Missing You by Louise Douglas Page B

air in the system, he said, and it needs bleeding. Sometimes, when one or the other of them flushes the lavatory, the whole house groans and rattles. When Fen suggested calling a plumber, Sean told her to save her money. He said he’d look at it. He is, she has noticed, inclined to volunteer for mending and maintenance jobs around the house, although he never seems to find time to actually carry them out.
    Fen holds her breath to slow her heart rate.
    Her head is throbbing.
    ‘Which is more likely?’ she asks herself firmly. ‘That the cold tap has turned itself on again, or that Tomas is upstairs running himself a bath?’
    Still she is careful. She pulls off her boots, takes hold of the banister and puts her bare left foot on the first stair.
    Fen creeps up the stairs, moving one foot after the other, cautiously unpeeling her sole from the carpet at every step to make herself as light and quiet as possible. She treads carefully, breathing in little shallow gasps, trying not to imagine how she will feel if she taps on the bathroom door and Tomas is there, in the bath. What will she say to him? What will she do?
    ‘Stop it!’ she says, out loud, but very quietly. ‘Stop.’
    At the top of the stairs, she pauses, rests a moment.
    The bathroom door is open.
    It’s not the cold tap making the noise. It’s not the bath either.
    It’s the shower.
    Fen takes two more steps forward, and looks through the narrow gap between the door and the door frame. The earthy, damp warmth of the bathroom, mingled with the metallic smell of hot water and the hot-plastic smell of the shower curtain, seeps through the crack.
    There is no ghost in the bathroom.
    It is Sean, and he’s alive. He is very alive.
    He is standing beneath the shower.
    The shower curtain is drawn and water streams down it, steam billowing softly so his silhouette and his colours are blurred, like the countryside seen through a rain-soaked window.
    He is leaning forward. One arm is braced against the wall, slightly below the chrysanthemum-shaped shower head. The fingers of this hand are extended, spanned for balance, the palm supporting his weight. His head is inclined downward, so his face is hidden by the arm, and the water from the shower is firing onto the crown of his head, pelting down his back, which is slightly arched.
    Although his body is hazy through the curtain and the water, Fen can tell that he has a beautiful shape from the way his back slopes into his buttocks, the length of his thighs and the tapering of his lower legs to his ankles.
    One leg is bent gracefully at the knee, like a statue of an Athenian athlete about to run a marathon. The braced arm and the bent knee give Sean’s body a heroic pose. But it’s the movement of his other forearm that holds Fen’s eyes: the V shape of the elbow, smudged behind the curtain, and the rhythm of the wrist working that private, universal, unmistakable sexual rhythm.
    Fen is spellbound.
    Everything drains from her mind.
    She is aware of nothing but the man in the shower just a few feet away from her, the beauty of him, the movement beneath the raining water.
    She holds her breath and she watches.
    She watches as the steam plumes, as the water splashes into the bath and trickles down the curtain. She watches as the water streams out of the shower head and down Sean’s wet hair, down the incline of his neck to the shadow of his shoulder blade, down the dark hairs of his leg to the bend of the knee. She watches the tension of his back, the movement of his elbow, his arm, his far shoulder arching even further, so muscular, so intent and intense. She breathes in his beauty as she watches and after a moment, after forever, he groans loud enough for her to hear. Then his head relaxes, and the working arm falls to his side and she sees the tension leave him.
    He stands still, quite motionless for a moment or two beneath the shower water, and then he pushes himself upright with the braced hand. He stands up