Ishbel kneaded, fingers sliding on taut skin, thinking of the bread she used to make with her gran years before as a young girl.
Now she was a 34-year-old woman who’d never laid hands on anyone before this, before kneading the neck of the man in front of her. A vulnerable neck, thick and strong, but strung with tension. Two hard knots of it like golf balls at the base of his skull, which her fingers found easily inside his loosened collar.
Pressing down firmly with her thumbs as someone had once shown her, she remembered well that dull pain that travelled right to the ends of your fingertips. Right down to your toes. Funny that a pressure point on the neck could do that, but she’d warned him all the same.
He’d laughed, though she could see the tension in his face, the sleepless lines below his eyes, recalled the painful stiffness in the way he’d carried himself that morning, walking down the path to her door.
I’m a big boy, he’d replied, I can take it.
She’d sat him down on the straight-backed chair, making him face forwards, no twisting posture or turned head. He’d loosened his collar, neck bared to her as he joked about executioners.
She promised again that afterwards he would feel light, so light he could walk on air. Light like that sparrow on the windowsill, she thought, watching it hop a few steps before taking off into cool spring skies of blue. A crisp spring day, like his shirt that brushed her hands, freshly laundered, lemon scented, covering shoulders that tensed further as she pressed more firmly on the knots.
Gradually, he relaxed.
Strange to think about her reluctance to touch him only moments before, this man she hardly knew, who drove her to the library once a week. The man across the fence she’d fallen into conversation with one afternoon last summer. A conversation about books, the novels each had taken out to read.
Yes, books were the glue in their casual acquaintance. Like the three library books on the table before them, ready to go back and be exchanged for new ones, even though it was afternoon, not evening. He’d taken the day off after a sleepless night. The tiredness in his eyes had moved her. She knew something about that feeling.
So here she was with her hands on his neck, offering this comfort, a little awkwardly, though not as much as she’d imagined. But still the rules of intimacy were unknown to her since that door had closed on her while she was still a girl.
A girl who’d liked to bake bread, swim or dance.
A girl who became intimate not with others, but with the space inside the four walls of her home, where bed was not a place of pleasure but somewhere to rest or sleep, a prison too sometimes.
These last few years, her world had gradually grown to include the garden, the street outside, the local shops, even the park. Still, illness and exhaustion lapped at the edges of her life, threatening to engulf her.
Her neighbour, this man with his neck bared to her, kindly drove her to the library once a week, as he would today too, when his eyes reflected in the mirror opposite were no longer closed in pleasure-pain, when his mouth no longer curved like that.
And all just from the touch of her hands.
How that surprised her.
Yes, after this they would laugh politely, everything as it was before, or not much different. They would head off in his silver-blue car parked just outside the gate. The gate where a woman with a push chair was pausing, bending down to talk to the child in the pram, before glancing at the garden,
at the window,
at Ishbel.
Lingering gaze, longing expression.
Suddenly Ishbel saw herself as this stranger saw her. As a woman engaged in casual intimacy, her hands on a lover. Another Ishbel, one Ishbel had never met, one she could see only too easily herself now, in the mirror opposite.
The shock of that image washed over her, forcing her to take a step back from the man before her. Because for the first time she could really see the possibility of it. The possibility of that door that had closed on her when she was still eighteen opening again for her now, the sunlight in the world beyond shining through, falling on her, on the blond hair of the man in the chair, on her hands whose fingertips tingled while her neighbour shrugged his shoulder experimentally.
She asked him if he felt any better. He got to his feet and turned, smiling, the lines around his eyes faded. Silver-blue eyes like his car, which she’d always known, but hadn’t thought about before today.
Much better, he said, Thanks Ishbel. Her name on his lips like the sound for silence or secrets. Sshhh.
The woman outside was gone.
Only the two of them here now, breathing, breathing.
She stepped back, light-headed, saying, I’ll get my coat. But went instead to sit in the kitchen for a few moments, to sit in the kitchen to catch her breath.
Image by Aleksandra at Fusion Dreams.
I love pieces like this that convey rather than tell. So much going on here for the reader to sort out. I would like to think that they "postponed" their trip to the library that day. Their books are overdue.