Lime Street Blues by Maureen Lee

Author:Maureen Lee [Lee, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Tom knew he would never sleep. His tormented brain wouldn’t let him. She was having an affair, sleeping with another man. His Rose, his dear, precious, lovely Rose was letting another man touch her in the places that belonged solely to him. He could smell the other man on her whenever she came home from her meetings with ‘Clara’. Imagining them together was driving him insane. He’d thought the note, clara baker is dead, would scare her off. If it had, Tom was prepared never to mention the matter again, despite the hurt that would never go away. Instead, she’d just come up with another lie. It was obvious that she had no intention of not seeing this other man again.

He remembered the day he’d collected her from the orphanage, the day he’d proposed. It was her purity and innocence that had drawn him to her. Now she was soiled. Yet this didn’t make him love her less, just differently, with a boiling passion he’d never felt before. He beat the pillow with his fist. She was his, and another man would never touch her again.

His eyes were closed when she came into the room. He heard the soft slither of her clothes as she took them off, the dull click of her suspenders, the tiny rustle of stockings being removed from her slim, shapely legs, and imagined the other man listening to the same seductive sounds as he waited for her in bed. Where did they do it? he wondered feverishly. Perhaps one day he should have followed her and tortured himself even more.

She slid carefully into bed. He could tell she was doing her best not to disturb him. He opened his eyes. She was lying on the very edge of the bed, as far away from him as possible. For a while, he lay watching the tumble of hair, the curve of her cheek profiled against the dim light that crept through the drawn curtains. His heart was pounding painfully in his chest and his body was racked with raw, primitive jealousy.

He reached out and put his hand on his wife’s face and turned it towards him. He could feel a pulse beating in her neck beneath his thumb.

‘Rose,’ he whispered, ‘I love you.’

Perhaps if she’d answered, ‘I love you too,’ as she’d done so many times in the past, he might still have forgiven her everything, but she didn’t say a word and he wanted to weep. He pressed his thumb against the pulse and she wriggled uncomfortably.

‘Don’t, Tom.’

He pressed harder and she spluttered, ‘Tom, that hurts!’

There was nothing he could do that would hurt as much as she’d hurt him. A feeling of madness came over him as he straddled her, both his hands around her neck, and squeezed. It was the only way he could keep her for himself, stop the other man from ever touching her again.

She was gagging now, making hoarse, croaking sounds. Her neck felt as thin and delicate as a bird’s in his big, broad hands.

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