Any Way You Want Me (15 page)

‘You don’t know the in-jokes, the leches, the bores,’ I added, with feeling. ‘You don’t know who you have to be polite to and who you can afford to piss off.’

‘And then you have to pretend you don’t know any of the gossip you’ve heard about them,’ Mark said. ‘That Matthew guy who was round for dinner at ours the other week – apparently, he’s this incredible philanderer who—’

‘Oh, I know,’ I laughed. ‘The secretary from Features, wasn’t it?’

It was his turn to laugh. ‘I don’t know about her. I was told about some new assistant in the post room.’

I rolled my eyes and took another mouthful of vodka. I could feel it hitting the spot already, burning its way stealthily through my body. I was starting to relax now. Enjoy myself. I would tell Alex I’d bumped into one of the mums, I decided quickly. No rush to get back.

‘He’s such a creep, that Matthew,’ I said. ‘Do you know, at your dinner party, he was trying to play footsie with me all night. With poor Chloe sat just the other side of him!’

Mark feigned outrage. ‘He wasn’t!’

I nodded my head, indignant. ‘He was!’

Mark held my eye for a second. Then he asked, ‘What, playing footsie like this?’

Under the table, his foot started sliding gently up my leg.

I jolted as I felt it, stared at him in shock. I tried not to let out the gasp that rushed up through me.

He was smiling at me, his mouth crooked, blue eyes steady.

Alex, I thought guiltily. Then I remembered him slumped on our sofa reading the paper and not helping me bath the children. And I thought about hearing that woman – Nat – laughing down the phone with him the other night.

Two can play that game, I thought to myself. And I took a deep breath, held Mark’s gaze. ‘It was a bit . . . higher actually,’ I said.

‘What, more like . . . up here?’

He moved closer towards me. Under the table, his knee pressed hard against my thigh, and I gulped. His eyes never left mine. Teasing, challenging. He was so close, I could see the lines on his skin. What looked like a scar on his cheek. I could smell him. That spicy scent again.

A surge of lust powered right through me, obliterating Alex and everything else from my mind. I gripped the table. Took another breath. ‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to keep my voice casual. ‘Yeah, just there.’

‘Dirty old bastard,’ Mark said, looking amused. Then he slid his hand under the table to rest lightly on my knee.

‘Did he do this, as well?’ he asked. His mouth twitched. I wanted to touch it, suddenly. Press my finger between his lips. Just to see what it felt like. Just to see what he did.

I watched my knuckles turn white as they gripped the table tighter. My knee trembled where Mark’s hand lay on it. What was he going to do? Oh God, why did I have to be wearing these wretched tracksuit bottoms? Why couldn’t I be wearing something sexier, like . . . like a skirt and no knickers?

‘No,’ I said, after what seemed like hours. My mouth was dry. I raised my glass to it and gulped a mouthful, to hide my face as much as anything.

My fingers were shaking. The pit of my stomach felt hollow.

‘Better hope he’s sitting at another table at the Laurel Tree on Saturday, eh? ’Mark went on. His thumb was tracing slow, deliberate circles on my knee now, yet his face was impassive.

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said. My heart was banging around under my ribs. What was he doing? What was
I
doing, sitting here, letting him do it? Tell him to stop, tell him to stop, part of my brain was ordering my mouth. Tell him you’ve got to leave right now. Right now!

I didn’t say a thing. Couldn’t. I wanted him to go on touching me.

His fingers slid further up my leg. They were on my thigh. My skin felt clammy under the Adidas stripes. My knickers felt damp. My nipples were starting to ache from wanting him to touch them, run his fingers around them, take them into his mouth . . .

His watch bleeped under the table, a quiet, nothingy sound, but I almost jumped out of my skin. I was on the edge of my nerves, I realized, strung out as taut as piano wire.

‘I’m going to have to go,’ I said. My eyes locked with his.
Talk me out of it
, I was thinking.
Don’t let me go
.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said. He took his hand away and rested it on the table. I wanted to snatch it back. No, no, carry on! Carry on with that stroking thing. Don’t stop now!

The skin on my thigh was warm where he had touched it. I looked on helplessly as he drained his pint. His throat was exposed. I saw him gulp down his lager, watched him put down the empty glass.

‘You’ve got froth on your lip,’ I lied, reaching over to touch his face. I pretended to wipe it off, brushing my thumb along his mouth. His lips moved beneath my touch; they felt soft, different to Alex’s.

‘I really had better go now,’ I said, abruptly pulling away and standing up. ‘Before . . .’

‘Before something happens?’ he said. He stood up, came over to me. We were about two inches apart. ‘Something you might regret?’

I bit my lip. ‘Yes,’ I said hoarsely. I didn’t dare touch him again. I couldn’t let myself.

He lifted his hand, hesitated for a second, then ran a finger down my cheek. ‘I reckon it’s too late to stop, Sadie. It’s already started.’

‘Yes,’ I said again, frozen to the spot.

There was a pause where I wanted him to grab me and stop me going. He didn’t.

He cleared his throat. ‘So I’ll see you at the Laurel Tree, then,’ he said after a few moments, sounding strangely formal. ‘Saturday.’

‘Yes, you will.’ I nodded and started edging back towards the door. ‘Saturday. Bye.’

I walked quickly out of the pub, not looking back. Shock tremors were coursing through me. My heart was still thudding hard. Once I was out of the door, I ran for home as fast as I could.

Oh my God!

What had just happened? What had I done?

I had let him do that. I had let him touch me like that. Loving, faithful partners didn’t do that sort of thing, did they? Loving, faithful partners stayed well clear of men like Mark. I was a slut, a slapper. I was a bad person to have let him done that.

I wanted to cry suddenly, in shame. I wanted to wind back the hands of the pub clock, to when we first entered. What had I been thinking? Why had I gone along with it? I should have walked away as soon as he put his hand on me. Sorry, no, I don’t do that kind of thing. I think you’ve got the wrong person . . .

But I had done it.

Alex, I thought helplessly, with an ache of guilt. Alex, Alex, Alex. If Alex had sat there letting some woman run her hand all over his leg, I would have been really, shoutily pissed off. I would have gone completely tonto about it. And God, I hardly dared imagine Alex’s reaction if he’d seen me sitting there in my clingy T-shirt, doing nothing to stop Mark’s wandering hand.

I remembered the conversation I’d had with Anna the other week. The one where I was moaning that I wanted to feel like a sex kitten again. Well, I
had
felt like that again. I’d got what I’d wished for, hadn’t I?
Was
that what I had wished for?

Too late to stop, Mark had said in the pub, like that made everything OK. Like that was our excuse.
We couldn’t help ourselves. It just happened
. Pathetic, I’d always thought, whenever I’d read magazine articles where other people used those words. Pathetic! Of course you could have stopped yourselves! Yet now I knew how they felt. And it wasn’t as simple as that.

The worst thing was how much I’d liked it. How much I’d wanted him to carry on. My cheeks flamed. I’d seen the lust in his eyes. He’d been imagining taking me out the back, fucking me up against the steel barrels and beer crates, no doubt.

I wrapped my arms around myself suddenly. I’d been imagining that too.

Too late to stop
, he’d said, and blood roared in my ears as I heard him say it again, in my mind. I found that I was shaking my head. No. It wasn’t too late at all. Because of course I was going to stop it. Damn right I was going to stop it! Like I’d throw away my life with Alex and the children, and for what? A bit on the side? Housewife’s pleasure? No way.

I slowed to a jog. I had done a bad thing, but I wasn’t going to do it again.
See you Saturday
, he’d said, but he wouldn’t. I’d make some excuse, bottle it so that I didn’t have to see him at Alex’s work do. And that would be that. I never had to see him again.

I glanced at my watch as I ran and was shocked when I realized it was still early. I had only been out of the house for forty minutes. I couldn’t believe it. Time seemed to have been stretched out in the Albert. I felt as if we’d been there the whole evening, it had been so intense. So lust-driven. The very air between us had felt charged.

I raced back home and up the front steps, as if I was running away from
him
.

‘Only me,’ I yelled, bursting through the front door, kicking my trainers off in the hall. I ran straight upstairs, stripped off and got in the shower, washing the pub smoke from my hair as well as the treacherous scarlet flush from my cheeks.

Mark. I ran a soapy hand across my breasts and shuddered at the hardness of my nipples. A hand on my knee and I was a quivering mess. I had physically ached for him.

The thought made me feel sick now that I was back in my own home. It seemed like a dream, a weird kind of dream. Me and Mark – yeah, right. Time to wake up now, back in the real world.

The next evening, Cat and Tom came over for dinner, full of happy plans for moving in together and their India trip.

I put together an Indian-themed banquet for their benefit. Poppadoms and pickles, jasmine rice, a gloopy mustard-coloured dal, sag aloo, bhindi bhajis and a dodgy-looking vegetarian dhansak, plus as much beer as it was possible to cram into our fridge.

We clinked bottles of Kingfisher across the table. ‘Hey, you know that Molly was conceived in Goa, don’t you?’ I said conversationally. ‘So watch out. Must be something in the water.’

‘Probably just that I’m incredibly fertile though,’ Alex said, raising an eyebrow at me.

‘Oh, so are you saying Tom’s
not
incredibly fertile?’ Cat joked, arching an eyebrow in imitation.

I had been feeling antsy all day over the Mark thing, avoiding Alex’s eye and trying to act as if nothing untoward had happened. Now, for the first time all evening, I found myself smiling over at Alex, trying not to get teary-eyed at the thought of Molly as a little bud inside my belly. We hadn’t been able to take our hands off each other on that holiday, Alex and I. He had woken me up with his hard-on every morning and we’d panted and bucked and gasped under the thrumming ceiling fan each time. Then he’d untangled himself from the sheets and gone to shower while I lay there with my legs in the air, willing his sperm to do their thing. He would come back after a while, water dripping off his tanned body, and then we’d start all over again. We never once made it down in time for breakfast.

I forked some curry into my mouth. ‘Started house-hunting yet?’ I asked.

Cat and Tom exchanged glances, and she pulled a face. ‘We’re going to do that when we get back,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to decide what area to look in first, though.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Which is taking a bit of time to negotiate, shall we say.’

‘Ahh,’ said Alex. He caught Tom’s eye. ‘I see.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You want to stay in Battersea, Cat, and Tom wants to stay in Hammersmith.’

‘Correct,’ Cat said. ‘But I hate Hammersmith. I hate driving around it. The shops aren’t very good—’

‘What, and the shops in Battersea
are
? ’Tom put in at once. You could tell this was well-worn territory.

‘Why not compromise?’ I said, wiping a naan around my plate. ‘Putney is nice.’

‘Can’t afford it,’ Tom said at once.

‘The Bush, then,’ Alex said.

‘The Bush is a dump,’ Cat growled.

There was a momentary silence as everyone busily forked in another mouthful and avoided eye contact.

The CD ended and the room felt even more silent. Alex got up. ‘What does everyone fancy listening to?’ he asked, flipping through the CD rack. ‘Ahh, this’ll do.’

He pushed the CD tray into the machine and some familiar notes started up. Air,
Moon Safari
.

‘I love this album,’ Cat said at once.

I had gone off on another nostalgia trip. I loved this album too. It was the one that had been playing when I’d given birth to Nathan, upstairs, on my and Alex’s bed. It had been one of those glorious late September days, sun low in a perfect blue sky, leaves glowing russet and yellow on the trees. The student midwife had been rubbing my lower back. ‘Good choice,’ she’d said approvingly as the first song had started. ‘Saw them at Glastonbury once. So-o-o fab.’

I found myself getting tearful all over again, thinking of the moment just before Nathan had been born, when he’d been poised on the very edge of me. I could feel him there, perfectly balanced on the verge of coming into our lives, and had shut my eyes, breathed in more gas and air, braced for the final push. He had rushed out of me in a bloody slither.
It’s a boy!
I had cried, choking with happiness, clutching his wet, slippery limbs to me.
Alex, it’s a boy!

‘You all right, Sadie?’ Cat asked, noticing my glassy eyes.

I pulled myself up quickly. ‘Yeah, fine,’ I said. ‘This curry’s a bit on the hot side, that’s all. Making my eyes water.’

What was
wrong
with me? All this emotional reminiscing. It was as if my subconscious was trying to flag up all the best shared memories between Alex and me. All right, all right, I felt like telling it. I know. Mark was just a stupid mistake. A vodka-on-an-empty-stomach mistake, one not to be repeated. OK?

When we’d all finished eating, Cat helped me carry the plates and dishes into the kitchen.

‘Sadie,’ she said, and then stopped.

I turned to look at her. She was standing against the worktop, her arms still full of plates, green eyes anxious. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Sadie, has anything happened with that guy?’ she went on. Her eyebrows were at ten to two, cheeks pink from the beer.