“Looking good, Nat. Still got that banging body, which is more than I can say for Paul. Where’s that dickhead husband of yours, anyway?”

  “Probably walking around Woolies with no idea what to buy,” I replied with a smirk. “I left it to him to work out what to bring tonight.”

  “Ooh, not making something to bring to Sunday night dinner?” Shaun shook his head with exaggerated emphasis. “No wonder Delia’s mouth looked like a cat’s arse. That’s just about an excommunicable offence. So’s not offering a man a beer.”

  I gave him a withering look.

  “Pretty sure your hands aren’t broken.”

  “You’ve got no idea,” he replied, stepping closer, then reaching around me, rustling around in the ice before pulling a beer out and twisting the top off before offering it to me to clink. “Cheers, big ears.”

  “So where’s Shari?” I asked. His wife was usually dragged along to these things too, something we’d shared some quietly spoken condolences over. She didn’t look the way she acted, having brassy bleached blonde hair and always wearing heavy black eyeliner, whereas in reality she was a pretty reserved person.

  “Shari’s got a thing on tonight,” was all he would say in reply.

  “A thing? I think I need a thing.”

  He laughed at that, but Shaun seemed to be keeping an awfully close eye on me, like the way he used to when the four of us would go out and Paul went off to get the drinks. Keeping an eye on the missus was apparently a time-honoured thing between guys. There was a small pause in the conversation, one I felt no compunction filling but it seemed Shaun did.

  “So, Natty girl…”

  I remembered this voice. It was the same one that coaxed me through smoking my first joint, right before his hand slapped down on my back as I coughed and coughed. But as I looked up at him, as he edged closer, he didn’t have any shitty foil-wrapped buds of weed to sell me. His eyes glittered like he had something to offer me, though, that same grey-green I’d caught myself staring into more than once. He sucked in a breath, smiling slowly as he kept moving closer. I watched him with a slight frown, then looked past him, seeing Paul had arrived, his mother clucking over him like a broody hen.

  “How’re you dealing with the whole Paul-Britney thing?”

  16

  “What?”

  I was starting to feel punch drunk. Hits kept coming from out of nowhere and I couldn’t get my hands up in time to block them. Shaun watched me with cat-like intensity, a small smile forming on his face, but I moved to look past him to where Paul and his mum were talking to the Prentisses.

  “Opening up a marriage is the only way a relationship can work long-term.”

  Shaun’s voice seemed muffled in my ears as I watched Britney smile up at Paul, my husband edging incrementally closer to her as they chatted.

  “It’s working real well for me and Shari. I’ve got the kids tonight and she’s off with this fella from work. Nice bloke, he is.”

  Paul said something that had everyone laughing, and wasn’t that a knife to my chest? Especially when Britney beamed up at him. I knew that look. Plenty of girls had looked that way at Paul when we were still at school, his laid-back attitude and good looks always a draw for other girls. I’d just never expected to see it now. Britney was still an annoying little kid. Paul and I were still in love. We were married, had a future. But as Britney reached out, ostensibly to put a friendly hand on my husband’s arm, Shaun stepped into my field of vision, the smile gone now.

  “He didn’t tell you.” There was a slight expression of concern there in his eyes and he shook his head, letting out a hiss of breath. “I told him he needed to be upfront with you, get you onboard. Look, love, it’s probably stinging a bit now, but you’ll see.” He took a step closer, treating me to the crooked smile that’d had half the girls in town panting after him back in the day.

  Trouble was, right now it left me cold.

  “He doesn’t have to be the only one having a little fun, love.” My eyes jerked up, staring into Shaun’s, seeing how close he was getting, hearing the husky edge to his voice and I finally realised what he was on about. “You were always fucking gorgeous, Natty, and seeing as you didn’t have kids, you’ve kept your figure. We could—”

  I didn’t stay there to let him finish. I didn’t listen to the rest of his raspy delivered little scenario. I just walked away. Shaun called my name, but he didn’t keep it up for long. I strode away, towards the house, towards the big, broad veranda that ran around the back of it, towards them.

  Would anyone else have noticed it, I wondered? Would they have seen the way Paul’s hand hung by his side, but only millimetres away from Britney’s? Would they have construed their closeness as anything other than that of two people who’d grown up together? But now, thanks to Shaun, I knew. Paul looked up when I climbed the back steps, a small frown forming between his brows as he stepped away from Britney and towards me. She saw it, her eyes flashing with a hard light, her smile faltering, but I didn’t, couldn’t, care.

  “So, you’ve decided to join us, have you, love?” Delia asked, the edge to her voice apparent, despite her mumsy words.

  I ignored her and turned to Paul. “I’ve gotta go.”

  He spluttered something and so did Delia because I wasn’t just slinking out the front door, though maybe I should’ve. Instead I wrenched the sliding door open, which had Delia crying out as it slammed against its frame, but I didn’t care. Let it shatter. I walked inside, through the kitchen, people looking up as I passed, but I didn’t stop, not until I was out the front door and standing under the starry sky.

  For a minute all I could do was suck one breath in, then another, over and over, like I’d run out of puff sprinting out of there.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Paul snapped, catching up to me easily, but I ignored him, shaking my head when I saw that my car was boxed in.

  “I’m going,” I said, “so get whoever the fuck parked their car up my arse out here right now, before I jump in the car and start forcing my way out.” I glared at him then, but for only a second. I couldn’t look at him for any longer, my eyes aching when I did.

  “You better fucking not.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Delia spluttered. “You’re creating a scene, Natalie. Go back inside and calm down.”

  I turned to her then and looked her square in the face and said the word I’d wanted to for so long. “No.”

  “No? No? What’s gotten into you lately?” She glanced behind her, seeing that we had an audience clustered in the doorway right now. “You haven’t been helping out in the kitchen and you’re always surly when you come around.”

  “Have you told her?” I asked Paul, because his response was the one that mattered to me right now, not that of his snotty mother. “Have you?”

  “Nat—” he started to say in his best ‘be reasonable’ tone, but I wasn’t having that. No fucking way.

  “Last Tuesday, he told me he was opening the marriage,” I told Delia, gloating in the prospect of tarnishing her opinion of her baby boy. “Didn’t ask. Told. Because he’s fucking Britney Prentiss.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  Delia puffed up the way she always did, like some kind of self-important chicken, but this was not a surprised chicken, and that told me everything. She wasn’t comfortable with this information being said aloud, but she knew. She already knew. I stared at her, heard her beginning to splutter something, then focussed on Paul.

  I had loved him. Hadn’t I? It was so hard to tell. He’d been the golden boy and I was the girl he’d chosen and in the microcosm of school that had meant so much. But then… Free of school, studying in the city, away from everything and everyone I knew, I’d got lost. In an attempt to resolve that, marrying him had seemed like the safe thing, the right thing to do. But as I looked at him now, I didn’t see any evidence of that boy. He’d been replaced by this… stupid man with a stubborn fucking look on his face, ready to dig his heels in, no matter what I had to say about it, prepared to wage bloody war to get what he wanted.

  But I didn’t want him.

  I let out a breath, feeling strangely weightless and numb. So much so it was hard to feel my face, but I moved it anyway.

  “We’re done,” I murmured.

  Done, not with a bang, but with a whisper. I said the words and knew down to my very soul that they were true and had been for some time.

  “We’ll talk about this later.”

  “No, we won’t,” I replied, smiling in what felt like the first time in ages and then I put out my hand. “Give me your keys.”

  “What?”

  “Give me your keys. I’m leaving, Paul, right now and I can either take your car and you can take mine home later or we can create a big thing, getting everyone out here to move theirs so I can drive mine. Your choice.”

  “Paul, love—” his mother said, moving to take his arm, but he shoved his hand in his pocket, pulling the car key off his key ring and handing it to me so I did the same.

  “I’ll grab some stuff from the house for the short term,” I said, “but I’ll be back for the rest of it later.”

  I turned on my heel then, walking away from their comments, their hissed asides, their looks and their stupid fucking faces. Every step I took away from them made me feel better. I reached my husband’s, no, Paul’s car. I opened it much more circumspectly, climbed in and then punched in Holly’s number.

  “What’s up, bitch?” she said when she answered.

  “How do you feel about having a room-mate?”

  “What? Do you want…? What?” I heard her hiss of breath down the line, as I did the same. “You’ve done it?” she asked in a much quieter voice, as if she didn’t dare spell the situation out.

  “I’m divorcing Paul,” I said, proud of the way my voice stayed level, while feeling the emotional toll it took to do so. “I just need somewhere to stay for a few—”

  “Stay forever,” she assured me. “You know you’re always welcome. Do you need me to pick you up?”

  I didn’t. I made it home, no, to the house in one piece, a strange kind of frozen calm settling over me. My muscles ached. They were tensed, ready for so much more than grabbing clothes and shoving them into a suitcase, but that’s what I had to do. I worked quickly and methodically, folding and placing just enough clothes so that I wouldn’t need to stop to get another bag. I stared at the case for a second, then looked around the room that had served as my bedroom for so many years, trying to see it clearly, but unable to.

  This wasn’t mine. It wasn’t my house. It wasn’t my bed. I felt a deep revulsion even for the clothes I’d packed. Only a deeply practical knowledge that I’d need them stopping me from tossing them out into the garden for the elements to take. So instead I zipped the case up and carried it downstairs, packing it into the car before driving to Holly’s.

  “I’ve got wine,” she announced, opening the door to the expansive flat she lived in above the shop. It used to be a massive open plan space, but she’d put walls in and amenities, then packed it full of her shit, turning it into a home.

  “Not tonight,” I said, my voice deadly calm and I saw my friend blanch at my tone. “Soon, but not now. I just need to sleep. I’ve got work in the morning.”

  “You can’t be thinking of going to work,” she said, sinking down on the couch beside me. “Simmons can hold down the fort without you, and you have a ton of leave saved up.”

  “The restoration project starts tomorrow and I think I just want to focus on that.” I nodded at my decision. “I can take some time off once that’s on track.”

  I could see that Holly wanted to argue, but instead she bit her tongue and set me up in her guest room. It had a gorgeous bed with an old hand-embroidered quilt cover, smelled of lavender and lemon and was filled with curios and books. But it still felt weird. It was as though I was right back at uni, standing in my student accommodation, feeling really uncomfortable. But I was older now, better able to cope with this change, or at least that’s what I told myself, so I got under the covers, sinking down into the soft bed.

  I turned the lamp off and stared into the darkness, willing sleep to come, but it didn’t, not at first. Instead my brain treated me to a slideshow of what had happened tonight. Shaun sussing me out about fucking him on the side. Paul and Britney edging closer and closer together, no doubt intending to spend the night eye fucking each other as I sat there, completely oblivious. The censure in Delia’s eyes… I frowned and punched my pillow hard then turned over and flopped back down onto the bed.

  It didn’t matter, I insisted to myself. None of it mattered. I wouldn’t be tied down by Paul’s shit. I’d ended this sexless, loveless, halfway place the two of us had been stuck in. My Sundays were mine to do what I wanted with. My whole life was. With those thoughts in mind, I didn’t expect the tears, but they came anyway.

  Because something had died today. When Paul had sprung this whole open marriage thing on me, I’d felt like he had shot me. And it was as though today was the day our relationship bled out. I’d lost something, even if I didn’t want it anymore, and that didn’t seem to stop me from grieving for it. I stifled my cries. I was used to doing that, because Paul always got irritated by a woman’s tears, but this time it was in someone else’s bed, and I was muffling them with someone else’s blankets, soaking someone else’s pillow. I cried silent, hacking, messy fucking tears until finally I couldn’t cry any more and then there was nothing else to do but sleep. And with sleep came dreams.

  The dream of Thorn the other night had been pure bloody wish fulfilment. I’d repurposed the hot guy I’d met as some kind of sex god, transforming my body from unwanted to wanton in my dreams, so when he appeared in my dreams again, I was surprised on some level. A dream orgasm probably would make me feel better, but in a move that underscored just how tired and sore I was, his body slotted in behind mine and I was held, just held, in a way I couldn’t remember being for so long. Dream me, real me, I let out a long sigh.

  How fucking sad, that I had to conjure a figment of my imagination to soothe me? Although, with how I was feeling, I didn’t care. His scent, rich and woody like cedar, filled my nose and helped me to take deeper and deeper breaths until finally I was wrapped in sleep.

  17

  Lars

  I fucking hated this.

  We were standing in our mate’s office on the first day of the project and the small room was filled with her, us and her scent. She usually smelled sweet as honey, but right now she stunk of burnt sugar. Not that fancy shit people use for cooking or whatever, but the ‘left too long on the stove and turned into a charred mess’ sort of burned. A lot like Thorn’s attempts at cooking. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Natalie looked pale as a ghost, except for the red rims of her eyes and the spots on her cheeks.

  She looked terrible.

  Still fucking beautiful with it, and she smiled at us when we came in. And that warmth? It had me wanting to step closer, as if I could thaw my hands on it. I was forced to shove my hands into my jeans to stop myself from doing just that. I shot a sidelong look at Ric and the idiot twins and they all nodded slightly. So they saw it too.

  “You’re here!” she said. “And nice and early. That’s awesome. I’ll just take you through to see the mayor before you get things started.”

  We all stood back, though not enough probably. I’m pretty sure every one of us felt the breeze on our skin as she walked past us all, gesturing for us to follow.

  I knew the boss was a dickhead before we even reached his office. His door was wide open and he was talking way too loud down the phone line, reading the riot act to someone. But I went stiff when our mate went to the doorway, raising a tentative hand to knock on his door, and Dickhead snapped at her dismissively.

  “I’m busy right now!” he said, putting his hand over his mobile, as if that would muffle his voice.

  Aw fuck no.

  I stepped closer, my hands going to fists, ready to keep this guy really fucking busy drinking his food through a straw, when Ric’s hand shot out. Just one warning look, that’s all I got, but it was enough to force me to stand down. He stared at me, waiting until the tension slowly released from my body. He nodded when I took an even breath and then turned back to her as she started to speak.

  “Ah, well, the contractors for the clock tower are—”

  “You deal with it.”

  This pudgy little fuck with eyes like two pissholes in the snow thought he could talk to Natalie like this? The twins started shifting restlessly as well. Ric knew he had about 2.5 seconds to defuse this situation, or we were about to earn ourselves a really shitty reputation in the little burg of Langston.

  “I’m Alaric Burns,” Ric said, stepping into the man’s office like he owned the place. He could’ve bought it, if he wanted to. We’d made good money with the company, but none of us more so than him. “And you are?”

  There was something about his voice that just had customers eating out of his hand. It always worked.

  “Simmons,” Dickhead replied. I was never going to call him by his right name. “Bernard Simmons.”

  “Nice to meet you. You’re obviously a very busy man, so this is just a formality. My team are all experts in this area and should have the job done with a minimum of disruptions. Since you’ve got a lot on your plate, we’ll coordinate our efforts through Natalie, yeah? She can provide any updates required.”

  Simmons nodded slowly, caught up in Ric’s spell.

  “Well, we won’t waste anymore of your time. Have a great day.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27