Chapter Five Fiona
Tasting today: pink lemonade, served to your children in beautiful glasses.
A drink that will melt your teeth, but maybe also your heart.
‘Rosie, please slow down,’ I said, phone jammed between my ear and my shoulder as I slid a piece of toast onto her plate. ‘You’re going to make yourself—’
‘—sick if I eat too fast, I know!’ Rosie kept shovelling scrambled eggs into her mouth as I put the other piece of toast on Georgia’s plate and craned my head to look down the corridor for her.
‘—sue for back payment!’ Dad was saying on the other end of the phone.
‘Kavita said we can explore that option. But we need to get the divorce finalised first, or – Georgia, don’t run, please! – it could lead to a renegotiation of – Georgia! – Sorry, Dad.’
‘I’m not looking for my money back here.’ If my dad had one superpower, it was being able to carry on a conversation by himself. ‘No grandchild of mine will ever go without. But it’s the principle of the thing, Fiona.’
‘I’m doing my best,’ I said tightly.
He grunted. I flicked the kettle on. He was clearly about to launch into a monologue about my inadequacies, and I needed the fortification of a cup of tea.
But, ‘Your mother wants to talk to you,’ was all he said. ‘Here she is.’
My mum already knew all the details, but I had to relive them for her anyway, taking my tea out into the backyard so I could watch the girls through the kitchen window without them overhearing all about how their father was a scumbag.
‘What an awful, awful man,’ Mum said. ‘Rubbing that woman in your face like that – sickening.’
‘Yeah, it was.’ I shifted the phone to my other ear. ‘But it was bound to happen sometime. At least it wasn’t in front of the kids.’
‘Still.’ She made a tutting sound. ‘I hope you’re doing something for yourself, Fiona.’
‘What?’
‘Something for yourself,’ she repeated. ‘You’ve been so laser-focused on holding things together for the kids. You need to make sure you’re doing things for yourself too.’
For a moment, I was back in the restaurant corridor, Satoshi grinding his hips into me. My face heated.
‘I’m going to send you a gift voucher,’ Mum said. ‘For a night in a nice hotel. Jonah can take the kids and you can have a self-care evening.’
‘You don’t need to do that.’
‘I want to.’ My mother was by far the least assertive member of the Fisher family, but her tone made it clear that this was the end of the discussion. ‘I know it’s just a little thing, but sometimes little things can go a long way.’
She wasn’t wrong. I was already a long, long way ahead, in a world where Satoshi was in that hotel room with me, throwing me onto the bed and making me forget everything, and…
‘Thanks, Mum.’ I rubbed my hand against the fluttery feeling in my abdomen. ‘That’s nice of you.’
‘Mummy, you’re all red,’ Rosie said, when I re-entered the house. ‘Did you get sunburned in the backyard?’
‘I’m just a bit hot.’ I fanned myself.
‘But it’s not hot,’ Georgia said.
‘I was walking up and down while I talked to Grandma.’ I thought there were no new depths of embarrassment for me to plumb, but if my eight-year-old daughters somehow managed to intuit that I was having explicit sexual fantasies about the nice young man who ran the bar…
It had just been so sexy, though. The feeling of his fingers against my waist – the other ones twined tight through mine as he pushed my hand over my head – the press of him against me – it had just been so – so – so—
So much. It had been so fucking much, making me feel like the tightly-wound cords holding me together might come swiftly unravelling, and I might shatter into a million little pieces.
My phone buzzed with a text. It was Jonah. Heading to the farmers’ market. Do the girls want to come on a little adventure?
The girls were indeed keen on a little adventure, and I’d just finished braiding Georgia’s hair when Jonah arrived on my doorstep.
‘Do you want to – Rosie, no, your jumper’s fine, it’s just the farmers’ market, you don’t need to be elegant – take my car?
’ I asked. ‘That’ll be easier than trying to manage the girls on the bus – Oh, hi, Sadie. ’
‘Hi, Fiona.’ Sadie leaned in to hug me, a twinkle in her eye. ‘I brought you a coffee and some croissants. Chess went back to Sydney this morning, so I thought you and I could have breakfast while Jonah and the girls are at the market.’
Fuck. ‘Sure,’ I said, so brightly it must sound completely fake. ‘That sounds lovely. Girly-pops, be good for Uncle Jonah, okay?’
‘We’re always good for Uncle Jonah.’ Rosie took his hand. ‘And we know the rules. No running where he can’t see us, and—’
‘—definitely no running into the road,’ Georgia finished.
‘Good. Don’t get so excited you forget, all right?’ I bent down to hug them. ‘I love you.’
‘Lex, do you want to come too?’ Jonah took my proffered keys. ‘There’s room in the car.’
They shook their head. ‘Can I have a croissant?’
‘Sure,’ Sadie replied. ‘There’s plenty.’
Like a coward, I hoped Lex’s presence would get me out of having this conversation, but no such luck. The instant they had a croissant in hand, they disappeared into their room, leaving me alone with my very lovely, very clever, very much grinning-at-me-knowingly sister-in-law.
‘How about we sit outside?’ I suggested. If we had to have this conversation, I didn’t want Lex to overhear. I wasn’t at all sure how they’d react to the idea of their queer hero hooking up with their mother.
The memory of it made my face heat up again as Sadie and I made our way out onto my front porch.
The firm, slippery pressure of Satoshi’s fingers inside me as he crooked them, stroking.
The way I would have come again so fast and so violently if Charlotte hadn’t knocked at the door.
How I would have slid off the desk and onto my knees the second I recovered the capacity for thought and motion, how once I got my mouth on him any question of him doing this solely out of a misplaced sense of charity would be completely obliterated, and—
Sadie started laughing. ‘Your face, Fiona.’
I covered it with my hands. ‘Stop.’
‘You and Jonah are exactly the same. You both go red so fast when you’re embarrassed.’
‘I’m not embarrassed.’
I was, obviously, but not the way she meant. Nice suburban mothers were not supposed to have vivid sexual fantasies about younger men while having nice suburban conversations with their sisters-in-law. My face was so hot against my fingers it felt like I might burn myself.
‘Good, because you shouldn’t be.’ Sadie took one of the coffees out of the cardboard holder and set it down in front of me. ‘If anyone in the world deserves some fun, it’s you.’
Fun wasn’t the right word to describe it. It had felt very, very serious when Satoshi had backed me into the wall, intense in a way that I hadn’t felt since…
I swallowed. Nothing had felt even remotely like that since Matt Sinclair had taken twenty-one-year-old Fiona Fisher home with him, fastened his hand around her wrist, and told her she wasn’t going anywhere.
‘We don’t have to talk about it.’ Sadie tore off a corner of her croissant. ‘Not if you don’t want to. But we’re friends, right?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you can talk to me. And I won’t tell Jonah. Not that I think he’d be particularly keen on hearing about his sister’s sex life, but if that’s something you’re worried about, I can keep my mouth shut.’
‘There’s not much to talk about.’ I tore a corner off my own croissant, the words sex life sitting awkwardly in my stomach in a way I couldn’t quite identify. ‘It’s… I don’t know what it is, to be honest. It’s… new.’
‘Have you had sex?’
I started to shake my head, then stopped. ‘Depends how you define it, I guess.’
Sadie raised her eyebrows.
After a moment, I sighed. ‘Fingers.’
Her grin deepened. I had to bury my face in my hands again.
‘Come on, Fiona, there’s no need to be embarrassed,’ she said. ‘Was it good?’
‘I think I saw the face of God,’ I moaned.
‘Even less reason to be embarrassed! I love this for you.’
I looked at her from between my fingers.
‘Seriously,’ Sadie said. ‘After all the shit you’ve been through, you deserve to see the face of God. And Satoshi’s such a sweetheart. If there’s one person in the world you could trust to look after you, it’s him.’
‘I thought that about Matt.’
The words were out of my mouth before I was even conscious of saying them. Slowly, Sadie’s grin melted away.
‘Not that the situations are even remotely the same.’ I picked up the piece of croissant I’d dropped, tearing it into even smaller pieces. ‘Satoshi and me could never be anything… you know, serious. And it’s not like I think he’d ever set out to hurt me – not on purpose, anyway – but…’
My voice trailed off. I wasn’t even sure of what I was trying to say.
‘Trust is hard,’ Sadie said. ‘Especially when you’ve been burned.’
I nodded.
‘But I think you’re underselling it,’ she said. ‘What the two of you could be.’
I snorted. ‘You know I’m eight years older than him, right?’
‘So?’ She popped a piece of croissant into her mouth. ‘You’re both adults.’
‘Adults who are at completely different stages of their lives, though. I have three kids. He works about eight hundred and forty-seven hours a week. And he’s – Satoshi.’
‘Exactly. He’s Satoshi. You know him. Your kids love him. And sure, he works a lot, but wasn’t Matt always at work?’
I bit back my immediate thought – that at least I could trust Satoshi to actually be at work when he said he was – and picked up my phone instead. ‘Let me show you something.’
I opened up Tsundoku’s Instagram and scrolled back through a few years’ worth of beautifully curated photos. ‘Here.’
‘What am I looking at?’ Sadie took my phone. ‘Who’s this? Satoshi, obviously, but who’s the other guy?’
‘Kieran. His ex. That’s the kind of person he usually goes for.’
‘Men?’
‘No! I mean, yes, sometimes, he’s pansexual, but – look at how hot he is!’