The man on the train kept looking at me, winking, then gesturing to the corridor, presumably to where the toilets were situated. I gave him a look that was as cold as the frost collecting on the window. I wasn’t interested in a quickie and, even if I was, he wasn’t my type. Not that I have a type nowadays.
‘You need to go away for a while,’ my friend, Cathy, told me. ‘You haven’t stopped since James died. It’s all very well to throw yourself into work, Vicky, but you need time to grieve too. Why don’t you go up to the cottage over the Christmas holidays?’ At the time I thought it was Cathy’s way of not inviting me to another strained Christmas dinner, but it started to make sense when other friends half-heartedly invited me to their own celebrations. This year I didn’t want to be a drain on peoples’ emotions. I’d spend time alone and not have to force a smile when I only felt like crawling into bed and dying slowly.
So that’s where I was headed, to our cottage in Derbyshire. James and I used to escape there for long weekends of delicious love-making that began on Friday night, and didn’t stop until Monday morning. Well, it stopped, of course. No one could have sex for that long without stopping, but it always felt as if we’d made love all weekend. Even eating pizza or lying together watching rubbish on television was an element of our love-making. Every word we spoke was part of the seduction, the most innocent touch a leisurely precursor to another hour of exploration. We knew every inch of each other, and when he died, we still had so much more to learn.
His memory gradually slipped away from me, so that I couldn’t remember his body. I couldn’t remember his touch. I couldn’t remember his kisses. I couldn’t remember how it felt when he was inside me. My body was an empty space where he used to be.
I wanted to forget him. If I could do that, it wouldn’t hurt any more. For two years I’d avoided the cottage, unable to face the bittersweet memories. Now it was time to exorcise his ghost.
When I arrived at the cottage, it looked so bleak in the snowy landscape that I almost turned around and went straight home. But I pushed the thought aside and plodded on, remembering that the first time we came here in winter, we fell in love with the cottage all over again, because it looked like something off a Christmas card. Inside was dank and dark. The furniture, which should have been familiar, looked as though it belonged to someone else. I felt awkward sitting on the chair, like an interloper.
Half an hour later, struggling to light the fire with damp wood and frozen fingers, the Aga barely warm, and with night drawing in, I admitted defeat and went to bed, wearing all my clothes for warmth. I must have been dozing when I felt a soft kiss on my cheek. I opened my eyes and for a moment I was sure James stood at the side of the bed. Then he was gone.
‘No,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Don’t do this. He’s not here. He’s gone.’ I pulled the covers over my head and slept.
I awoke in the morning with the covers thrown off, and heat filling the bedroom. When I got up and touched the radiator, it was hot. Rushing down to the kitchen, I found the Aga not only hot, but with a kettle of water heating on the hob. The fire was blazing, with more logs in the grate. James used to do that when we stayed. Get up early, light the fire, put the kettle on then return to bed until we were ready for our first drink of the day. I pushed the thought away. Obviously the fire had got going after all. Quite who’d kept it stocked up all night, I didn’t want to think about.
I took my drink back to bed, and lay among the covers, stretching my fingers out to what used to be James’s side of the bed. Trying and failing to find him in the cool cotton sheets. I must have dozed, because when I opened my eyes a little, I was sure I could see a form in the bed next to me. I reached out my hand and felt skin. I reached further and felt the soft down of chest hair. I kept my eyes half closed, afraid that if I opened them fully the sensation would disappear.
‘Close your eyes and feel me,’ I heard someone whisper, so I did as I was told. Whether this was real or a dream I didn’t want it to end.
The covers above me moved a little and I felt warm fingers stroking my collarbone, moving slowly downwards to my breasts. I lay on my back and savoured the sensation of fingers tweaking nipples so they became hard to his touch. When the fingers were replaced with a probing tongue, sweetly tickling my nipples, I gasped, arching my back for more. The hot mouth on my breast moved lower, over my ribs, down to my navel and then…
My mobile phone rang on the bedside table next to me. I opened my eyes and all the sweetness was gone. It was my mother, asking if I was all right. I didn’t want to be angry with her. After all, she’d only disturbed a dream, and she had no way of knowing. Yet, when we’d finished talking, I switched my phone off.
‘Come back,’ I said to the shadows in the bedroom. ‘Come back and finish what you started.’ But the moment was gone, even though I lay there for quite some time, willing him to return.
I got out of bed, and made myself some breakfast. I was tempted to go back to bed, in case he returned, but it seemed silly in the cold light of day. I dressed in tight jeans and a chunky sweater, then went out for a brisk walk, bought some food from the village shop, then returned for a lonely lunch, all the time wondering if this was how the rest of my life would play out.
After lunch, I lay on the sofa, watching an old James Stewart film on the television. I dozed again, and awoke to hear the zip on my jeans. He was back, so I closed my eyes again, determined not to lose him this time. Warm hands slipped the jeans down, and I helped by kicking them off completely, leaving me lying there in the sweater and my panties. I could feel breath on my belly and fingers – oh, those fingers – caressing me, sliding into my panties and finding my sex, which was still wet from remembering the morning session. His fingers found my clitoris and gently stimulated me. I wanted more. I wanted him to ram his fingers deep into me, to hurt me if he had to so I could feel what I hadn’t felt for so long; and I said so, but he controlled me completely, and I was secretly happy to let him. I felt my panties tear and gentle hands move my thighs apart, then the flick of a tongue where his fingers had been. It was like being caressed by a rose petal, the tip of his tongue so soft, so gentle that I wasn’t sure if I really felt it or imagined it. I came with tears welling in my eyes, and then he was gone, leaving me wanting so much more.
I awoke some time later, to find I was lying there wearing only my sweater, with the lower half of my body naked. I hadn’t closed the curtains so anyone looking in would have seen me. The idea was quite arousing. I blushed and giggled to myself. Either I was going completely insane or the cottage had a very accommodating ghost.
He came to me again that night, just as I was dozing off to sleep. At first I could just see him out of the corner of my eye, lying in the bed next to me, yet I knew that if I turned to look at him, he would disappear again. Our relationship was to be played out half in shadow.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘A memory,’ he replied.
‘Then make me remember.’ I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to feel his tongue in my mouth and, as I wished it, it happened. We kissed for the longest time, me hardly daring to open my eyes in case I lost him again. I could feel his body above mine, the weight familiar to me. ‘James,’ I whispered against his hair, as he kissed my throat. ‘James, is it you?’
‘Hush now, darling,’ he said. I felt him lift my hips and the smooth hard feel of him as he entered me. And yet, I hardly felt him at all, not in any physical sense. I was reminded once again of rose petals, as if they were stroking me inside. He was right. He was a memory, not real, and I wanted real.
‘Please, harder,’ I begged, but he drifted away from me, back into the shadows, leaving me aching for more.
As he went I heard him say, ‘Let me go now.’
He didn’t come again that night, or the next day. So on Monday I took the train home.
The train had journeyed half way towards my home when I saw the man looking at me. Not the same brash idiot who’d clumsily jerked his head towards the loos on the way. This one was different. Better looking for a start, in a rugged way that suggested he was some sort of lecturer, or academic of some type. He smiled shyly, yet there was obvious attraction in his eyes when he looked at me. I found myself imagining what it might feel like for him to kiss me, but there was no way I was going to have a quickie in the lavatory and he didn’t seem the type. He found an excuse to sit near me and we started talking. I’d been right about him. He was a lecturer in archaeology and his name was Andrew.
Andrew got off at my stop, walking a little ahead of me. I thought that was it. I’d lost my chance by being too coy, but at the ticket barrier he stopped and waited for me. I think he asked me if I’d like a drink and I think I said yes, but that was only a precursor to what we really wanted. An hour or so later we were in a hotel room in the centre of London.
We’d barely got through the door when I grabbed him and kissed him hard, wanting to feel skin on my lips and a real body on my fingertips, which I thrust inside his shirt, to feel his chest and scrape my fingernails over his nipples. ‘Touch me,’ I said, pressing his hand against my breast.
Pushing me against the wall, he pulled my blouse apart and tore at my bra, cupping my breasts in his hands, while we explored each other’s mouths. I revelled in the feeling of real hands on my body, with all their imperfections; the slight roughness on his fingers from the work he did, the sharpness of his nails against my hardened nipples; his slight stubble scratching my chin as he sucked at the pulse on my throat. The smell of him, male sweat, aftershave, the slight taste of something – salt perhaps – on his lips. All making him real to me in a way my ghostly lover hadn’t been. I felt his rough cheek on my belly as he slid lower down my body, pulling up my skirt, then his tongue, hot and wet, exploring me while his fingers plunged into me. ‘Harder,’ I said, pushing myself down onto his fingers. I took a handful of his hair in mine, enjoying the texture, pulling slightly, making him groan.
Somehow we got to the bed, and I fell back against it, offering myself to him. ‘Make me feel you,’ I said. He put a condom on, then thrust into me and I cried out in triumph, bucking my body against his. ‘Harder still,’ I begged as the bed rocked beneath us, wanting to feel every sensation, pleasure, pain and the burning ache that comes from knowing an orgasm is imminent. Suddenly he flipped me over, entering me from behind, his hands grasping my buttocks, whilst I bit the duvet, trying to stifle my screams as I came. He came soon after, falling against my back, but staying inside me.
He let me cry in his arms, understanding that what we’d just done wasn’t only about sex. He asked nothing of me. Later, I took him in my mouth, to give him the pleasure he’d given to me. It was one more sensation I wanted to savour.
I left him sleeping in the early morning light, knowing I’d never see him again, but grateful to him for helping me to feel again.
My immortal had taught me it was time to move on. Chasing James’s ghost around the cottage with my eyes half closed wasn’t going to bring me happiness. Maybe it wasn’t yet time for me to find someone else, but at last I was able to look to the future with eyes fully open and see the ghost of new love somewhere in the distance.