Hero is a Four Letter Word (7 page)

She can’t be miserable forever, and despite the rocky, slightly illegal start, Liam
is
endearing. Cute, perhaps too young, but earnest and right now, Jen needs to feel beautiful. Feel
wanted.
And it is very easy to call the police if he continues to overstep.

“Yes Liam?” she asks, choosing a low-fat Greek yogurt and popping it in beside the red wine.

“Would you like to go on a date with me?” he mutters.

“Yes, Liam,” she says.
Now
Jennet turns her full attention to him, and graces him with one of her warmest smiles. He seems to grow taller, to unfurl under her gaze, his own puckish grin sliding back across his mouth. “I think I would like that. Let me pay for these, and then why don’t we go to the café down the main road?”

“I would like that very much, Miss Carter,” Liam replies with another endearingly formal head-tip, and this time when he holds out a crooked elbow, Jen takes it.

Months pass. Nearly a year since her father died, and Jennet wouldn’t have thought this time last year that she would be smiling by now. Laughing. Flirting.

Happy.

And Liam does make her happy.

The thing is, Jennet knows this is all silly, and doesn’t much mind. She tells Karen that she’s been seeing someone, and that he is far more serious about it than her, and her friend yells “finally!” and pours them both another glass of wine and turns off the telly and adds, “So, details!”

“None really,” Jennet says. They are taking it slow, oh so slow, because Jennet still hurts behind the smiles. Because she feels guilty for finding joy when her Da is dead and in the ground.

But Liam is kind, and clever, and quick. He moves like a ballet dancer and smiles like the sun, and he is everything that grief-damp and sorrow-grey Jennet has feared she would never feel again. She is a full decade his senior, and yet he makes her giggle and blush.

And on their third meeting, when he brushes a sweet kiss across her cheek and asks her to meet him in the woods tomorrow for a walk, she turns positively crimson and agrees.

So here she is, being honest to goodness
wooed
as she walks the woods.

“I like it when you visit me here,” Liam says, guiding her over a split rock in the path. “It feels like our secret.”

“Not much of a secret,” Jennet says. “My family’s been meeting lovers in the woods for centuries.” She realizes what she’s just said, what she’s just insinuated, and covers her face with her hands, positive her blush is phosphorescent.

Liam laughs at her discomfort and pretends he didn’t hear it in a gentlemanly manner. “Oh, how those robust, virile Carterhaugh men loved their women. So many children they had, so many little heirs running about, but the families got smaller and smaller. The men loved their women just the same, though.”

“True,” Jennet allows, still mortified, but unwilling to let her male ancestors have all the bragging rights. “And the women their men.”

“Look, here,” Liam says, leading them to a gentle stop beside a lump of weed and bracken about twice wide as his own shoulders. “Do you know what this is?”

“… dead ivy?” Jennet answers.

Liam grins and crouches down, yanking on the dead vines until a small circle of grey stone is revealed.

“Oh, a well,” Jen says, kneeling on the moist leaf-mold to peer down it, hands braced on the ground rather than the rim, in case it’s unstable.

“The well from which Tam Lin was reborn.”

Jennet laughs. “Oh, no, you know the song, too?”

Liam laughs with her. “And the tales. But it’s not a tale, Jennet. It’s true. ‘Twas your own ancestor Margaret clung to Tam Lin as the Faery Queen transformed him into a lion, and an adder, and a rod of red-hot iron. She flung her lover into the well and he became a man again, reborn in the waters of a woman. They cleaved to one another their whole lives after.”

Jennet rolls her eyes. “Which is, you have to admit, the prettiest way to talk about what was probably a road-side tryst. A length of red-hot iron? The waters of a woman? Sounds a lot like shagging to me.”

“Why Jennet,” Liam says, voice pitched to mimic a particularly offended maiden aunt, and slides down to sit beside her, one of his thighs pressed along her hip. “Your mind is positively in the gutter today. Was there something you wanted to proposition?”

“
My
mind is in the gutter?”

“We could take a roll here, like the heroes of the great tales. Make love in nature. Declare ourselves under the stars, all that romantic nonsense.”

She is tempted.
God
she is tempted. It’s been two years since her last serious boyfriend, and there is only so much batteries and fingers could do, but she has no condom and Liam is already dangerously infatuated. What would a twenty year old man allowed to have sex with an older woman think?

She lets him put his hand on her thigh, fingernails scratching the denim puckering around her knees. Here is the moment of truth. Does she say yes, or no? Or later?

“What is a hero, really?” Jen muses, instead of answering herself. The coward’s way out, but she needs to think. Not
if
she’s sleep with Liam, she’d decided she will weeks back. But if she will sleep with Liam
right now
. Right here.

And if she does, will she tell him about
that
before, or after, or not at all?

“How do you mean?” he asks, palm sliding towards her inseam. She doesn’t stop it.

Jen smiles and leans into his arm, parting her legs a little further, inviting him to wander northward. Nothing wrong with some harmless flirting. “Was Margaret the hero, because she rescued Tam Lin? She held on, and was granted marriage with Tam for her courage? Even though he told her how to do it all? How to win?”

“That’s how the other stories go,” Liam allows, accepting the invitation of her spread thights. “Rapunzel tells the prince how to defeat the witch, the princess on the glass hill rolls apples down to the farmer boy; the captive chooses their rescuer and eventual husband, and tells them how to win. It’s less the challenge for the valiant knight that makes him the hero than it is the woman consciously choosing her mate.”

“So what, their heroism is empty because the princess has already decided? ‘Oh, that one looks humble, and kind. He’s make a good king and he won’t beat me. I’ll pick him to marry me, but I have to make him think he’s winning of his own cunning and strength?’ Some sort of centuries old mind-games that the Grimms and Perrault never caught on to?”

Liam grins. “Tell me how it is any different now? Men ask to wed a woman after dating them, after spending months or years proving their worth as a husband, as a father, and the woman is the one with the veto power. She says yes, or no.”

Jen can’t help but echo his grin. “You make it sound like a meat market. That’s
not
what it’s like. Besides, sometimes the woman asks the man. Sometimes there is no woman, or no man. Sometimes like my Dad, they don’t want to get married.”

“I am generalizing,” Liam allows. “But you know what I mean. One person does valiant things to prove their worth, even if those valiant things are just taking out the trash and doing the dishes, and the other one decides they get to keep them or not.”

“You’re still missing the point,” Jen says. “It’s a marriage, not a property contract. People choose to stay together not because one person wants and the other one consents to being wanted; they stay together because they
like
each other. They want to stay in each other’s company, make the other one happy, make them smile, comfort them when they’re hurt and take care of them when they’re sad and sick. The other person increases their happiness when they’re around, when the other person does something nice for them, when they do something nice for their partner. They
both
want and they
both
consent.”

Liam leans forward. “Well said, Jennet of Carterhaugh.” His face is so close to hers, his breath a warm puff against her lips that tastes of mint and the bottle of cider they’ve been passing back and forth along the walk. “Will you let me make you happy?”

“Sure,” Jen allows. A single kiss can’t hurt.

He leans forward just far enough that their mouths touch. Then he giggles, lips vibrating against hers in a thrilling, delicious sensation that makes heat slide down her spine. “See?” he asks, flesh to flesh, the words smeared against her skin. “One asks, one consents.”

Before she can answer, he pushes that clever tongue between her lips, and Jen opens for him. Opens her arms, her mouth, allows herself to feel good, to feel for herself, for the first time since her father had passed. Liam kisses the scar on her stomach over, and over, and over again and produces a condom from the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie.

“I consent,” Jen murmurs amid the late autumn roses.

And Jennet allows herself to remember that she is a human being who deserves good things, and Liam is more than happy to help her get there.

Jennet is more relaxed than she’s been in probably a decade. She’s just had about three spectacular orgasms on the forest floor, a hot bubble bath in her en suite, and there are no people staying over at the B&B so she was able to have dinner alone. Now she’s reading in her squashy chair, a fire crackling in the grate and really, all is well with the world.

Somewhere out there, her
lover
is at home, probably doing the same.

He could be doing it here, but he hadn’t asked. He’d just wiped his chin and handed her a bouquet of late-blooming roses fresh picked from the bush beside them, smiled his cheeky, twinkly smile, and sauntered back towards the little house he’d told her about. He’s never invited her back, either, but Jen likes to imagine it as an enchanted cottage, small and wood and covered with a carpet of ivy so thick that it would be invisible to all but those who know where and how to look. Romantic nonsense.

She is just turning a page when a flash of blonde hair and green eyes catches her attention. At first she thinks Liam has come to visit, snuck in to the house somehow to continue what they started, and she turns with a smile and a tingle on both sets of lips. But when she looks at him, she realizes that it’s not Liam at all. It’s just the painting of Margaret and her husband. She’s still not used to having the portraits in her room.

She smiles at Maggie and her man, and is about to resume reading when something about the portrait arrests her attention. Now that she’s really
considering
him, she can see that Margaret’s husband looks an awful lot like Liam. She sets aside her book and goes over to the painting, tracing the curve of his weskit with her fingers. The man was painted nearly life-sized, and up close, the detail is as remarkable as the resemblance. Well, it’s a small county, and people have been intermarrying for years. It’s entirely possible that Margaret’s husband might resemble Jennet’s new lover.

She closes her eyes and compares Liam to the late Mr. Selkirk, or whatever his actual family name was, and is amazed to understand that they are not only similar, but to her memory they are damn near identical. Creepy.

A shiver crawls over her shoulders and Jen turns to fetch her shawl from the warming rack by the fire. As she swirls it over her shoulders, another flash of emerald catches in the corner of her eye. She turns to the small, hand-sized picture of the two men, the ones her Da called lovers. There, again, is a young man who looks so very much like Liam that he could have sat for the portrait.

No. No, no, this is silly. This is just family resemblance. Like Margaret Selkirk and auntie Jane Carter, and Jennet. Jen clutches the shawl close around her arms, fingernails digging into the scratchy wool, and takes a step back. Then another. All the way to the wall between the windows, and narrows her gaze, lets it slide across the wall of family, really
looking
for the first time. There, in the first photograph, a twenty-something young man in a full formal dining suit, light hair and eyes and a cheeky smile. He is slightly apart from the family, perhaps an uncle or a brother-in-law, but one of the daughters is looking at him out the corner of her eye, and she is just the right age to be besotted. There, again, in a mid-century Polaroid, maybe the sixties judging by the hair styles, here is the green-eyed blond man holding up a stubby brown bottle of beer and grinning out at the antics happening on the loch. Under his face it says ‘Cousin Lin’ in someone’s blue, feminine penmanship. There, in a somber black suit among the military uniforms of the brothers Carter as they take one last family shot before half of them are sacrificed to the First World War; there, whispering with a young man in the back of a ballroom; and there again, in the early nineties, auntie Jane sitting on his knee, face half-obscured by the glass of wine in her hand.