International Player(45)

Twenty-Five





Noah


I pulled a beer out of the fridge and took a seat next to Rob on the sofa with a sigh. I’d hoped Truly would be at Abigail and Rob’s when I dropped around.

I still wasn’t sure what had happened to make her ditch me at brunch. I’d tried to call her, but she hadn’t picked up. And the few messages that I’d sent had been met with a combination of silence and one-word responses.

“What does it mean if a woman goes cold on you?” I asked aloud, then wished I hadn’t as Rob shifted, a smile curling his lips.

“Who’s gone cold on you? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“I’m talking hypothetically.”

“Yeah, of course you are. Tell Uncle Rob all your worries.” He shuffled in his seat to face me.

“I don’t have worries. Not with women. Not with anything.”

Rob took a sip of his beer, content with my response. He knew it was true. Except while it wasn’t exactly a worry, I struggled to understand what had happened with Truly.

“So if I take a woman to brunch. We’re there, everything’s perfectly fine until . . . another woman approaches.”

“Did she throw a drink at you?”

“Who? The woman I was at brunch with?”

“No, the one who approached your table. She was an ex, I assume.”

“Yeah. We weren’t serious. Only lasted a couple of weeks. But no, no drinks were thrown. We exchanged a few words, it was all perfectly amicable and then all of a sudden T—the woman I was with decided she had to leave.”

“Did she say why?”

“She’d forgotten she had to do something at work, which was clearly bullshit because it was Sunday, right?”

Rob nodded. “Yeah. Unless . . . did she get a phone call or message or anything?”

“Nope. Everything was fine. One minute we were flirting. The next minute—boom she’d left.”

“Was this other woman who approached you flirting? Were you flirting back?”

I grimaced. “No!” The idea that I would flirt with Ginny was crazy. I’d never embarrass Truly like that.

“Maybe she thought you were.”

Truly was no idiot. Could she have been jealous of some woman who meant nothing to me? I didn’t pretend to be celibate, and I’d told her that Ginny was from New York. Even if I was dating Ginny, it had been Truly’s idea not to have monogamy as part of our arrangement anyway. Jealousy didn’t make sense. Ginny was firmly in my past. I was at brunch with Truly because she was who I wanted to be with. There was no one else I’d rather spend time with.

Shit. I’d not thought about it like that before. Truly was the person I wanted to spend my Sunday with. Wanted to spend every night with. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like that about any woman. But then I’d never fucked a friend before.

A knock at the door and my heart began to pound. It had to be Truly. Who else called around on a Monday night? I could ask her face-to-face if it was her, clear this up between us.

“That’s Lev,” he said, getting up.

“Your brother?”

“Yeah. He’s passing through on his way to . . .” He paused and narrowed his eyes. “No idea.”

I’d met Levison a couple of times. Once at university when he’d come to visit, and another time at Rob and Abigail’s wedding. My main impression was that he was a cocky little shit who acted as if he was Rob’s older brother rather than five years younger.

“Hey,” I said, getting up as he came into the room. He was taller than I remembered, dressed in an expensive suit which he filled out well—he’d been quite lanky back when I’d last seen him.

“Noah, I wasn’t expecting to see you. Congratulations on the float of Concordance Tech.” We shook hands, his grip firmer than I expected, an expensive watch on his wrist. “You bumming around for a bit?”

“Working on a few things. What are you up to?”

“Private equity. Set up my own fund.”

That was impressive at any age, but before thirty? “Going well?”

“Harder you work, the bigger the reward, right?” he said. “We should talk. Have a meeting. See what we can do together.”

Rob pushed a beer into his brother’s hand. “Enough of the office talk, Lev. I want to relax, not watch a pissing contest.”

Lev was no competition as far as I was concerned.

“We were talking about women,” Rob said as Lev shrugged off his jacket.

“Well, if we’re not going to talk about work—and there’s no way Arsenal are going to be the topic of conversation—then women it is. Speaking of, where’s that delicious Truly? I’ve not seen her in over a year.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose. Of course, he’d know Truly. I guessed they were family and saw each other regularly. When I’d approached her at the wedding reception, she’d been talking to Lev, who’d clearly been hitting on her despite the fact he’d been seventeen.

“Is she seeing anyone?” Lev asked.

I not only wanted to confirm that she was, I wanted to shout that I was the lucky bastard who got to see her naked. But as Truly had clearly set out in neat, black handwriting on crisp, white paper—rule one of our relationship was that Rob and Abigail didn’t find out about us.