Not Quite a Husband (8 page)

Too hot. Too hot. Someone lifted his head and pressed something cool against his lips. He had no idea what he was supposed to do.

“Drink,” the person said.

He still didn’t understand.

A minute later water trickled into his mouth—he was being spoon-fed. He half expected any liquid to evaporate upon coming into contact with him, but the water pooled pleasantly at the back of his mouth.

“You’d better swallow that.”

So he did.

But the next thing that came into his mouth, a pill as bitter as injustice, did not please him at all. He spat it out.

“Leo, you blockhead. If you’d been honest about the state of your health I’d have put you on quinine already. You are running a temperature of a hundred and five. You’d better take it fast.”

Bloody hell. Not malaria. He hated quinine with a passion. He’d stopped his prophylactic doses after his first week in India, because they wreaked havoc with him.

“Leo, don’t be a ninny.” She tapped the tablet against his teeth.

If ever there existed a cure worse than the disease, quinine must be it. He refused to budge. She tried to pry open his teeth and grunted at the futility of it.

“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to administer the drug rectally.”

He laughed. “Bugger me,” he said.

Or at least in his mind he spoke.

“Don’t think I won’t,” she threatened.

He was serenely unconcerned. He wouldn’t have to taste it if the quinine came up his behind.

She sighed in frustration. “You need to take the quinine, Leo.”

He ignored her. The coolies talked among themselves somewhere in the distance. Pots and pans jangled as Saif Khan packed away his implements. A breeze snapped some external flap on the tent.

And then he was twenty-four again. It was his wedding night. And he was with her for the very first time, dying to come, and dying a little inside.

He could tell at the ceremony and the subsequent wedding breakfast that she was having doubts. He understood cold feet. He’d had a case of it before he left for France, the sudden realization that he was about to make the commitment of a lifetime, to Bryony Asquith no less, a decision that everyone except him regarded as insane.

In his bout of confusion, he’d done something
stupid. But at least that incidence of stupidity had cleared his thinking: For him it was Bryony, it had always been—and the hell with what everyone else thought.

He would reassure her that she’d made the right choice, that
they
’d made the right choice. He would seduce her slowly and properly, the way he’d want to be pampered and cherished if he were a woman lying with a man for the first time. And he would hold her in her sleep, afterward, quietly rejoicing in his good fortune, in holding his heart’s desire in his arms.

But he never imagined she’d lie beneath him like this—stiff as a log, her teeth ground together, her face turned so far to the side that the tendons of her neck trembled with the strain.

He did everything he could think of to ease the discomfort of her first time, to give her pleasure. But nothing he did pleased her.

The climax of his own body stole upon him. He ejaculated into her. But the pleasure of it was eclipsed by his growing dismay. He withdrew from her and held her beside him, seeking some sort of assurance from the warmth and closeness of their bodies pressed together, even if she still had on her nightgown and he his nightshirt—she’d asked him not to disrobe them entirely, and he’d agreed because
it was her first time and he would take things slowly.

“I would like to sleep now,” she said.

It took him a minute to understand that she’d asked him to leave, to go to his own room.

“Is something the matter, Bryony?”

“Nothing,” she said curtly. “Nothing’s the matter. I just want to sleep now.”

He tried to kiss her before he left, but she only blocked her lips with her fingers. “Remember what I said? I’ve a summer cold. I wouldn’t want to give it to you.”

He did his best to calm himself. It was her first time. Newlywed jitters. Nothing to it. She needed a few days to get used to everything, that was all.

But as he slumped out of her room, he could only think,
What if that isn’t all? What if it will always be like this?

“If I kiss you, will you take your medicine?”

The question jolted him out of his near unconsciousness. “What?” he mumbled weakly, unable to open his eyes.

“If I kiss you, will you take your medicine?”

He was twenty-eight, in the grips of a full malarial attack, in a tent one march northwest of the Lowari
Pass. And the woman who’d once been his wife wanted to know if she could get him to save himself with the bribe of a kiss.

“Make it good,” he said.

He wasn’t swallowing God’s turd—as he’d privately come to think of quinine—for some sisterly peck.

Her hands cupped his face. She breathed against him, uneven, tooth-powder-scented exhalations. The kiss grazed around his lips, as innocent as Easter bunnies gamboling on a meadow.

All of a sudden, her tongue was in his mouth. He reacted with equal abruptness. In the space of a heartbeat he had her under him. She tasted sweet, so sweet, pure and delicious. And her body—how he coveted her, an unholy lust, like burning in hell.

She trembled, his little piece of heaven. So cold, so distant, beloved and despised. He would worship her if she but let him. But she would never let him, would she? She would always remain out of reach, on her icy perch, indifferent to the struggles of mere mortals such as he.

She set her hands on his shoulders. He expected her to push him away, but she didn’t. Instead, she rubbed her palm across his cheek. And he was lost.

He shoved her skirts aside, freed himself from his trousers, and sank into her with one push. The
sensation—God, the sensation blinded and deafened him. He could not see, hear, or speak; he could only feel. Yes, she was heaven, his heaven. He had never felt pleasure but this knife-sharp pleasure, never known solace but this heart-crushing solace. He shuddered into her, a fanatical release, a hot dark surge that drained everything from him and some more.

Utter exhaustion came over him. He could barely breathe, let alone move. And he was only dimly aware of her leaving him.

She slipped the quinine tablet between his lips. “You promised,” she said, her voice shaking.

He swallowed the quinine, drank the water she gave him, and fell back onto his pillow.

He was twenty-eight, his marriage three years annulled, and he’d just taken possession of Bryony.

She was in shock.

He’d been hallucinating, mumbling about obscure mathematical concepts. She’d been furious and anxious, and truly ready to shove the quinine up his posterior should he continue to resist treatment.

And then he’d called
her
name, over and over again.
Bryony. Bryony, sweetheart. What’s the matter, Bryony?
Once she realized that he was still only barely
conscious and not responding to her answers, the repetition of her name on his tongue became a painfully sweet music, an ode, an incantation.

It had seemed a very logical thing to offer him a kiss, since he’d kissed her just before the malarial attack got the better of him. She could not have predicted that it would lead him to such a fevered concupiscence. One moment she was braced on her arms over him, the next moment she was under him, and the moment after that he was inside her to the hilt, his breaths harsh with pleasure.

That was not what shocked her—that he’d been able to perform in his condition. But that she’d let him—and that she’d derived such a fierce, if incomplete pleasure from that brief, intense joining.

And that she wanted more.

Q
uinine made Leo wretchedly sick: He was either fighting a violent nausea or being soundly defeated by it. The rest of the time he was so weak he could scarcely lift a finger. She did not leave his side. With a heroic calm, she dealt with his vomitus that profoundedly disgusted him.

“How do you stand it?” he asked her once.

“I’ve seen worse,” she answered. And that was that.

When he could not bear the taste on his own tongue, she made a solution of menthol and thymol for him to use as a mouth rinse. She gave him honey water for nutrition, brushed his teeth, and changed his clothes.

“Why are you so nice to me?” he asked her another time, too tired to open his eyes, as she rubbed salve on his hands, rope-burned and rock-scraped
from crossing the awful terrain between Gilgit and Chitral, the slippery warmth of her hand melting the sweet-smelling beeswax salve into his knuckles, his calluses, the creases between his fingers.

“You are ill. I’m a doctor.”

The answer he wanted to hear, of course, was that her meticulous care was motivated by something beyond medical obligation. Even though he already knew better.

In the last month of their marriage, he had found a crumpled letter in the wastepaper basket of the study when he’d gone to look for a page of equations he’d thrown away in a fit of agitation. The letter, from a young woman who owed her life and the life of her child to a successful caesarean section performed by Bryony, had been one of the most moving pieces of English prose he had ever read.

He never doubted that Bryony was a first-rate physician. He never doubted her professional devotion. And he’d always understood that her essential interest was in diseases, not patients, her drive less compassion than the desire to triumph over nature’s more pernicious agents.

During the afternoon he spent standing over the letter, however, its large, painstaking, almost childish handwriting slowly burning into his mind’s eye, he finally had to accept that his wife’s reserve was
less aloofness than wholesale apathy: Only a person allergic to human proximity of any kind, physical or emotional, could disdain such heartfelt gratitude.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“As well you should be.” The pad of her thumb massaged circles on the back of his hand, his palm, and even two inches up his wrist. He did not want her to stop. “What were you thinking, concealing your symptoms from a doctor?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Let me have you again. Let me make love to you properly. Let me give you the kind of pleasure that you gave me, delicious, terrible pleasure
.

“I know what you meant.” She let go of his hands. “Let’s not speak of it again.”