The One by Diane Lee

Author:Diane Lee [Lee, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B011P7JT62
Publisher: Delicious Publishing
Published: 2015-07-21T23:00:00+00:00

- 8 -

In the kitchen, Paton busied herself opening a bottle of wine, and poured the dark liquid into heavy crystal glasses. She had lit the beeswax candles that congregated in the middle of the kitchen table like town elders; their scent was earthy, smelling faintly of honey and vanilla, their flickering light reflected in a million shards in the cut crystal of each glass. She handed Tom his wine, skimming his fingers as she did, and sat down at the table. He stood in the doorway, filling it with his frame.

Paton took a sip of her wine.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Sit down with me.’

He didn’t move from the doorway, hand swirling the wine in his glass, but he didn’t bring it to his lips. He swirled the wine for a few minutes before he spoke.

‘We’re just friends, Paton. You know that. Nothing more.’

She put her glass gently down on the table, and smiled up at him. ‘Tom, I don’t buy that for a minute.’

He shifted his weight, then walked over to the sink and placed the glass on the stainless steel, the meeting of the crystal and metal making a ringing, clinking sound.

Moving back to the relative safety of the door frame, he said ‘I don’t want anything else.’

Paton laughed quietly, stood then moved toward Tom until she faced him. She stared up at him and caught him in her gaze like a trapped animal, the steel of the situation closing in around him.

‘Sure you do,’ she said, ‘Or you wouldn’t be here. It’s that simple. You felt it the minute you started working here. I did too. Why do you think I kept finding things for you to do? I just wanted to see you. To have the certainty that I would keep on seeing you. At least for a time. At least until…’

He held her gaze: defiant, scared, trapped. ‘It’s not what I want,’ he said. ‘Paton, you are not what I want.’

She wanted him to understand that what she felt was bigger than him, so she reached for him. Placing her hands on Tom’s face alongside his mouth, tracing the line of his lips with her ring fingers, she asked: ‘But how do you know that if you aren’t even prepared to try?’

She raised herself up on her toes and kissed him gently on his lips.

He didn’t resist.

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