The Family Remains(23)
I use the bathroom and then return to the living room, where Joe is putting my water glass in the dishwasher.
‘I’m in town’, I say, ‘for another couple of nights. I’m staying in Northalsted. If you wanted to meet up, maybe, for dinner? Or just drinks? You have my number, I suppose. In your phone. Just call. Or message.’
I read his face for his response. I see something flicker across it: a kind of dark dread. It makes me want to slap him.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yes. Maybe. Though I’m kind of booked up. But if I think of anything else, about Finn, I’ll drop you a message.’
I smile grimly. No more of the Hugh Grant. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Well, anyway, thanks for your time.’
I leave Joe there loading his dishwasher in his bare feet and I let the door slam closed loudly. I picture him on his phone, calling Lyle, saying, ‘Whoa, that guy was intense. I think I’m gonna block him.’ I feel a throb of rage across my temples. I breathe it away and I order an Uber.
While I wait for it to arrive, I stand across the street and stare up at the bay window inside which, I now know, sits Phin’s double bed. A moment later I see Joe’s face appear at the bay. I raise a hand to him. Just for fun.
21
February 2017
Rachel and Michael honeymooned in the Seychelles two months after Michael’s proposal. ‘I’m not getting any younger’ had been his rationale for a short engagement. They had a small wooden house on stilts over an azure sea filled with colourful coral and ribboning fish, a private plunge pool on the deck and a double-ended bath with a glass bottom. They drank champagne every morning with their breakfasts of fresh fruit and fish and slept the days away on hammocks and loungers. And, as any good honeymooners, should – particularly honeymooners who have known each other only a few months – they spent quite a lot of their time having sex.
Sex with Michael had always been calmer than Rachel had anticipated during those heady few days of expectation before their first date. She had appreciated this at the outset as it had helped build her trust in him, helped her to feel safe and secure with a man who’d appeared in her life from nowhere. But now, three months into their relationship, with a ring on her finger and actual paradise on their doorstep, Rachel had hoped that things might start to develop into something more … complex, something that more met her needs. Because Rachel was fine with vanilla sex on the whole, but she did not want to spend the rest of her life having sex only one way. And yes, she should probably have had this conversation with Michael before she agreed to marry him, but things had still been so sweet then, in those early days, so precious and delicate. And then her focus had switched to the exact filigree of her antique-lace wedding dress, the last inch she wanted to carve off her hips, the precise cut of the yellow diamond of her engagement ring and the carat count of Michael’s wedding band. It had been on scouring the internet for the most perfect Seychellois resort and trying to find shoes in a size nine to fit Dominique’s late-pregnancy-swollen feet. Sex had been an afterthought, a nice thing that she and Michael did at the end of every day that soothed and reassured them both that they weren’t doing anything stupid, marrying so soon after meeting.
But now there was nothing left to think about other than sex. Sex and food. And she was bored now, bored of the soft thrusting and gentle caresses and his face buried lovingly in her hair. She thought about the man she’d seen on the internet, the man in the photo who looked as though he expected to be in control of everything and she thought that surely he would like to be in control of her. Sometimes. Not all the time. But sometimes.
After dinner on their third day, Rachel felt the bottom of her suitcase for the package she had brought with her from London. The silken ropes. The switch. The underwear that didn’t come from Victoria’s Secret. She took out the objects – all brand new – and she laid them by the side of the bed.
Then she waited for Michael to appear from the shower. His gaze didn’t alight upon the objects for a few moments and there was a messy episode of banal conversation that threatened to deaden the mood. But then his gaze found the objects and she watched him closely to gauge his reaction. First of all, an uncertain smile; then a small burst of laughter. Then a wide-eyed glare of recognition, followed by a ‘Whoa!’
Rachel couldn’t tell what the whoa meant. She waited a beat.
‘Are you …?’ He looked from the objects to Rachel and back again. ‘Is that …?’
‘I just thought … I mean … Is it something you’d like to try?’
Michael put a hand against his chest. ‘Me? You mean, you tie me?’
‘No. You tie me.’
‘And then I—?’ He picked up the switch and ran it across the palm of his hand. ‘I do this?’ He swished it against his hand, once, then twice. ‘To you?’
‘Erm. Yeah.’
‘Whoa,’ he said again, before unleashing a throaty laugh. ‘Well, my goodness me.’
Rachel held her breath. She could not tell where this was heading but she knew that it would end up somewhere different to anywhere they’d ever been before and that there’d be no going back to the innocence of earlier days.
‘Have you ever …?’
‘Er, no. No, no. Never. I never have.’ He shook his head decisively. ‘Nope.’