It took two tries to unlock the door. They stomped their feet and shrugged out of coats, boots, and scarves. She wasted no time reaching for him, wrapping her arms around him, sliding her hands up his back again, this time under his jumper.
"You're cold," he hummed and hugged her, rubbing warmth into her torso wherever his hands fell. She felt his lips press to the crown of her head and buried her face in his chest. Tears threatened, he felt so good, so familiar. She might have wept had Dink not sauntered in, meowing a loud and disgruntled greeting. She laughed out loud and took a relieved breath. "He won't stop shouting until I cuddle or feed him. I'll occupy him with a tin of wet. Fancy a cuppa?"
"Not particularly," he said, his eyes twinkling, his cheeks all apple.
"Beggar," she said brightly. "Right. Well, I'm dry and I've a bit of a chill, so why don't you nip into the other room and start a fire while I plug in the kettle?"
"I thought you had central heating."
"I do," she called over her shoulder as she opened the tin of cat food. "But it's useless. The bedroom overheats in a blink." She grimaced when she realized what she'd said. The tea was ready far too soon. No sugar for him. Milk. But only enough to cloud the tea. It meant something to her that she knew how he took his tea. She wasn't sure how to look at him when she walked out of the kitchen. She stood at the threshold carrying two cups on a wooden tray, wondering if she had crossed a line, if he would shy away from her or grow awkward.
She had no reason to worry, of course. He was laid out like a pasha, with his feet confidently up on the ottoman.
"Your fire, Miss Smith," he said, with a theatrical flick of his hand.
She set the tray down near his feet on the ottoman, and picked up the mugs.
"It would seem that my mother isn't the only one with grand plans for tonight," he said, smirking.
She cringed.
"Am I terribly forward?" she asked.
"Perhaps a bit, but not terribly," he said, looking regal, all legs and smirking presence.
She huffed a relieved breath and held out his mug, offering it to him as if in apology.
"I know you said you didn't want any but I'd feel silly drinking mine alone," she said.
He took the tea from her and tipped his head in thanks. She settled next to him. She blew on hers, looked at the ripples her breath made. Then in a moment of what she hoped would seem appropriate familiarity she shifted herself so that she faced him and tucked her toes under his thigh.
He jumped, but only a little and to his credit he recovered quickly, even seemed to be bolstered by it. He dropped a hand to loosely circle her ankle.
"I'll be back in time for late tea tomorrow," she said. "It IS a Friday, if you wanted to go on that date."
"Won't you be tired?"
"Yes, but we don't have to stay out late."
"With you I want to stay out late."
She pressed the kiss she wanted to give him to the rim of her mug, chose not to joke about an evening of Netflix and chill. They lapsed into a shy silence, which stretched between them and grew comfortable. Each nursed their own tea, and pretended they weren't looking at the other from beneath their eyelashes. He'd taken to tracing a repetitive pattern along her ankle and calf. When Dink ate his fill, he perched next to Mr. Bates, and groomed himself with fanaticism and vigor. When his hind leg stretched up in the air they both stopped making eyes at each other and burst into laughter. This of course caused the cat to leap from the back of the sofa to the cat tree, disgusted with them. She set her tea down so she wouldn't spill.
"He's a sensitive soul," she said when she'd caught her breath. "Get his knickers in a twist and he'll glare for ages, all evil-looking, silent resentment. He doesn't mean for it to be evil-looking, it's just his face."
That made him choke and splutter. Which started her up again. He coughed a moment and set down his own cup.
"I like to hear you laugh," she said after her own giggling died down.
"I like that you make me laugh," he responded, pulling one of her stockinged feet into his lap. He set to kneading it.
She sighed into his touch, made an illicit noise when he worked a tense spot near her heel. Her eyes drifted shut and she lay there, relaxed and nearly purring when something occurred to her. John Bates was big. He wasn't just a tall man, but solid and strong as well. While he was a man with a past, she was at ease with him and had been from the start. It had taken years to be alone with a man and only feel mildly trapped and on the edge of anxiousness. She'd not hesitated with him, never felt any of that. Any anxiety Anna nursed lay within wondering how her cracks — the strange little faults and fissures that Green tore open — would manifest. Mr. Bates would witness her broken bits sooner or later. She doubted that he'd turn tail and run away, but she didn't want to be an object of his pity.
"That feels heavenly," she said, refocusing on him, on stretching her toes wide, welcoming the soothing pressure of his fingers, the solid warmth of his legs.
"Penny for your thoughts?" he asked in a humming whisper. She knew, with a cold sinking in her gut that he had felt her tense and was probably thinking it was him. He was his mother's son, sure enough; he didn't miss a tick.
"Where'd you go just then?" he asked in that quiet way he had.
She found she couldn't answer him; anything but the truth would be a lie. She let her eyes focus on the fire, it was dying, the smaller log ready to collapse. His hands stilled.
"I wish you'd just out with it," he whispered when her words wouldn't come.
"Out with it?"
"Whatever it is you're hiding."
The cold in her gut slid up her spine to her cheeks. She wasn't ready. The world strobed when she blinked away her panic. She pulled her feet from his hands, tucked knees under chin. She had to tell him, but she wasn't ready.
"I can't," she whispered.
"You don't deny it, then," he said quietly. There was no question in his words, instead he said it as though he'd expected her to lie.
"I don't deny it and I don't deny you have a right to ask. But I just can't. Not yet."
"Is there someone?"
"What? No, there hasn't been anyone in years, even when there was there wasn't."
"If you're feeling strange because of my past I completely understand," he said, his burr tinged with a gentle stoicism. "I would never want to pull you into something you weren't comfortable with."
"No," she insisted. "Well, I mean, we do need to talk more about that, an a great deal of other things, but that isn't it."
"Because ... Because I love you, Anna. I know it isn't right for me to say it, not so early on, but ..."
"You don't know me, Mr. Bates," she interrupted. His words frightened her. She heard things in his tone she wasn't ready to admit about her own feelings for him, her own desires for them, not yet.
He paused and when he continued, his voice shook with naked vulnerability. "I want to know you, if you'll let me."
"It'd change your opinion of me," she said. Holding her breathing even was possible, she was sure of it, but she needed to find something to look at besides the concern that lined his face and hardened his jaw.
"Nothing could change my opinion of you," he said softly.
Her chest felt tight. She wanted to believe him. She pushed off of the loveseat and knelt before the flames. When she slid open the screen – a funny little chain-mail curtain, the burning log collapsed in on itself. Her body was turned just far enough away that he was out of her line of sight. She took a steadying breath and another, and fed the fire more kindling – twigs and broken branches collected and dried. When she walked she was never without a small handful for fire-starting. She teased up a flame from the tinder pieces and then added some thicker kindling, small logs quartered, ones she had delivered by the cord and split herself outside the back door on the old stump. The wood blackened and caught, flames curled around its edges, warming her face.
"It's all buried and over," she finally stated, her mouth dry. "It doesn't ... I ... I don't ..." She tripped over her words and scowled, dug her thumbnail into a piece of bark. "I've worked my way through it, you see, and I'm not... I don't want you to think ... I don't need any sort saving or fixing... I'm not some sort of victim."
She stopped and found her breath, silently counted out her inhalations. She followed him without watching. It was a habit she had, drawing pictures with her ears. His breathing was different, was shallower, fast, more uneven. He stood and shuffled over to the leather recliner by the fire. It squeaked when he used it to ease down near her. She heard his socks whisper over the carpet, heard his sniffle, felt the creak of the old wooden floor beneath him as he settled close.
"Anna," he whispered. She wasn't startled by the tentative way his fingertips brushed against her shoulder, but she flinched anyway.
"I don't want you to be different with me," she insisted. She glanced his way, not really looking at him.
"Please tell me," he said in a rough whisper.
"It is what it is and I live with it how I do and it's alright. I'm alright." She reached for his hand where it rested on her shoulder. She liked the feel of his fingers twined through hers.
"It's not alright," he said after a long beat.
She pulled his arm across her chest and scooted back into him, smiled when he looped his other arm around her waist and held onto her. He kissed her shoulder and rested his head on it.
"Maybe not, but I'm alright," she said, insistent. "I've had a long time to sort myself out and untangle things."
"When did it happen?" he asked.
"Seven years ago," she said and sighed. "In London, after an event with that famous Kiwi opera singer, Kiri Te-Something-Or-Other, to celebrate some Grantham modernization anniversary. It was late. Mary had just left with a client for drinks. His personal assistant stayed behind and tried to talk me into a shag. He didn't like that I said no. Or that I fought back."
That was it. Even though it wasn't, even though it did nothing to describe the way it sat with her like a stone that hunched her shoulders and bowed her back when no one else was watching.
"Anna how could you think I would pity you?" he asked in a choked whisper. "You aren't pitiful, you're strong. You fought and you kept on."
She remembered running the shower so hot that night when she finally made it back to her flat, that her skin was angry and red for hours. It was still tender and pink the next day when the bruises started staining her. That was the beginning of the sunset and sunrise of colors on her skin. Purples, browns, sallow yellows. Green's marks lingered after they were gone. The welts she raised herself lingered longer. Hers were fine-lined scratches beading red – they were to remind her that she was still alive, that she was in control of her own pain. They began when she learned of the lorry accident and the girl's arrest, ended after she stopped going to bars to shag strangers. She was doing better, doing well, finding a boldness and sensuality she'd nearly forgotten about. Now here she was. She'd spoken it aloud and remained whole. Nothing had shattered away from her in the retelling. She felt a bit ill, but no more than that.
"It was ages ago," she said, uncomfortable in his grief for her.
"That doesn't make it less real," he said in a tight voice.
"No, but I've learned how to live with it," she said. Needing to see his eyes, she turned to him. His face was ruddy and wet. She touched his cheek. "You sweet, sweet man," she whispered, holding his face and his gaze. "Please don't cry. Please."
She kissed him solemnly, earnestly, needing to feel him and reassure him. "I'm here, I'm fine. I'm the same woman I was ten minutes ago."
He sat with his bad leg straight out. She felt a pang of guilt and turning to the fire, added a last, solid log. "The fire's perked up, and the couch is far comfier than the floor," she said, standing and offering her hand. She leaned hard against his weight as a counterbalance while he stood up, then buried herself in his arms for a little while. Dink stood watch from his cat tree, still glaring.
Anna stepped away from Mr. Bates finally, and arranged a bit of a nest on the loveseat with the pillows, gracelessly flopped amongst them and opened her arms.
"Come on, then," she said. "Put up your feet and weigh me down a bit."
"I'm too heavy."
"No you aren't," she reasoned. "We just have to arrange it so that your heaviest bits are on the couch instead of me."
She smiled and tugged his arm, pulled him to sit next to her, and sprawl into her. He rested his head against her chest, pulled her legs over his. It was blissful to lay folded together before the fire. For once she didn't care about the past. The promise of this man weighting her to the two-seater in her grandmother's living room was too lovely to be ignored.
"I need you to swear," he said after a time. "If I ever make you uncomfortable or do something..."
"I like the way you look at me, Mr. Bates," she said, speaking over him, silencing him with the force of her interruption. "It's why I didn't want to see pity in your eyes. I like it when you touch me, when you kiss me, and I don't want you feeling like you can't. What happened, it's there. Sometimes that will make me react or overreact. But it doesn't mean I need to be treated with kid gloves."
"I still want you to promise me that you'll tell me if I..."
She rolled her eyes and smiled, pleased at the way they fit around one another. "I'll tell you if something makes me uncomfortable, don't worry."
"Good," he said. "Thank you."
They lay together in the low light, creating a cocoon of silken touches, punctuated by soft sighs.
"Is he locked up now?" Mr. Bates asked quietly.
It was an honest question, she should have expected it, but her stomach sank.
"No one knows about what he did to me. I never told anyone besides my gran, never filed charges." She sounded reedy, feeling panic rise up again in her. She had almost made it through the telling, and could hold her voice even for a time more. She could. She took another breath and soldiered on. "You say I was strong, but I wasn't. I should have gone to hospital, reported him. But I couldn't bear it. It was all I could do to change into my spare workout clothes and get to my flat. It took a while to manage that. I'm not as brave as you think."
His open palm smoothed up and down her arm, over and over again. She kissed the top of his head in gratitude at the tenderness.
"He's dead," she continued when she was able. "He was killed four months after. I only know from what was on the news and from what his employer told Lady Mary. It was all caught on CCTV. The footage apparently showed a woman pushing him in front of an oncoming lorry. The DI found and interviewed her, and sure enough he had raped her. They ran into one another on the street, he said something foul, and she snapped." She took a ragged breath before continuing. "I wonder sometimes, if he hurt her before or after me. Had I gone to the police, would he have been off the streets?"
"Anna," he interjected. "You can't go there. You just can't."
"But in a way it's my fault this poor girl is locked away, isn't it."
"Anna, you are not responsible for that bastard's twisted choices. Nor are you responsible for the choices of the woman who caused his death."
"Still, when all was said and done I took the easy way out."
He hugged her tightly for a few deep breaths and then shifted, lifted his head to look at her, rested his chin on her breastbone.
"That isn't what it sounds like to me. Not at all. I don't think anything about what you did to survive after it happened was an easy way out," he said, his voice low and rasping. "We're all flawed, Anna, all of us scarred by the lives we've lived. Those sorts of choices shouldn't be second guessed. Or the ones that come after. Please don't take that guilt on. It will eat at you. It sounds like you did everything you could, everything that was right and safe for your to do in the moment. So maybe you got a little lost along the way. We all do. What's important is that you survived and went on, without letting go of your sense of compassion. That is bravery and strength, and it's worth my admiration."
The warmth in his eyes was undisguised. Anna frowned and blinked back tears.
as something within her gave way. She brushed his hair out of his eyes
"You're very dear to me, Mr. Bates," she admitted quietly. "Please don't doubt it. I hold my feelings tight to my chest, is all."
"Nothing wrong with that. Besides, you seem to be doing a shade better than me."
"How so?"
"If you hadn't kissed me, I would probably have been working up my nerve for the next year and a half. I'm hopeless with this sort of thing."
"I'm nearly as bad," she intoned tracing the edge of stubble high on his cheek. "We are a pair of messes half cleaned up, aren't we?"
He grinned broadly. "Half is better than not at all."
He kissed her cheek, her temples, the skin below her ear. They were the barest of contacts, like apple blossoms falling against her skin. Each one drew stuttering breaths of anticipation from her lips. When he found the corner of her mouth she made a noise and turned her head, blindly seeking him out. It was fumbling and needful. And perfect. He filled her senses, woke her up in ways she hadn't been for years.
He surfaced abruptly, panting, all gentlemanly worry. "Are you sure I'm not too heavy?"
"You feel good," she reassured, and pulled him closer. His weight pressed her into the sofa cushions, but instead of pricking her into a panic, it slowed and deepened her breathing. A smile grew at his concern, at the warmth of his hand. It was satisfyingly wide and warm where it spanned her ribs and then gripped her hip.
She nuzzled into his neck, nipped his earlobe, and pulled his mouth to hers. She could feel his erection against the outside of her thigh, hummed her delight into their kiss.
And then he was pushing away again, sitting up and taking a deep, gasping breath. "I should probably be considering playing like I'm a responsible adult instead of a hormone addled teenager," he said, his restrained tone was laced through with his self-deprecating humour. "Friday morning is approaching fast."
"I bet you say that to all the girls," she said with a smirk.
They laughed hard enough that Dink huffed and left the room entirely.
"What if I wanted you to stay?" she asked in a different tone altogether, when their laughter calmed.
"I'd do damn near anything you asked," he said. "But if you did, I'd beg a condition."
"Mmhmm?"
"That tonight, we sleep. If I've gathered anything from what you said, Anna, it's that the last thing you want is me treating you like you're made of glass. And I know myself well enough to know tonight I'd do just that."
She kissed him gently and sighed. "You are a lovely man, Mr. Bates. There aren't many like you in this day and age. If you ask me, though, I'd say you're just concerned I might be using you for your body," she dead-panned.
His laughter was full and rich. "That's it, you've found me out."
She couldn't see tiring of the way he looked at her or the tenderness and warmth of his smile. But that was putting the cart in front of the horse, as her gran used to say. For now she was contented to giddiness at the prospect of someone to hold on to and whisper with on a rainy night.
"You can call me John, you know," his tone matched his gaze.
"I know," she said. It was easy enough to stand up and straddle his lap. His thighs were wide and strong beneath her. It was delectably fun flustering him. He cleared his throat when she trailed her thumb along his ear. It pleased her that she teased out a shiver from him. "I like calling you Mr. Bates. I don't know why. It sounds broad and dignified in my mouth."
She searched his eyes and kissed his forehead, tucked him beneath her chin. "I'm not ready to go to sleep, " she whispered into his hair. "Not just yet. Not when the fire's so lovely and you feel so nice."
He made a low, rough sound and wound his arms around her. It felt right to hold him, his head large in her hands, his mouth pressing rasping kisses to her collarbone, then throat. It wasn't an entirely chaste night, but for the most part, they behaved themselves.
A/n: A giant thank you to AnnaMBates for creating my wonderful cover art! Thank you to everyone who has been reviewing. I'm terrible at responding to reviews but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate them.