than anything. You have absolutely fucking everything in the world, and you’re just throwing it all away, and—and—breaking his heart in the process. I can’t bear it.”
“It’s not like that, really,” I said at last.
She’d finally run out of things to say, just the odd sob and endless sniffing. At least she hadn’t hung up.
“You don’t know what it’s like with him. He follows me around. He lets himself into the house when I’m not here . . .”
“You gave him a key, Catherine. Why would you give him a fucking key if you only wanted him to go in the house when you were already inside it?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Even I knew it didn’t sound bad, put like that.
“Do you know what makes it all worse? Even after what you’ve done to him, even after you’ve broken his heart, he’s still completely madly in love with you. He told me all about all the things you said to him, and straight after that he said if I saw you I was to ask you if you’d go and see him. He’s back working at the River. He said he wanted to see you, to check you’re all right. He said he wasn’t going to come to the house because you’d asked him not to. So, you going to go?”
I told her I’d think about it.
Clearly that had been more or less what she’d been expecting, because she gave me a final shot of, “I still can’t believe what you’ve done, I hope you’re proud of yourself,” and hung up.
I cried after that, shutting the office door and hoping to God nobody would come in. Claire had never spoken to me like that before. She was a loyal friend, someone who understood that friends always came before guys, that whatever a guy said to you was not usually to be relied on, especially not when a bloke was bad-mouthing a friend.
I went through the rest of the day in a haze of misery. I finished my presentation as quickly as I could and delivered it without any real thought or enthusiasm. Claire’s words spun around and around in my mind. I must have been really wrong, for her to talk to me like that. I thought about what she’d said, about how unhappy he was without me, how much he loved me. I thought about his last girlfriend, this Naomi—he’d never mentioned her name again after that one whisper in the middle of the night—and about why he’d chosen to talk to Claire about her, and not me. And I thought that he must have been through such a lot of misery, and how he’d been happy. How I’d made him happy.
I left work as soon as the presentation was finished, telling them I had a headache, which was the truth. I went home and cried some more, thinking about Claire and how I couldn’t afford to lose one of my dearest friends, one of my oldest friends.Later, when I’d been lying in bed for hours, thinking about it all, I got out of my pajamas and into the red dress. It didn’t fit me as well as it had done last time I’d worn it—it was baggy around the waist and the chest, as though some large person had stretched it when I wasn’t looking. But I wore it anyway. Slapped on some makeup, and went to the River looking for him.
What I really wanted, despite everything, was a repeat performance of that time when he’d fucked me in the office at the River. I wanted him to look at me as though I was the most perfect creature he’d ever laid eyes on, I wanted him to take me by the hand and haul me down the corridor to the office, as though he couldn’t wait another second to get inside me.
He was laughing and joking with Terry, the door supervisor, when I walked past the line of people and up to the VIP entrance. My chest tightened when I saw him, short blond hair cropped close to his head, still improbably tanned despite the cold and the rain; that dark suit, well-cut, defining the muscles and the shape of his taut body.
“Hi,” I said.
“Catherine. What are you doing here?” he asked. He was trying to sound cold, but already I’d seen the reaction in his eyes.
“I was hoping you might let me in so I could join my friends,” I said, giving him