I smile cautiously. ‘Nope.’
He nods down at the bottle. ‘Better crack that open, then.’
We drink wine by the light of his desk lamp. The whole building is silent, save for the faint whirr of static from idling photocopiers. Beyond the glass doors of Lawrence’s office, the rest of the vast space is an open ocean of black.
Lawrence still has one of those giant leather-edged ink blotters, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen him write with a fountain pen. Behind his desk, there are lots of framed training certificates for things like capital markets and financial modelling, operational risk.
He follows my eye, smiling faintly. ‘I get jealous, sometimes. Of all the guys here with framed photos of their wives and kids on their desks. A solid pass in preventing financial crime isn’t quite the same, is it?’
I have really missed you, I think. It surprised me, actually, when we stopped speaking, just how hard his absence hit. Like going cold turkey from a drug you didn’t know you were hooked on.
‘Lawrence . . .’ I say.
He nods once, then waits.
‘I obviously don’t see you as “just” someone from the office.’
‘Is it obvious, though?’ His green eyes are a jungle, dark and impenetrable. ‘I mean, that is what you said, when you thought I wasn’t listening.’
He’s not about to make this easy on me, which is fair enough. ‘I was protecting Josh’s feelings.’
Tilting his glass to the light, he takes a long sip. ‘Why?’
I swallow. I promised myself before I came in here that I would be as honest as I could. ‘We were married... I guess it felt like a sensitive subject. And you and me... It’s taken me time to adjust, to the idea of being in a serious relationshipagain. Because we did always say we were just having fun. Not swapping keys, and sayingI love youand—’
‘Rachel, don’t get me wrong,’ Lawrence says, leaning forward in his swivel chair, fixing me with earnest eyes. ‘I was more surprised than anyone when I realised I was having those feelings for you. But don’t you think that means it’s real? Isn’t that the most pure kind of emotion there is? Something that appears out of nowhere? That catches you completely off-guard?’
I wonder if I agree, or if Lawrence is in fact talking about lust. A commotion of chemicals, our body’s way of bypassing our brains. Wilf lectured us all about this once over dinner, only piping down when Ingrid snapped a breadstick in half and lobbed both pieces at his head.
‘We canbesomething, Rachel,’ Lawrence insists. ‘I know we can.’
He gets to his feet, comes round to my side of the desk and bends down to kiss me, murmuring, ‘God, I’ve missed you so much.’ He tips my face up between his hands. I part my lips, let him in. His mouth is supple and smoky from the wine, the kiss so vigorous it feels almost territorial, and my heart is going berserk now and all the chemicals Wilf was talking about are shooting through my bloodstream, and I think,Fuck it, and fuck you, Wilf, and your bullshit dopamine cocktail theories. Lawrence is right – this is too good,we’retoo good, and I’m sick of always being sensible.
Right now, as Lawrence kisses me, Dad’s perspective is speaking louder to me than Ingrid’s love-bomb warning. Because, okay – maybe I haven’t fully let my guard down with Lawrence yet. But does that mean we don’t have something great, something worth fighting for?
36.
Rachel
October 2003
And then.
A couple of months later, everything changes.
For about a fortnight – or maybe longer – my body has known. I have felt vaguely unwell, tired in a wired kind of way. Coffee has begun tasting off, as if the milk in it is sour, though Lawrence disagrees. I’ve started sleeping through my alarm, feeling faintly queasy while brushing my teeth.
It must have happened the night Lawrence and I made it up at the office, back in August. A friend of his had called while we were finishing the wine, to say he had a table at the opening of a new club in town. We were feeling good, already giddy on the drug of reconciliation. So we called a taxi and went to join him.
Things got messy, that night. So messy, I can barely recall most of it.
I do remember the make-up sex, though, when we got back to Lawrence’s flat. Frantically cathartic, up against his kitchen counter, both of us high on adrenaline and pent-up lust, the rush of reconnection.
The next morning, I was so hungover, I threw up and had to call in sick. I spent most of the following two days in bed, and messed up my pill timings entirely.
We have been dating less than a year. But, when I look in the bathroom mirror after taking the test, I feel a flare of happiness so powerful, I have to grip on to the sink with both hands.
I am going to be a mum.
