To relax, he’d said. Not for the thrill, or the sense of achievement. That was how she felt. Besides, as Petra, Stephanie found herself in situations where the adrenalin flowed faster than it ever could clinging to the slick underbelly of a precarious overhang.
‘Here we are.’ His fingers stopped, just above the top of her jeans. Very gently, he pressed against a point. Stephanie felt heat bloom beneath. Then he placed a forefinger on either shoulder. ‘Look in the mirror. You’ve dropped a little through the left.’
It was true. She could see a marginal difference.
‘Can you do something about it?’
Mark looked around the room. ‘Well, normally I’d use a bench for something like this, but I’ll see what I can do.’
‘See what you can do?’
He smiled, a fissure forming in the rock-face. ‘I’m joking. You’ll be fine. You don’t have a desk in here, so we’ll use your bed.’
Stephanie felt she ought to say something but couldn’t.
Mark said, ‘Let’s hope it’s not too soft. I’d like you to undo your jeans.’
She raised her eyebrows at him in the mirror.
‘You’re lucky I haven’t asked you to take off your T-Shirt.’
She really couldn’t gauge him at all. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘You don’t have to.’
But she did, before undoing her jeans. ‘Is that better?’
‘That’s fine. But you really didn’t have to.’
He moved closer to her and laid a coarse hand on one hip. Then the other hand settled on the other hip. She felt radiated heat on her naked back.
When he manipulated her, the conversation dried up. She let his hands guide her, let him turn her, position her, let him use his weight against her. His fingertips seemed to carry an electrical charge.
Any moment now …
There was no reason for it. It was just a feeling. An assumption. That whatever was happening was mutual. One part of her felt wonderfully relaxed while another part burned in anticipation. But of what, exactly? She closed her eyes and waited. For a kiss, perhaps. Or for a moment when his fingers deviated from the professional to the personal.
Instead, his hands left her body. ‘That’s it. You’re done.’
She opened her eyes. ‘What?’
‘You’ve been manipulated.’
Said with a grin. Stephanie wanted to be annoyed, but wasn’t. ‘Well … thank you, anyway. Do I owe you something?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no charge.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
He smiled, a little embarrassed, it seemed. ‘I’ll be going.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Stay.’
Mark said nothing.
‘Stay.’
The smile had gone. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Why?’
‘I just want to know the time.’
Stephanie looked at her watch. ‘It’s eight minutes past six.’
The first time they made love it was as though the manipulation had never stopped. More than anything, it was his hands that made love to her. Stephanie was almost entirely passive. There were moments when she didn’t feel she had a choice.
Two-thirty in the morning. Stephanie ran her fingers over the scars on his back. With scars of her own and a library of scars inflicted upon others, she had to ask.
‘It was eleven years ago on Nanga Parbat, coming down the Diamir Face. With hindsight, we shouldn’t have been there at all. It was a bad team, no cohesion, no leadership. But, being arrogant, we went up anyway. During the descent there was an avalanche. Afterwards we were all over the place. Two of our group died. I would have died too, but I was lucky. Dom stayed with me. He kept me from freezing to death. As for Keller, our team leader, he was close to us but never tried to reach us. He didn’t even attempt to communicate with us. We watched him disappear.’
‘He died?’
‘We assume so. His body was never recovered.’
‘And you?’
‘Again, in a strange way, I was lucky. Broken ribs, crushed discs, two hairline fractures, muscle separation, some nerve damage, but no permanent spinal damage.’
‘That’s a painful kind of luck.’
‘It led me to my career.’
‘I’m not sure I’d have reacted to a back injury in the same way.’
‘A lot of people say that. For me, I think becoming a chiropractor was a Pauline conversion. It’s what I’m supposed to do.’
‘And climbing again – how hard was that?’
‘It was gradual, rather than hard. I didn’t think about it for three years. Now it’s not an issue. The only thing that’s changed is my ambition. Before the accident I had a hit list of climbs and peaks. These days those things don’t matter to me.’
By the time they fell asleep daylight was seeping through the curtains. When Stephanie opened her eyes Mark was no longer in bed. He was on the far side of the room, almost dressed.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to where I came from.’
‘Where’s that?’
He shrugged. ‘You tell me. You’re the only one who knows.’
Which was true. Although it took her a while to realize it. By then, he’d gone. She’d chosen him, not the other way round. He’d understood that and had accepted it. Had been happy to accept it. She found him after lunch, on the observation deck again, reading his paperback, cloned from the day before.
‘Is that it?’
He put down the book. ‘Wasn’t it what you wanted?’
‘What did you want?’
‘I thought we understood each other.’
‘After one night?’
‘I thought we understood each other yesterday afternoon.’
He was right. ‘We did. But that was then. What about today?’
‘Today?’
‘Yes. And tomorrow.’
Now, standing on Mark’s roof, rather than some remote roof of the world, it was hard to believe a year had passed. As far as Mark was concerned she was still Stephanie Schneider, a lie so slender she could sometimes convince herself it wasn’t a lie at all; Schneider had been her mother’s maiden name. Instead, she had been born Stephanie Patrick. But in a windswept cemetery at Falstone, Northumberland, there was a gravestone bearing her name, date of birth and date of death. Her stone was the last in a row of five that included her parents, Andrew and Monica Patrick, her sister, Sarah, and her younger brother, David. They’d all died together, but there was nothing of them in the cold ground. Their vaporized remains had drifted towards the bottom of the north Atlantic with the incinerated wreckage of the 747 they’d been in. Christopher, the eldest child, was still alive, still living in Northumberland, a wife and family to