“It’s fine!” protested John-Paul, holding on to the edge of his plate with his fingertips. “I was quite enjoying it.”
Cecilia pulled his plate away. “No, you weren’t.” She avoided his eyes. She hadn’t made eye contact with him since he’d come home. If she behaved normally, if she let life just continue on, wasn’t she condoning it? Accepting it? Betraying Rachel Crowley’s daughter?
Except wasn’t that exactly what she’d already decided to do? To do nothing? So what difference did it make if she was cold toward John-Paul? Did she really think that made a difference?
Don’t worry, Rachel, I’m being so mean to your daughter’s murderer. No lamb roast for him! No sirree!
Her glass was empty again. Gosh. That went down fast. She took the bottle of wine from the fridge and refilled it to the very brim.
Tess and Connor lay on their backs, breathing raggedly.
“Well,” said Connor finally.
“Well indeed,” said Tess.
“We seem to be in the hallway,” said Connor.
“We do seem to be.”
“I was trying to get us to the living room at least,” said Connor.
“It seems like a very nice hallway,” said Tess. “Not that I can see all that much.”
They were in Connor’s dark apartment, lying on the hallway floor. She could feel a thin rug beneath her back, and possibly floorboards. The apartment smelled pleasantly of garlic and laundry powder.
She’d followed him home in her mother’s car. He kissed her at the security door to the building, then he’d kissed her again in the stairwell, and for quite a long time at the front door, and then once he got the key in the door, they were suddenly doing that crazy, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off, banging-into-walls thing that you never do once you’re in a long-term relationship because it seems too theatrical and not really worth the bother anyway, especially if there’s something good on TV.
“I’d better get a condom,” Connor had said in her ear at a crucial point in the proceedings, and Tess said, “I’m on the pill. You seem disease-free, so, just, please, oh, God, please, just go right ahead.”
“Rightio,” he said, and did just that.
Now Tess readjusted her clothes and waited to feel ashamed. She was a married woman. She was not in love with this man. The only reason she was here was because her husband had fallen in love with someone else. Just a few days earlier this scenario would have been laughable, inconceivable. She should be filled with self-loathing. She should feel seedy and slutty and sinful, but actually what she felt right now was . . . cheerful. Really cheerful. Almost absurdly cheerful, in fact. She thought of Will and Felicity and their sad, earnest faces just before she threw cold coffee at them. She recalled that Felicity had been wearing a new white silk blouse. That coffee stain would never come out.
Her eyes adjusted, but Connor was still just a shadowy silhouette lying next to her. She could feel the warmth of his body all along her right side. He was bigger, stronger and in much better shape than Will. She thought of Will’s short, stocky, hairy body—so familiar and dear, the body of a family member, although always sexy to her. She had thought Will was the last bullet point in her sexual history. She had thought she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else for the rest of her life. She remembered the morning after she and Will were engaged, when that thought had first occurred to her. The glorious sense of relief. No more new, unfamiliar bodies. No more awkward conversations about contraception. Just Will. He was all she needed, all she wanted.
And now here she was, lying in an ex-boyfriend’s hallway.