Free Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen Page B

clothes for two nights and they were rank, particularly bearing in mind the quantities of rich food I’d been consuming. The smell, whenever I lifted my arm, was of overripe fruit. Curiously, I wasn’t so scared of what he’d do to me – from what I’d learned about Dominic so far, he was more interested in the power than the flesh, but being stripped bare in front of him still seemed obscene.
    ‘Chop-chop, Jessica. We haven’t got all day.’
    I didn’t point out that technically that’s exactly what we did have.
    Slowly, I pulled my jumper over my head, and rolled down my jeans. Dominic’s expression didn’t change. I was wearing a pair of black featureless knickers.
    ‘And the rest.’
    He sounded almost bored.
    I swallowed a lump the size of Brazil and slowly unclipped my T-shirt bra, then, with one hand covering my chest, I attempted to wriggle out of my knickers.
    ‘What the fuck is that?’
    Dominic was pointing to my stomach. For a moment I was flushed through with embarrassment until I looked down and saw a large patch of pink raised skin, about the size of a side-plate. He appeared quite disgusted by the rash.
    ‘In the shower,’ he said.
    I stepped in and he slid the glass doors together, leaving himself just enough room to operate the controls.
    ‘Arms by your side. Your skin will never get back to normal if you keep it covered up.’
    The freezing water hit my body like a car smashing into a wall. I screamed as powerful jets blasted my head, shoulders, arms, thighs, calves – but the glass doors allowed no escape.
    ‘I was going to let you have a nice hot bath,’ Dominic shouted over the noise of the shower. ‘And then you had to spoil things. What were you thinking, waving to that boat? Did you really think I wouldn’t notice?’
    He twisted the knob that regulated the shower pressure so the jets slowed to a trickle before coming back on bruisingly hard.
    ‘You’re just throwing my love back in my face.’
    * * *
    Afterwards, when I sat shivering on the bathroom floor with my arms wrapped around my knees and my hair dripping freezing water down my back, he brought a fluffy white towel and wrapped it around me as gently as if I was a baby bird that had fallen too early from the nest.
    ‘What are we going to do with you, sweetheart?’ he purred in my ear as he patted me dry. ‘ Silly Jessica Gold.’
    * * *
    Kim had arrived at work half an hour early that morning, prompting a few raised eyebrows, but people had swiftly looked away as soon as they caught sight of her blotchy face and puffy pink-tinged eyes. Most mornings she came rushing in, out of breath after dropping the kids off at breakfast club (as press officer for an IT company Sean was in work by eight-thirty). Even if she was on a later shift, there’d be something to hold her up – a doctor’s appointment about Rory’s asthma, a forgotten lunch box to drop off, a supermarket trip that took longer than she thought, the endless round of cleaning, shopping, cooking that seemed to engulf whole days – so that she’d arrive flustered and already on the back foot. Sean did what he could, but his hours were rigid, and his job more precarious than hers, so she was the one who called into work pretending to be sick when one of the kids was running a temperature and couldn’t go to school. Anyway, Sean had always been less fazed by it all, more able to compartmentalize the kids’ stuff from the house stuff from the work stuff, while with her it all blurred into one big jumbled mess.
    At home she was always cutting corners to get on with the next thing she had to do, and getting frustrated with the kids when they noticed. ‘You missed out a page!’ Katy would cry when Kim was reading her a favourite book for the tenth time in a row. While Rory would give her that look when she started gathering their things together in the park. ‘We can’t go now – we just got here.’
    And all the time she was watching her mostly male