‘I’m afraid all I have might be a little rich for your tastes.’
He smirked. ‘Try me.’
He watched as the woman’s eyes drifted over him again, taking in his six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine, the expensive cut of his suit and the uncalloused smoothness of his hands. There was nothing blue collar at all about Cohen, nothing to indicate anything other than a life of wealth and affluence. He was fourth-generation wealth, the son of Esther Sedler and heir apparent to Sedler Enterprises, and it showed.
She slid into the seat beside him, letting him know that he had passed her little test. He looked her up and down again, appraising his choice for the evening.
‘What’s your name?’ Cohen asked, pouring her some of the Napa.
‘Christine.’ Her reply was cool, aloof even. Cohen wasn’t fazed, for he knew this game. It was one he’d played before, many times. Christine was making sure he knew she was hard to get, even harder to keep. She was telling him she was something he was going to have to work for. She was setting up hoops and making him jump. And jump he would, using his sizeable wallet to cushion the inevitable fall.
He spent the evening wining and dining the delicate, slightly out-of-reach Christine. She was an actress, she eventually admitted, but an actress in a strange position of being both in demand and yet completely out-of-work.
‘I mean, can you really see me in a toothpaste commercial?’ she spat, without waiting for a reply. ‘I told my agent that I would absolutely do a shampoo ad, or even, at a push, hand cream ... but toothpaste? I’m a little more high-end than that, don’t you think?’
‘Well, I—’
‘—I’m Christine Carter,’ she continued bitterly. ‘I was in an episode ofGame of Thrones.I played a chicken farmer. I don’tdotoothpaste.’
All the same, Cohen took Christine home that night and bedded her eagerly, although between the sheets, just as in life, she was detached and somewhat cold.
Cohen didn’t take her lack of response personally. If anything, she became a mountain to climb, a goal to score. He was determined to win her over, if only to prove that he could.
Besides, he was tired of being single. Tired of coming home to an empty bed at night, and tired leaving an empty apartment in the morning. He was tired of evenings spent alone. Tired of being too often left with his own thoughts, haunted by his own memories, alone in this prison of his own making.
Did he love Christine? It wasn’t a question he liked to ponder; a can of worms he was never quite ready to open. After all, Cohen wasn’t certain he even knew what love was. But Christine was at least a warm body in his bed and someone to come home to at night. A living, breathing person who took an interest in him and his life.
She had to take an interest in him.
He paid a lot of money to make certain she took an interest in him.
Expensive gym memberships, a new car, a hefty clothes allowance and free-range of his Manhattan penthouse. Jewellery, perfumes, exotic holidays. He left Christine in no doubt that he was her bread and butter, and that he kept that bread liberally spread with jam to make certain that she would never leave him.He married her, giving her his grandmother’s prized diamond and sapphire ring, the first of many payments towards the debt he created out of a living, breathing woman.
Naturally, Esther hated her.
‘All I wanted,’ Esther told him tightly, ‘was a nice, friendly Jewish girl. She didn’t have to be pretty. She didn’t have to be clever. Just a nice girl I could take to temple now and again. And what do you bring me? A bony actress with over plucked eyebrows and a resting bitch face so tight you’d think Moses himself had commanded she wear it. She’s so obviously a gold-digger, Cohen.’
Obviously,Cohen agreed. He was under no illusions where Christine was concerned. He knew that just like everything else in his life, his wife was something to be paid for.
And pay he did. He paid then and he still paid now, and he would continue to do so every God damn month for the foreseeable future until some other poor schmuck had the misfortune to marry her.
He was sitting in The Great Greenwich Ice Creamery, waiting for River’s lunch break, when another email came in from Christine’s lawyer. It wasn’t good news but nor was it unexpected, and Cohen read over it with a deep sigh.
Christine wasn’t happy with the current terms of her alimony and wanted to discuss how much money Cohen would behappyto part with in order to correct this matter. In return, shemightbe willing to part with his grandmother’s diamond ring before Christmas, although obviously she was very fond of it and while legally it washers, she understood that morally itcouldbe his, though for the right price, obviously ...
Morals. Cohen felt his fist clench, his blood pressure rise. He didn’t think Christine even knew what they were.
He slammed his phone down on the table so hard that the screen shattered in his hand, and once again, he was bleeding in the ice creamery. Blood seeped from his hand, a sticky rivulet snaking down his wrist onto the table and then across the remnants of his phone below. There was a large shard of glass embedded into the fleshy mound of his thumb, and the pain was a burning reminder that everything in his life – his pitiful, lonely life – was messed up and awful.
He sat, breathing heavily, unmoving, when he felt a gentle hand wrap itself around his wrist. Momentarily, he closed his eyes, breathing in the close scent of vanilla and honey, before looking up.
There she was, the reminder that perhaps not everything in his life was messed up and awful. River de Luca, the living embodiment of all he longed for in life.
Happiness, warmth, light and compassion. He stared at her sadly, and she gave his wrist a gentle squeeze.
He’d almost not come to the ice creamery today. He’d woken in the morning, gone to the mirror, and seen in the glass the bitter and hard-hearted man he thought himself to be. He’d gripped the sink and berated himself for being so easily won over by a woman. He’d chewed on his lip and hated himself for being so quickly entranced by a pair of hazel eyes and the flutter of a gingham apron. As he made his morning coffee – black, no sugar – he tried to tell himself that he really was the man the world thought him to be. A man who didn’t have time for a chestnut-haired woman in a small shop in Greenwich. A man who sneered at sweetness and was downright disdainful of ice cream.
He'd made it as far as King’s Cross before he inexplicably found himself changing tube lines and then switched onto the DLR, watching the underground tunnels of London fly by before stepping into the light at Greenwich and rubbing his eyes.
