He gasped as the pleasure surged through him. He wanted to own her the way a man wants to own a woman in a moment like this.
She murmured against his cock. Was it good?
He was drained of tension. He was full of nothing, just the fact of her in his life.
She rose. She cradled his cheek. He kissed her palm and said, “Let me. I want to—”
She placed her slender index finger against his mouth. “Was it good?” she asked again.
He laughed softly. “What do you think?”
“I’m glad of it.” Both her blouse and her bra lay discarded on the ground, and she picked them up. When he said, “No, don’t,” she shook her head. When he said, “Please. I just . . . All right. I’ll only look. I swear. If you won’t allow me . . . I’ve got to see you, at least.”
“I can’t,” she told him. “The park will close soon. Someone will be along in a moment to make sure no one’s locked inside.”
He wondered if she’d set things up that way. This was the part of town where she lived. She would know where and at what time they could meet, the sort of place where the hour of the day allowed only what had just occurred between them. He said, “I’ve gone straight round the bend. You’re all I think about. I can’t do my job properly any longer. And I’m not going to be able to do it properly if we go on like this.”
She was buttoning her blouse. The light was nearly gone. He couldn’t see her face as well as he wished. She said, “Are you saying you won’t be able to do your job unless you’ve had your penis inside my vagina?” She laughed sharply.
“This isn’t a game,” he said, and when she didn’t reply, he added, “D’you know that I could have you right here if I chose to? Or I could show up one night at your flat. But I don’t do that, do I? I let you set the rules.”
“Do you mean you’re owed something because of that?”
“You know that’s not what I believe.”
“Then what do you believe? What do you imagine? You come to my flat, force your way inside, I submit and we fuck—”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“—and then you go home to your wife and child and I’m left with what? Watering my plants? Is that how you see it?”
“Is this how you see it?” He gestured round the grove. “This feels . . . filthy is what it feels.”
“And in my flat—perhaps in my bed?—it would feel less so? With your wife and your daughter at home while you and I are naked in a bed together?”
“Not a bed. Your bed.”
“Which makes it less tawdry? My bed where at least we can control the freshness of the sheets?”
“I love you,” he said. “It’s killing me. There’s nothing for me there. Pietra and I . . . there’s nothing. Just Lilybet and even she . . . without you . . . Christ, I think I’m going mad. And with you not letting me be with you the way I want to be with you . . . ? That makes it all worse. Not better. Worse.”
“Then we should end it.”
“Is that what you want?”
She moved to him. She kissed him deeply, pressing against him. “I don’t want either of us to make this into something we both end up regretting,” she said.
“I won’t regret anything. There is no regret for me. There’s just this. Us. But I can’t cope any longer with the way it’s going.”
He strode away from her, ducking beneath the chestnut branches to come out on the path above the slope of lawn. She was right about so many things, he thought. She was wrong about so many others. But they were caught, the two of them. They had been caught the very moment he found himself looking at her long, crossed legs—so smooth, they were—and then allowed himself to look at the rest of her, quite slowly, taking her in and wondering and imagining. Had there ever been a bigger fool? he wondered. Paulie’s recommended way was also the way of wisdom: massage with benefits administered by a woman whose full name he would never know, let alone pronounce correctly. It was a business deal with nothing attached to it save money, while this was like a structure on fire, doing what unmanaged fires do: consuming everything in its vicinity.
He heard her emerge from the trees behind him. She took his hand. He raised hers to his face and pressed it to his cheek. They walked in silence, out of the Rookery and in the direction of Streatham Common. He said, “I don’t know how to continue as we are because I can’t see a life without you in it. I can’t even imagine a life without you in it. What I have now is a life by halves, by quarters, even.”