But you did! Why didn’t you tell me? ‘By the way, Anna, I’m quitting, I have a new job in London. If we’re discreet, we can get away with a little affair.’ What’s so difficult about saying that?”
His jaw locks, but he has nothing to say for himself.
“You accused Amanda—sorry, but this seems relevant! You accuse Amanda of refusing to talk about how your marriage was going down the drain. Seems to me that it takes two to be in denial!”
He looks down at his knees and shrugs. There is an insecure sixteen-year-old in Giles Cleveland, and I know he will not stand up to me. A praying mantis would now go for his jugular.
“When were you going to tell me?” I ask, more calmly.
“When I could bear it.”
“When you could bear it. Well, thanks, Giles. Thanks very much for your kind concern for my feelings!”
“I wasn’t even sure whether I would go,” he says, asserting himself. “You make it sound very straightforward, but it wasn’t. They wanted me to sign the contract in October, but I said I needed to talk to Paul French first. But after that…after Notre Dame—” He glances over at me and shrugs again.
“So you’ve known for two months!”
“No, no. I held off. I couldn’t believe you’d come to me…like that, and then pretend nothing had happened.” An ironic snort is comment enough, and I’m glad he is leaving it at that. “I signed after Nick caught us together in the observatory.”
I need a minute to digest this, and to control the tears pricking behind my eyelids.
“You thought about staying here?” There are tears in my voice, too.
“I was about to risk the withdrawal of the offer, yes. Caught between a rock and a hard place.” He grins but thinks better of spelling out the innuendo.
“If you’d asked me to come home with you, after Nick caught us, I would have. You pushed me away, Giles.”
“I know.”
I look over at him in the half-dark of the car. “Why?”
“Because, Anna, implausible though it may seem to you, I am actually doing what I can to protect you.”
“Don’t protect me from what I want!”
He opens his mouth to counter this, but I interrupt him.
“The only other man I’ve ever—” I catch myself in mid-sentence and glance at him quickly, embarrassed. “When I was in my early twenties I loved someone very much, someone who just wanted to have sex with me. He was fond of me, fond enough to want my love, but he didn’t want to…he didn’t want to be with me, either. He came to London to spend a weekend in bed with me, and at the end he told me he was engaged to be married to someone else.”
And it took me years to get over it.
Giles reaches over, clasps my hand and draws it to his lips.
“Anna, I don’t just want to have sex with you. You know it’s more…it’s a lot more than that. But I can’t ask you to be with me. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be…honorable.”
And suddenly this discussion ends the same way it began.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Giles!”
I yank the key out the ignition and jump out of the car, slamming the door as hard as I can. The Subaru is hardly perturbed by my little anger. The drops of rainwater on the roof twinkle in the light of the street lamps like the stars in a clear, cold night.
Halfway up the entrance portal, he catches up with me.
“Go away and be an immature, screwed-up English schoolboy somewhere else!” I am not shouting. But I am about to knee him in the groin, and he is well aware of it.
“Anna, don’t. Don’t fight with me. Please.”
“But that’s what happens, Giles! You lie to people to keep them sweet, they find out about it, they feel jerked around, they shout at you! Which part is it that’s coming as a surprise to you?”
“You are very self-righteous for someone who has applied for a job across the pond herself.”
This comes so completely out of left field that all I can do is stare at him, slack-jawed. “How do you—”
“People keep asking me whether I know you and what I think of you.” He shrugs. “I always tell them the same thing, although I’m not sure any more that I’m doing you a—” A blood-curdling noise drowns out the rest of his words. “That’s the fire alarm!”