We come full circle when she asks, “So, Dec?”
I sigh and cup my head in my hands because I want Dec. Like I have never wanted anyone else before. “He makes me feel things nobody else has, before or since.”
She nods like she really understands.
“But I don’t want to simply be another notch. I don’t need to be his sun rising and setting and everything in between but I need not to be no more than a notch…even if I go home before breakfast, I need to at least be the only one who is sent home by him.”
I had no idea all those words and thoughts were inside me, nor the tears that are running down my face. Liv is crying too as she rounds the table to hug me hard, a little too hard.
“You,” she says on another squeeze. “You deserve to be somebody’s everything and more and if Dec can’t see that then he’s a bloody fool and whilst he’s a dick, he is nobody’s fool.”
Returning to her seat she fixes me with a stare. “Next Tuesday, come out with me and Mase. There’s a new club. Come to ours for dinner first and maybe we’ll find you your Mr Right.”
My initial reaction is to say no but her face does this thing where it crumples when she’s sad, like Dad so what I actually say is, “Okay.”
I think she might have just manipulated me because her crumply face disappears in the blink of an eye and her regular face is reinstated leaving her looking smug, but then I realise Mase has just walked through the door so it might just be her smugly in love face.
Chapter 9
Declan
Mase walks into the pub, and I see him a split second before he spots me. He is alone, making me worry that something is wrong with Liv. The smile he greets me with suggests that he is happy, meaning Liv is fine, if absent. He sits next to me at the bar and immediately orders us both a drink and grabs the bar food menu.
“Olivia will meet us there. She worked late.” He frowns.
“You’re not enjoying having your wife as the boss of her own company?” I laugh making my brother’s frown deepen.
“I didn’t fucking think it through, did I? She is happy though and it was only because there’s been a problem of some sort. Nathan seems happy with Olivia at the helm.”
I nod thinking that our former stepfather, Christian’s father-in-law. and now the junior partner in Liv’s company, Nathan, will be more than happy to let my sister-in-law run things while he plays golf. I wonder if I should tell Mase about Christian’s visit and the frown potentially causing permanent creasing to my brow alerts him to my confusion.
“What? You’re surprised he’s happy with my wife’s work?”
I laugh at his bristling mood at the idea that I might have been in anyway criticising Liv.
“No. I was thinking about Christian. He came to see me, while you were on honeymoon.”
My brother looks less than impressed but not entirely surprised.
“He suggested a little reworking at the club.”
“I hope you told him to fuck off!” my brother snaps.
“Not quite, but I did say I’d probably go to Liv first. How is it going to work with him and Liv?” I ask because no matter what else Christian is, he’s family, kind of, but he is involved and woven into the fabric of our immediate family.
“I anticipate it being awkward for a while, but ultimately she’s my priority so if he chooses to make it too awkward, he will have made his own choice I suppose. Can we talk about something else because I still don’t get his open hostility and total opposition to my wife and thinking about it pisses me off?”
“Okay,” I agree and address the niggle in the back of my mind about the evening that lies ahead. “Mase, tonight, please tell me Liv isn’t going to try and fix me up?”
With a shake of his head and the running of a hand through his hair he shrugs. “I’d like to say no. I have told her to mind her own business and she felt bad for Anita when she found you with Lindy and Laura,” he says with an arched brow.
“I felt shit about that. I thought she’d already left. I wouldn’t have done that to her, although she’s seeing someone else anyway.” I sigh thinking that the churning in my guts feels a lot like pain when I think of Anita with someone else.
“Yeah, but I think it was casual,” he says, revealing that it is over by speaking about it in the past tense. “Nigel was pissed off about it, but she’s a grown woman at the end of the day. Let’s eat and then if you want to dissect you and Anita again, we can, but whether Liv tries fixing you up or not, you need not to make my sister-in-law feel any shitter than you already have.”
He’s right. I know he is and yet I can’t guarantee that I won’t say or do something in the future that makes her feel bad. I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens. Like I told Anita, I’m not like Mase. I don’t want or need to make this perfect family he has his heart set on and always did have. We are the product of a broken home, well maybe not quite, but divorced parents. Our mum married four more times and our stepfathers were okay, and we always maintained a relationship with our own dad but this whole need to be with one person and for it to be enough is not my thing.
Mase married his first wife even when he realised he shouldn’t. They should have remained business only. He insists that when he met Liv it was a lightbulb moment, a second of complete clarity and he is happy, sickeningly so, but I don’t believe that everyone has that one person and at what point is that soulmate simply a case of settling. He calls me cynical, and I am, but maybe that’s not why I see things the way I do. Could it be that Mase and I are two different sides of the same coin? Whereas he wanted to prove our parents, their divorce and statistics for kids of divorce wrong, I am happy to accept that all relationships are flawed and that I will never, ever settle for one person to make me complete, no matter how good the sex might be and the best sex I have ever had was with Anita. I can’t even describe what it is or how it makes me feel. I just know that when I kiss her, touch her, fuck her, everything makes sense. When I watch her climbing higher and higher until there is only one way for her to go and that is into a spiral of pleasure and arousal, she brings me to my knees. Knowing that I have done that to her. The feeling of being inside her will remain with me for the rest of my life. The perfection of how she holds me; soft and warm, tight, and yet gentle. She really is a conundrum.
