Chapter 23
‘Finally. I was about to send a search party.’ Archie’s voice brings us both down to reality with a stark, treacherous little crash. Florian brushes his arm past mine, an innocent action but it still makes my cheeks sting.
Archie is standing by the sink, washing up the dinner plates. ‘Sorry, didn’t realise we’d been gone so long.’ I linger by the entrance, watching both men in my apartment feeling terrifyingly responsible for them both.
‘Where’s Inés?’ Florian hulks himself down on the sofa, his eyes darting around as if she might be hiding behind the table.
‘She left about twenty minutes ago, said she had work in the morning.’
‘Oh.’ Florian looks a little shocked. I think we were both banking on letting Inés dominate the remainder of the evening until we could both go.
‘Not a problem though, sure we can still have a nice time without her. You get the bottle?’
‘Here.’ I pull it out of my jacket pocket.
‘Well, open it then.’ Archie laughs at my awkwardness.
‘I’ll get the glasses, go sit down.’ I do as he says and choose the armchair; it feels perfectly isolating and separate.
Florian looks up at me; his hair is messier than it had been when we had left the apartment an hour ago and his fringe is falling over his eyebrows.
He looks slightly apologetic and for a moment I wonder if he wants to take it all back, but with one hand he gestures for me to breathe, to calm down and I know that he is simply thinking of a way that we can both get out of this evening with the least amount of damage.
We had walked back in this kind of heavy silence, drunk from touch, bodies aching and heavy from unfulfilment. When we neared the apartment, I had slipped my hand into his and pulled him to a stop.
‘I won’t say anything,’ Florian had answered before I even had the chance to ask.
I knew I needed to tell Archie, but tonight wasn’t the right time or place to break his heart.
So, I had nodded gratefully, smoothed down my hair and then his hair and took a deep breath before climbing up the flights of stairs back to him.
Archie pours out three measures and hands them around the table,
‘Cheers.’ He proffers up his glass and Florian and I awkwardly extract ourselves from our seats to meet him.
‘Santé.’ Florian offers his native alternative, but it feels wrong in this language too. Archie downs his measure with a theatrical gasp at the end and then roots into the cabinet behind us, pulling out a pack of cards I hadn’t realised were there.
‘A game?’
‘Of what?’
‘Strip poker?’ It takes a while for the joke to make itself evident on Archie’s face, it’s like there’s a lag as he looks up at me with a blank face until a small smirk appears. ‘Jesus, I’m only joking.’
‘Sorry, it’s just late, I’m tired.’ I make my move, pray that he might get the hint. I look to Florian who positions himself at the corner of the sofa, ready to leap up and grab his coat.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Sorry?’ I look at him, startled.
‘The game, a round of bullshit.’ Archie gestures to the cards, and I notice how hard my heart is pounding. I look at Florian who is once again miming at me to calm down.
‘Oh, I don’t remember how to play.’
‘Course you do, it’s easy.’ He starts to shuffle the cards, splitting the deck and running them through his hands, fanning and dividing, fanning and dividing until he snaps them back into one pile.
‘One game,’ Florian concedes. He has the cool head of someone who has found themselves in situations like this before, an attitude that I – a chronic, anxious overthinker – can only dream of.
Archie starts to deal out the cards.
‘You two okay? You look a little… flustered.’
‘No, we’re fine,’ Florian answers flatly.
‘Ah.’ Archie smirks. ‘Do it a lot, do you?’
‘Do what?’ I ask not liking how his words are slurring, how he looks bedraggled and undone like he has spent the last half an hour waiting impatiently, thinking of all of the things we could be doing.
‘Oh come on, you know.’ He takes another shot of whisky that I hadn’t seen him pour. ‘Use your dead husband’s café as an excuse to hook up… or is it the first time? I’m assuming you guys have fucked before, yeah?’
My head shoots up to Florian; his coolness has dissipated and his wide, panicked eyes scream at me to say something.
‘Archie…’ I try to find the words. I think of lying but what good would that do?
He knows, he’s not stupid, we must reek of it.
He throws his cards down, gets to his feet, his hands go to his head, his face lights up with a manic, exasperated laugh.
‘Fucking hell, you aren’t even going to deny it?
I thought you might have at least spun me a good line, Ava, told me something that I could have unravelled or at least believed for a couple of weeks!
’ He bends down to the table and pours himself another larger measure.
Florian’s hand hovers near it. I wonder if he’s going to say something, tell him that adding alcohol into this mess isn’t going to make anyone more coherent, but he thinks better of it.
‘I… don’t want to lie to you.’ I smooth my hair back with my hands and rest them on my temples.
‘No, you really are a decent person, you would just rather cheat on me instead.’ The word riles me a little; we exist together here, but before this weekend I didn’t give a shit if he was seeing someone else, in fact I encouraged it.
To call it cheating evokes images of sordid sexts and work colleagues. ‘It’s not cheating… we aren’t—’
‘Together?’ he finishes for me. ‘We aren’t together, right,’ he mutters and then rounds on the sofa, giving it a swift kick. ‘Are you actually serious right now, Ava?’
‘Look… It wasn’t her fault…’ Florian gets to his feet, his hands now trying their hardest to tell Archie to calm down, take it down a notch, but he fails miserably.
Archie’s attention fixes onto Florian. ‘You don’t get a say in this, you smug bastard, you got what you wanted so fuck off.’ I stand up then, take a step towards Archie.
‘Don’t speak to him like that!’
‘Did our conversation the other day mean nothing to you? I poured my heart out to you and you go and do this?’
‘I know, I know, I’m so sorry Archie. I never meant for it to happen…’
‘Oh give over, you don’t just slip and fall onto someone’s cock.’
Florian moves closer, putting himself between Archie and me.
‘It’s fine.’ I try to calm him down. ‘I didn’t…
we didn’t have sex.’ I shake my head. ‘It’s not this cold and calculated long drawn-out affair, it’s today, just today and things just got out of control, and we didn’t have time to really stop and think… ’
‘I’ve waited for you, Ava, for so long! Waited for you to be ready to commit, not pushed you, treated you well, picked up the phone whenever you wanted to moan about him and when finally you say you’re ready, when you let me in, you let him in as well!’
‘You haven’t done anything wrong, you did everything right.’
‘No, I was too fucking na?ve. Tried far too hard to be the nice guy. I never thought you could be such a bitch.’
The word hurls itself around the room and comes to rest by my feet. I go to look at Florian, warn him not to do it, but he isn’t there; instead he’s rushing at Archie, grabbing a handful of his shirt in his fist. They slam into the wall and a picture frame smashes on the floor.
‘You don’t talk to her like that,’ Florian spits, his voice almost terrifyingly quiet. I expect Archie to pale away from the confrontation, but his eyes light up a little.
‘I mean fair play, Florian, your brother’s Mrs, that was probably the reason Etienne never saw you back then, the poor guy knew what a sleaze you were.’ Florian tightens his grip.
‘You don’t say his name.’ He is losing his cool, unravelling.
‘Don’t say his name.’ He stabs him with a finger in the chest. Archie’s smirk doesn’t fade, I think he wants me to see it, wants me to see this side of Florian, but I have seen a side to Archie too, one that I would never have seen until it would have all been too late.
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Florian, let go.’ I watch his brow furrow as if I’m a million miles away, not standing an inch away from his ear. ‘Florian – please.’
He releases and stands back.
‘Fuck this.’ Archie holds his hands up, gathers his jacket, phone and the remainder of the bottle on the table. He goes to the front door and looks back at me. It’s only now that I see his eyes are rimmed with red. ‘And fuck you.’
The door slams behind him on his way out.
Florian and I both stare at the door for a moment, the sound echoing around the apartment for longer than it should. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
‘You should go too.’ I ignore his concern.
‘Me?’
‘Yes. It’s late and I’m tired and…’
‘What, so I leave and then you can avoid me for another week and then when we do see each other again, you’ll just pretend that nothing’s happened?’
‘Well, shouldn’t we?’ I turn on him.
He looks shocked, more shocked than when Archie had found us out. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it better if we pretended like it hadn’t?’
‘Are you fucking serious, Ava?’
‘Look, perhaps it’s best if we just have some space.’
‘Some space?’
‘Yes, space, and just some thinking time, you know? Look, Florian, I like you, I do, but we can’t seriously think this is going to do anything but backfire on us. I’m leaving in just over a week, Florian. Surely, it’s best if we don’t try to complicate things any further…’
‘Don’t use that excuse.’
‘Okay, well how about this one: you’re his brother, Florian, I’m his wife, in what world would this ever work?’
I watch as a darkness pours over his face, it was the same instinctive cloud that materialised when Archie had said Ettie’s name.
‘You know what? Fine.’ He grabs his phone and keys from the coffee table.
‘I’m done. You want time then you can have it, all of it.
’ He grabs his jacket and exits, leaving me alone in the apartment, wondering at what point in the night I managed to fuck it all up quite so catastrophically.