Any Way You Want Me Read online

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

  ‘You. What a funny mixture you are,’ I replied.

  ‘Isn’t everyone?’

  ‘I suppose so, but . . .’ I shrugged. ‘You’re unpredictable. I never know what you’re going to say next.’

  He put his arms around me, hugged me in so that I slid all the way down his legs and we were crotch to crotch. ‘Good,’ he said.

  There was a silence again.

  ‘OK, your turn,’ I said. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  He ran a finger under the strap of my bra. ‘You. How much I fancied you. As soon as I saw you.’

  ‘Really?’ I tried to hide my astonished delight but failed abysmally. ‘Did you really?’

  ‘Of course I did! We all did! You in that low-cut top, making everyone laugh, being so bubbly and funny and . . .’

  ‘Pissed,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, that as well, but . . . phhwooarrr. I could hardly get to sleep thinking about you that night. Thinking about how much I wished—’

  I kissed his nose. ‘How much you wished what?’

  His voice had been wistful; now he laughed it off. ‘Oh, just how much I wished you’d given me a blow job under the dinner table. I could tell from your dirty mouth it would have been good.’

  ‘You . . .!’ I gave him a push and tried to sound stern, rather than shocked. ‘No, what did you really wish?’

  He took my hands in his, and looked serious for the first time all evening, so serious in fact that I regretted asking. ‘I wished that we could have met each other before – well, before we both settled down with different people,’ he said.

  There was a silence while I tried to make sense of this. Hang on a minute, I was thinking, wasn’t this supposed to be a bit of no-strings, no-feelings sex on the side? I didn’t think that people involved in no-strings, no-feelings sex on the side were meant to start talking about wishes like that. Because I thought everyone knew that wishes didn’t come true, however much you wanted them to. And some wishes just couldn’t come true, end of story.

  ‘Right,’ I said, stalling for time. I didn’t like the way the conversation was going. He was looking too serious, too much like he wanted me to reciprocate. But I didn’t want any falling-in-love stuff from him. No way! I knew where falling in love got you. I’d been there, done that, had the children.

  ‘That’s . . . sweet,’ I said eventually. I climbed off his knee and turned away, hunting for my clothes. ‘Listen, I’d better go.’

  He stayed put on the sofa; I could feel him watching me dress. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I told him.

  ‘Have I said something wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but . . .’ I pulled on my trainers, wondering how best to phrase it. ‘Let’s not get all heavy, yeah?’

  He shrugged, then leaned back against the sofa. ‘What, you mean let’s stick to joking about tasselled bras and blow jobs?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  He stood up and drank the rest of his wine. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll stick to that. For now.’

  I ran home with my mind in turmoil. I had been gone for ages. I felt sick with guilt for what I’d done with Mark, but at the same time, I felt I was rushing with the sweetest, purest drug, on the best high I’d had for years. How was it possible to feel so dreadful and so exultant in the same second?

  I kept my eyes straight ahead as I ran. I was a bad, bad person. I was cheating on Alex. Not just a one-off either; I’d done it twice now. Three times if you counted the near-miss at the Laurel Tree. I was the type of slaggy mistress that women like Gwen hated. I kind of hated myself for it too.

  The wind was buffeting me along the road, sending a beer can skittering and bouncing down the pavement ahead of me. The branches of the trees were groaning. Oh, and how I had groaned with Mark. He made me feel so . . . desired. So horny. He made me feel like sex kitten Sadie again. I hadn’t felt like that for a long time.

  So that was all skin-tinglingly marvellous and breath-stoppingly exciting but . . .

  I ducked my head. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to confront the ‘but’. The ‘but’ was so enormous and terrifying, I couldn’t quite bring myself to look it in the eye. I knew that once I started thinking about the consequences, they would snowball out of proportion. Because it wasn’t just Alex I would be hurting. It was the kids, too, and I’d rather flay myself alive than have to hurt them.

  Plus there was Julia. She struck me as the kind of woman who would want to flay me alive as well. We could both do it, take turns, maybe.

  Anyway, I wasn’t going to think about her. I would see Mark maybe once or twice more, get him completely out of my system, then nip the whole thing in the bud before anyone got hurt. And before anyone found out, more to the point.

  I felt myself fill with virtuous intentions, like a balloon, puffed up with its own hot air. I would renounce Mark, and the secret would go with me to the grave. I would renounce my inner slut too, send her packing, and instead would become a devoted partner and mother to Alex and the kids. I would cook proper meals for them rather than opening packets of Alphabites and fishfingers all the time. I would read Molly’s story books all the way through, instead of editing them down to two lines per page in the hope of an early bedtime. And as for Alex, I would make more of an effort. I’d be super-partner. I’d be dirty in the bedroom and clean around the house. Yes, I’d do the whole domestic goddess thing – perhaps even trying out some of Nigella’s recipes in the book Alex had given me, rather than leaving it on our shelf like some kind of upmarket ornament.

  Then I spoiled all my good work by thinking, Mark would never have given me a cookbook. A rotating-head vibrator maybe, or that tasselled bra he seemed to know all about perhaps, but cookery? I doubted it.

  I was home. ‘I’m back!’ I yelled, poking my head around the sitting-room door. James the little red engine was falling off a bridge again on the telly, but there was no one watching.

  Alex called back an echoey hello and I looked upstairs in alarm. Oh no. The kids were still in the bath. I’d been planning to leap in the shower like last time, wash away my guilt and the smell of sex before I could be seen. But with Molly and Nathan still splashing around up there, what was I going to do?

  I was dithering horribly. ‘Mummy, come see me!’ Molly was yelling from upstairs. ‘I got a bubbly beard!’

  I couldn’t go in there. Alex would know at once. I smelled of Mark. He was all over my skin.

  ‘Just a sec,’ I yelled back. Then I stripped off in front of the washing machine and bundled everything in. Everything – knickers, bra, the lot. I grabbed a large towel from the washing pile on the dresser and wrapped it around me.

  ‘Room for me in there?’ I asked jokingly as I went into the bathroom.

  Oh God, I was so horrible. I was a whore, a slut. I was . . . Oh, I hated myself as I slid into the water between my pink beaming children. Molly wrapped her slippery arms around me and decorated my hair with bubbles, and Nathan stretched out his fat hands for a cuddle, and oh, they were so innocent and unknowing, and I was so deceitful and full of shit and evil.

  Alex was strangely quiet. No banter tonight. In fact, he barely said hello. ‘You were ages,’ he said. It was a statement and a question at the same time. I couldn’t read his eyes; his face was impassive.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ I said. ‘I bumped into Nicki on the way back and stopped for a chat.’

  ‘Nicki?’ he repeated. His eyes never left my face.

  I grabbed the Teletubbies flannel and draped it over my head, making the kids giggle. ‘Blub, blub, blub,’ I said to them, reaching out to tickle Molly in her most ticklish spot, under the knees. ‘It’s the flannel monster! Yeah, Nicki,’ I added in a normal voice. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  I didn’t answer. I felt sick with paranoia. He knew. He must know. He never ‘just wondered’ about anything I di
d usually. He barely listened to what I told him, let alone wonder about it for any length of time. Oh God. The game was up. Someone had told him something. Or he had followed me, seen me going to Mark’s studio . . .

  I gasped inadvertently under the flannel. Act normal, I thought, and put the flannel on Nathan’s head to make him laugh, then busied myself soaping Molly’s hair and sculpting it into a bubbly Mohican.

  ‘Good day? See anyone interesting?’ he asked.

  I stared hard at Molly’s hair. Making sure her Mohican was bang in the centre of her head was suddenly crucial. ‘It was OK. Met up with a couple of the mums. You?’

  ‘Same old, same old.’ He stood up and rolled down his shirt sleeves. ‘Now you’re back, could you finish off in here? I’ve got a few emails to send.’

  Before I could reply, he was gone. ‘Wait, I . . .’ I began, but I could already hear his footsteps tramping down the stairs.

  ‘Mummy, you be flannel monster again,’ Molly said insistently, leaning over me to try to pull it off Nathan.

  ‘Careful, love – gently!’ I said, as Nathan lost his balance and almost fell. Now that I could drop my air of forced gaiety, I felt exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to be the entertaining flannel monster any more. It was all I could do to be corrupt Sadie, she who had gone so terribly astray.

  It wasn’t until the kids were in bed that he finally confronted me. Large whisky in one hand, eyes unwavering, he sat forward on the edge of the sofa, with his elbows on his knees.

  ‘Who’s Jack?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I replied.

  ‘I said, “Who’s Jack?”’ he repeated grimly. ‘I found this in our bedroom. Who is he?’

  He was holding Jack’s business card – where the hell had he found that? – and I tried to take it off him but he snatched it away.

  ‘Jack,’ I began haltingly, ‘is some guy I met in the pub. When I went out with Becca a few weeks ago.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing! He chatted me up, gave me that card, then you phoned, my boobs started leaking everywhere, and I came home. That’s it. End of story.’

  ‘Sadie, just tell me. If something’s happening, just tell me. Seriously.’

  Thank God he doesn’t know the truth, I thought, as adrenaline pumped around me. It was like a premonition of another conversation – an infinitely worse conversation – we could be having if he ever found out about Mark.

  I sat down next to him. ‘Nothing is happening with Jack,’ I said evenly. ‘I promise. I swear! He was just some wideboy, that’s all. You can chuck that away. I didn’t even know I still had it.’

  ‘Why did you take his card, then, if he’s just some wideboy? Have you phoned him?’ His eyes were glittering. He looked as if he wanted a fight – with me, or preferably with Jack for daring to speak to me and press his number on me in the first place. For all his left-wing, right-on, new-man behaviour, there still lurked a slice of caveman in Alex’s personality. You looking at my bird? I’ll kill yeh!

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Politeness, I suppose.’ His face hadn’t changed. ‘Phone him if you want. Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.’

  Don’t phone him. Don’t ask him. Please believe me. After Jack had seen me in the park the other day, the last thing I wanted was for Alex to start ringing him up, harassing him for looking at ‘his bird’.

  There was a silence. ‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to sound hurt. ‘If you don’t want to marry me, what am I supposed to think?’

  His eyes swivelled round. He looked incredulous. ‘Run that by me again,’ he said coldly. ‘You think that because I don’t want to get married – not just to you, to anyone – it means that . . . what? That our relationship doesn’t mean anything to me?’

  Damn. That had not been the best thing to say. ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘So the fact that we’ve got two kids and a house, and we’ve been together donkey’s years doesn’t count for anything, is that what you’re saying?’ He was on a roll now. Oh, Christ. I could write off the rest of the evening, then. It would be lecture, lecture, lecture until dawn, if he had his way. ‘And you take that as meaning you can go off and chat up the likes of Jack with your single mates, yeah?’

  ‘No! I—’

  ‘Because that is bollocks, Sadie. That’s a piss-poor excuse, and you know it.’

  ‘All right, I . . .’

  ‘Why do you have to keep going on and on about getting married anyway? I don’t want to. I just don’t want to. It’s not you or us or anything, I just think it’s all a load of cobblers. And we can’t afford it anyway. Not unless you want a second mortgage or—’

  ‘All right!’ I shouted. ‘You’ve made your point! I am sorry I spoke to a strange man when I went out. I am sorry I mentioned the dreaded, forbidden M-word that is obviously so traumatic for you to hear. I’m sorry I . . .’ I’d run out of things to be sorry about. Well, things he knew about anyway. No, wait, I’d just thought of another one. ‘I’m sorry you can’t trust me to go out with my friend – well, to try and go out with her anyway – only to be called back because you can’t cope with two children for one evening, even though I have to do it every single bloody day, and—’

  ‘All right, all right. Stop shouting, will you?’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said, and walked out before he could see the tears gathering in my eyes.

  It’s hard to sleep next to somebody you’ve just had an argument with, so I lay under the duvet, trying to nod off as fast as possible before Alex came up to bed. Instead, though, my mind kept running through our argument in an annoying, spot-picking kind of way. Even when I was trying to be scrupulously fair about what had been said, I found it impossible to decide who should be madder with whom. Both of us were in the wrong somewhere or other in the argument, but both of us, equally, could claim the moral high ground for different reasons. Moreover, I was nursing my Mark secret and feeling guilty enough to start with, so I didn’t feel I could blame Alex for everything. Although, after a bit of effort, I eventually managed to.

  I was still awake when he came to bed a few hours later.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he whispered.

  I shut my eyes hurriedly and tried to breathe as slowly and evenly as possible.

  ‘Oh, right, you are. Not farting and snoring like you usually do.’

  I rolled over indignantly. ‘Fuck off. I don’t fart and snore. I think you’ll find that’s you.’

  He climbed into bed and put an arm across me. He was drunk, I could tell by the clumsiness of his arm. That and his breath, which smelled of pure Laphroaig.

  ‘Sadie, Sadie, Sadie,’ he slurred.

  I was hoping he’d fall into an alcoholic comatose sleep. That often happened. Although when it didn’t happen . . .

  ‘I don’t suppose you fancy giving me a hand-job, do you?’ he asked, fumbling around with the old T-shirt I was sleeping in.

  ‘No, I bloody don’t. You stink,’ I told him. ‘And get off me.’

  ‘Come on, Sade. It’s been hours. It’s been days! Come on. Let me show you where I am. Let me introduce you to an old friend.’

  He took my hand and tried to drag it down to his boxers, but I snatched it away. ‘Sod off,’ I said. ‘First you wake me up, crashing around like a tanked-up wart hog, then you start insulting me, then you start on the sexual harassment front . . .’

  His hand had found a way underneath my T-shirt. ‘Oh, Alex,’ I moaned. ‘I’m too tired.’

  ‘You just go back to sleep then,’ he slurred boozily. ‘Pretend it’s a dream. I won’t be long.’

  I laughed, despite myself. ‘You are so romantic, it’s untrue,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I know. The Yorkshire Casanova,’ he said, rolling on top of me and nearly toppling off the other side of the bed.

  ‘God, careful, you moron!’ I cried, dragging him back.

  His hand had found my breast now. ‘Good evening,’ he said reverently. ‘Nice to be back here, at Sa
die’s left breast. My particular favourite.’

  ‘Since when?’ Oh, no. Now I was getting drawn into his booze-soaked bullshit. Even worse, I was starting to feel turned on by the breast-stroking thing he was doing.

  ‘Or is it the right?’ He’d managed to roll on top of me now and I could feel his stiffy against my leg.

  He was kissing my neck. Jesus, he stank. He absolutely reeked. ‘You are such a pig,’ I grumbled, not trying to stop him any more. Sod it, a guilt shag would ease my conscience a tad, I reckoned. ‘You are such an animal. Such a bloody oaf.’

  ‘I love it when you talk dirty to me. Keep going.’

  He was in me, his breath panting out heavily.

  ‘You’re a dirty, stinking, caveman sex maniac,’ I told him, warming to my theme. ‘A—’

  ‘UHHHHHHHH!’

  He collapsed on top of me. After a moment or two of silence, I tentatively pushed at him, only to hear a grumbling snore start up in his nose. Oh, great. And now, having ravished my love, I will . . . fall asleep on her. Before even rolling off!

  I shoved him away from me. He weighed a bloody ton.

  ‘We’ve got to get some condoms,’ I said to the darkness. ‘Must get some condoms tomorrow.’

  The Yorkshire Casanova snored throatily in reply, a satisfied smile across his face. So that was that.

  Twelve

  Dear Ms Morrison,

  Thank you for your letter regarding our Producer vacancy. I’m delighted to invite you for an interview on 29th March at our Soho office, and would be grateful if you could contact me to arrange a convenient time . . .

  It was the morning after the night before and I practically choked on my mouthful of toast as I read my letter from Firestarter.

  Nathan, smeared in Weetabix, tried to grab it from my fingers. ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ I told him, snatching it away quickly. ‘Mummy’s going to frame this and put it on the wall. Mummy is so desirable and talented that she—’