They held hands and ran to the car park. As he drove, Ivan steered with one hand and left the other big hand on Maggie’s jean-clad leg, stroking gently, making her feel intensely excited. It was odd: until a few moments ago, she’d seen him as a friend, and now, in a flash, it was like a curtain being pulled down to reveal a totally different picture and he wasn’t a friend any more. He was a man, a sexual, charismatic man and she wanted him. The intensity of the want frightened her.
The car pulled into a lane a few streets away from home and Ivan parked outside a small mews house. He took her hand again as they went inside and she barely had time to register what the inside of the house was like, noticing a giant fireplace with open brickwork and bare floorboards, before he had pulled her upstairs to a huge bedroom that seemed to take up the whole of the upper floor, an enormous low bed dominating it.
Then they were half sitting, half lying on the bed and Ivan was tearing her clothes off as she tore his off with fervour. His mouth found hers, as if he couldn’t bear not to be kissing her.
And for the first time in her life, tall Maggie Maguire felt like a small fragile creature beside this giant of a man, who touched her lovingly, as if she might break. It was that, that and the tenderness and the love in everything he did to her, that made her melt.
Afterwards, they lay coiled together in bed and Ivan gently stroked the small scars at the top of her thigh.
‘We should go to French films more often,’
Maggie said lightly.
‘Don’t.’ Ivan held a finger up to the softness of her lips. ‘Don’t make a joke about it,’ he said. ‘You do that when you’re unsure?’
She nodded.
‘I love that you’re so funny,’ he added, still holding her close to him. ‘You make me laugh, but I don’t want you to need your defence mechanism around me, I want you to be yourself, not to joke about the things that matter.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning around and propping herself up on her elbow, so that she could look down on him. She ran her fingers through his close-cropped hair lovingly. She didn’t think she’d ever get enough of touching him. ‘I can’t help it. I always think that if you make people laugh they don’t see what you’re really thinking or they don’t see that you could really be in pain.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw that in you the first time I met you.’
‘You did?’
‘And I wanted you the first time I met you,’ he
added and the growl in his voice made her feel faint with longing again.
‘But you teased me,’ she protested, and he laughed then and pulled her close to kiss her on the lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently, his lips against her cheek. ‘Seeing you gave me such a jolt, I wasn’t thinking straight. All I know is that I wanted you from the moment you came into the garage. I knew I’d have to wait though.’
‘What if I hadn’t wanted you?’ Maggie asked.
Ivan smoothed her hair back from her forehead. ‘I’d have waited,’ he said. ‘I’d have waited a very long time for you, for ever in fact.’
It felt odd waking up in a strange bed in the morning, but only for a moment. Beside her lay Ivan: large, muscular and warm, one arm flung over her body. Even in sleep, he was holding her close. Maggie knew you shouldn’t compare, but she couldn’t help it: Grey liked to sleep in his own space, on his side of the bed, and she did the same.
Except last night, she and Ivan had slept curled together, drawing comfort from each other. She wriggled against him, loving the feel of his warm, hard body against hers. And it was hard, definitely: a certain part very hard. She wriggled closer still.
‘I wouldn’t do that, unless you like making love in the morning,’ came a low, sleepy voice.
Maggie moved a sliver closer, feeling herself grow warm inside, adoring the power she had over him. Just her touch seemed to inflame him.
‘I warned you,’ he murmured, and then, like a great bear rousing himself from sleep, he swiftly moved till he was pinning her down on the bed, grinning at her, his face covered in dark stubble, his eyes glinting.
Maggie reached up and pulled his face down to hers, eagerly. ‘I thought you had someplace to be this morning?’ she teased as he rested his weight on his elbows, the lower half of him holding her to the bed, hard evidence that they weren’t going to be getting up for a while.
‘It can wait,’ Ivan said huskily and lowered his mouth on to hers.
Ivan’s bathroom was typically male with cream tiles, a bath he clearly never used because he had the last word in power showers, and a mirrored cabinet that contained nothing but shampoo, shower gel, shaving foam, toothpaste and mouthwash.
‘You’ve
got no stuff in your cabinet,’ teased Maggie, rooting through, trying to find something that might remove the remains of her mascara.
There wasn’t even any male moisturiser. Grey had as much in the moisturising and sunblock line as she had and borrowed hers if he’d run out of Clinique for Men.
‘Would you prefer if I had a ton of women’s stuff in here?’ Ivan demanded.
‘No, but you must have had other women here,’
she added, trying to sound diffident, and failing utterly. ‘Go on, tell me,’ she said. ‘We’re modern adults, we need to know everything about each other. I’ve told you about Grey.’
‘I’d quite like to hear more about Grey, actually,’
Ivan said, a muscle tautening in his jaw. ‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Maggie shook her head.
Grey was the past, a never to be revisited place. ‘Yes, I do,’ Ivan said. He’d had his shower and wore only a small towel tied round his waist as he began shaving. He looked great, tautly muscular and just as wantable as he’d been minutes before.
Maggie wished women could look as effortlessly good as men the morning after. She had panda eyes and blotchy skin from not taking off her makeup and needed a shower cap before she could shower as she didn’t have her hair paraphernalia there to stop the wild auburn frizz.
‘Grey was a part of your life for a long time and I want to know it’s over, properly over.’ ‘Of course it’s over,’ Maggie said quickly. She didn’t want to talk about this, it was too soon for her two worlds to collide. The new improved Maggie and the old, stupid one.
‘But Ivan, your past is a mystery to me. When you took me to your cousin’s wedding in the first place, nobody mentioned any special person you were supposed to have taken,’ she said. ‘Did you train them all to keep their mouths shut, because I can’t believe there’s really been a drought on the girlfriend front lately.’
Once she’d admitted Ivan’s fierce attractiveness to herself, it was obvious that he was the sort of man who’d appeal to women. However, Ivan was a hard man to get to know. He was quiet, intense and very private. Few women would get past his outward face, to see the man underneath. The kind, gentle man who was an incredible lover.
‘There have been a few women in my life,’ he said, ‘but very few of them got to leave their toothbrushes over.’
‘You don’t like sharing your bathroom?’ Maggie asked lightly.
‘Up till now, no,’ he said. ‘I think I’m changing my mind about that.’
She grinned, took his toothbrush from the holder and began to brush her teeth.
‘Nobody’s ever used my toothbrush before,’ he said, watching her.
‘So this is a first,’ she teased. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is a first.’
She’d wrapped a towel around herself and stripped it off to climb into the shower.
‘Show me your thigh,’ he commanded abruptly.
The night before, his fingers had touched one of the pale scars on the top of her left thigh and she’d muttered about the car crash - the same story she’d given Grey when he’d seen the marks.
But this time, in the bright light of his bathroom, he looked at them more carefully.
‘Sit down.’
Gently, he made her sit on the edge of the bath
and knelt in front of her. Maggie wished she had something to hide her thighs but she had nothing.
Her wounds were laid bare. They were ragged scars, not deep, not ever having required stitches, but they’d left their mark. There were many of them, uneven marks that would never fade, like a barcode scratched into her soft skin.
‘It was a car accident,’ she repeated.
Ivan’s fingers traced the marks.
‘These scars don’t look like any accident,’ he said. He looked up at her, his fingers still touching the scars. ‘What really happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, anxiety blooming.
Ivan put two strong arms around her waist and locked them behind her back, pulling her closer to him. ‘I want to know all about you, Maggie Maguire,’ he whispered, kissing her face, ‘every inch of you, every inch of your head, so tell me the truth.
Tell me, where did you really get those scars?’
It had all started so innocently on her first day at St Ursula’s, when she’d arrived full of excitement and enthusiasm at being in big school. She and the other first years had spent the morning being shown classrooms and meeting their new teachers.
It was a busy and interesting day, learning where everything was, getting used to which lessons would be in which classrooms.
The group of girls were waiting to be told where to go next when it happened.
‘Hey, lanky, what’s your name?’ asked a girl with fair hair, a little freckled face and eyes that made her look older than twelve.
‘Maggie Maguire,’ said Maggie eagerly, not seeing the word lanky as derogatory.
‘Big Maggie, huh?’ sneered the girl, and the small group surrounding her laughed.
Maggie had laughed too, half out of nervousness, half to show that she wasn’t offended. ‘Sandra, you’re a panic,’ laughed one of the gang. ‘Big Maggie - that’s classic.’
A teacher had arrived at that moment and corralled the first years into their classes.
The next morning, Maggie was in early, determined to be ready for this exciting new world.
She was sitting at the front of the class for English, her first lesson, shyly saying hello to other girls, when Sandra and her cohorts strolled in. ‘Big Maggie’s up the front of the class,’
announced Sandra. ‘You’re a swot, are you, Big Maggie?’
Sandra walked past Maggie’s desk and, in one swift move, shoved Maggie’s neatly arranged textbooks on to the floor. ‘Oops. Sorree,’ she said insincerely, and the gang laughed.
Her face crimson and tears burning in the back of her eyes, Maggie bent to pick up her books, hoping somebody would stand up for her or flash her a sympathetic glance. But nobody did.
Everyone was too scared.
Maggie wasn’t the only one of Sandra’s victims.
There were several more, and as the years went on, the bullying ebbed and flowed. Maggie found if she got to class after Sandra, and ran out of the door before her, then Sandra didn’t bother to follow her.
She became adept at rushing everywhere and trying to be invisible at times like lunch or break.
They even ruined netball for her. When she was alone, she loved the touch of the ball on her hand, the thought of springing it from long fingers into the hoop. But as soon as the bullies were in the background, taunting, teasing, making snide remarks, her hand-eye coordination fell apart. ‘Oh yeah, look at No-Tit Maguire, screwed it up again,’
Sandra would say.
Ever since she’d tried to make her flat chest look bigger, Sandra had swapped the Big Maggie name for No-Tit Maguire. Maggie pretended she didn’t care and ignored her.
‘You’re nothing but a long streak of misery,’
was another of Sandra’s taunts.
In her more charitable moments, Maggie liked to think that maybe Sandra had lots of problems and that’s what made her so hard and cross with the world. That was often what was wrong with people in the books Maggie read: when they were nasty, they were suffering really and they just took it out on the heroine, so that could be the answer.
But after a few years of unrelenting nastiness, she didn’t want an excuse for Sandra or her gang any more, they were just bitches. Kitty, the nearest thing that Maggie had to a best friend in school, had no interest in the theory that Sandra’s life was hard, which was why she took it out on other people.
‘She’s just a cow,’ Kitty said, vehemently. Kitty was small, very clever, wore glasses and lived in the purdah of plumpness, which meant she was Sandra’s ideal target.
Brains was the only obvious link between Maggie and Kitty but the two girls became united in terror. They had agreed there was no point telling anyone about it. The teachers knew what Sandra was like, they couldn’t control her either, or the gang, so it wasn’t as if people didn’t know.
But nobody seemed able to do anything, not even that time in third year when it emerged that Sandra had been taking money from the first years. Nobody knew quite how that had been brushed under the carpet, but it had. Sandra had been off school for two days and then she was back and just as bad as ever, without even a flicker of remorse. In fact, she and her cronies seemed worse now, as if their leader had got into trouble and had walked free, so they felt they had nothing or nobody to fear.
The first and second years stayed out of their way. People in third year, Sandra’s year, didn’t have that option.
‘Why do adults insist on that rubbish that your school days are the best days of your life?’ Kitty said. ‘They’re not, they’re horrible, I can’t wait to get out of this place, away from those lowlifes.’
At least Kitty could talk about it at home. She had an older sister who was now at college and understood that being small, bespectacled and clever wasn’t the route to popularity in school, and comforted her, but there was nobody Maggie could tell. Mum and Dad were so thrilled to see her fabulous reports.
‘Look, five more As and an A+. You’re amazing. Where did we get such a brilliant daughter, Dennis?’ her mum would say delightedly, when the report cards arrived in Summer Street.
The reports always guardedly mentioned that Maggie was quite shy and needed to come out of her shell a bit too, but Maggie knew that her parents couldn’t quite see this because the Maggie they knew at home was funny and merry. She could see them working it out: this classroom version of their daughter was the one who worked so hard she got A+. That must be why only they saw the bright-eyed Maggie at home. In class, she was diligent, that was it.