When Time Stood Still – Bobby

1

Roberta slowed her silver Audi A3 to a stop opposite a neatly kept terraced house, but a short walk away from the quayside in the centre of Bristol. She had removed the magnetic business signs from the driver’s and passenger’s side doors as she didn’t want to announce the fact that Svensson Fabrics was attending. Her time here was to be only too private.

Yes, she was fitting some curtains in her daughter Jocelyn’s new house, but it was her man, Mark, that she really wished to see and be with again. She had to concede that it was a little crazy to be besotted with him, but his attentive ways had won her heart, and she really wasn’t the kind of woman to let that happen so easily. His fledgling property business was becoming increasingly successful, and the purchase of the house, where she now found herself, was proof of that.

She had only just pushed on the metal gate, set into the boundary wall, when the front door was tugged open, the flaking yellow paintwork she had last seen now a pristine smooth, and gleaming, surface; the leaded glass, set into the two panels, also repaired.

‘You’re early, Bobby!’ Mark laughed, using his name for her and that Jocelyn found over familiar. ‘I was looking out for you…didn’t know if I should start painting one of the bedrooms while I waited. You’ll soon see all the clutter, just as it was the last time you were here, but work’s been manic. Had any more thoughts on what I asked Svensson’s to do?’

‘Don’t rush me and let me get inside!’ she laughed, buoyed up by his enthusiasm. He took the bulging bag that she carried from her hand and held the door open. She met a moment’s look upon her.

‘Thank you…’

‘You’re dressed for work as I am, but you’re the smarter one by a long way…’

‘Enough of your flattery!’ she responded on a thin-lipped smile. It would be only too easy to encourage him. He was the type of man to have the right words at his disposal. Clients who consulted her on interior design changes expected as much. She took pride in her appearance as well as in what she could do for them.

Yes, she’d dressed up and had chosen to wear navy-blue tailored slacks and a sky-blue flowing blouse that hung free, along with bangles and baubles on her slender wrists and at her throat. She didn’t have to fuss over the tumble of her auburn red curls that hung loose to her shoulders and framed a slender, unremarkable face. The heels of her blue and white flats echoed on the pine boarded floor of the entrance hall that seemed to flow, uninterrupted, into a cavernous living space and kitchen.

‘I say what I see…’

‘Don’t I just know it, Mark! Just pick the moments better…’

He laughed on hearing her mild rebuke. ‘I’ll bear it in mind for the next time…and the next.’

Mark was a broad-shouldered man, an uncompromising and gifted rugby player who had swept Jocelyn off her feet after meeting her at some holiday resort in the Med. He towered over them, his often blunt and direct ways a cover for a more thoughtful and considerate sort. She saw it in the work that had been undertaken on the property that was close to Brandon Park. The dry-dock with SS Great Britain lay not so far away and across the river.

She looked at the bag that he had placed at the foot of a bare-treaded spiral staircase that rose to the first floor in an easy curve, the light flooding down from a skylight that had been placed on a ceiling above, on the second floor.

‘Thank goodness it’s the bedroom above…’ she teased. ‘I don’t think I could cope with what you and Jocelyn have decided to have here…’

He stopped half way up the stairs and looked down at her, saw Bobby’s thin fingered hand grip the rope that hung from brackets screwed into the wall. ‘Jocelyn tells me that it’s been a mistake in just the same way…’

Mark continued walking, the bag under one arm, his shoulder brushing the wall. Roberta shivered as she took in his appearance. He was so darned strong and his tone of voice as he spoke, in reply to what she had just said, deep and unforgiving.

‘Don’t be angry,’ she asked as they stood at the doorway into an echoing bedroom, the walls a pristine white; the curtain poles and brackets, to the bay window that she had brought curtains for, a dull finish.

‘I’m…I’m not…not angry with you.’ He leant against the doorway, with his arms folded, the fastenings on his decorator’s overalls opening to reveal the hair on his chest. He closed it on seeing her eyes drift. ‘Jocelyn’s giving me grief about this place…about the work to be done…us and about us all but camping here. If it’s not about that than it’s about the stairs and her journey to the hospital. She’s wrecked from her work as a nurse most days and now nights. ‘I don’t want a hike to get to my bed’…were her words.’

Roberta stood closer, looked up at his unshaven, craggy face. She noted the soft lines of scars under his eyes that were the legacy of past sport’s injuries. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in personality. She didn’t see that now.

‘Where’s the man I danced with at that charity function a year or two back?’

‘Two- and a-bit years, actually. I counted back to that time while I was waiting for you…you weren’t alone then.’ His voice trailed away, and she now saw him take the bag and put it on a folding ladder that also converted into a trestle table. ‘I’ve put a clean dust sheet on it so that the curtains don’t get messed up. I didn’t have time to air the room after sweeping it. I had a lot going on…up here!’

She gasped on seeing a ferocious jab of his fingers to his head. Bobby let his comment pass on what had become the wreckage of her marriage. She would be eternally grateful to have been self sufficient and reliant on the income from Svensson Fabrics. The work and the money she earned from it had gotten her through.

‘Don’t do that, Mark!’ she cried out in evident fear of what prompted his actions. ‘Is it…has it gotten that bad between you two?’

‘Yes…yes it has. I’m making real money for the first time in what the business is involved with. I can step up…that’s why I’ve asked you to help me…advise on the décor of the places I’ve been run ragged on. The buyers have real money and I’ve put everything I have into the schemes, but for what?’ He met her considerate look upon him. ‘Things between us have gone haywire. Jocelyn and I live in the same house…but we live separate lives…as anyone looking in would soon see.’

She sought to concentrate on what she was here to do. Instead, she felt her thoughts drift to what he had said about them dancing and how close they had been…

 

2

‘The others will be angry…I’m monopolizing you,’ Mark smiled, his hold on her possessive.

She felt small against him; slender and yet happy to be dancing with him. For a big man he was surprisingly light on his feet and accomplished in the old ways of dancing, not all this jigging about and your ears about to burst with the noise.

‘Am I complaining?’ she smiled, looking up at him. They were seen to be having more fun together than was decently allowed. They had known how to get lost in each other’s ways, all of it on account of being taken out of routine behaviour when together, with others in their party, at a medical charity function Jocelyn had gotten tickets for. It was a dressy affair of dinner and dancing. They were living it out to the music that would often silence any conversation. Thus, a look or a touch conveyed what was on their minds.

It was to have fun and to push the boundaries as far as they dared, or decency allowed, and the feelings of others. She sensed the tension between her daughter and the man holding her, his behaviour arousing a riot of emotions in her too. She was having her own troubles with Tony.

Yes, she would have fun in Mark’s arms. It was a refreshing change from ordered ways of it and that her business demanded of her. She had a right to some fun and to be made a fuss of. She was getting precious little of that with Tony. Money and success didn’t buy you happiness. The cliché, she thought as Mark twirled her so expertly, was only too true and relevant to her situation.

‘I’m having a good time…love what you make me feel,’ she whispered as Mark held her close,; too close some would say. She’d known it then, the making of a deeper bond and she had felt it as Mark pressed against her. She had known of his ardour and, in her, the disconcerting and gnawing ache of longing for him. She felt that she was in his life, really in it, and what they talked of engaging her attention. It was crazy, what she was falling into, but the man holding her made her feel so special.

‘Better make this one the last dance…or people might get to saying something,’ he said, his breath in her ear making her shiver and clutch his hand a little tighter.

‘For now…it’s not the end of it, Mark.’ She gave voice to her hopes, destructive of an ordered life as that would be if they became real.

She wasn’t fleshy or buxom, and she; felt herself to be no beauty but a woman who still sought to look after herself and make the most of what she did have. Having two kids at a young age hadn’t sucked the firmness out of her breasts, and a careful diet had given her a sleek body that women of her age could be proud of. She thought of herself as a woman with a loving, even passionate, nature that found full expression through her work.

She wanted more. Knew that she wanted that with Mark…absurd as the idea was. Moments in his arms, on the dance floor, had taken her out of her closed in world.

The music stopped but the ache to know of him was as strong as ever. Jocelyn had her father’s temperament and could shift her loyalties. Mark didn’t deserve what her daughter’s previous lovers had endured. Yet, something had brought them together.

Who was she to intrude on that, let alone think of doing so?

 

3

She felt Mark touch her arm for an instant.

‘Sorry…’

‘You were miles away,’ he smiled considerately. ‘I was saying that you give me a shout when you’re ready to hang them on the poles…and you have threaded the rings through the openings. I’ll be upstairs, in the master bedroom which is all but done.’

‘It won’t take so long!’ she called after him even as Mark loitered in the doorway.

‘Fine…just say the word.’

Roberta nodded and looked away. She soon sought to busy herself with the curtains and laid them out on the pristine, clean, dust sheet that he had the foresight to unwrap and lay over the grooved metal surface of the bench.

‘You could drill the holes for the tie backs,’ she called after him, as an afterthought, wanting him to be close so that she could see and talk to him.

His footfalls echoed in the room. ‘Sure, show me where’s best, Bobby?’

She saw him crouch down and find the correct masonry drill bits in a tool box the size of a small trunk She saw the certainty in his movements and understood how his skin could feel so rough. She had felt that when he had touched her hand moments ago. He got involved, he didn’t rely on others, even if he was the boss of a business she had heard others talk of.

‘We’ll do our best to please that daughter of mine,’ she said, watching him as Mark stood up. ‘You…you don’t deserve the grief she seems to give you. I didn’t bring her up that way, and her nursing should have rubbed those ways out of her long ago.’

‘And you didn’t deserve what happened…Tony just walking out on you.’ He’d not heard the full story, not even from Jocelyn.

Bobby gasped as his fingers brushed her cheek. ‘What…what are you doing…mean by doing that?’

‘Just letting you know that I still care…that dance took my mind off things and onto you, if you remember?’

She nodded and met his stilled look upon her, his pass unnerving for its certainty and feelings behind it. How crazy to feel that she was at the edge of a dizzying fall and would succumb to whatever he sought of her.

‘Even then, the two of you were arguing?’

‘Yes…even then you and Tony had your troubles?’

‘Yes…touché,’ she sighed and took to tearing open the packages that held the tie back hooks. He had given voice to how it was for both of them now.

Mark saw her hands tremble, and how Bobby’s hair tumbled down to hide her face a as she worked. He had seen her struggle to tear the packages open.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you…what I did just now.’

It had been a clumsy pass, but the woman before him beguiled and bewildered him. He sensed that under the business woman’s exterior lay a passionate heart. He’d known of it on that dancefloor and the feelings aroused then had never quite left him.

‘You didn’t, Mark…upset me.’

He watched her as Bobby found a soft pencil in her ‘box of necessities’ as she called it, before walking to one side of the bay window. After a moment’s thought, when he saw her tap the pencil against her lips, she put a mark on the wall. She then repeated the process on the other side.

‘Here, I would do it this way,’ he suggested on standing by her side, the soft whirr of the tape measure as he pulled on it. ‘I would measure from the floor for the height you want, then from the edge of the reveal…and level up. Things don’t always click by sight alone…’

‘I’ve done this before you know!’ Her nerves were all a jangle, and she gave him a nervy smile. Her behaviour was more like that of a teenager than a mature woman. ‘Let’s get on, Mark…shall we?’

‘Sure…’ he moved away; put the tape measure on the broad window sill. The paintwork gleamed. ‘When you’ve hung them up, the curtains will lift the room some more…’ Unbidden, he now brought a step ladder close to her. ‘You know what you’re doing…so, I’ll hand the curtain up to you…bear the weight of them as you slip it over the rings…’

She gave a soft, disbelieving laugh. ‘Less of the sarcasm, mister…’

They worked on with practised ease, Mark handing up the curtain as she threaded the two halves along the length of the pole, the brackets then bearing its weight. She was unaware of his appraising looks, but she knew that her blouse stretched; had come loose from the waist band of her slacks.

She looked down, twisted on the rung that she stood on. ‘What?’

He held out a hand should she need it. ‘I have feelings about you that I should keep to myself…have done for some time, Bobby.’

On a gasp, Bobby did take hold of his hand. Mark had given voice to what she had been dealing with as she drove over to his place. How could she deny her feelings and live out an ordered life, especially as he had asked her business to help him, and offer advice on decorating the properties he was building out in a distinctive style but without the costs spiralling?

He did not let go of her hand. Bobby could not help but sigh. The tension between them had to be broken and her unrequited feelings for him satisfied, destructive as they would be.

‘I have them too,’ she heard herself whisper. ‘It’s what happens now…what we do about it that’s the problem…for both of us.’ They heard an iPhone play out its merry tune. ‘Damn those things…and it’s not mine…I left it in the car…on voicemail.’

She hoped that what she confessed to would not sound overly purposeful.

‘Hi…’ he mouthed ‘Jocelyn’. ‘We’re finishing off the curtain hanging, they look great already…you’re sure to like it.’ He watched Bobby move to draw them together. He saw her blouse ride up as she stretched.. How slender she was and how pert her breasts were as they pushed out the fabric of her blouse. How beautifully pale her skin was. ‘Sure…Jocelyn wants a word.’

‘Hello, Joss…we’re nearly there. You’ll be pleased…’

She was cut short and listened to her daughter as she spoke in haste. Jocelyn told her of how it was between her and Mark and that he would soon be living in ‘that place’ on his own.

‘I see…and no…I didn’t know.’ Bobby turned to watch him as Mark knelt down and marked out the spots where he could drill the holes for the tiebacks more certainly. ‘I’ll hand the phone back to him…’

”There’s no need. Just tell Mark I’ll be back later than usual after my shift…’ The call was ended abruptly, and Bobby simply held out the phone to him.

‘You kept quiet on all of that…’ she said coolly. How was she to be angry not to have known how it had gone for him, for her daughter and the man before her? Everything was changed, turned over as never before.

‘It all crashed in a few days ago…’ was all Mark needed to say by way of explanation. ‘I’m signing over a place in my portfolio to her. We’ll each live on…separately.’

‘That’s generous of you…’ she said, struggling to conceal her anger at what Jocelyn had secured.

Bobby leant over him and brazenly brushed her hands through the opening of his overalls. She brushed her fingers over his skin, her breaths on his ears making him shiver. Mark half-turned and met her certain look before meeting her slow, faltering kiss.

‘Stop what you’re doing, Mark…this is more important to me…perhaps to both of us.’

He stood up, her hold not restraining him, and Mark crushed her to him, his hungering mouth on her lips, the tip of his tongue probing before she opened the way to a flurry of noisy deepening kisses. Bobby felt his hips pushing forward to have her know of his erection, trapped between them. She placed questing kisses to his chest as he tugged open his work suit and she put her arms around him.

‘We can do this now,’ he murmured appreciatively.

‘Yes…it’s not so crazy anymore.’

She felt the man’s toned physique as she tugged on his clothes and pushed it, with trembling hands, from his body before groping and then clamping on the swell of his prick in his pants.

He lifted her arms and eased her blouse over her head, his lips soon claiming her small, pert breasts. He then tugged open the front fastening of her bra, the fabric like a second skin and allowing the weight of her breasts to fall naturally. It was no hindrance to his delighting in them as her nipples strained against the soft lace fabric.

‘You wonder…wonder…so firm…so firm and beautiful.’ Mark would not be distracted with what she did. She held his head, guided his claims to them for only a moment before she clamped on him, fumbled as his arms got in her way.

‘I want to see all of you,’ she gasped; squirmed on feeling the rush of longing as his fingers caressed her belly and sought the fastening of her slacks. His touches to her skin incited a charge of excitement. She met his unashamed hungering kisses, wrapped her arms about his neck as he moved to lift her out of her slacks that lay at their feet.

They stumbled against the wall, his hands sliding to ease down her lace trimmed cutaway panties, her body trembling and now open to his wondering gaze and touch. He slowly caressed her cleft. Deepening open mouthed kisses followed. She heard his wondering sigh.

‘So smooth…your skin’s so smooth where I touch you. You…you have a young woman’s body…yet you will bring me so much.’

Bobby languished in his questing touches and admiring kisses. She felt her blood coursing in her veins, her heart beats in her throat as her breaths became quick and shallow. She ached for him to take her, the novelty of where he would do so a raging delight.

‘Find me down there,’ she groaned as he worked her, as she pushed on his chest and made him squat. She needed no coaxing to part her legs and held his head as his tongue flickered and licked; poked and swirled. ‘Mark…Mark…this is so crazy!’

‘I was crazy to wait…’ his kisses sucked the breath from her.

He lifted her into his arms, and she wrapped her legs about his waist and soon felt the coolness of the wall that she was pushed against. She shivered as his fingers worked to open her and to rise against him before she looked down. She gasped as she saw the glistening tip of his penis. She reached between them to touch it and heard him gasp in expectation. She had brushed the hooded tip against her opening and used it to caress her wet folds until it entered her body.