amberfocus | A Sky Without Zeppelins: Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Rose grumbles as her alarm clock goes off the next morning, slaps the snooze alarm and falls back under the warm cocoon of blankets she has no intention of getting out of anytime soon. Her mind struggles to recall why her alarm is even going off. It is Saturday, an even rarer Saturday off and she always sleeps in on days like that. Had she just forgotten to turn it off the night before? Stupid clock.

She drifts back into sleep and when the alarm blares again a few moments later she sits up with a sudden start. Jonathon! She is supposed to go to Jonathon’s this morning! She bolts from her bed, grabs her robe and dashes to the shower. She tears through her morning beauty routine stopping long enough in the kitchen to swig down a glass of orange juice and eat a slice of toast.

She brushes her teeth despite being short on time, not an option she wants to skip today though she is not going to admit to herself just why, grabs her purse and races out of the flat. She is grateful her mum is either out or still asleep because she doesn’t have time to stop and chat. She hurries down the stairs, dashes across the estate and makes it to the bus stop just as the bus is starting to pull away.

Recognizing her, the driver stops the bus and opens the doors. “Cutting it close, Rose,” he tells her.

“Thank you so much for stopping, Will,” she says flashing him her biggest smile. She digs out her pass and swipes it through the slot and hurries to sit down before the rest of the passengers get restless at her messing with the bus schedule by being late.

She collapses into the nearest empty seat. It’ll be a half hour on this bus with a ten minute wait for an exchange onto the next one and then a further ten minutes to the stop near Temmel’s and then the three block walk to Jonathon’s building. She digs her current paperback out of her purse and settles in for the only pleasure reading she has time for anymore.

Rose has difficulty getting into the story, her mind flitting back to Jonathon time and time again. She wonders if she’s crazy going up to the flat of a man she only just met six days earlier. Will he have any expectations from her? Does she want him to have? She knows that nothing’s going to happen, is secure in it because they’ll be waiting for the delivery people who could show up at any time. She isn’t entirely sure if she’s relieved by that or disappointed.

It frustrates her that her body is so willing to throw itself at him. Her body could care less about life plans or the inconvenience of a new romance–if it is a romance, she isn’t even sure–to her educational goals, to her future career. Her body says things like “want” and “touch” and “have” and “now.” Her body, always so firmly under control until a few days ago, is a traitor. All it cares about is feeling good and it’s utterly convinced that Dr. Jonathon Smith would fulfill that requirement splendidly.

All she knows is that she is far too attracted to him for her own good. A fling is the last thing she wants, the idea of something casual with this man feels abhorrent to her. There can be no one night stands with Jonathon, no serial sexual encounters, because she wants something more out of this than that, but she also knows she’s not ready to throw herself headlong into a serious relationship right now, either. Why couldn’t she have met him a few months from now when she was settled into a new job, a new life? Why now when she could least afford the distraction?

Rose sighs and puts her book away. It isn’t even worth trying to read when all she can envision is the deep warmth of his chocolate brown eyes, the gorgeous gravity-defying chestnut hair that trails down into two long sideburns that seriously send little jolts through her system if she concentrates on them too long. She tries not to think about the line of his jaw or how incredibly soft his lips look, how they might feel against her own, against the skin of her throat as he sucks at her pulse point or licks his way down…

“Stop it,” she whispers to herself, but her mind only skips away from his lips to thoughts of his hands. His fingers are long, slender, his hands quite large. She tries not to make any correlations about the size of his fingers or of his feet to any other portion of his anatomy, but in skittering away from that thought she runs smack up into thinking about what it might feel like if he were to drag his hands down the length of her body and–damn it, this is no good!

She is saved from her illicit thoughts by having to exit at the next stop and wait for her exchange bus. One of the other waiting passengers smiles and makes small talk with her. It is a girl named Georgie, who works in one of the café’s in Temmel’s, that she often ends up seat partners with and she listens intently to the girl’s happy chatter about what she’d been up to in the last three days since Rose has last seen her. Georgie talks of her date the night before and she is happy to discuss all the details of the restaurant that she had been taken to.

Rose grins at the girl’s enthusiasm for the food and happily loses herself in all of the details of someone else’s burgeoning romance. It is lovely having a half hour before she must face head on the reality of her own.

Jonathon is nervous as he waits for Rose to arrive. He doesn’t know why he is anxious for her to approve of his home when there is almost nothing in it to suggest who he is at all. He only had the contents of one suitcase, a sleeping bag and a pillow with him when he’d driven up from Cardiff to London a few days before the incident of the doomed moving lorry. And of course there are the new clothes tucked away in the bedroom closet. There are only a few odds and ends, his most favorite of items scattered about, a couple of trinkets, three books and his best coffee mug.

His sleeping bag and pillow are tucked under the windows of one wall of the living room. He likes to gaze out at the stars at night, what he can see of them anyway amidst the bright lights of London. He can see enough to keep him happy from here, though he dreams of a little cottage getaway in the country for weekends, something with blue paint and yellow trim that is open and airy and gives the impression of far more space than it actually has. After a year of steady saving he will be able to put down a good deposit on such a place, though the idea of holding a mortgage again for the first time in ten years fills him with a bit of dread.

He hasn’t been tied to anything like that since selling his family home after the accident. He doesn’t know why his mind correlates the two things together. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Except maybe that family ties you to people the same way a mortgage ties you to a place.

It seems a bit of a stretch to him that one should have any impact on the other, but it does. One of his idiosyncrasies that he’s not even sure he had before…well, before. It has kept him from putting down new roots, never staying in one place for very long. The last two years in Cardiff had been the longest of the lot and even then he’d done a lot of travelling in his spare time. He’s never really considered settling down and isn’t quite sure how he feels about it.

Still, it’ll be worth it for a place he can go to and see the stars, as many as possible from this location on planet Earth. It will be nice to have a place to go to to leave it all behind, though so far there isn’t much of a life here to leave behind. Well, there is Rose, but he…well, if she and he…if they…he doesn’t want to leave her behind. He wonders if a year from now this silly infatuation will be gone, barely remembered or, and he hopes this more fervently than he cares to admit, she will be helping him pick out his lovely little dream cottage. Not the way she is helping him pick things out now, either, but with an eye toward knowing she’d be spending as much time there as he would.

The idea thrills him a little more than it scares him. Roots with Rose, well, he likes the way that sounds, lovely alliteration really, roots with Rose. Rose roots, no that sounds too much like a flower, a flower that has thorns while his–his?–Rose is completely thornless. No, it doesn’t quite work the same way as roots with Rose. “You’re being ridiculous,” he mutters to himself.

What is he thinking anyway? Just because he’s signed a five year contract that binds him to this place, well, mostly binds, he can still travel a fair bit, he has generous vacation time and there’ll be business travel as well, doesn’t mean he has to completely settle down, find himself a new…a new what? Life? All the trappings that go with it?

No, Rose isn’t a trapping. Despite her youth and her beauty she’ll be no future trophy wife. Wait, wife? Where the hell has that thought crept from? No, no, no, no, no, he is not looking, does not want, isn’t about to go there. Stupid, stupid crush, he is too old for this sort of school boy thing. Really, he should just shag her and get this out of his system, get this distraction taken care of, move past the silly infatuation with a girl young enough to be his…well, no, not his daughter, not unless he’d been far more precocious as a twelve year old than he ought to have been, but still…

He’d fallen asleep the previous night to the thought of shagging Rose Tyler. No, if he is honest with himself he’d fallen asleep to the thought of making languorous love to the young woman; of finding ways to make her moan his name in ecstasy, of learning every nook, every cranny, every crevice of her body. He had even thought for far too long about what it might feel like if her mouth had encased him and…no, he can’t think about that, she is due any minute and he is embarrassed enough just remembering what he used those thoughts for the night before without greeting her at the door with an obvious bulge in his trousers.

“Stop thinking about her like that,” he tells himself firmly, his voice echoing in the empty flat. “She’s not your plaything and she’s not your future spouse and she’s not even your girlfriend. She’s a charming, lovely woman who is doing you a very large favor and does not need you pinning her up against the wall and taking advantage of her kind heart.” Even if some of the looks she’d given him yesterday had seemed to say that she wouldn’t mind a bit of pinning against the wall.

He heads to the kitchen, pulls out his lonely Inventors Do it with Ingenuity coffee mug from the cupboard, fills it full of cold water and takes a long drink. He is in serious need of some caffeine, but without a coffee maker or even instant coffee he is out of luck. He doesn’t even have tea bags on hand. He needs a serious grocery run after shopping and wonders if Rose will help him with that, too.

He is really taking advantage of her good nature, but perhaps he can offer her lunch and dinner out today as a way of paying her back for her kindness. Maybe somewhere casual for lunch and then perhaps a bit more of an upscale restaurant for dinner. Somewhere with candles on the tables. No, it isn’t a date, so maybe midscale would be better. Somewhere intimate enough that they can be alone in a booth, but not so intimate that it looks like he’s trying to turn this into something it isn’t. Like he’s trying to turn it into a romance. Because this is not a simple romance, this is…well, he doesn’t quite know what this is, but whatever it is he doesn’t want to muck it up by racing for the finish line.

Rose walks the final three blocks to Jonathon’s apartment building. She has to give her name and the name of the person she’s going to see both to the doorman and at the reception desk in the lobby that blocks the lifts from immediate access. She is ridiculously scared for a moment that Jonathon might have forgotten to leave her name with anyone, that she’ll be turned away, but she is waved inside and then to the lifts with a smile and a nod.

Jonathon’s flat is on the sixth floor and the ride up is short. She wanders out into the hallway for a moment checking to see which direction she needs to go in to reach flat 609. Her first choice, to turn left, is correct and she heads down to his door. She knocks lightly and the door is immediately opened as if he had been standing on the other side just waiting. For a second she is unsure of her welcome as she stands there nervously. She shifts from foot to foot. Then Jonathon’s face breaks out into a joyful grin and he’s urging her to come in.

She looks around the barren flat with hungry eyes. There’s not much. She notices the blue sleeping bag and pillow with a burgundy pillow case tucked under the living room window, the tones a vivid splash of color against the cream colored carpet. It’s odd that he has carpets. She figures him for the hard wood floors type of man. Still, he had told her that Illuminate had set him up with the flat in the first place, it is one of the company owned apartment buildings, so maybe he didn’t pick it out.

Rose wanders over to the fireplace with the gas insert stove. Her fingers sweep across the mantelpiece and come to rest on a fist-sized lump of pink stone. She touches it gently, moving against the rough surface. “What’s this?” she asks him.

He shrugs. “It’s a paperweight really. A chunk of coral I picked up on a scuba dive off the Inner Australasian Reef. Had it for years and years. Just a souvenir.” He put his hands in his pockets and comes nearer her. “It was one of the few things that wasn’t on the moving lorry,” he adds quietly.

“It’s lovely,” she tells him. She turns towards him, finds him closer than he was and she smiles at him.

“I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but I don’t have any groceries in yet or anything to serve them in,” he said. “Don’t suppose you know of a good grocer in the area?”

“I do. Want me to take you there after we do the rest of the shopping?” she volunteers.

He smiles at her. “I’d love that. Thanks so much for doing this, Rose. Taking pity on this poor stranger.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she tells him. “And I enjoy pleasurable things.” She wants to clamp a hand across her own mouth. That last sentence had not gone anywhere near her brain before just flying from her lips. How is she ever going to slow things down with this man if she says things like that?

He looks a bit gobsmacked before he pulls himself together and with a twinkle in his eye says, “It just so happens that I like giving pleasure, Miss Tyler.”

“That so, Dr. Smith?” she asks with a cheeky grin.

“Oh, yes,” he tells her firmly. “There are so many ways to give and receive pleasure, you know.” His voice drops into a lower timbre and he reaches out and lifts her hand up in both of his. “The simple stroking of fingertips across the palm, for example,” and he matches actions to words as he dances across the inside of her hand in feather light movements, “can be exceedingly pleasurable.” On the last word his Scottish accent kicks in full force, the letter r massaging his tongue lingeringly.

Rose shivers under the tender caress and her eyes leap to his. She sees something akin to desire in his gaze, but it is more of a longing than anything else. She moves her hand against his, her thumb finding the webbing between his thumb and index finger and ghosting across it. He closes his eyes for several seconds before opening them again and regaining control of their hands, turning hers against his until they are pointed towards the ceiling, palms flat against each other, her small hand only half the size of his.

Their fingers spread, separate, thread together for the briefest moment and Rose feels something slip into place inside her, a feeling of absolute compatibility, a perfect fit between hands, perhaps even between hearts and lives. Their hands fall to their sides and separate just as suddenly as they were joined and Rose takes a step backwards. “Rose, I--,” Jonathon begins but he is interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Furniture must be here,” Rose says. Jonathon strides to the door and flings it open with far more force than is necessary and Rose thinks that he doesn’t much fancy having been interrupted. Her heart rate returns to normal as the men from Temmel’s start tromping through the flat, setting up all the bedroom furniture and leaving an hour later.

“Shall we go shopping then?” he asks Rose after the delivery men have cleared out.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Rose says and as his eyes meet hers she adds, “Well, one of the reasons.”

“Oh, yes? And what might the other reason be?” he asks teasingly.

“Thought you might have figured that out,” she responds cheekily.

“Do tell.”

“Pleasure,” she says returning to their former conversation. “More specifically the pleasure of your company.” She holds her breath waiting to see what his response might be.

He smiles and then an odd look comes over his face as if he is debating something. His eyes clear and decision made he holds out his hand to her and waggles his fingers. She hesitates only briefly before wrapping her hand in his. Yeah. This romance is happening.

Ch. 6: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/121291.html