“Sounds good.” He rolled onto his back, watching her move toward the bar. She looked tense. Cramped with nerves. He cleared his throat. “You know, I was also a pretty big deal at school. Sexually.”
She laughed as she opened the mini-fridge. “Sure.”
“I played first eighteens football,” he said in the same conversational tone. “The ladies were pretty into it.”
“Actually, I heard your older brother Antony was the family playboy.”
“Second to me.”
“Nope. I’ve been reliably informed you had the same girlfriend for most of high school and you only ever did hand stuff.”
Patrick sat bolt upright. “Lies! Who told you that? Lies!”
Cheryl poured soda water into two balloon-shaped glasses. “I’m afraid I can never reveal my sources. Also, it was your brother Dominic.”
“Bastard! You know he once walked in on me getting sucked off and didn’t leave right away?”
“Eww!”
“How do you think I felt?”
She brought him the water and he entertained her with a few more of his high school war stories. Embarrassing himself in front of girls. Puking at parties. They were nothing on hers, but he liked making her laugh. Distracting her for a little while. When she seemed more relaxed, he took her water glass and put it on the floor.
Cheryl smiled warily. “Are you going to try to convince me you got mad pussy in high school again?”
“No. I guess I wanted to know how you got engaged if you want to tell me?”
She tugged at her top lip. “I met Carlo at my first real office job. He was my boss, and he was older than me.”
He stared at her, wondering if she recognised the symmetry between that relationship and how her parents met.
“Don’t,” she said lightly. “I know. He was half-Turkish. He even looked like my dad.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And he…?”
“Thirty-eight.”
It shouldn’t have been harder to listen to Cheryl talk about her ex than her childhood, but it was. Not because he was jealous—at least not only because of that—but because he’d studied trauma patterns and schema therapy. Caring for her mother full-time, starved for male role models and approval, it was almost inevitable that Cheryl would end up in a dogshit relationship. She hadn’t had any internal scumbag protection and her emotional support system had been Eden, who was still in high school at that point, and a mother who’d needed her more than Cheryl was allowed to need them. The greenest psychologist in the world could have picked exactly where things were bound to go when it came to Cheryl’s love life. But no amount of retroactive psychoanalysis made it easier for Patrick to hear about the love of his life falling for a marketing manager who drove a Subaru WRX. Especially one who might as well have punched a ring through Cheryl’s nose and steered her around with it.
“Carlo liked me from day one,” she said in a quiet, almost colourless voice. “He made me coffee and took me around and introduced me to everyone. It’s so fucking obvious now, but I was really flattered. I was so nervous, and he made me feel better about not having any office experience.”
She told Patrick that she’d known better than to fuck her boss—that she was evidence of why you didn’t fuck your boss—but that, somehow, knowing that didn’t matter. Carlo took her out for fancy dinners, and wore suits and drank whiskey. He also smoked; cigarettes, weed, and, on occasion, meth.
“Only when he’s upset,” she’d told Eden, who’d given the obvious answer.
“That’s worse, Bernie. Can’t you see smoking meth when you’re upset is worse?”
They’d traveled a lot—Cheryl burning through her meagre life savings on drinks and drugs and spontaneous trips to Bali. Soon the fancy dinners had stopped, and she found herself living at Carlo’s house, cooking for him and driving him around when he was drunk. He hated her looking after her mother, hated whenever she spent time at her apartment instead of his.
“Your mum can do shit for herself,” he’d told Cheryl. “You’re making her helpless.”
A nice little smokescreen for the guy who’d turned his subordinate into his whipping post, sex object, and secretary. Then Cheryl and Carlo had gotten engaged and everything ramped up. He’d disappear for days at a time, flirt with other girls in front of her, and leave presents for them lying around the house. She left him, but she always went back.
“I felt like if I ended it for real, it all would have been for nothing,” she whispered, her eyes like dark hollows. “I wanted to prove I could make it work, but I was drowning. I had no money, I was always hungover and smoking all the time. My chest hurt every day and Eden thought Carlo was going to kill me. But you want to know the worst part?”
