Chapter 10
TEN
We ride the lift in the sort of silence you could slice with a knife. I get out first. He follows me to my door, standing a little too close for comfort while I fish for my key. ‘Not exactly a Malibu mansion,’ I swipe a hand around once we’re inside, ‘but I like it.’
He studies me a little analytically for a moment, then he says, ‘Very nice indeed.’ Though he hasn’t even looked.
What is it about having a stranger in your personal living space? Just your person, and his person, barely the distance of a Fisher & Paykel stove? ‘Shall we sit?’ I say, my tone clipped. ‘Get started?’
He doesn’t move. His eyes travel up my twenty-feet walls, with their two enormous, stacked windows that look out onto palm trees whose leggy green fronds dance and crackle like party bunting in the breeze. ‘How did you find this place?’ he asks. I realise I’m clutching my car keys, so I set them down on the round travertine dining table.
I suppose we’re back to doing more of the small talk that degenerates into insults and then rage.
‘Quite by chance.’ I try to loosen enough to breathe. ‘I saw a lot of places in my budget on Airbnb that were closer to the water, but they were much older buildings, and most didn’t even have in-unit laundry. And then, right when I was giving up hope… up came this.’
I rest a hand on the back of the dining chair, feeling myself waver a little under the weight of his scrutiny. Revisiting that dilemma in any way, shape or form – can I really stay here and rent myself an apartment for a few months, or am I obliged to fly back home with my husband who most likely cheated on me? – is not something I relish doing, so I find myself waffling on…
‘Nineteen blocks from the beach – so very walkable. There’s a bike lane that goes right down Broadway to the ocean. Also, I’m just a ten-minute walk to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.’
‘You’d have made a great real estate agent,’ he says, then adds, ‘seems perfect for one.’
It’s a harmless observation and not untrue, but there’s nothing incidental about the way he looks at me when he says it. Nothing incidental at all.
‘What’s up there?’ He flicks his head to the wrought-iron spiral staircase.
What’s this? The Invasion of the Home Snatchers? My vocal cords can’t seem to negotiate the words, ‘my bedroom’, so I settle for, ‘Nothing much. Just the, er… the upstairs.’
He tips his head back, feigns great interest in the crystal chandelier and I am almost incapacitated by his suffocating presence. ‘Seems a little too cool for you somehow.’
There’s a stripe of red across his cheekbones where he must have caught the sun yesterday. That hair of his never seems to look combed. ‘Who says I’m not cool?’
‘Because I spent a whole morning hanging out with you yesterday,’ he smirks. ‘Trust me, you’re not cool.’
While I flail around for an appropriately insulting comeback, he walks over to my fridge, reaches in, pulls out a beer. What the…? I watch him twist off the top, sink half of it in one go. ‘You’re not having one?’ He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.
‘So good of you to offer. But no.’
My eyes follow him like a moving target as he walks past me, over to my sofa, sits himself down. He sets the bottle on the blond, acacia-wood coffee table, leans back, clasps his hands behind his head. His white cotton shirt strains across his chest, and I have no idea why my eyes shoot to his crotch, but oh my God why did they have to do that? I’m almost certain he saw. ‘Do you have any snacks?’ he asks, almost a little saucily, like he’s throwing out a challenge.
‘Snacks.’ I slap my temple. ‘How stupid of me. I didn’t realise we were doing happy hour. I’m afraid I don’t have any snacks. I’m just not really a snacky person.’ I shrug. ‘Sorry.’
He nods, his eyes dropping to my feet in my black flipflops, my pink toenails, which makes me want to curl my toes up to get away from his eyes. Then he says, ‘The woman he cheated with was probably a snacky person. She probably wasn’t as beautiful as you, or as witty as you, and she couldn’t possibly be as uptight as you, but I’d like to bet she kept a ready supply of trail mix for whenever the occasion called for it.’
When I can recover from the fact that he just called me beautiful, I say, ‘What makes you think he cheated?’
He picks up the remote and turns on the TV. ‘Didn’t he?’ He clicks onto the big red Netflix logo. Now he’s scrolling through my viewing history – WTF !
‘Maybe it was me,’ I say. ‘Maybe I cheated.’
‘Nah,’ he says, his eyes not leaving the screen.
My heart is back to hammering again. ‘Er… Why is that so hard to believe, if I might ask? That it was me?’ I frown. ‘And what exactly are you doing, by the way?’ He’s just seen I’m on episode six of Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story . About a wife who murders her cheating husband in cold blood. As well as the damned movie poster for Love for Lara . We are both staring at a close-up of the two gorgeous young stars’ faces.
I am waiting for him to say something, but, instead, he puts the remote down, looks me candidly in the eye again. ‘You seem like an honourable person, Moira. That’s why I don’t think it was you.’
Honourable. It should be a compliment. It’s meant as one, I think. But the word just jumps in line with all the others I’ve recently supplied about myself: upright, modest, honest. Chump. Laughingstock. Doormat.
He whips me up and down with his eyes again. ‘Don’t let me be the one with all the great ideas, but we could order some food. You know, given it’s after lunch, and you’ve got no snacks in.’
I don’t know where my possibly massive overreaction hails from – I can almost hear imaginary sirens pumping out a warning: meltdown, meltdown – but I shoot a finger to the door. ‘You know, it might be a really great idea if you leave.’ My heart is performing an ungodly hammering. Even my arm is trembling.
‘What did I do?’ he asks, like he genuinely has no idea.
I continue to stand there, arm outstretched, trying to steady my gaze on the tip of my finger. ‘Please,’ I repeat. ‘I’d really like… I just really need you to go now.’ I try to say it as assertively as I can, but my voice is a hot pool of emotion.
He continues to sit there, which makes my adrenaline whoop up a frenzy, a strange push-pull inside me. Rupert, you bastard. You did this. I am only here, in this strange apartment, in this strange city, with this stranger planted on my sofa, because I can’t go home. I can’t look you in the eye when I’m so convinced you are lying to me.
I’m conscious of him picking up his beer bottle, of him standing. There’s a very confusing conflict running rife inside me now that it seems he really is leaving. He moves past me, making a point of being in no great hurry, the slightly rakish swagger of someone playing to an invisible audience. I keep my eye on my fingertip, but my senses are hyper-tuned to his every micromovement as he places the bottle down on the travertine table.
But instead of heading to the door, he turns. A halting of his course that I’m not expecting. A tingle of energy runs wild down my back as he proceeds to walk towards me until my finger is poking him in the chest – a shocking electromagnetic current that makes my hand fall away to my side.
He takes one step forward closing the distance, his eyes conducting a lazy enquiry of my face. That one step is all it takes.
I have no idea how heat-seeking missiles operate. But I am on him like a human one.
Hands clamping around the back of his head, leg trying to hitch itself to his hips. Kissing his eyes, his ears, his nose, his neck. Inhaling the hoppy, deodoranty scent of him. Tasting the salty tang of his sweat. A new man’s taste and smell, not Rupert’s. A new man’s body with its unfamiliar topography beneath my hand. He makes a murmur of incredulity and pleasure when my hands travel south and I pluck, with ferocity, at his belt buckle. A stopping. Brief, like the relaxation between heartbeats. A chance to turn back that neither of us takes. Instead, he grabs me hard by the waistband of my jeans, yanks my hips into his bulging crotch, pops the top button. It’s him kissing me now. Deeply. Passionately. Probing and consuming me. The sort of kiss that fires nerve endings I didn’t know I had. His thumb draws circles around my belly button, dipping in and out, his lips blazing a trail down my throat. I am throbbing between my legs. As though he feels it, he mutters, ‘Jesus. Fuck,’ and then he rips my zipper down. I suddenly realise that God didn’t invent the chaise longue if not to use it, so I push him backward until we fall on it together.
This thing is rock hard.
And the chaise isn’t exactly well-sprung either.
He flips me onto my back, easily, like I’m a page he’s turning, then proceeds to undress me. My jeans stick and resist as he yanks them down, and I modestly try to hang on to my little white knickers. Once he shakes my last foot free, his eyes home in on my hand clutching the triangle of damp cotton. A smile, like he’s decoding new information about me. He plucks my hand away, surprises me by upturning my palm and drawing his thumb along my lifeline, like he’s identifying the site of a scar. Then he climbs on top of me, looks down at my face. A question in his eyes. Are we definitely doing this?
I throw my legs around his rib cage.
Yes, we definitely are.