Ice Burns Page 10

  I was shell shocked and didn’t know what to say. By the time we went to bed that night, there was a wedding date in the diary and everyone who mattered knew. She kept putting my hand on her belly and I told her I’d always known my first child was going to be a girl. I wasn’t thrilled about Lizzy, but once I got into it, I was really excited about being a dad and my parents were already talking about turning the back room into a part time nursery for when they had the baby while we were studying for finals”.

  Aiden gets up, takes the two coffee cups into the kitchen. I can hear the sounds of coffee being made and I spot a box in the bay window. As I’d hoped, there are blankets inside. I make a nest on the floor and when he returns, we snuggle up naked in front of the fire. We sip our coffees in silence, watching the flames jump and as he puts his empty cup to the side, Aiden looks over at me with such an intense look in his eyes, it breaks my heart a little.

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  I shake my head, and reach out to touch his cheek.

  “I want to know all of you, Aiden”, I say softly.

  He holds my hand in his against his face and turns his head to kiss my palm. He takes my hand in both of his and plays with my fingers as he continues.

  “I wanted an intimate wedding in the barn, or on the lawn, but Lizzy wanted hundreds of guests at the Waldorf. Her dream since she was a child, apparently.” He scoffs as he says it. “It was farcical. She wanted us married within the month, and it had to be big and expensive. And still I didn’t see that she knew about the money. My mum came to me a few days before the wedding and said that if I didn’t want to marry Lizzy they’d support me. We’d still all support the baby, and her, but I didn’t have to go through with the wedding if I didn’t want to. But I wanted to do the ‘right’ thing, so we did.”

  Aiden clenches his jaw so tightly I’m worried he’s going to break a tooth.

  “I kept asking her about doctors appointments, scans, anything, so we could make sure everything was okay with the baby. She kept putting it off and appointments were mysteriously cancelled and postponed. She eventually made an appointment for about 9 weeks after the wedding, saying we could go together for the 20 week scan and that the NHS didn’t recommend scans between 12 weeks and 20 weeks because it was a waste of resources if nothing was wrong. I went along with it, because what do I know about babies and ‘women’s business’, as she called it. I wanted the picture from the 12 week scan she’d gone to without me, but she said it had fallen out of her day book and she’d get a replacement printout next time. Lizzy was always a bit ditzy anyway, so it wasn’t so much of a stretch to believe.

  The wedding came and went and I tried to be happy about it, and for a while there, I think I had convinced myself that we would be okay.

  By 18 weeks I had fallen so deeply in love with the idea of my daughter, I’d have done anything for her.”

  A wistful smile crosses his face, and I remember the DVD’s.

  “The DVD’s?”

  “Yeah. And that was just the start. I was going to give that little girl the world.”

  He sits up, moving away from me. His body tenses up.

  “On the morning of the 10th of June... it was one of those summers where we just had days and days of drizzle. There was a lot of fog and mist on the roads and visibility was poor. I had a meeting in New York. I was going to an agency there to find out about an internship … anyway, that doesn’t matter. I was in New York. I’d flown out the night before so I was actually still in the air. When I landed there was a message on my phone from Lizzy. She was sobbing, in tears, saying she was having a miscarriage and there was blood everywhere and she didn’t know what to do. I flipped out and phoned her straight back. She said she had just been collected by the ambulance and was waiting to be admitted, but it didn’t look good for the baby.

  There was some crazy weather pattern or something and all the flights were delayed, but I never even left the airport. I cancelled my appointments in New York and waited around for 8 hours trying to get another flight. I was frantic on the phone to my parents. I didn’t know how bad the weather was, and I asked them if they could get to Lizzy. I didn’t know what hospital she was at, but I was going to find out and let them know, if they could just head towards London so long.”

  Aiden is shaking, his head is in his hands and I have my hand over my mouth and I’m fighting back tears. I don’t think he’s ever spoken about this stuff. It’s all still so raw for him.

  “I spent 7 hours trying to get hold of Lizzy, phoning one hospital after the other, asking if my wife is there, but I couldn’t find her. Then I was trying to get hold of my parents and they weren’t answering either. I was losing my mind, Amber. I almost wasn’t allowed on the plane I was in such a state. When I finally got a standby flight, I was given a sedative and slept the entire 7 hours back.”

  He is quiet then, for so long I check to make sure he’s not fallen asleep, but I see big, fat tears falling silently to the floor. I long to reach out, to touch him, and comfort him, but I know that right now he needs to be semi-alone with his grief, and to just let it all out. When he starts up again, his voice is shaky, quiet.

  “I got back to Heathrow and there was just a text from Lizzy. ‘She’s gone’. The bottom dropped out of my world, Kitten. At least, I thought it did, but there was worse to come. I didn’t know where anyone was, so I went home - a little student flat we were still staying in while we looked for a family home - and there was no one there. I’d just put my bags down when there was a knock on the door and two policemen were standing on the doorstep. They asked me to accompany them to the King’s College Hospital and I thought Lizzy must have died, somehow. When I got there, I was asked to identify my parents’ bodies. They had raced around London hospitals trying to find my fucking wife, when a drunk truck driver side swiped their car and killed them both on impact.

  “I went home and waited to hear from Lizzy as not one of the 87 hospitals in the Greater London region had any record of Lizzy Blythe being admitted. She came home late that night with a new hairstyle and her nails freshly manicured. When I asked her where the hell she had been, she said she’d checked herself into a private maternity clinic and they had offered her ‘healing services’ before her discharge. Oh, and her phone had died so she couldn’t get in touch. I didn’t even tell her about my parents till a few days later as I didn’t want to upset her further.”

  Aiden looks up at me and there are tears running down my face as I silently weep for him, for his loss, for the horror he had to endure on his own. To my surprise, he starts laughing, but it’s not his beautiful, deep laugh. It’s bitter and sounds hollow.

  “It gets worse, Amber”, I shake my head. I don’t know how it possibly could. “It really does. My parents were buried with an empty baby coffin on the 15th of June. No human remains, but we put a little dress in it, and the hospital blanket we’d bought for bringing her home. Stuff like that. About two weeks later, after the funeral, I go to the private clinic Lizzy was treated at. I take a bunch of flowers and a few big boxes of chocolate. I want to thank them for treating my wife so kindly, you see” he shrugs his shoulder and I nod understanding “and supporting her through this horrible experience when I couldn’t be there, something I feel endlessly guilty about. I also take a big mobile power bank with a selection of charging cables, intending to gift it to them so that future couples don’t have to have something as simple as a battery put them through so many hours of stress and pain.

  The receptionist looks at me like she’s really confused, telling me that each room has its own charging stations built into the wall and she can’t understand why my wife didn’t know this. She asks for my wife’s name, so that she could see what room she was in and show me. She searches for Lizzy Blythe, nothing. She searches under her maiden name, Lizzy Bevan, nothing. There’s no record of Lizzy ever having been at this clinic, not even for the earlier ultrasounds. I leave the chocolates and flowers anyway, perplexed.


  When I get home, I pick up the mail and open everything that’s been piling up for the last few weeks. Lizzy isn’t there - she rarely is these days, just comes home with bags and bags of shopping every day and doesn’t even bother to go to classes any more. I go through the letters, and see an invoice for an exclusive day spa. The invoice is for 10 and 11 June. Everything inside me wanted it to be a mistake. Or maybe they provided maternity care too, right?

  So, I phoned the number on the invoice, and asked to speak to the manager. It’s a cheerful woman who ‘can’t divulge personal information,’” he makes air quotes with his fingers, “till I tell her the invoice won’t be paid unless I can confirm that my wife was there. Yes, she tells me, Lizzy Blythe was there those two days. She enjoyed a number of massages, treatments including colour therapy and a visit to the hair salon and nail bar. She had two breakfasts, two lunches, and two dinners and enjoyed a bottle of Cristal on the balcony in the evening.

  What about the baby? I asked her. She was quiet for a bit, then said, ‘I’m sorry Mr Blythe, if your wife is pregnant, there was no indication. She signed the treatment forms and confirmed that she wasn’t pregnant - and in the case of the hot stone massage, confirmed that there was no chance that she could possibly be pregnant’. I was quiet for so long she thought I had hung up, and when I almost whispered ‘so she did not have a miscarriage and a horribly invasive DNC at your facility’ the woman audibly balked at the idea.

  I was still sitting in the chair with the phone in my hand when Lizzy walked through the door with arms full of shopping. At first she cried and denied and accused me of trying to bully her, trying to break her and blaming her for losing our baby, but eventually she conceded that there was no miscarriage.”

  He laughs that horrible, hollow laugh again.

  “Nope, not just no miscarriage, there simply never was a baby.”

  I was wrong about our Cinderella story. So much died, getting us here.

  ~ 11 ~

  *AIDEN*

  My alarm wakes me on Sunday morning, telling me it’s time for Park Run, but I’m curled up on the nest-bed Amber made us last night. My legs are intertwined with hers, and my arms are wrapped around her body. I move my hand a little, and feel her breast, soft, naked and in my reach. I already have a pretty serious case of morning wood, and this makes it worse. She’s asleep and I don’t want to be creepy, so I try to extract my arm from under her body. Amber stirs, and eyes still half closed she reaches for a glass of water. After a few sips, she offers the glass to me, and I down the rest, swirling it around my mouth in the hopes of killing off the worst of the morning breath I’m sure I’m sporting. She turns to me, resting her head in that hollow beneath my clavicle, and I can’t stop my eyes from lingering on her bare tits, practically waving hello from where they rest against my chest.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks tentatively.

  “Like a freight train bulldozed my masculinity then broke free out my eye sockets.” I close my eyes, and fall back onto my pillow. I would feel ashamed about last night, and I probably will, later, but right now I can feel her body pressed up against mine and that’s all I want to think about. I want to lose myself in her.

  “Aiden, don’t. You went through a series of really terrible things, and it doesn’t sound like you ever dealt with it. I’m guessing you don’t talk about what happened often.”

  “Never.” I run my free hand down the path from her throat, down the valley between her breasts.

  “Never what?”

  “I’ve never spoken about it”

  “To a woman?

  “To anyone. I’ve never told anyone the whole story, like I did last night. Jamie knows obviously, but mostly because he was around when it all happened.”

  She’s quiet for a long time. My hand moves down her abdomen, and I splay my fingers over her flat stomach, flirting with the area around her belly button.

  “Do you come back here often?”

  “This is the first time since the wake.”

  Amber lifts her head from my shoulder and does a recap. “You’ve not been here since the wake, and you’ve never told anyone the full story, and last night you brought me here because I got us wet in the woodlands and then I used stuff in your parents’ kitchen and you didn’t say anything?”

  “I think I said rather a lot, actually.” My fingers swirl little circles around her pubic bone, but she raises herself up to a sitting position.

  “Then let me say this.”

  Amber lifts her body up onto mine, lowering her already wet pussy on my painfully erect cock. I groan as I sink into her, and so does she. I grab her hips as she slowly moves up and down on my shaft, impaling herself again and again on me. She moves her hips in slow circles, and I lift my hands to her breasts, and raise my mouth to take a nipple into it. I use my teeth to graze her nipple and she hisses from it, but it makes her buck her hips a little more wildly for a minute. Her head is thrown back and she slows down again, riding me slowly, with purpose, like she’s trying to convey a message with her body. I read it, loud and clear: I’m all man to her. All man, deep inside her.

  As her breathing becomes heavier, Amber leans forward and kisses me greedily. It’s all tongues and teeth and hands on bodies and her slow sensual love making turns into a frantic fuck as the moans begins to come longer until I can feel her clamping down around me. In one swift motion I’ve flipped us around so that I’m on top of her, feeding the frenzy I hammer into her as she begins to scream my name. She clamps down so hard my cock is ejected out of her and seeing her body contort as the longest orgasm I’ve ever witnessed rips through her makes me come all over her stomach and thighs before I even have the chance to plunge back in.

  I collapse onto Amber and we lie there panting in a sticky, sweaty, messy heap until our heart rates have slowed down. I take Amber’s hand and lead her to the shower she never got to use last night, and under the running water we wash each other clean. Along with our ejaculations, I wash away the tears, and the anxiety and enough misery for a lifetime, before we make slow love against the shower wall again.

  Amber is definitely my new favourite thing to do on a Sunday morning.

  *AMBER*

  We’ve showered and dressed and I’m in drying my hair when Aiden says he’s going to drop into town for some brunch. I’m actually happy for the space so that I can try to sort through everything I’ve heard and experienced over the last few days. If I thought we’d crossed some invisible line on Friday morning, last night and this morning pretty much plummeted us head first into a new dimension. We’ve known each other a week - I can’t get my head around that - and I feel closer to Aiden than I did to any of the guys I’d dated for months or in two cases even years.

  My cautious side is telling me to put the breaks on, and when I’m on my own, I can tell myself that that’s what I need to do. But when Aiden walks in the room it’s as if all the air is sucked out of it. I feel like I’m buffered by cotton wool, unable to think clearly. All I can feel is the pounding of my heart, and the inevitable dampness between my legs. He plays my body like a fiddle, making music I didn’t even know I was capable of and I want more of it. I want more of him.

  Aiden returns just as I finish putting a plait in my long hair, and together we start making breakfast. Even this is sensual - he walks up behind me and plants kisses in my neck. He runs his hands over my ass each time we cross paths, runs his finger along my bottom lip when he’s given me a taste of dressing for the salmon bagels he’s preparing, chases my last sip of coffee with a deep, throaty kiss. We’re constantly touching, flirting, smiling and chattering and I realise it again - every moment with Aiden is foreplay, preparation for the next time he pins me to the wall, the bed, the sofa and fucks me like his life, our lives, depend on it.

  “That reminds me - since you have the next few days off, what are your plans for Christmas?”

  I stop and look at him. We’ve not spoken about anything work related all weekend. “How
do you know I have time off?”

  “Oh, it was one of my conditions when I spoke to Mr Anville. You have enough ammo and Jamie and I have both seen enough to be able to support you in a sexual harassment claim, if you want to make one. I suggested as much to him and said that perhaps some paid leave would help you get over the stress of it all.”

  I’m not sure how I feel about Aiden interfering with my work. I thought Mr Anville had suggested it because I earned it, not because he felt threatened by me.

  “What other conditions did you make?”

  “Hmm. Not a lot. The firm will be handling my legal work free of charge for a while, you’ll be moved to a higher ranked position in the firm if that’s what you want,” he cuts his eyes to me and I shrug.

  “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Mr Marks no longer works for the firm and he will probably be disbarred, so not able to work as a lawyer at all any more.”