Chapter 8 #2
‘Got you, got you.’ He was looking at the tins, tucking his hair behind his ears, frowning a little, working out how much cake batter would be needed, and she couldn’t resist curling into him again and licking his neck. ‘Get off!’ he told her again. ‘We aren’t going to get anywhere like this.’
‘Couldn’t you bake naked?’ she asked him. ‘No, naked apart from an apron, maybe? I have this butcher’s one. Very macho.’
‘You are a filthy old woman,’ he repeated, but then got hold of the hem of his T-shirt and pulled the top off over his head and threw it onto a kitchen chair.
‘How about topless baking, will that keep you happy? Obviously if a health inspector turns up at the door, I’m in big trouble.
’ He picked up a bag of flour and began to shake it carefully into the scales.
Much as Jo wanted to run her hands all over his bare skin and pull him down to the floor on top of her, she restrained herself. ‘I’m going to sit down over here and just watch you, OK?’ she told him. ‘The topless chef.’
‘OK.’ Without taking his eyes from the scales he added: ‘Obviously, if you want to touch yourself, I’m fine with that.’
She bunched his T-shirt up into a ball and threw it at him.
‘What do you like about me so much anyway?’ he asked, heaping sugar on top of the flour.
‘You mean apart from your fabulous body and what you do with it?’ Jo smiled.
‘I know it’s hard to look beyond that,’ Marcus joked back, clearly flattered.
Jo put her elbow up on the kitchen table, leaned her head on her hand and considered her reply.
‘You’re like a début album by a band I’ve never heard of,’ she said finally. ‘That’s what I like about you.’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, Simon was a greatest hits compilation I’d heard thousands of times before… and you are not. That’s what I like so much about you.’
‘I see,’ Marcus said.
‘I never cheated on Simon,’ she felt the need to add.
‘Last year, I thought about cheating on him a lot. In fact, I thought about it constantly,’ she confessed.
‘The postman, the Frenchman behind the counter at the deli always going on about his amazing saucisson, just about everyone in my office, including the Fashion girls, Mel’s very handsome teacher, you name them, I had a bedroom fantasy about them,’ she laughed at her confession.
‘Simon and I were so fed up and so pissed off with each other, one of us was bound to go off and have an affair,’ she added.
‘I thought it would be more grown-up to split before that happened, rather than after.’
‘And his new bird?’ Marcus asked.
Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t think that happened before we split. She was his shoulder to cry on and things developed from there. I’ve no reason not to believe him… and anyway if they were seeing each other before, do I need to know that? Probably not.’
Marcus broke eggs. She liked the way he did it: with a deft flourish, a twirl of forefinger and thumb before tossing the shells into the sink.
‘I’m much more interested in you, Marcus,’ she said. ‘Why are you here? In a crap kitchen, baking a cake for a little girl you haven’t even met?’
‘I dunno,’ he answered. ‘Maybe you’re like the first new release in a decade by one of those great bands from the Eighties.’
‘Oh God!’ she burst into laughter, ‘I was a child in the Eighties. A mere child!’
Marcus cubed butter with a small knife and slid the pieces into the mix.
‘I hardly know anything about you,’ she went on. ‘Have you got brothers or sisters? I don’t even know that and I’m sleeping with you.’
He turned to give her a little grin. ‘Début album, remember, band you’ve never heard of…’ but then he answered, ‘I’ve got a younger brother.’
‘Me too,’ she said.
‘Yours first,’ Marcus said, turning on the mixer.
‘He’s called Matt,’ she said over the whirring, ‘he’s thirty-one, he works in the oil business, married, one son, currently living in the States.’
‘But do you like him? Is he a nice guy?’ Marcus asked.
Jo sighed. It was a tricky question, tricky subject: ‘Not much, I suppose. I liked him when he was small, but he got more and more annoying with each passing year.’
Marcus switched the blender off and checked the mix: ‘My brother’s cool,’ he threw in. ‘He’s a chef too. Works in a luxury resort in Africa.’
‘Nice one,’ she said.
‘I’m thinking about going out there for the summer,’ he said, and licked the back of the teaspoon he had dipped into the mix to assess it.
‘Sounds good,’ she said.
‘He says it’s busy, but good pay and you can drink under the stars every night, swim in the lake every morning. We’ll maybe do a bit of travelling together once the season’s over.’
‘When does the season start?’ she couldn’t help asking. It was mid-May now.
‘Middle of June,’ was Marcus’s reply.
Middle of June. She smiled at him. So, the Marcus question – the Marcus situation – looked as if it was going to resolve itself.
Nicely, casually, just as easily as it had begun.
Except… she didn’t think that it would be just nothing to wave him goodbye.
Yesterday, she’d thought this was just casual, a fling, as easy to end as it had been to begin.
But today, she knew that if he went away, it would hurt.
‘Why don’t you come?’ he offered, pouring cake mix from the bowl into the tins.
But this just made her laugh.
‘Me? Ha. No,’ she ran a hand through her hair, ‘Nice of you to ask, but, you may not have noticed’ – she waved her hand about – ‘I have children, this big job thing… career, I think it’s called, my house, my mortgage, my divorce to sort out. So, no, I can’t just pack my beach bag and—’
‘Fuck it,’ Marcus said. He was shaking each cake tin in turn, gently, settling the mixture to an even level: ‘Once the summer holidays start, just come over, you and the girls, swim, get tanned, live in my beach hut with me.’
‘Aha.’ For one long, lovely moment, as he pushed the cake tins into the oven, she allowed herself to think about it: Mel and Nettie on the beach all summer long, Marcus, wood-brown and naked, rolling over in bed towards her, hair curly and tangled, bleached in the sun. And then: cut.
‘No,’ she smiled, ‘I don’t think we can come… But you probably have to go.’
‘Why?’ He crouched down beside her and slid a hand up her leg.
‘Because you can,’ she replied, hands on his shoulders squeezing the muscle there. ‘Because you’re twenty-six and footloose and have all these adventures ahead of you. God, when I was twenty-six, I was so boring. I’m boring myself just thinking about it. I wish I’d done so many more crazy things.’
‘Not so boring now,’ he said, brushing his lips against hers, undoing buttons so he could touch her bare skin, ‘I’ve set the timer for forty-five minutes. Although I’ll skewer after thirty-five. What can we do in thirty-five minutes?’
His fingers were already inside her bra. He was kissing her stomach and moving downwards.
‘Make icing?’ she replied.
‘Oh, yeah. I want to make icing with you.’
Could she go? She wondered. For a summer holiday? To Africa… just to see what might come next?