The air in the car was thick with tension as she drove them home from work, both of them knowing how the evening was going to end. As they did every Friday night, they would eat a leisurely dinner picked up from the array of take away venues that they passed on the drive through the city centre. Often they would accompany this with a glass or two of wine, although recently she had noticed that since his conversation with her stepmother he tended to arrive with orange juice rather than red wine and showed little enthusiasm for raiding Michael's wine and whiskey collection as they had countless times before. She suspected that he felt as uncomfortable about bringing alcohol into her house as she would feel about buying him a Racing Post instead of the Times on her regular Saturday morning foray to the newsagents. Time and time again she tried to convince him that she really had no problem with alcohol but he didn't buy it for a second and grew tense every time she had so much as half a glass of wine with dinner. Strangely she found that she didn't particularly mind this; if he was working himself up about her drinking then he wasn't trying to get to the bottom of her nightmares.
Up until their return from her father's house she firmly believed that the nightmares were under control; she hadn't experienced one since the night before she married Michael and fifteen years on, she certainly hadn't expected them to return with a vengeance. Along with the return of the nightmares had come the return of the problem that had always gone hand in hand with them; her hatred of being touched. When she'd first met Michael she would flinch if he so much as brushed against her in the kitchen the morning after and could only bring herself to allow him to sleep with her once she had consumed a sizeable quantity of alcohol and even then she would flinch at the first sign of intimacy instead of the fast furious lovemaking that had been Michael's specialty. Like Ric, Michael had noticed that there was a problem and in his arrogance, he had decided that he would be the one to 'fix' her. She had told him everything that had happened to her, from the circumstances of her mother's death to her issues with alcohol to the things she was so ashamed of that she had barely been able to articulate; he responded with a proposal of marriage. At the time she had been livid, thinking that he had asked her out of pity but now she realised that it was worse than that. By marrying her he had given himself his greatest challenge to date and over the fifteen years that they were together, he had failed spectacularly in his quest to repair the damage that another man had inflicted upon her. The only good thing that he had done for her was to cure her of her nightmares, and she suspected that their absence had as much to do with the presence of a man in general as being with Michael in particular. For fifteen years she had struggled to rebuild her life, becoming more successful than she had ever dreamt she could be, finally leaving her troubled past behind her, or so she thought. Recently she felt as terrified as she had when Michael had rescued her from her own personal hell and taken it upon himself to play Knight in Shining Armour, an act which he soon tired of, leaving her floundering hopelessly at his side, desperately trying to keep up with him and his upper class twit friends who looked down on her with barely disguised contempt. Worse still, Michael's attempt to 'cure' her had entailed large amounts of affection and the intimacy that she loathed and so she had pushed him away leaving him to wonder why the woman he had married couldn't stand to have him touch her. Over the years she had gotten over her aversion to any kind of contact with her husband and had even gone so far as to allow some of the casual partners that had been the currency of their marriage to hold her afterwards. Now she was back at square one; no matter how much she craved Ric's touch and wanted him to hold her, the moment his arms slipped around her she would feel every muscle in her body tense and worse still, he felt her anxiety and barely seemed to want to touch her any more but why would he sign up for continual rejection? Far easier to keep his distance and deny that there was a problem.
They entered the house in silence, Ric making his way straight to the kitchen where he served two plates of curry and passed her one, wincing as she flinched as his thumb brushed the back of her hand. It was a completely innocent action, as harmless as being knocked against someone on the tube or jostled in a crowd and yet her body reacted forcibly; she dropped the plate.
'Don't worry' he murmured soothingly, scooping the remains of curry and shards of crockery up with a tea towel and throwing the whole lot in the bin 'hey, you know what they say'
'What's that' she mumbled through tears that spilled onto her reluctant cheeks where her hand was ready and waiting to obliterate them before he noticed and grew concerned.
'No use crying over spilt curry' he chuckled to himself, standing up but making no move to comfort her beyond passing her a tissue and averting his eyes, knowing how much she would hate to cry in front of him.
'No, this is ridiculous; I never used to be this jumpy' she heard her voice crack, despising herself as she heard it rise slightly with mild hysteria and yet she found that now she'd started she couldn't stop and she stopped speaking, the silence penetrated only by the gentle sound of her tears dropping to the cold slate tiles of the kitchen floor. For a long time he kept his distance, watching her uncertainly, not knowing how to comfort her but as he watched her knees finally buckle and her crumple to the ground he realised that doing something had to be better than doing nothing. Tentatively he moved closer to her, putting an arm around her and trying very hard to ignore the way she flinched at his touch as she leaned into him and then he kissed her. The only way she would allow him to touch her these days was if they were in bed together and even then it had to be furious and utterly impersonal. He hated it but she needed it so he reluctantly obliged, learning very quickly that his attempts to work affection into their new routine were not well received; the last time he'd tried she'd spent half an hour in the bathroom throwing up, emerging only to tell him to have gone by the time she'd finished. At that point, he thought he'd lost her but to his immense surprise and concern she had been waiting for him on Monday morning when he arrived at work, full of apologies, almost begging him to forgive her. He'd taken little persuading.
As soon as his lips met hers her movements became frantic, almost ravenous as she tore at his clothes with such urgency that he watched the buttons ping from his shirt and dance across the kitchen floor but she barely noticed; she was already working on relieving him of his trousers with such brisk efficiency that he found himself suddenly naked in the kitchen.
'Bedroom' she gasped eventually, releasing his lips and running ahead of him up the stairs, keeping just enough distance between them for it to be awkward for him to reach out and lead her to the bedroom as he once had. Pushing open the door they collapsed in a writhing heap of limbs on the bed, her lips planting butterfly kisses down the length of his torso, leaving a lipstick trail where they had been. It was as he made to respond that he felt the shiver run through her and the all too familiar tension return to her body and sighed. This was a new one; as long as he didn't attempt to hold her or bring any kind of personal touch to the act, she would allow him to screw her as hard and as often as he liked, in fact she positively encouraged him. For a moment they eyed each other in horror and then she was on her feet, bolting for the bathroom and dropping to her knees, turning to shut the door only after she had parted company with most of her lunch.
For ten minutes he sat in the bedroom feeling utterly useless as he heard her throw up and sob in the bathroom, but could see no point in going in to comfort her; it would only make her more distressed. It was when it went ominously quiet that he moved from the bed, making brisk progress across the floor before opening the door and feeling a chill overcome him at the sight that greeted him.