Fallen Gods

Sixteen

Sarah Grace Skinner looked out of the window as she buttoned her shirt.

Her hair was still damp from the shower, and stuck to the collar, but she ignored the small inconvenience. She was still brooding over the fury of her argument with her husband.

She and Ron had gone back to bed afterwards, but the mood had been more than broken, it had been shattered like a smashed windscreen. So while he had gone downstairs to dig out his rarely used coffee percolator, she had set about dressing, and restoring herself to a state in which she could face Trish, and Mark, if he was still up and about.

She looked out over Ron Neidholm's front lawn; the sounds of the street drifted through the open window. A car drove by sedately. The kid across the way kicked a soccer ball against his parents' garage door.

The deep voice of Celeste Polanski sounded from next door as she bellowed the latest in a lifetime of instructions to her meek husband

Mort. The Polanskis had lived there for even longer than the

Neidholms. Celeste missed nothing; Ron had always called her the

Sheriff of Sullivan Street.

The house was modest for a sporting icon, much smaller than the mansion she had inherited from her parents, but then, Ron was a modest guy.

Also, she knew that it was not his only home; he had shown her a photograph of his farm in Tennessee, where he had spent the last seven years of his football career, and of his condominium in Maui, where he passed much of his vacation time, and in which he had installed his mother.

Ron and his younger brother Jake had been raised in a single-parent household, after their father's departure with a travelling saleslady from Tulsa, a year after Jake's birth. Crystal Neidholm had devoted her life after that to raising her boys, and to her job as a teacher in the local elementary school. She smiled up from a photograph on the dressing table, alongside a more serious study of Jake, in air force uniform.

Sarah winced as she looked at the younger Neidholm. She and he had been classmates in high school, and had even had a few tentative, feely-fumbling dates, but Jake's overwhelming focus had been on his worship of his older brother and on the real love of his life, aeroplanes. He had gone straight from school to the US air force, and had won himself a pilot's seat in a fighter squadron. His career and his life had come to a blazing end five years earlier, when a prototype bomber had gone out of control over the New Mexican desert during a test flight.

Ron had been no more than a name to her until her college days; she had seen him around, but Jake had never introduced them, and being in different grades in a large school their paths had never crossed. It had taken Ian Walker to bring them together, at a party in his apartment towards the end of Sarah's freshman year, and after she and

Ian had moved on from each other. The attraction was instant, and it had taken no more than a couple of hours for it to translate to action.

They were at different colleges, since Ron was a law major and she was in med school, but that was no barrier to their relationship, which had all the intensity and vigour of youth. She had taken him home at an early stage, and in turn she had met Crystal. All round, assumptions had been made.

And then the moment of choice had come; Ron's graduation, and with it, the prospect of a pro football career. Under a selection system that would have been illegal in Europe and in most other first world countries, he had been a first-round draft pick of the Seattle

Seahawks, who had traded him at once to Dallas. The process had come as a bombshell to Sarah who, innocently, had believed that he would be able simply to sign up with his home town team, the Bills.

She had been two years short of graduation when it had happened; he had asked her to switch colleges and come with him, and she had countered by suggesting that he have himself traded again to a New York team, or forget football and practise law. She had given him no outright ultimatum, but when he left she had made a choice, nonetheless; she would not be anyone's camp follower.

When he returned in triumph at the end of his first pro season, she had told him that she was too involved with her studies to become involved in anything else, although in truth she had had two relationships over the winter, one of which was still active. A year after that, she had graduated herself and had moved to New York City as an intern, and to begin postgraduate study in forensic pathology.

She had followed Ron's career with more than a touch of pride, but as her own life had developed, professionally and personally, she had felt no longing for him. Nor, after her marriage, had she ever felt the need or the inclination to discuss him with her husband. Over the years she had come to see him as no more than the prize name on her sexual cv, not imagining that they would ever meet again, especially when her mother had told her that Crystal had left Buffalo for

Hawaii.

And then Barbara Walker, her dear, devious friend Babs, had thrown them back together, in the very moment of Sarah's vulnerability. She had known damn well what would happen, and as usual she had been right; for sure, an interrogation would follow. Unconsciously, Sarah's mouth tightened as she thought about it.

"How you doing?" Ron called upstairs.

She slipped her feet into her shoes, and walked to the door. "Just about there," she replied. "Crystal didn't leave a hair drier here, did she?"

"Not that I know of; sorry."

"That's okay. I guess it's still warm outside; it'll be dry by the time I get home." She picked up her bag and her reassembled but inactive cellphone, checked that she had left nothing else behind and walked downstairs, feeling a tenderness as she moved that took her back to her college days. People had often wondered how a quarterback had come to be nicknamed "Rhino'.

The percolator had run its cycle as she walked into the kitchen; she sniffed. "Brazilian?"

"Colombian."

"I'll take that."

"Black?"

"No, with a little milk."

He chuckled. "You've been in England too long."

"Scotland, as my older son would be quick to tell you."

"Sorry, Mark; Scotland then."

"Maybe I have."

He handed her a mug. "From what I heard upstairs, you ain't going back, though."

"Don't make assumptions," she snapped.

"Hey, I wasn't; but you sure put the shoe leather to old Bob there. You didn't leave much room for doubt."

"Maybe not, but there are other things to think of; my career for a start."

"What career?"

"Are you kidding? My medical career, that's what. I'm a practising consultant pathologist, with a reputation as one of the best in the business. I have a personal investment in Scotland that's quite distinct from my marriage."

"Yeah," he said quietly, 'but they do pathology in the States, don't they? And a hell of a lot more of it, I'd guess."

"But why should I come back to the States?"

He bowed his head and looked at her, from under his heavy eyebrows.

"Are you asking me something here, Ron?" she challenged.

"Maybe I am."

"Aren't you a couple of assumptions ahead of yourself?"

"Am I? After this afternoon?"

She sighed, loudly. "Ron, we just made love, that was all. I was horny, so were you; I wanted you, you wanted me. So we had each other.

But that doesn't wipe out the last dozen years of my life."

"That's in the past."

"Not in mine it isn't; it's a current issue." She stared at him. "Ron, why did you come back to Buffalo?"

"To attend your parents' funeral."

Sarah was taken by surprise. "You did?"

"Yes. I was there, among the crowd. It was hardly surprising that you didn't see me given what happened."

"How did you find out about it?"

"I read about it in a newspaper in Maui, but Babs Walker called to tell me too."

"Ah," she murmured. "And what made you decide to stick around afterwards?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "After what happened with Bob, I just thought you might need support."

"You just thought?"

He took a sip of coffee. "Yeah. Babs suggested it, and when she did, I agreed."

"Good old Babs. Ron, do you think we might have been manipulated just a little?"

"Eh?" He gasped in surprise. "How can that be?"

She laughed. "For such a smart guy you can be so innocent."

"Are you trying to say Babs set us up to get back together?"

"I'm saying that she's playing games with us, and that so far things have gone in line with her plan."

"Why the hell would she do that?"

"I've told you why. She detests Bob. She's had a down on him since our first separation, but it goes deeper than that. He terrifies her because of everything he is, and isn't. Babs was brought up to believe in the all-American hero. When we were kids you and I were the ideal couple, in the world as she sees it. Bob, on the other hand, is as far from the Pro-Bowl as you can get. He's from another planet as far as she's concerned. He shares our values, but he plays by a completely different set of rules. On top of all that, he has this… charisma, let's call it. It can radiate from him, and to Babs it expresses itself as pure danger."

"And what is it to you?" Ron asked quietly.

"Excitement. There's something about him that's thrilled me, from the moment I met him. I could say the same about you. With you it's sheer sexual attraction, allied to your sheer unadulterated niceness. With him it's… everything."

"So why…?"

"Because," she said, cutting him off, 'there's a single mindedness about him that can turn into remoteness, and that cannot be deflected.

Bob's about control, not simply over me, but over his whole life. He can't even stand to be a passenger in an automobile. Anyone who threatens that control, or tries to interfere with his life, is in for huge trouble. It's happened now, and it's pushed even me and the kids into second place. I don't know if I can ever get over that."

"Don't I give you a reason not to want to?"

Sarah sighed then smiled at him. "I want you to pick up that knife over there," she said, 'and make a cut in your left thumb."

"Uhh. Why?"

"Because if you're even going to start giving me that reason, it'll be by putting me first. I want you to give me a written declaration that you will not leave me behind to go off and play just one more season for the Nashville Cats. And to make me believe it, I'm going to want it signed in your own blood."

She walked over to the counter beside the sink, picked up the knife by the handle and offered it to him. "Go on," she said. "But only if, in your heart, you really mean it, and you know for certain that never in your life will you blame me for making you miss out on the chance of that one last great moment."

Ron took the knife from her and held it to his thumb. For a moment she though that he really was going to cut himself open, but just as she gasped, he laid it back down.

"No," he murmured. "I can't promise you all of that. Some of it, maybe, but not the last part."

She patted his chest. "See? You guys, you're both the devils I know, and you both say you want me, on your terms. So the way I see it, I've got to figure out which devil I'm better off with, or whether I should leave you both in your different underworlds."

The giant smiled down at her, gently. "While you're doing that, are you going to carry on seeing this horny devil?"

"I don't know whether I should. I doubt if it would help me think objectively."

"I tell you what," he said. "Mom wants me to sell this house for her, so I'm going to stick around for a while." He reached into his pocket, and brought something out. "I don't think it would be right for me to be around your kids too much, so here's a key to the front door. If you feel you want to be with me, don't even call; just come. If I'm not here, the alarm code's eleven ninety-one. Deal?"

She took the key from his hand. "No promises, but okay. If I find I can't resist you any longer, I'll come. But that won't necessarily imply anything, understood? It might just mean that… Hell, you know what it might just mean."

He chuckled. "Sure. Understood."

"Right. Now get me back to my kids."