Chapter 35
Rachel
Ingrid takes me out for cocktails, demands to know why I’ve been so morose of late.
After I tell her what happened with Lawrence, she looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a while, babe.’
For maybe the first time in my life, I find I do not want to hear the truth from Ingrid. Already I am flinching from the fear of what she might say.
‘Lawrence is a love-bomber.’
‘A what?’
‘You know: he’ll shower you with attention and affection until you let your guard down. And then he’ll be off. Nowhere to be seen. Speck of dust on the horizon. Classic.’
‘Classic what?’ I say doubtfully, thinking unexpectedly of my mother. I wonder if maybe she was a love-bomber, when she first met my dad.
Ingrid eyes me over the top of her negroni. ‘Just be careful,’ is all she says.
Last night, I went to see my father. He asked after Lawrence, so I ended up telling him, as well, what had happened between us.
I’d expected Dad might express some paternal wariness about Lawrence expecting too much, too soon. But instead, he surprised me by saying, ‘You need to move on from Josh, sweetheart. You chose to leave him so you could have a future.’
‘Right,’ I said uncertainly, even as I was thinking, But you loved Josh, Dad.
He spread his hands, wise old Dad, dispensing sage advice in his dressing gown from his fireside armchair. ‘So, it would be illogical to let Josh stop that from happening. Wouldn’t it?’
Two weeks pass. Lawrence doesn’t call, or text. His office is empty whenever I walk past it at work, and he hasn’t responded to any of my tentative emails to him either.
One night, though, I am working late when I notice his office light is on. It has been dark and deserted all day, so I guess he’s just returned from meetings off-site somewhere.
I take a breath, then leave my cubicle and go to knock on his door.
He looks up. He is sitting behind his desk, tie loose, tapping on the upgraded Nokia work gave him last month.
Through the glass, our eyes meet.
He doesn’t smile. But he does beckon me in.
‘What’s this?’ he says with a sigh, when I set a bottle bag on his desk. I’ve had it with me for a couple of days, waiting for the right moment to give it to him.
‘Single-vineyard shiraz. I’m reliably informed it’s a good one.’
It cost more than I’ve spent on a bottle of wine in my entire life. Not that it’s about the money. But I do want him to know how sorry I am.
He folds his arms, settles back in his chair, doesn’t go near the bag. ‘Yeah? What’s the occasion?’
‘The occasion of me wanting to make it up to you. I am sorry, Lawrence.’
Silence spills through the room. Neither of us moves.
Eventually, he says, ‘Do you have your HR hat on right now, HR?’
I smile cautiously. ‘Nope.’
He nods down at the bottle. ‘Better crack that open, then.’
We drink wine by the light of his desk lamp. The whole building is silent, save for the faint whirr of static from idling photocopiers. Beyond the glass doors of Lawrence’s office, the rest of the vast space is an open ocean of black.
Lawrence still has one of those giant leather-edged ink blotters, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen him write with a fountain pen. Behind his desk, there are lots of framed training certificates for things like capital markets and financial modelling, operational risk.
He follows my eye, smiling faintly. ‘I get jealous, sometimes. Of all the guys here with framed photos of their wives and kids on their desks. A solid pass in preventing financial crime isn’t quite the same, is it?’
I have really missed you, I think. It surprised me, actually, when we stopped speaking, just how hard his absence hit. Like going cold turkey from a drug you didn’t know you were hooked on.
‘Lawrence . . .’ I say.
He nods once, then waits.
‘I obviously don’t see you as “just” someone from the office.’
‘Is it obvious, though?’ His green eyes are a jungle, dark and impenetrable. ‘I mean, that is what you said, when you thought I wasn’t listening.’
He’s not about to make this easy on me, which is fair enough. ‘I was protecting Josh’s feelings.’
Tilting his glass to the light, he takes a long sip. ‘Why?’
I swallow. I promised myself before I came in here that I would be as honest as I could.
‘We were married . . . I guess it felt like a sensitive subject. And you and me . . . It’s taken me time to adjust, to the idea of being in a serious relationship again.
Because we did always say we were just having fun.
Not swapping keys, and saying I love you and—’
‘Rachel, don’t get me wrong,’ Lawrence says, leaning forward in his swivel chair, fixing me with earnest eyes.
‘I was more surprised than anyone when I realised I was having those feelings for you. But don’t you think that means it’s real?
Isn’t that the most pure kind of emotion there is?
Something that appears out of nowhere? That catches you completely off-guard? ’
I wonder if I agree, or if Lawrence is in fact talking about lust. A commotion of chemicals, our body’s way of bypassing our brains. Wilf lectured us all about this once over dinner, only piping down when Ingrid snapped a breadstick in half and lobbed both pieces at his head.
‘We can be something, Rachel,’ Lawrence insists. ‘I know we can.’
He gets to his feet, comes round to my side of the desk and bends down to kiss me, murmuring, ‘God, I’ve missed you so much.
’ He tips my face up between his hands. I part my lips, let him in.
His mouth is supple and smoky from the wine, the kiss so vigorous it feels almost territorial, and my heart is going berserk now and all the chemicals Wilf was talking about are shooting through my bloodstream, and I think, Fuck it, and fuck you, Wilf, and your bullshit dopamine cocktail theories.
Lawrence is right – this is too good, we’re too good, and I’m sick of always being sensible.
Right now, as Lawrence kisses me, Dad’s perspective is speaking louder to me than Ingrid’s love-bomb warning. Because, okay – maybe I haven’t fully let my guard down with Lawrence yet. But does that mean we don’t have something great, something worth fighting for?