‘There’s plenty more if you want.’ She smiles, pouring me a large cup of coffee.
‘Amazing,’ I grunt through a large, graceless bite. That I hardly slept last night has left my stomach raging, acidic with hunger.
‘Aren’t you eating?’ I ask as she busies herself around the kitchen in a blue blouse and a black, A-line skirt that I bought her for Christmas last year. Not an outfit she’d usually wear in the house.
‘I’ve already eaten; I’ve been up for a while.’
‘Couldn’t sleep?’
She shakes her head, scrubbing bacon fat from the grill pan in the steaming water of the ceramic white sink.
‘How was your evening?’ she asks. ‘You know, I wasn’t sure if you’d be back here last night.’
‘Sandy!’ I blush. ‘If I didn’t come back, it would’ve been for fear of catching Jackson humping your leg.’
She tuts and puts a marigold-gloved hand on her hip.
‘I saw you two flirting,’ I tell her.
‘You have a very vivid imagination.’
‘Mmm-hmm, and I suppose I’m also imagining seeing you dressed in a skirt and blouse to scrub the dishes?’
‘I thought I’d pop out today, that’s all.’
‘With Jackson?’
‘No, not with Geoffrey Jackson. My goodness.’ She wafts a hand as if she’s annoyed but the sides of her cheeks betray her smile as she turns back to the sink. ‘Anyway, I asked about your night.’
The sick, churning feeling comes back to my stomach and I push away the remainder of my pancakes.
‘Actually, it didn’t end well. Gregory and I sort of had a fight. Well, a disagreement.’
‘Does that mean you’re, you know, together?’ she asks, turning from the sink, drying her hands on a towel.
‘Oh, erm, no, no, we’re not together.’ And we aren’t, so why is this whole thing driving me to the brink of sanity? ‘Gregory’s a client. Maybe not even that any more.’
‘I’ve not known your other clients buy you designer dresses and jewels.’
The problem is, I don’t know whether he bought those for the woman he danced with, the woman whose skin he caressed and pressed his warm lips against or his lawyer. The lawyer he needed to bribe into a dodgy deal.
‘Sandy, can I ask you something?’
‘Always.’ She pulls up a stool and sits opposite me, her hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea.
‘What would you do if someone asked you to do something that you knew wouldn’t really be right but for their sake, you wanted to do it and doing it somehow felt like the right thing to do?’
She regards me with a frown, assessing a person she’s unsure of, a person she doesn’t know. Or perhaps my own subconscious just thinks that.
‘Well, I would think that if you wanted to do that maybe wrong thing for that person, that person must mean a lot to you. Having said that, if you mean as much to that person as he, or they, do to you, perhaps they shouldn’t have asked you to do something that wasn’t really right in the first place?’
‘Okay, and supposing they said that, or implied that, you had the option not to do the thing, but you really wanted to help them?’
‘Scarlett, what’s this about?’
‘I can’t really say.’
‘This is what you and Gregory argued over?’
