A Lady Under Siege(94)

“The plan is to get to know each other.”

Meghan chose her words carefully. “Some things I know about you make it difficult to really imagine it could work out.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way you drink, and smoke. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take a page from Sylvanne. I was so impressed with the way she just laid out her conditions. I’m going to lay down mine. First and foremost, no substance abuse.”

“Well of course no substance abuse. No one likes abuse,” Derek answered. “But there’s also substance use—substances in small doses can actually be good. A glass of wine with dinner, an occasional puff of weed after a stressful day—that’s substance use. It’s moderate, and medicinal.”

“Don’t try to weasel out of it.”

“I’m not weaseling, I’m negotiating.”

“Okay, I’ll be more specific. No drinking to get drunk, and no drugging just to get stoned. No partying your face off, in other words. No drugs harder than pot—”

“I don’t do anything harder than pot anyway.”

“—and no pot around Betsy, or me for that matter. It’s the smoke I hate. I’d love it if you quit smoking.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Miss Meghan.”

“Not really. I’m already compromising on the pot. You can still sneak off and do it sometimes. Medicinally. Although what you have to be stressed about, I don’t know. You don’t even have a job.”

“I don’t need a job. I own this place, and I have money making money, not a lot, but enough to keep me out of the rat race.”

“Must be nice,” she said.

He brought his legs up to give her more space on the couch. She leaned back and rested her chin between his knees, looking at the playful smile on his broad face.

“I feel like quitting smoking, just to show you I can,” he said.

“It’s more the booze, really.”

“No no, if I’m going to do it, do it right. Do it big. Booze, drugs, cigarettes—I’ll tackle the whole shebang. Besides which, if we’re going to hold hands and walk into the future, then Betsy will be there too, and she might want to hold my hand sometimes, and you’ll have my other hand, and then, how would I smoke?”

“Exactly,” she laughed. “It’s not possible.”

“So it’s necessary I quit smoking, whether you want me to or not.”

She kissed his knee happily, then made a face. “Your jeans don’t taste very good,” she said. “They’re quite dirty, now that I look at them.”

“I’ll wash them more often. You see? I’m agreeing to conditions before you even express them. I must really like you.”





49





Of all his vices Derek found nicotine the hardest to wean himself from, but after two weeks he could think about a cigarette without his teeth clenching with the craving of it. He hired a cleaning service and two meticulous women came to scrub his house from top to bottom for three days straight, and he arranged for one of them to come back every Thursday afternoon to keep it ship-shape. He stocked his kitchen properly, and started to cook, not just for himself, but for Meghan and Betsy. Sometimes they came over to his house to eat, but usually he carried the meal over to their place. Very quickly this became a routine, and after a month, with Meghan’s approval, he built a gate in the fence between their back yards to speed the passage from kitchen to kitchen. One night at dinner he joked that they should just knock a hole in the shared wall between their townhouses and have one big place together. Betsy was very excited by that idea, and thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to show off to her friends that the two homes, so normal from the street, shared an amazing secret. “Let’s do it!” she cried.

“I hate to be the party pooper,” Meghan told her. “But it’s a bit too rash and permanent at this stage.”

“Maybe someday though,” Derek said. “Then we could tear down the fence and have one big back yard, too.”

“Yes! Awesome!” Betsy yelped. “We could even play proper badminton.”

Meghan smiled. “Why do I always feel outnumbered by you two?”

“We operate on the same wavelength,” Derek said.

ON THE SIXTH-WEEK ANNIVERSARY of his smoke-free sobriety he showed up on Meghan’s back deck on a Friday afternoon and came in the kitchen without knocking. He had a handful of documents. “I need to you fill these out and sign them,” he said.