The Rose Petal Beach (31 page)

His mouth stayed silent while our eyes could not tear themselves away from each other. I could look into his eyes – that shade of brown between chocolate and maple – for ever. ‘I don’t want to hurt her,’ he repeated.

Neither did I. That’s the insane part. She was my best friend, she really was. Yet, this was love we were faced with. Love trumps everything, doesn’t it?

Suddenly we were moving towards each other, we were grabbing each other, kissing ferociously, hands on faces, in hair, inside clothes. We were tearing at each other’s clothes until we were on the floor, and we had access and he was doing it again, he was entering me and that deliciousness was descending again, and he was moving hard inside me and I wanted him to slow down, to be as gentle as he had been the other day but I knew he was excited and it was sort of passionate, and then he was orgasming and I was too.

‘That wasn’t meant to happen,’ he said, genuine regret in his
voice. ‘I came here to stop this very thing from happening but I can’t help myself. I’m weak when I’m around you.’

‘It’s like you’re reading my mind,’ I said to him.

‘I don’t want to lose the girls,’ he said. ‘She can never find out about this otherwise she will take the girls and leave.’

I sat up, then climbed on top of him. I wanted to do it again, but this time I wanted to control it, I wanted to be in charge of the pleasure. ‘I’ll never tell her. And this won’t happen again after this, so there’ll be nothing to tell. Right?’

I cried out a little as I sank down onto him.

‘Right,’ he replied. ‘Absolutely, right.’

Tell me what it is, in case I don’t make it tonight.

Well you’d better make sure you do make it tonight, otherwise you’ll never find out. Bea x

Fifteen months ago

‘Do you love Scotty?’ I asked her.

Things hadn’t gone to plan. Not that there’d ever been a plan. We were simply meant to stop it after that time. But it’d been more than a few times – weeks, actually. All right, it was months. We had been together for months. I avoided her as much as possible and she didn’t seem to notice, probably because she spent a lot of time with Mirabelle. But, occasionally, she would ring me to see if I was working at home and would come over like now with coffee and homemade cupcakes.

‘Course,’ she replied. ‘We wouldn’t be married if we didn’t love each other.’

‘Even after all this time you still love each other?’

‘Yes. I know we had that conversation a while back where it seemed I couldn’t stand him, but that’s the way things get sometimes. We’re mostly happy.’

‘In all areas?’

‘If you’re asking if we still have a love life, then yes, we do. It’s not as frequent as I’d like, but with so little time for each other that’s no real surprise. But yes, we, you know, do it.’

‘Can you ever imagine your life without him?’ I asked. Recently he’d been hinting that he wanted things to move to the next level. He wanted to leave her and be with me. We’d have to move out of the area, of course. I loved where we lived, but that would be the price we’d have to pay for us to be together because no one would understand. They’d take her side and shun us. The girls wouldn’t be able to understand at first why Dad was with me, and we’d probably have to keep it from them for a while. His work could be tricky since a lot of the senior people knew her and still gave her a substantial amount of work. It wasn’t impossible, it’d simply be easier if we moved elsewhere while everything settled down. Maybe nearer to Kent, where my head office was.

‘No,’ she said.

‘That’s it, no qualification, no explanations, a flat “no”?’

‘No, I can’t imagine my life without him. Why would I even try?’

You might need to,
I thought. My eyes started to sting, guilt started to blossom in my heart. I was doing a terrible thing to a lovely person.

‘It’s all right, you know,’ she said, perplexed by my behaviour. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

‘I’m being silly. Thinking about when my husband left me,’ I said. ‘It would have been our anniversary today.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, then put her arm around me. ‘You’ll be OK. Things will get better, I promise.’ The explosion of guilt almost stopped my heart.

When she left, I broke down. I sat on the floor of my living room, surrounded by memories of making love to him where I sat, and I cried. I hated what I was doing, how much I was hurting her without her knowledge, but I loved him. I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. I couldn’t give him up.

My tears became full-body sobs. What was I going to do? I loved
him too much to finish it, but the alternative was hurting someone I cared for deeply. At some point I was going to have to choose: friendship or love?

Even as I sobbed, I knew I was too selfish to choose the option that would cause me the most pain.

That’d be telling. You’ll just have to make sure you come over tonight and find out. Bea x

Tease!!!

Always. Bea x

You can’t help who you fall in love with. And you can’t help, sometimes, who you hurt in the process. I hope she understands that when she finds out, I really do.

‘I’m just nipping out for a bit,’ Scott says to me. The girls are in bed and everyone has gone, although a few people did stay behind to make sure the place was cleared and put back together. I can still feel it, the heavy fug of what has happened here today, the sadness and shock over who has been lost.

After everyone left, while Scott put the girls to bed, I seated myself in the living room, on what used to be my favourite seat, and looked around me, taking in the fragments of our lives again. The sofa, the chairs, the ridiculous fireplace, the rug, the carpet, the butter-yellow walls, the wooden-slatted blinds, the ceiling rose, the chrome sockets, the oversize television.

I hate this room now. Everything bad that has happened seems to have happened in this room. Over there, Scott was put in handcuffs. Right here, I sat and listened to him tell me about his affair, not knowing he was lying about who but not what. And right there, in front of the door, I discovered whom he is really sleeping with. I will take a flame-thrower to this room one day, I really will. I will raze it to the ground and start again. Much like what I am going to do with my marriage right now.

Scott, my husband, the love of my life, is the picture of innocence as he checks his messages on his mobile and prepares to go out. He is that hard-edged handsome that unsettles rather than comforts or attracts me. His black suit is expensive, you can tell by looking at it. He fills it well, along with the black silk tie that I can tell – from knowing her – Beatrix bought for him. His white shirt is crisp and still crease-free, it will be another designer label. His shoes are from his collection, probably quite old since no new
boxes have appeared on his side of the wardrobe recently. His hair is combed back, styled into place with the products that have been multiplying in the bathroom for months, probably even years now. He looks fake. He is a fake. Everything about him is fake.

‘Going over to screw Beatrix, are you?’ I ask him, conversationally. I do not feel like I’ve been hit by a truck this time. For the first time in a long time everything makes sense, the world does not seem to be full of things that don’t add up, with inconsistencies that only I seem to see, which must mean it is me who is crazy, out of step with the real world. I have clarity. I was not going mad, I wasn’t paranoid, I wasn’t selfish and clinging to the past, I wasn’t holding up the process of moving on by being cautious and on edge. All of my reactions were normal because I was still being cheated on, disrespected. LIED TO.

‘What?’ His head jerks up from staring at his mobile. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Isn’t that what you’ve been texting about all day? How soon you can get over there and screw her?’

Hurt, shock, a smidgen of anger from him. ‘You can’t go around accusing me of all sorts because I’m friends with a woman, Tami. You have got to start trusting me again sometime, otherwise what’s the point in us trying again? Now, it’s been a really long, difficult day, I need to go out and clear my head. When I get back we can talk again about your ridiculous accusations and how you’re going to start to put this stuff behind you.’

‘Or were you both laughing over how stupid I am not to have seen what was going on
literally
under my nose?’

‘I don’t know where you’ve got this idea from but—’

‘I know you’ve been sleeping with Beatrix. Not Mirabelle, Beatrix. It was her all along.’

Scott’s light brown eyes are piercing as they try to drill their way into my head to find out what I know and what I am guessing.

He moves to speak, opens his mouth to lie.

‘There’s no point lying, I know the truth. I saw it with my very own eyes.’

He closes his mouth and slowly, surely he is transformed. His back is a little straighter, his body a little more rigid, his features set themselves into a sneer, and his hands curl into fists. I have seen this man before, of course, but he has rarely been like this with me. Tilting his head to one side slightly, he observes me for long, uncomfortable seconds. ‘If you know it all, what are you bothering to ask me about it for?’ With his voice the transformation is complete. He is a Challey again. A real Challey with all the sociopathic traits of one.

I should probably be scared, but I’m not. I am a fool, of course. ‘I want to know how you got those texts from Mirabelle because they were definitely from her number.’

‘What makes you think it wasn’t Mirabelle as well?’

‘I
know
it wasn’t Mirabelle as well,’ I state. ‘She wouldn’t do that to me.’

‘What, don’t think your precious Mirabelle was capable of it?’ Scott sneers.

‘Mirabelle was gay,’ I say to him.

The sneer is washed away by the tidal wave of that revelation. ‘What?’ he says, jolted to a whisper.

‘She. Was. Gay. She said to me that she wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole and me, idiot that I am, didn’t believe her. I mean, I touched you, so in my brain, obviously a million other women must be as stupid as me. But not Mirabelle, apparently, you’re not her type.’

Scott says stares wide-eyed at me.

‘Tell me how you got those text messages that convinced me you had been sleeping with her and that she was so obsessed with you she would lie to the police? I don’t understand how you managed that.’

‘Thought you were the person with all the answers.’

‘You stole her phone and wrote them all yourself, didn’t you?
You did that so you could … Oh my God. Oh my God. You set up an alibi so you could force yourself onto someone.’ Nausea rises through me. My husband is a cold, calculating sexual predator. He’s probably done it before. I’m shaking now. The full horror of who I have been living with, sleeping with,
loving
, is revealing itself to me in broad, sickening strokes.

‘No, no, I didn’t plan it,’ he protests. ‘I didn’t do that and I didn’t plan it.’

‘Then tell me about the text messages because that’s the only thing that doesn’t makes sense.’

‘I, erm, I found her phone—’

‘Where? Where did you find it?’

A sigh, a pause. ‘On her desk. I went through her office, looking for information. I wanted to find out about her, she was so closed, so guarded. I always thought there was something she was holding back so I went through her desk and found she hadn’t taken her phone with her to a meeting. It wasn’t password protected despite how paranoid she was, so I looked through it. I saw the text messages and I
knew
it was a married man on the board, maybe even Terry. I wanted time to work out who it was, so I sent the messages to my phone as an insurance policy.’

‘Blackmail?’ I put my hands to my face in horror. ‘Blackmail, infidelity, violent porn, rape—’

‘No, no, you can’t say that because I didn’t do that. I didn’t try to rape her. Things got confused. She was sending mixed signals—’

‘How could she have been sending you mixed signals? She’s gay. She
was
gay.’ Was. Was. Was. She
was
gay. She doesn’t exist in the present tense any more; she’s gone.

‘Maybe she was confused about her sexuality,’ Scott says. ‘But, I thought, you know, she wanted it. I thought if we got it over and done with, things would be more settled between us.’

‘Over and done with? Did she have any say in it, or did you just—’

‘It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t how you’re making it sound. You weren’t there, you don’t understand. I thought if it got going, she’d—’

‘She’d what, happily accept what was happening? What you’re describing is rape, Scott,’ I shout at him. ‘And you know that. Any man knows that.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘You need to leave. I need you to pack your things and leave.’

He shakes his head. ‘No. I can’t.’ He shrugs.

‘Scott, I need you to leave.’

‘That’s not going to happen. I can’t leave. Where would I go? And I can’t be without you all.’

‘I need …’ My voice dries up and I take a moment, a moment to accept what is happening. I knew before, when I realised it was Beatrix not Mirabelle, what he had done, but now it is real. Now it is in front of me, the monster that lives under the bed, the bogeyman that stalks your dreams. They are real and here. My husband is a rapist. He needs to leave. ‘You have to leave.’

‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t you understand? I can’t.’

‘Scott, if I told you that your daughters were living with a man who had been arrested for a serious crime that he’s all but admitted to, that he was planning on blackmailing someone, that he lied to their mother on a daily basis for years, and was addicted to something that would be harmful to them if they were exposed to it, what would you say? Wouldn’t you want that person away from them? Wouldn’t you say that he had to leave and sort himself out before he had meaningful contact with them, let alone lived with them and influenced important decisions in their lives?’

His face crumples, he shakes his head. His hands come together as in prayer, as if begging. ‘Please, Tami, don’t make me go.’ He seems small, terrified.