Chapter 3
When Jo opened the front door, there he was on her doorstep, stepping out of the luminous dark of an unusually warm May evening.
‘Hey,’ Marcus said, slow and easy smile spreading.
‘Hey,’ she said back, meeting his eyes, relieved to see he was just as good-looking as she remembered. Because there was always that risk: she’d worried she might come back from her break, see him again and wonder what on earth she’d been thinking.
‘Here we are,’ he said, still on the doorstep, still smiling, trying not to let the smile run away into a nervous laugh.
‘Are you going to come in?’
‘Yup,’ and the nervous laugh escaped, but he stepped into the little hall and they moved in to kiss hello.
And once they started to kiss, the nervy newness and the awkwardness fell away.
It was as if they’d moved into the right gear or their native language.
This was the easy part, the familiar territory.
His wavy shoulder-length hair fell around her face, his fingers linked round her waist and he shut the door behind him with his foot.
Jo’s hands were on the skin of his back, warm and slightly damp to the touch after his bike ride over.
She ran her hand round, brushed it against the fuzzy warmth of his stomach, then up to his chest. She could just pull off his T-shirt.
He wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t care if she undid his jeans and pulled them off either, he was happy and unselfconscious naked.
At one with himself, comfortable in his skin and grounded.
It made her feel like a mass of complications but was part of his irresistible attraction.
She eased the T-shirt up to his shoulders, running her fingers across their smooth, muscular roundness, then tugged the top over his head and met his smile before they were kissing again.
Want pulsing through her, she could feel her heart race, hear her breathing switch to shallow.
She loved the kissing. He had a small, precise tongue and he tasted dry, salty, but with a hint of sweet too. His curtain of hair smelled slightly of caramelised onions, cigarette smoke and fresh bread. This was Marcus: always delicious, good enough to eat.
She slid her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, squeezing at the solidity of him. He moved slowly, feet planted firmly to the ground, rooted. His hands pulling her into him, into the push coming from the crotch of his jeans.
‘Missed you,’ he said, breaking from the kiss to smile at her.
‘Me too,’ she said back. She pressed her face against the warmth of his neck and couldn’t resist sliding her nose down his skin to the fold of his armpit.
The smell of his sweat had a strange effect on her.
It didn’t matter that he was nine years younger than her, that they didn’t have much in common, that, if she was honest, she found many things about him intensely irritating, there was a magical something – hormones?
Pheromones? – whatever chemical ingredient it was that governed the laws of attraction, he was her perfect match.
She didn’t think she’d ever been so giddily moved by anyone.
She ran her tongue against him, bit gently into his shoulder, heard him undo his belt buckle, and closed her eyes.
His hands moved in under her dress and she felt herself slipping into an unfocused, breathless place.
When she opened her eyes again, she registered the framed photo on the wall opposite of her girls crouching in the snow, building a snowman.
It had a sobering effect. Her children were upstairs, she couldn’t just get naked in the hallway with someone they’d never even met.
‘Shower?’ she asked and when Marcus nodded, she took him by the hand up the small set of stairs into the cramped white and pale blue bathroom.
Jo had moved into this mini-house with various grandiose decorating schemes, but so far, all she’d had the time or energy to do was slap hideous Barbie-trademarked glitter-pink paint over the girls’ bedroom walls.
All the other rooms in the house were slightly shabby, but calmingly ordinary.
When you’d spent years trying somehow, all at once, to have a brilliant career, be a wonderful mother, a good wife, chef, housekeeper and interior designer, it was a huge relief to let standards plummet.
Behind the security of the locked bathroom door, Marcus and Jo undressed each other quickly, kissing, touching, tripping in the tangle of clothes, hurrying into the liberation of the shower where they could lather up and slide against each other.
Did anything else matter more than Marcus?
Yes, of course, but not in this moment when he was leaning back against the shower tiles, eyes half closed, water splashing down, his fingers moving against her, inside her, his other hand guiding hers urgently over his soapy, swollen hard-on.
No, nothing else mattered. She ran a nail over his nipple and watched him come.
Afterwards, they lay on her bed together, Marcus naked, apart from his woven leather bracelets, damp hair spilling out over the pillow beside her, one hand companionably on his crotch, the other holding a cigarette.
Jo was much shyer – she had stretch marks, tummy bumps, cellulite, history – so she’d put on a silk slip, one Simon had given her years ago, but virtually unworn, then lay down, then got up again to open the window and let the smoke out, then got back onto the bed, where with her head on Marcus’s chest, they talked and joked comfortably together.
When he was halfway through his cigarette, she began what she knew perfectly well was her ridiculous smoking dance.
She took it from his fingers and had a drag, then she decided, yes, she would have a cigarette of her own.
She lit it, took four puffs, felt her lungs contract and her head spin and quickly stubbed it out on the outside windowsill.
Then she fanned the air and sprayed perfume.
‘I can’t just smoke, you know,’ she told him.
‘This is the one thing in life which does exactly what it says on the packet…’ She waved the cigarette box at him.
‘Kills you! Not to mention gives you wrinkles, bad breath, yellow teeth. Nothing about it is good.’ She took the cigarette from his hand again and put it between her lips.
‘Calm down!’ was his response to this.
After another drag, Jo handed it back to him and started looking in her bedside table for her vitamin pills to counteract the effect of the smoke.
Smoking! She knew perfectly well she was only smoking again to annoy Simon, and to pretend she wasn’t that old, to deny that she thought about death much more than she had done a few years ago.
Smoking could only be done with true enjoyment when you were young, when death was a far-off country you wondered if you’d ever visit.
But she now worried at least three times a day about what it was that would finish her off: a sudden heart attack, a slow cancer, the tragedy of a late-night car accident. Horrible, horrible. She popped two vitamin pills as Marcus slid his hand over her breast.
Marcus had been sleeping with Jo for several weeks now, but she suspected he’d been watching her with interest for some time before that.
She was a once-a-week, or at the very least once-a-fortnight, regular at the cosy but fashionable restaurant where he worked.
Not that chefs and diners ever usually met.
Chefs were relegated to the hot metal creative sweatshop at the back, diners pampered in the intimate leather booths at the front.
But, once she’d had several glasses of white wine (he knew now she never touched red in public because she thought she was too clumsy) and her soup or oysters, fish and salad then pudding – always chocolate of some sort – Jo liked to go to the back courtyard, not the front of house, and smoke a cigarette.
This was where they had met, in the grubby courtyard, down by the bins, with the kitchen doors flung open to let out the heat, chefs and sous-chefs coming and going to blast their lungs with strong cigarettes whenever they got a chance.
Jo liked to sit on the wall and gossip with whoever was around, make mock complaints about the food, moan about how boring her dining companion was and confess that she was out with them ‘just for work’.
She always wanted to know if anyone famous had been in that week and what did they eat?
Who were they with? Who was dating whom?
It was a new restaurant at a fashionable address, had only been open for half a year and all the cool, important people ate there.
She had soon realised that Marcus had started watching out for her, sneaking glimpses of her through the serving hatch when she was in.
Her and the ever-changing rota of people she brought to the restaurant.
The occasional face he recognised from the papers.
‘You’re smart,’ he told her on one cigarette break, ‘you remind me of Bond girls. Not the ones in the bikinis that get killed,’ he’d added quickly over her laughter, ‘but the clever ones that carry guns and know how to scramble up walls and deactivate nuclear devices.’
‘Yup, that’s me,’ she’d joked. Pointing at her battered bag, she’d added: ‘Tape recorder, notebooks, nuclear codes.’
Jo had seen him noticing that she didn’t wear a wedding ring. She still had the mark where one had been. Her fourth finger was slightly narrower below the knuckle.
Then, one night she’d turned up at the restaurant in a knockout outfit: tight grey pinstriped skirt, even tighter matching sleeveless waistcoat.
She’d taken her smoke break mid-meal and she’d been too cold to sit in her usual spot on the wall, so she’d come and stood beside him in the warmth of the kitchen door.
‘Did you make the monkfish and mango?’ she’d asked.
‘Did you eat it?’ he’d asked back.
‘No! Way too retro,’ she’d told him. ‘It was so back to the Nineties.’
He’d smiled. ‘Who are you with tonight?’
‘Ah. Someone important who doesn’t want to give me the story, hence the need for full-on temptress wear—’ She’d gestured to her waistcoat and skirt.
‘Is it working?’ he’d asked.
‘I’ll meet you back here after dessert and let you know.’ Jo had winked, causing him to dare the question: ‘So, are you married then?’ with a shrug supposed to show how casual he felt about it.
Her answer, which she gave with an unflinching look, had been the flirtatious challenge: ‘Why, do you want to ask me for a date?’
‘You’d be lucky,’ he’d managed in reply, still sounding cool, but feeling far from it.
‘I’m separated,’ was her reply.
‘Sorry,’ he’d said. But their eyes were locked together and it was hard to ignore the mutual attraction.
‘Don’t be,’ she’d said. ‘I’m better off without him.
’ She’d broken eye contact at that, drawn in one last lungful from her cigarette, then flicked the butt high over the wall and out into the street on the other side.
‘So,’ she’d turned to face him, head a little to the side, hair brushing her bare shoulder, ‘where shall we go afterwards?’
‘Huh?’ he’d asked, not understanding.
‘On our date,’ she’d said.
Jo had waited in the restaurant till closing time when he’d taken her to the cramped bar the kitchen staff went to after hours for beer and vodka shots. ‘Don’t you have to go home?’ he’d wanted to know. ‘Don’t you have kids?’
‘They’re with their dad,’ she’d explained, buying yet another round of drinks, paying cash from her battered brown wallet, which was overstuffed with receipts and scraps of paper.
‘Anyway,’ she’d told him later, ‘I don’t like going home when I’m the only one there. I’d rather stay out.’
So, they went to someone else’s flat and drank more. ‘Don’t you ever get drunk?’ he’d asked her, leaning too heavily on her bare shoulders, until she’d just turned and kissed him, full on, mouth to mouth, sliding her hands straight into his cargos, as if she did this kind of thing all the time.
‘No,’ she’d replied after the kiss. ‘I’m very practised at pretending I’m drinking just as much as everyone else. I think I should take you home,’ she’d said against his ear. ‘Where do you live? I’ll get us a cab.’
They had snogged in the taxi all the way back to his flat, Jo running her hands over his soft hair, softer skin, feeling breathless, dizzy at the thought of getting him bare, solid and real against her.
But she’d had to help him out of the back of the cab, then she’d had to get his keys out of his pocket, unlock the door for him and get him up the stairs.
Once they were in his flat, he was still trying to kiss her but he could hardly stand up and she could see that for tonight he was a lost cause.
‘Too many shots. You made me nervous,’ he’d mumbled as she’d helped him out of his shoes and jacket, then put him into his unruly tangle of a bed, complete with the kind of grimy, flowery sheets she hadn’t encountered since uni.
After another deep kiss, his eyes had closed and he’d immediately fallen into a heavy, drunken sleep.
She’d searched for the kettle and tea bags in his kitchenette and made herself a mug of tea.
Sitting on the sofa with the hot drink, she’d wondered what on earth she was doing.
Getting someone many years your junior rolling drunk then taking them home was the kind of behaviour middle-aged men got into trouble for.
Was she having some sort of early mid-life crisis?
She’d called another cab then taken several minutes to decide what to write in the farewell note that she intended to put on the counter beside the kettle.
‘Sorry, I bought you a vodka too many.’ No. Too sinister.
‘This wasn’t what I’d planned.’ No… even more sinister.
What to write? ‘See you again’? ‘Give me a call’? She’d gone for the noncommittal:
Goodnight, Jo x
and her mobile number.
Before she left, she went through to his room.
To check he was OK, she told herself, but really to have another look.
Marcus was curled up on his side, snoring slightly.
His closed fist was up beside his face on the pillow and she saw the faded sweatband on his left wrist. There were two brown leather ties and a beaded one on the same wrist. It looked carefree and young – it reminded her of a long time ago, and she’d felt a glimmer of guilt.
She didn’t belong here, intruding on his sleep and his privacy.
So, she’d slung her bag over her shoulder, closed the door on his flat and decided to wait for her taxi downstairs.