Faithful (6 page)

“You need to see
, Leah. Open it.”

Time shifted into slow motion as I picked up the envelope and slid my fingers underneath the seal. I pulled out the contents: photographs.

Daniel looked pained when I caught him glancing at me. He put his head in his hands.

I didn’t understand what I was looking at
at first. The pictures were of Charlie going to and from work. They looked like they had been taken with a zoom lens: close-up photos, but he was clearly unaware that he was being captured.

Then I saw similar pictures of Fran leaving her office. Was Daniel carrying out surveillance on all my friends? What was going on? The next was of Fran and Charlie. That was odd. They didn’t know each other that well. Had they bumped into each other in the park they were sitting in?
Her hand was on his arm and his hand was on her back and … oh god, surely not.

I skipped to the next picture. It was taken at night
. A professional couple, both in dark suits—but what they were doing was far from professional. He had pinned her against a wall with his body and they were kissing passionately. The next one was the same scene but from a different angle, and again, and another and another.

Unmistakably
, the couple I was looking at was Fran and Charlie. I tried to rationalize it: Maybe it was before I met them. But Charlie’s tie was one his mother bought him last Christmas. I didn’t need to see more. The photos spilled out onto the floor and sprinkled like confetti.

I stared after them as the extent of my
fiancé’s affair surrounded me. I couldn’t pull my eyes away; the pictures seemed endless, taken on different days, in various points in their passion, all over the city. There were several of the two of them going into her flat at night and coming out during daylight hours.

I
was going to fall. My arms, like lead, refused to steady me and I gave into it, almost wanting the pain of hitting the floor to wake me from this slow-motion nightmare.

The pain never came
. And then there were arms around me, and I was upright though I made no effort to try to stand. My whole body was just limp, and Daniel scooped me from my half-standing, half-falling position and carried me to the sofa. He went to move away and I grabbed his hand and pulled him back.

“Don’t leave me,” I whispered.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said quietly.

I didn’t understand what I was feeling
—numb, I suppose, like I wasn’t really there, like I was just watching myself. My cheeks were dry, I wasn’t crying. I just found out my fiancé was cheating on me with a close friend of mine and I wasn’t crying. I felt no pain, no loss. Maybe this was what shock felt like. All I was aware of were Daniel’s arms around me. His strong hand stroking my shoulder, his mouth pressed to my temple, and that delicious scent of his enveloping me.

My numbness made way for the beginnings of my arousal. The feeling was
unmistakable, but I tried to ignore it. It seemed so inappropriate. But it wasn’t anymore, was it? There was no longer any reason for me to deny what I felt for Daniel. I was free to give in to it, to give in to him.

I placed my hand just above his knee. The hand stroking my shoulder paused for a second and then continued its rhythm. I moved my hand up his thigh and up to his waist and his powerful chest and he exhaled. His hand continued its rhythm and he pulled me closer. I trailed my fingers down his
chest, tracing the hard outline of his muscular chest down to the waist of his trousers and I ran my hands across the top of the waistband. I could see his desire for me increase as his trousers became more taut, and I was suddenly desperate to uncover him.

Charlie might not want me, but I was in the arms of a man who did
. He’d told me so. Emboldened, I brought my hand to his face and turned my head so our foreheads were touching. He closed his eyes and sighed but made no move to kiss me. His hand moved down, circling the dip in my lower back. My nipples strained against the confines of my bra and my breath came in shallow bursts.

I was aware of the slickness between my legs. I was ready for him so quickly
; he had such an unrelenting impact on me. I wanted to him to feel it, feel the effect he had on me. I brought his hand from around my back between us and placed it over my breast, rubbing it over my hardened nipple and he buried his head in my neck.

“You feel so good
, Leah. You are such a sexy girl. You get me hard just looking at me.”

I reached my hand down to his hardness. “It feels so good that I do that to you.” I never felt comfortable saying what I was feeling during intimate moments
, but now it was like I didn’t have a choice. I wanted him and I wanted him to know it.

“Are you wet for me
, baby?” he growled. The coarseness of his words combined with the sweetness of him calling me baby sent a jolt of desire through me and, unable to contain myself, I moaned and pushed myself against his mouth, delving into him with my tongue. He returned my enthusiasm as we devoured each other, pushing harder and deeper, exploring every part of each other’s mouths. His slight stubble from the day grazed my chin over and over, like he was marking his territory. It felt so masculine, so virile, so
him
. My clit was throbbing. I was desperate for his touch to relieve the ache. Without breaking our kiss I drew myself up and straddled him.

He cried out
, “Oh god, Leah, I want you so much.” He grasped my buttocks and pulled me into him as I reached behind his head and tangled my fingers into the inky smoothness of his hair. I reached down to his zipper, and, my hands shaking with anticipation, I fumbled to find the opening.

Sharply he brought his arms
around, clasped my shoulders, and pushed me away. “No, Leah, no. Not here. Not like this.” He moved me off him and stood up.

I was left stunned as he stalked over to his desk.

Facing away from me he shouted, “Fuck!” in a deep, angry voice. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He kicked the desk, sending papers flying onto the floor as he thrust his hands through his hair.

Then my tears started falling. I wasn’t sure if it was the shock of finding out that Charlie had cheated with Fran or the humiliation of being rejected by the beautiful man
I had just thrown myself at, but the floodgates opened and saltwater was streaming down my face.

“Fuck, I am such an a
sshole. What the fuck is the matter with me!” Daniel howled at the moon but he had stopped kicking the furniture.

I stood up, desperate to get out of that room, to be away from my embarrassment. Why did I assume he still wanted me when I couldn’t keep a man interested even a few weeks into our engagement? I forced myself to halt my tears and gathered up my jacket and handbag,
then looked around to see if there was anything I had forgotten. I didn’t want to have to return.

“What are you doing?” Daniel stood up and came toward me.

“I’ve got to go. I’ve embarrassed myself. I need to leave.”

“What do you mean you’ve embarrassed yourself? Why would you feel that? Leah, look at me.” He reached out for my arm but I twisted
my body away from his.

Without looking at him, I repeated
, “I need to go.”

“I’m so sorry for being such an
asshole, Leah. Look at m—”

“Please, enough
,” I interrupted. I turned to the door just as I felt my heart rip in two. I forced myself onward and fled for the elevator.

Thankfully the reception area was deserted and there was no one to witness my physical and emotional disarray. Exiting
the elevator, I made toward the exit when I heard my name called.

“Leah,
Mr. Armitage has asked me to drive you to your destination. Would you please follow me?”

Disoriented and with no energy left to argue, I followed the smartly dressed man outside. The fresh air hit my lungs and nausea hit me like a truck. Where was I going? I couldn’t face Charlie. I mumbled Anna’s address at the driver and collapsed into the back seat.

The drive to Anna’s takes forty minutes at least, but I had no memory of the journey and suddenly we arrived. Did I sleep? Anna was in her doorway as we pulled up. Had I called her to tell her I was coming? My head was spinning and the nausea hadn’t lessened. Anna came over to the car and opened the door.

“Hey, lucky for you I just opened a bottle of wine
,” she said gently as she poked her head into the car. “Come here.” And she took my arm and led me up the path to her flat.

I watched the man in his luminous overall frantically waving and managed to raise the corners of my mouth at his furious baton waving. Nudging Anna next to me I pointed at him and she smiled and went back to her gossip magazine.

“Have you heard this about Tom Cruise? It’s crazy, look. Read this.”

Anna had a weird fascination with
Mr. Cruise and his various ex-wives. I think she seriously thought at some point in her life she was destined to be one of them. I smiled and started to read the article she pointed to despite my complete lack of interest. Anything to distract me from the roar of the engines and the impending take off.

Anna had been quite simply fantastic. Last night, during intermittent sobbing and slurring of words caused by the consumption of copious amounts of sauvignon
blanc, I gave Anna every last detail of the previous 24 hours. Her initial reaction was total shock and incredulity. I realized I was relieved at her response. She hadn’t known. Her reaction was my confirmation of that and I garnered some strength from the fact that not everyone in my life had betrayed me. She didn’t know about Charlie and Fran; she didn’t lie, cover anything up, or turn a blind eye. She was as stunned as I was.

After the initial shock wore off she went into survivor mode. She was fantastically patient and sympathetic
, but also incredibly practical. The following morning she called my work and persuaded them to let me take a week off and did the same with her boss. She then booked us a last-minute vacation and twelve hours later we were hurtling down the runway.

In those twelve hours, Anna arranged
to have movers at Charlie’s flat for when Anna and I arrived later that day, and while I locked myself in the bathroom trying to stem the flow of my tears, Anna and the movers carried me out of my old life piece by piece.

By the time Charlie was home from work, I would most certainly be at the airport, if not in the air. It was what I needed to happen. I didn’t want to
—couldn’t—deal with the inevitable confrontation of him: the tears, the shouting, his excuses, the blame I would see in his eyes that I would hang onto for an indeterminable period of time. Most of all I couldn’t bear the thought of him seeing how much he had wounded me.

I just wanted to escape.

Apparently he texted me to see where I was while Anna was booking the trip. She confiscated my phone so there would be no drunk-dialing, no room for his excuses, no more pain. He assumed I’d worked through the night at work.

Panic washed through me. All those nights I assumed he was working, he was with her, in her bed. All the guilt I felt at him working so hard for our future and he was fucking around on me. Was he in love with her? Or was it just the sex? Fran was experienced
, that was for sure. She was probably much more adventurous than I ever was. I tried to push images of them together out of my mind, but they kept creeping back in—Fran’s hands in Charlie’s hair, Charlie’s tongue over Fran’s neck. Christ, I needed a drink.

“Excuse me, can I get a glass of wine?” I asked the stewardess. Thankfully
, Anna had managed to get seats in business class on my miles, and the crew in business were always much more accepting of women getting drunk before noon than they were at the back of the plane. Or at least they faked their acceptance better.

“Certainly madam.”

I turned to Anna. “When did I stop being ‘miss’ and become ‘madam’?”

“The day you hit
30, sweetheart,” Anna replied without missing a beat, engrossed in another magazine. She seemed to have a never-ending supply. “There’s some kind of invisible sign women start to hold the day they turn 30. It’s genetic, or a pheromone or something.”

Oh my god, I was
30 and single. I felt I’d been punched in the stomach. My life was not meant to turn out like this. I handed the magazine back to Anna and started to sob again.

“The baby, Fran’s baby. Charlie’s the father
, isn’t he?” Anna and I had skirted around Fran’s pregnancy, neither of us mentioning it since I dropped the bomb of Charlie and Fran’s affair 24 hours ago. Anna finally put down her magazine and turned to me.

“Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What about that DJ? It could be his, couldn’t it?” I was desperate to somehow make the situation less dire that it really was.

“It could be
, Leah. But, realistically, the DJ may have not existed. If you think about it, Fran didn’t juggle men. She slept with lots of people, but they didn’t overlap. At least I never thought they did. I’m not sure I really know who she was or is.”

“How long do you think it has been going on? Since before the engagement
, I guess,” I answered myself. “I thought she seemed a bit subdued when I told you guys, but I thought she was just disappointed that she wasn’t at the same point in her life—I suppose I was right, she wanted to be at the exact same point in her life, with the same guy ... Jesus!”

“Look
, babe, I don’t think there’s any point in torturing yourself about it. Whether the baby is his or not shouldn’t matter to you anymore. They have both betrayed you, whatever the genetic code of that poor child. At least you know now and you didn’t end up marrying him and finding out later that he’d cheated with your friend—not that I would ever touch him with a bargepole, you know that.”

I did know that. Anna had never liked Charlie. Not that she was pleased with what he had done
—I believed wholeheartedly that she would never want me to feel like this—but I think she was relieved that her instincts about him had been right and she no longer had to worry about what was going to come. It was here. And she was right, there was no point in torturing myself about him and Fran and the baby. But it wasn’t that easy. It was all I could think about.

How long had it been going on?

What had I done to send him off looking for something more than me?

What was it about Fran that attracted him?

Well, I suppose the attraction bit was obvious. She was tall and thin with curly blond hair and a wide smile. I’m sure she could model if she wanted to; she was gorgeous. In comparison, my figure with hips and waist and my barely containable breasts must seem dumpy, perhaps too obvious for his taste, although I never heard him complain. He took the opportunity to trade up, simple as that.

Somehow
, though, I just couldn’t see them together. Charlie was a bit of a snob, to be honest, and from what he had said about his parents thinking I was “for fun,” it ran in the family. What would they say about Fran? She was so far from the other side of the tracks she was on a different continent.

Fran’s family, which consisted of her mother and a younger brother, certainly didn’t have money or status
. She had been the first in her family to go to University. Her brother had had his share of problems with drugs but was now working in a factory just outside of her hometown of Coventry; he was married with two children, in his mid-twenties.

I couldn’t imagine Charlie spending Christmases in a two
-bedroom flat over a convenience store in Coventry. His idea of an idyllic Christmas was with his parents, at their country house in Scotland, spending his time huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’.

Perhaps she had changed him. Maybe it was just physical, her beauty combined with sexual prowess. Maybe it was just a fling, a final sowing of his oats before he settled down to one woman for the rest of his life.

Images from the last time Charlie and I had sex flickered through my head and I cringed. He must have been comparing us. Oh god, how horrible. She would have been so much more forthcoming than I was, more confident, more ... creative. I had thought we were finally reconnecting after a few months of me being distant and doubtful. I hadn’t realized I was being scored, and if I didn’t rate highly enough I would lose my fiancé. But the distance I created in the first place must have started it, pushed him away, forced him into Fran’s bed because he wasn’t getting the attention he needed—the attention he
deserved
—from me. Maybe I had done this.

Tears started to flow again and
, embarrassed about feeling so sorry for myself, I pretended to sneeze, wiped them away, and waved at the stewardess for a top-up. I wanted to drift off into unconsciousness and not think about this anymore. At some point the alcohol must have its desired effect because the next thing I knew we thudded to the ground at Cancun International Airport.

“Hey
, sleepyhead. I was beginning to think you were never going to wake up. You’ve been passed out like the dead. Come on, brush your hair. Try not to look like a homeless person. This is a really nice hotel we’re going to.” Anna smiled. If you didn’t know her, you could be easily offended. But I knew she was trying to cheer me up, get me to see the future and not wallow in Charlie’s betrayal.

In all the drama, I managed to push to one side my embarrassment about what happened between Daniel and me. I was so taken up in my grief over Charlie that finally descended on me like a cloud as I had relayed the situation to
Anna that I managed to relegate what happened with Daniel to the separate part of my brain that stored up fuel for my neurosis for when I next needed it. There was always plenty of fuel slushing around in there and I was used to keeping a lid on it. God, I really hope we didn’t get the Palmerston job. I could never face him again.

The hotel was all Anna promised it would be. We had a beautiful two
-bedroom suite with a balcony off the living area that opened out onto the beach and a hot tub. The bed was huge and canopied.
Very romantic
, I thought wistfully.

I quickly changed into my bikini and raced down to the pool to meet Anna. Some vitamin D would improve my mood, I was sure of it. I found Anna at the bar flirting up a storm with the very handsome, topless, barman.

“Fast work!” I teased as we headed to our loungers.

“Yes
, a little work up front and hopefully our drinks will be constantly refreshed without another word all week. Besides, did you see the bod on him?”

I threw my head back and laughed
. I realized it was the first time I’d laughed since I’d seen the photos. The vitamin D was working already. It was a relief to see the first evidence that I wouldn’t feel as wretched as I currently did forever.

I slept on and off again on the lounger
; the sun mixed with the alcohol was like the most effective sleeping tablet ever. It seemed like days passed, but it could only have been hours. Anna was engrossed in her magazines every time I summoned the energy to turn my head in her direction, and then sleep pulled me under again.

When the sun completely disappeared from view
, Anna ordered us back to shower and change for dinner. If I had my choice, I would just crawl into bed, but this was Anna’s holiday, too, and I felt I should make an effort.
When I came out of my room Anna was waiting for me. “Oh, dear God!” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “You look like an Amish person.”

Before I could respond she marched me back into her room, barked at me to remove my pastel linen shirt and drawstring trousers. “That shirt and trousers should never be put together and shouldn’t be worn at all unless we are sightseeing, do you understand me? She dressed me like I was three years old in a strapless maxi dress, a bold tribal style necklace and applied some tinted
moisturizer, lip gloss, and mascara to my bare face.

“There
. Slightly less Amish, slightly more like you.” She was right; I did feel more feminine, more attractive.

At dinner we were surrounded by a lot of couples. The pain it caused was a constant tightness across my chest and I found it difficult to look up and around and kept my head focused on the menu, my plate,
my hands. Anything so I didn’t have to witness other people’s loving relationships.

“Do you think he ever took her away? Like, for a break? What about the weekend he went fishing with his brother last November? Was he with her?”

“I don’t know, Leah,” Anna said honestly and she patted my hand.

“Have you spoken to Fran? Have you had a text or email from her?”

“No, I don’t want to speak to her, I don’t want someone who would do what she’s done anywhere near me. She did text me to see what I had done at the weekend but I didn’t reply and I won’t reply.”

“Don’t feel you don’t have to speak to her on my account. We don’t know who instigated what. Maybe Charlie started this whole thing and maybe he’s not to blame so much either.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to be honest with myself, I pushed him away. I was having doubts and wasn’t making time for him so it’s not surprising he found someone else.” Tears started to pool in my eyes, threatening to make a run for it down my cheeks.

“Just stop right there. Charlie and Fran have both been completely shitty to you. I don’t care if you were having doubts or whatever. You were together six years. It’s not all going to be fair sailing. And even if he did want out, sneaking around with your close friend wasn’t the way to go about it. Fran always wants what everyone else has and even if Charlie did come on to her, she should have kneed him in the bollocks and run screaming. She was meant to be your friend.”