the day thinking obsessively about all aspects of you, and going over your every word and action in my mind, to the exclusion of all else, for the foreseeable future.’
Gibbs grinned. ‘It’ll be easier for you to think about me if I stay here.’
‘Wrong. For as long as you’re here, I’ll be too busy wondering what you’re thinking to do any thinking myself.’
‘I’m not thinking anything, apart from I want to fuck you again, but I’m too knackered.’
‘Not listening, not listening!’ Olivia covered her ears with her hands. ‘Stop adding more words to the ones I already have to think about. I need to deal with the backlog. Don’t laugh – I’m being serious. Please just go. Don’t say anything else.’
‘So that you can think about me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And about nothing else?’
‘Not until I’ve cleared the backlog, no.’
Gibbs nodded as if her request were entirely reasonable. He sat up and started gathering his clothes together. Olivia looked at her phone again. Five past two. She felt excitement welling up inside her at the prospect of him leaving. There were things she needed to attend to, urgently. First on the agenda was the letting off of steam in an undignified manner: running in circles round the room screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ Second was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the door and studying her face and body as if she’d never seen them before and never would again; trying to see them as Gibbs saw them, through his eyes. Then she would ring Charlie. Or rather, she would ring the caretaker at Los Delfines, the one whose number was on the website, and ask him to pass on a message for Charlie to ring her. Any decent sister – and Charlie was, generally – would want to hear this sort of news straight away.
Guess who’s been a complete and utter slapper? Me!
Some gossip was so momentous that it demolished all considerations of honeymoon privacy that stood in its path; by pure chance, this was exactly such an instance. Olivia knew she would enjoy gossiping about herself as much as she enjoyed gossiping about other people. More, even. She so rarely did anything that would shock anyone. How refreshing, to be a scandal-maker at her age – to do something indescribably stupid when, in forty-one years, no one had ever feared she might.
Could she ask Charlie not to tell Simon? Some people kept no secrets from their spouses. Would her sister become fanatical about sharing everything, now that she was married? Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on. He would feel that in some obscure way, his and Charlie’s wedding day had been ruined, degraded, by their two witnesses ending up in bed together.
Olivia sighed as she realised the implications. For Simon’s sake, Charlie would have to be livid and wounded. She wouldn’t see Olivia’s one-night stand with Gibbs as something that had happened to Olivia, but as something bad that had happened to her all-important husband. Perhaps she would also object on her own account, and accuse Olivia of trespassing; Gibbs was police, and therefore belonged to Charlie and Simon, and not to Olivia, who’d had no right to barge in to a world that wasn’t hers, into which she was only invited from time to time, at Charlie’s discretion.
Had she hijacked the most important day of her sister’s life? Was it unforgivable to cast oneself as a rival leading lady without consulting anybody, when one was supposed to be playing a supporting role? Olivia couldn’t decide whether she’d done a terrible thing to Charlie, or nothing at all. She would never know, unless she told Charlie what had happened; she couldn’t work it out on her own, not without knowing what the reaction would be.
I ought to be feeling guilty about Dom, she thought, and about Debbie Gibbs. They’re the wronged parties here.
Gibbs was dressed. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘You can start thinking.’
‘So can you,’ said Olivia, wanting a way of attaching him to her, now that he was going. ‘Think about me, I mean.’
‘To the exclusion of all else,’ he said. ‘For the foreseeable future.’
It sounded like a quote. Because it was, Olivia realised. He was quoting her.
Sam Kombothekra wasn’t used to feeling guilty, but that was how he felt as he sat at a window table in Chompers café bar, waiting for Alice Bean.