Any Way You Want Me Page 12

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. He took his hand away and rested it on the table. I wanted to snatch it back. No, no, carry on! Carry on with that stroking thing. Don’t stop now!

  The skin on my thigh was warm where he had touched it. I looked on helplessly as he drained his pint. His throat was exposed. I saw him gulp down his lager, watched him put down the empty glass.

  ‘You’ve got froth on your lip,’ I lied, reaching over to touch his face. I pretended to wipe it off, brushing my thumb along his mouth. His lips moved beneath my touch; they felt soft, different to Alex’s.

  ‘I really had better go now,’ I said, abruptly pulling away and standing up. ‘Before . . .’

  ‘Before something happens?’ he said. He stood up, came over to me. We were about two inches apart. ‘Something you might regret?’

  I bit my lip. ‘Yes,’ I said hoarsely. I didn’t dare touch him again. I couldn’t let myself.

  He lifted his hand, hesitated for a second, then ran a finger down my cheek. ‘I reckon it’s too late to stop, Sadie. It’s already started.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again, frozen to the spot.

  There was a pause where I wanted him to grab me and stop me going. He didn’t.

  He cleared his throat. ‘So I’ll see you at the Laurel Tree, then,’ he said after a few moments, sounding strangely formal. ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Yes, you will.’ I nodded and started edging back towards the door. ‘Saturday. Bye.’

  I walked quickly out of the pub, not looking back. Shock tremors were coursing through me. My heart was still thudding hard. Once I was out of the door, I ran for home as fast as I could.

  Oh my God!

  What had just happened? What had I done?

  I had let him do that. I had let him touch me like that. Loving, faithful partners didn’t do that sort of thing, did they? Loving, faithful partners stayed well clear of men like Mark. I was a slut, a slapper. I was a bad person to have let him done that.

  I wanted to cry suddenly, in shame. I wanted to wind back the hands of the pub clock, to when we first entered. What had I been thinking? Why had I gone along with it? I should have walked away as soon as he put his hand on me. Sorry, no, I don’t do that kind of thing. I think you’ve got the wrong person . . .

  But I had done it.

  Alex, I thought helplessly, with an ache of guilt. Alex, Alex, Alex. If Alex had sat there letting some woman run her hand all over his leg, I would have been really, shoutily pissed off. I would have gone completely tonto about it. And God, I hardly dared imagine Alex’s reaction if he’d seen me sitting there in my clingy T-shirt, doing nothing to stop Mark’s wandering hand.

  I remembered the conversation I’d had with Anna the other week. The one where I was moaning that I wanted to feel like a sex kitten again. Well, I had felt like that again. I’d got what I’d wished for, hadn’t I? Was that what I had wished for?

  Too late to stop, Mark had said in the pub, like that made everything OK. Like that was our excuse. We couldn’t help ourselves. It just happened. Pathetic, I’d always thought, whenever I’d read magazine articles where other people used those words. Pathetic! Of course you could have stopped yourselves! Yet now I knew how they felt. And it wasn’t as simple as that.

  The worst thing was how much I’d liked it. How much I’d wanted him to carry on. My cheeks flamed. I’d seen the lust in his eyes. He’d been imagining taking me out the back, fucking me up against the steel barrels and beer crates, no doubt.

  I wrapped my arms around myself suddenly. I’d been imagining that too.

  Too late to stop, he’d said, and blood roared in my ears as I heard him say it again, in my mind. I found that I was shaking my head. No. It wasn’t too late at all. Because of course I was going to stop it. Damn right I was going to stop it! Like I’d throw away my life with Alex and the children, and for what? A bit on the side? Housewife’s pleasure? No way.

  I slowed to a jog. I had done a bad thing, but I wasn’t going to do it again. See you Saturday, he’d said, but he wouldn’t. I’d make some excuse, bottle it so that I didn’t have to see him at Alex’s work do. And that would be that. I never had to see him again.

  I glanced at my watch as I ran and was shocked when I realized it was still early. I had only been out of the house for forty minutes. I couldn’t believe it. Time seemed to have been stretched out in the Albert. I felt as if we’d been there the whole evening, it had been so intense. So lust-driven. The very air between us had felt charged.

  I raced back home and up the front steps, as if I was running away from him.

  ‘Only me,’ I yelled, bursting through the front door, kicking my trainers off in the hall. I ran straight upstairs, stripped off and got in the shower, washing the pub smoke from my hair as well as the treacherous scarlet flush from my cheeks.

  Mark. I ran a soapy hand across my breasts and shuddered at the hardness of my nipples. A hand on my knee and I was a quivering mess. I had physically ached for him.

  The thought made me feel sick now that I was back in my own home. It seemed like a dream, a weird kind of dream. Me and Mark – yeah, right. Time to wake up now, back in the real world.

  The next evening, Cat and Tom came over for dinner, full of happy plans for moving in together and their India trip.

  I put together an Indian-themed banquet for their benefit. Poppadoms and pickles, jasmine rice, a gloopy mustard-coloured dal, sag aloo, bhindi bhajis and a dodgy-looking vegetarian dhansak, plus as much beer as it was possible to cram into our fridge.

  We clinked bottles of Kingfisher across the table. ‘Hey, you know that Molly was conceived in Goa, don’t you?’ I said conversationally. ‘So watch out. Must be something in the water.’

  ‘Probably just that I’m incredibly fertile though,’ Alex said, raising an eyebrow at me.

  ‘Oh, so are you saying Tom’s not incredibly fertile?’ Cat joked, arching an eyebrow in imitation.

  I had been feeling antsy all day over the Mark thing, avoiding Alex’s eye and trying to act as if nothing untoward had happened. Now, for the first time all evening, I found myself smiling over at Alex, trying not to get teary-eyed at the thought of Molly as a little bud inside my belly. We hadn’t been able to take our hands off each other on that holiday, Alex and I. He had woken me up with his hard-on every morning and we’d panted and bucked and gasped under the thrumming ceiling fan each time. Then he’d untangled himself from the sheets and gone to shower while I lay there with my legs in the air, willing his sperm to do their thing. He would come back after a while, water dripping off his tanned body, and then we’d start all over again. We never once made it down in time for breakfast.

  I forked some curry into my mouth. ‘Started house-hunting yet?’ I asked.

  Cat and Tom exchanged glances, and she pulled a face. ‘We’re going to do that when we get back,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to decide what area to look in first, though.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Which is taking a bit of time to negotiate, shall we say.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Alex. He caught Tom’s eye. ‘I see.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You want to stay in Battersea, Cat, and Tom wants to stay in Hammersmith.’

  ‘Correct,’ Cat said. ‘But I hate Hammersmith. I hate driving around it. The shops aren’t very good—’

  ‘What, and the shops in Battersea are? ’Tom put in at once. You could tell this was well-worn territory.

  ‘Why not compromise?’ I said, wiping a naan around my plate. ‘Putney is nice.’

  ‘Can’t afford it,’ Tom said at once.

  ‘The Bush, then,’ Alex said.

  ‘The Bush is a dump,’ Cat growled.

  There was a momentary silence as everyone busily forked in another mouthful and avoided eye contact.

  The CD ended and the room felt even more silent. Alex got up. ‘What does everyone fancy listening to?’ he asked, flipping through the CD rack. ‘Ahh, this’ll do.’

  He pushed the CD tray into
the machine and some familiar notes started up. Air, Moon Safari.

  ‘I love this album,’ Cat said at once.

  I had gone off on another nostalgia trip. I loved this album too. It was the one that had been playing when I’d given birth to Nathan, upstairs, on my and Alex’s bed. It had been one of those glorious late September days, sun low in a perfect blue sky, leaves glowing russet and yellow on the trees. The student midwife had been rubbing my lower back. ‘Good choice,’ she’d said approvingly as the first song had started. ‘Saw them at Glastonbury once. So-o-o fab.’

  I found myself getting tearful all over again, thinking of the moment just before Nathan had been born, when he’d been poised on the very edge of me. I could feel him there, perfectly balanced on the verge of coming into our lives, and had shut my eyes, breathed in more gas and air, braced for the final push. He had rushed out of me in a bloody slither. It’s a boy! I had cried, choking with happiness, clutching his wet, slippery limbs to me. Alex, it’s a boy!

  ‘You all right, Sadie?’ Cat asked, noticing my glassy eyes.

  I pulled myself up quickly. ‘Yeah, fine,’ I said. ‘This curry’s a bit on the hot side, that’s all. Making my eyes water.’

  What was wrong with me? All this emotional reminiscing. It was as if my subconscious was trying to flag up all the best shared memories between Alex and me. All right, all right, I felt like telling it. I know. Mark was just a stupid mistake. A vodka-on-an-empty-stomach mistake, one not to be repeated. OK?

  When we’d all finished eating, Cat helped me carry the plates and dishes into the kitchen.

  ‘Sadie,’ she said, and then stopped.

  I turned to look at her. She was standing against the worktop, her arms still full of plates, green eyes anxious. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Sadie, has anything happened with that guy?’ she went on. Her eyebrows were at ten to two, cheeks pink from the beer.

  I nearly dropped my serving dishes in shock. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, turning away from her to the sink. I put the taps on, squirted washing-up liquid into the bowl, busy, busy. How did she know? What did she know? Had one of her friends seen us in the Albert? My fingers shook under the bubbly water. Reflected light winked up at me from the cutlery.

  ‘That guy in the bar the other week. The one we saw with Becca.’

  With Becca? Oh. Oh! Jack. She meant Jack.

  I almost laughed out loud in relief. ‘No way!’ I said. ‘Absolutely not. Nothing has happened with him!’ I was careful to put my emphasis on the ‘nothing’ rather than on the ‘him’.

  Cat put the plates down on the side and came over to me. ‘Really?’ she asked, looking into my face. ‘Really and truly? Only you’re acting a bit strangely. And I couldn’t help wondering . . .’

  I looked straight back at her. ‘Cat, I don’t even know what happened to that number he gave me,’ I said. The truth felt like a luxury. She could bang on about Jack until she was hoarse, and I could honestly answer everything without guilt, for the simple reason that there was nothing whatsoever to tell. I laughed. ‘Anyway, he’s hardly my type, is he?’

  ‘Good,’ she said. The words rushed out of her; I could see her transparent relief. ‘Good. I’m really glad. Because you and Alex are just so great together and I would hate anything to mess it up.’

  The smile tightened on my face like an uncomfortable mask. ‘Well . . .’ I started. Then I got stuck. ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said. I looked over at the door guiltily and lowered my voice. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t say that we’re that “great together” at the moment. Yeah, we get on, obviously, and we still have a laugh, but . . .’ I shrugged. ‘It’s all so bloody domestic. We don’t do much any more. We don’t go anywhere. We’ve been out together once since Nathan was born. I mean, look at you and Tom, off to India, making plans—’

  She interrupted, shaking her head. ‘Look at you and Alex, with your house and two gorgeous children!’ she countered.

  I pulled a face. ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Look at me right now with my hands in the kitchen sink, where they are every single bloody day.’ I closed my mouth abruptly. My voice sounded shrill and bitter.

  Cat hesitated. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ I said, not looking her in the eye. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  I put the pile of plates into the foamy water and dried my hands. I would finish those in the morning. Right now, I needed to drink some more beer.

  ‘No reason,’ she replied awkwardly. ‘I’m just glad you’re all right. I mean, I’m glad that the Jack thing was . . . well, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said briskly. ‘Another drink?’

  Friday went by slowly and exhaustingly in the usual whirl of deeply trivial yet deeply passionate battles over which socks Molly was going to wear, what she didn’t want to eat for lunch, how she didn’t want a nap, and all the rest of it.

  Nathan and I weren’t the happiest of souls either. I had started phasing out breastfeeding, which meant reproachful glances from him every time I produced a bottle instead of my own boob (or so I interpreted it anyway) and hot, full, uncomfortably lumpy breasts for me, with milk inadvertently dribbling out if I so much as heard him snivel.

  Who would be a woman? I thought miserably as I discarded another drenched breast pad. All this leaking and bleeding, and all the rest of it. I had been chatting to a heavily pregnant mum, Nicki, down at the park that afternoon, who had started coughing, only to wet herself all down the front of her khaki maternity trousers. I mean . . . Was there no end to the lack of dignity?

  ‘Oh, bollocks, not again,’ she’d moaned, trying and failing to gather up the wet material over her enormous mound of bump to inspect the damage. ‘Does it show?’

  ‘Ye-e-eah,’ I’d replied carefully. ‘Only a bit, though.’

  ‘Fucking fuck shit bollocks,’ she’d growled, low enough that her two-year-old wouldn’t hear. Then, with a resigned shrug, she’d carried on where we’d left off in our conversation, moments before. ‘And then he suggested Octavia if it’s a girl! Octavia! I said, Liam, remind me what kind of car we’ve got again.’

  I grinned. ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘We have! A Skoda fucking Octavia!’

  ‘Mummy, what she saying?’ Molly had asked loudly.

  Nicki had clamped a hand to her mouth. ‘Sorry. Bad case of pregnancy Tourette’s. I think it’s my repressed rage at being a woman, you know. Having to do all . . .’ She’d waved a hand over her seam-straining bump. ‘Having to do all this.’

  I knew exactly how she felt. Having to do all this, indeed.

  On Saturday morning, I woke up feeling shivery inside with apprehension. Alex’s work do was that evening and I desperately didn’t want to go. I needed a good excuse to get me out of it.

  ‘Oh-h-h,’ I moaned at the breakfast table. ‘I think I’m coming down with something. I feel really ropy.’

  ‘What sort of ropy?’ Alex asked from behind the newspaper.

  ‘Just a bit fluey,’ I said, improvising rapidly as I glimpsed a packet of Lemsip in the open kitchen cupboard. ‘Um . . . Headache, aching joints, blocked nose,’ I said, reading aloud from the box. ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ he replied, as if he wasn’t really very interested. ‘Lot of it going around at the moment.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, then played my trump card. ‘I just hope I’m up to going out later on. Because right now’ – I coughed pathetically – ‘I don’t feel like going anywhere other than bed.’

  That made him put the newspaper down. ‘What – you’re backing out of the do tonight?’ he asked. ‘Sade – I know you don’t like these things, but . . .’

  ‘And I like them even less when I feel ill,’ I said as weakly as I could. ‘But hopefully if I just take it easy today . . .’

  Alex looked at me disbelievingly. ‘Sade, you’re such a crap actress,’ he said. He actually sounded exasperated. ‘If you don’t want to
go, just say so. Don’t give me all this I’m-so-ill stuff.’

  I stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘That’s a bit rich, coming from Brixton’s biggest hypochondriac,’ I said accusingly. ‘Oh, I’ve got a twinge in my back – ooh, I must be practically paralysed. Get me to a consultant at once!’

  Alex smirked at me and picked up the newspaper. ‘Sounds like you’re feeling better already,’ he said lightly.

  Smug git, I thought crossly, and made a big show of mixing myself a disgusting honey and lemon drink, knowing I’d only pour it down the toilet as soon as I had a chance.

  ‘Still,’ he went on, from behind his paper battlements, ‘if you’re going to duck out on me at the last minute, then at least I won’t feel really bad about getting hammered with everyone else, I suppose.’

  I stared at his newspaper, quite tempted to punch a fist through it. Right. So that was the score then, was it? Either I came with him – which I so didn’t want to do – or, by not going, I gave him licence to . . . Well, to do absolutely anything he wanted, by the sound of it. And what exactly did he have in mind? Something with new-girl Nat, she of the loud laugh?

  ‘Like I said, I’ll see how I feel later,’ I said through gritted teeth. Curses. I’d handled that really badly. So . . . what to do? Go, and risk bumping into Mark? Or stay, and torture myself imagining what drunken Alex was up to all night?

  I flounced out of the room with my horrible honey drink. I’d have to go, I decided – but I’d just stick by Alex’s side all night. After all, there was no way on earth that Mark was going to try anything on with me while Alex was in the same room, was there? No way on earth.

  By the time the evening rolled around, I was starting to get a bit trembly with nerves. I felt really odd about seeing Mark again after that strange, intense encounter in the pub – how would I be able to look him in the face after that? I also hated going to these work parties, where they all knew each other and I knew almost no one.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Cat, who’d come to babysit, said cheeringly, slapping on my make-up for me. ‘Look, I’m making you look utterly ravishing here, so everyone will want to talk to you. You’ll be the belle of the ball.’