving off to university. Time, he said, for her to grow and find out

about herself.

It had not been long after her disclosure that she received an allowance that

Jayne had asked to borrow money from her. Of course she had given it to him.

He was a friend...

And then, after she had given Wayne the money he had asked for, she had

discovered that she needed to buy some new course books, and that stupidly she

had not realised that she had an advance rent bill due for the small flat she lived

in.

She had had to telephone Jack to ask him for an advance on her forth coming allowance. She had felt uncomfortable about doing so, but after a small pause,

when she had stammeringly explained that she had loaned some money to a

friend, he had said quietly that she could leave the matter with him.

Naively she had assumed that that meant that he would send her a cheque, and

suddenly she’d had more important things to worry about than money. Hardy

her friend, was dead. He had collapsed at a rave party and been rushed into

hospital, but it had been too late to save him.