Page 26 of Mine before Dawn
Daylight still belonged to practical matters.
To the narrow streets and the women peering through curtains. To the old men smoking outside the bookmakers and the rough laughter spilling from the pub. To the careful distance Asha kept between herself and everyone else. That included James… especially James.
But the nights were theirs.
James would walk her home as always, carrying Tanay when the boy fell asleep against his shoulder. It was obvious the boy liked him but Asha knew what this was and wished she could turn back time and keep her distance, if only to stop the shine in the boy's eyes when he looked at James. James was her silent bodyguard who stood at the bottom of the steps while she unlocked the door, his face shadowed in the dim glow from the hall light.
Then he would leave.
At least, that was the story they were selling.
He now knew which stair groaned near the turn. Which board near the top squealed beneath his weight. Somehow a man built like him could move silently when he wished to.
He would wait in the alley beside the building, an untouched cigarette between his fingers because Asha wrinkled her pretty nose at the smell. His eyes gleamed as they raptly watched the thin slit of light beneath her curtain for her signal.
Sometimes it took ten minutes.
Sometimes an hour.
Then the light would blink once. The boy was asleep.
And James would climb the stairs carefully while his heart beat with anticipation. He would relish in the throbbing ache of his loins, could almost feel her soft, giving curves in his arms. While he worked the backbreaking hours in the mines, his mind would wander… and wonder. Wonder why everything that was wrong in his life disappeared when he held her… why they fit so right. Chemistry was a strange thing.
The moment the door shut behind him, they would watch each other like wary opponents before the strain would seep out of her shoulders. He loved to bite that junction where her neck met her shoulders. He liked to leave his marks where no one would ever see. He loved the weight of her breasts, the fullness of her ripe lips, the olive of her skin. He revelled in that soft place between her legs and how only he had made her sigh and choke her screams with a pillow. He loved everything about her.
It became a hunger neither of them spoke about, only expressed with their bodies.
There was neither a courtship nor a romance in the way Mavis's lady magazines described.
It was exhaustion and relief and loneliness, all tangled together with a desperate hunger for every moment they had. James had promised himself the madness would end once he had her, once he knew what she felt like inside. But he foundhimself falling deeper into that obsession that gripped him that first day when she walked into the pub.
They barely made it to bed most nights. The cold floor worked. As did the wall.
The tiny home smelled of soap and damp walls. Coal smoke drifted through the cracked window. The mattress dipped badly in the middle, springs complaining beneath their combined weight, but neither cared.
Sometimes she laughed afterwards against his chest and licked his nipple in a tease. Sometimes she was breathless against his throat, and whispered that the bed would collapse and kill them both one day. He told her it was a worthy death. That he wanted to take her to a cottage far away where they didn't have to muffle their groans and screams of pleasure.
Even on the nights she bled, he came.
Those nights surprised her most. Her husband had treated menstruation like a curse. Untouchable. Unclean. She used to pray for her monthly bleeds just to avoid him. She enjoyed being in isolation during those days when she was not allowed into the kitchen and could read as much as she wanted.
James simply tugged her against him and kissed the top of her head as though it changed nothing. And it didn't for him. It only meant they had to place a towel under them and he could avoid those awful French letters that he had come to hate.
One rain-soaked evening she lay sprawled over his chest afterward, listening to the steady thud of his heart beneath her ear with a smile on her face.
Outside, water rattled against the windowpane. It was so soothing.
Inside, the room was warm with sweat and shared breath. And the scent of them together.
“Why did you take your nose ring off?” he asked while touching the small stud piercing her nose.
“Mavis didn’t like it,” she replied. Silence draped over them like a warm banket while he imagined her with a diamond stud.
She spoke suddenly into the darkness.
“I was fourteen when I got married.”
James stopped playing with her hair for a moment, then continued to twirl it around his finger.
