Damage by PJ Adams Page A

to enchant her, possess her.
    They had always fitted together so well. So easy for her body to melt into his, onto his hard lines, her breasts squashed up against the rough corrugations of his ribs.
    That familiar scent: Lynx.
    The beat of his heart. His breath on the top of her head. A sudden hardness growing against her. All the old sensations, the old responses.
    He hesitated. She felt it in the way he held her, a sudden fluctuation in the tension, a tremor.
    “No, Tommy.” She pushed sharply against his chest, breaking his grip, freeing herself from his embrace.
    Why did he have to spoil everything?
    Why did he have to take things too far? All this... it was too damned much .
    “No, Tommy,” she said again, backing away into the darkness, turning, walking fast. Not running. Taking all the control she had to stay walking, not running.
    “Not now, Tommy. Okay? Just... no, Tommy.”

8
    At home, she went straight to bed but couldn’t sleep.
    She lay there long into the early hours. Her heart kept growing calm for a few minutes and then racing again. Her head was one big mad rush of thoughts, like a waterfall, like white water rapids.
    Tommy. The feel of him. The urgency. That point when he had overpowered her, when it was just a caveman thing and he had her but he didn’t know it because he was still a boy with a boy’s inexperience and inability to spot that critical moment.
    That moment when, briefly, he had been too strong and she had liked it, and then that point had tipped over and she had come to her senses and pushed him away.
    Was she really the kind of girl – the kind of woman – who wanted only to be overpowered, to give herself up to a man’s strength? She had never thought of herself as that woman, but the response had been undeniable. The physical reaction to that kind of strength, to those kinds of demands.
    She turned over, and focused on the rain lashing down against her window, drumming on the glass and running down it in streams. She didn’t know how to handle all this. She’d never known anything like it. Nicholas Blunt with his inarticulate, bludgeoning interest; Tommy’s Jekyll and Hyde flips between friend and pursuer, just when she thought they’d moved well beyond all that. She had enough shit to deal with right now, without all this.
    She had to find a way to put it out of her head. Get on with her real life.
    Focus, and move forwards.
    That’s what she’d been doing for the last three years.
    Since Mum fell ill and Dad had struggled to deal with how she relentlessly fell apart before his eyes, layers of the woman she had been being stripped away as the tumors took hold.
    And then afterwards, when he had carried on struggling to deal with anything, and Ruby had been so young and lashing out angrily at the world, and everything had been down to Holly.
    Focus. Move forwards. Deal with the shit.
    That was all she knew how to do.
    §
    A full morning at university helped her distance herself from things. Tommy, Nicholas Blunt... those encounters had happened, and were in the past now. Behind her.
    Lunch at the club with Ruby brought it all back, though.
    The health club was a modern building on the edge of town, nestled into the foot of a hill, with woodland climbing up the slope behind it. It was a beautiful setting, and the club made the most of it with floor-to-roof windows so you could sit in the restaurant and look out over the lush green Cotswold landscape.
    “I’m worried about him,” said Holly, as she picked at the remains of a Thai crabcake. “Dad. He just seems so flat about everything. Just accepts whatever’s thrown at him. When he got that eviction notice he didn’t seem to care. And now this morning when I left for the bus he was just packing his books into a wooden crate, ready to move out. Dad never used to be like that. He was a fighter.”
    Ruby opened her mouth to speak, then stopped. They both knew when that had changed. He’d put all his fight into helping