Bashie and Sadie press fresh drinks into our hands, and for the next hour we just dance. Kieran grinds behind me like we’reeighteen again (which he basically is). The Brazilian lads try to teach me how to samba, and it goes about as well as my attempt at Top Bins. At some point, the border between our area and the rest of the club becomes permeable, and a dozen beautiful women edge into our territory. Several of them flock to Kieran, and I delight at the look in his eyes, like a kid who’s just been given his allowance and can’t decide which toy to spend it on.
I’m also grateful for the distraction these strangers provide, because as the clock pushes into the wee hours, Lachlan and I are increasingly drawn to each other. The DJ transitions from poppy New Year’s bops into harder electronic stuff, thumping bass lines and sexy rhythms, the only light in the club coming from a laser display in tune with the music. The cover of darkness emboldens me, emboldens us, and we back into a secluded corner.
He’s drunk,sodrunk, but then, so am I. We’re sharing a beer now, passing the bottle back and forth lazily, languidly, our tongues always staying a little too long on the rim. The warmth of his earlier smile has gone, replaced by a ragged, starved look. He’s got his goal-scoring eyes on, pitch-black and asking questions that demand answers. I take a sip of the beer and raise my hands in the air, twirling the bottle and my arms over my head, and Lachlan uses this opportunity to move closer. We sway together for a moment, not quite touching, the air between us crackling with electricity. He grabs the bottle from my hand and takes the last sip, never breaking eye contact, and smiles as he sets it on a nearby table.
Then his hands are on my hips and just like that, it’s like he found the button and switched me on. All the way on. I lean into him, closer than I’ve been even in my dreams. I catch the familiar scent of him, but it’s masked by beer and whisky. Whisky-no-E,so much of it that I might be getting drunker just by the secondhandfumes. But I can’t think about that because all of my attention, all of my focus is on his hands on my hips. His fingers are sinking into the soft flesh there, grabbing it like it’s a lifeline, like it’s the only way out of quicksand. Strobe lights bathe us in splintered beams, making the bodies writhing around us move in slow motion. In a dark corner of my mind, I know this is dangerous. There are too many people here that we know, too many people watching. But I watch Lachlan’s beautiful body move in steady, fluid arcs through the fracturing light of the strobe, and I can’t think of anything else.
His hands slink behind my hips to the small of my back and he pulls me into the boozy heat of his breath. Then he presses his lips to my neck, right behind my earlobe, and each breath sends a shockwave through me. I angle my chin upward and he slides his lips to the sweet spot right where my jaw meets my ear. The feeling of his mouth on my skin is too much and I take a short, shocked gasp. My fingers, already pressed between us, clutch at the fabric of his shirt, twisting and pulling in a desperate attempt to close the infinitesimal gap between our bodies.
He moans and the vibration travels from his throat to his lips to my neck, an electric shock that short-circuits me. I slide my leg in between his and feel him there, and the thought that I’ve made this man hard is nearly enough to finish me off. But then his mouth is on my ear and he murmurs, “I want you so bad.”
The way I light up at his words, the way I burn…It’s like reaching the bottom of a staircase and thinking you have one more step, so you fall forward, suspended ever so briefly in a dizzying freefall. That’s what he does to me, but the freefall doesn’t stop. I hang there in blissful suspension, not thinking about the ground rushing up to meet me.
He’s grabbed the folds of my dress, hiking it up a bit as hishands roam down. The heat of his palms radiates through the fabric, leaving little trails of lightning as he cups my ass, pulling me up and into him, and he looks at me, searching. “Abby…”
I haven’t said anything. Ican’tsay anything. How can I form words when all the air has been pressed out of my lungs? My hands are trapped between our bodies. I send one to his heart, my fingertips finding it thumping wildly under his shirt. I send the other to his neck, his throat, his cheek. I run a thumb along his bottom lip, tracing it up with his smile. And he’s smiling, yes, but his eyes are pained. I can see the anguish there, can see my own reflected back at me. Because sure, the hand curling around the back of my thigh is not sporting a wedding ring, but we both know it could still be there, legally and perhaps morally. The lips under my fingertips are not yet mine for kissing; the heart under my palm is not yet mine to take.
“Abby,” he says again, and it’s deeper this time, heavy with the lust and heat welling between us, honeyed with the sweet malty notes of our beer. But there’s something else there, buried under the desire. He’s pleading, begging, but the tone I hear isn’t the impatience of someone who wants to hurry out of the club and into bed, it’s the agony of someone who knows he can’t. Shouldn’t.Might.
“Lachlan,” I say, because to move beyond our names is to invite trouble. Is to open Pandora’s box. And we need to leave it shut tight. We need to stop this. I need to step back, not fold my body against his. He needs to release me, not turn us around and press me into the wall. Not slide his hand further up my thigh. Not move his mouth so close to mine that only a whisper separates us.
The strobes are flashing and the beat is pulsating, and where his lips continue to explore my neck, I’m sure he can feel mypulse throbbing along with it. The music is so loud that he has to speak directly into my ear, and his breath hitting my skin sends a trail of cold snaking around my neck and down to my navel. I shiver and clutch the fabric of his shirt tighter. His lips brush my earlobe again and every part of me is coiled so fucking tight in anticipation of his words.
But of all the things I was hoping him to say, wanting him to say,begginghim to say, I would never have chosen this: “If you ask me to leave her, I will.”
Oh, God.
I’d never realized how close the sensations of arousal and anxiety are, but at those words, the shivers he’d just sent down my spine turn sinister, the tautness of my muscles becomes paralysis. I shake my head and push him lightly off me so I can look him in the eye. “What?”
“Claire,” he says, like it was just that I didn’t know who he was talking about, not that he just begged me to ask him to leave his fucking wife. “If you ask me, I’ll pull the trigger. I’ll leave her. For good, for real. But I need you to say it. I need to know it’s worth it, that you’ll be waiting for me on the other side, because it’s a huge decision for me.”
I blink while I process the words. “You wantmeto…” That’s all I can spit out because my head is spinning and I have to get away from this man. Immediately. I recoil, step away, collide with someone behind me, but I don’t stop moving. I’m shaking my head and my breath is coming in shallow gasps and I see Lachlan reaching for me, trying to say something, trying to clarify, maybe, but what the fuck else is there to say? I turn away from him and muscle my way through the writhing crowd as the speakers ring in my ears and panic rises in my chest.
How did I think this was going to end? My stupid little Day 366fantasy, when he knocks on my door and presents me the signed divorce papers? Was I really that naive? Claire is very much still in the picture, very much still married to this man who I’ve just been putting my body all over in a club, who I’ve been living with for months, who has just asked me to give him an out so he can escape with a clear conscience, leaving me to be the bitch who ruined their marriage.
All the truths I’ve been repressing come rushing back. I mean, Christ, even if they did just get divorced of their own accord, I’d be complicit. I can’t look back on these last few months without guilt: Even if the very thought of it still sounds laughable to me, haven’t I lured him away? Haven’t I been shamelessly pursuing him, pretending she didn’t exist, pretending she was nothing more than a signature on a piece of paper, even though I’ve seen her with my own two eyes?
I have nobody to blame but myself. I should have shut this down ages ago, the very first time I met him. Shit,beforethen. I should have cauterized the part of my brain that got excited the first time I googled him, the first time his confidence radiated out at me from his fucking Wikipedia page. I should have heeded Charlotte’s warnings that these men don’t care about collateral damage. But not only did I not do any of that, I encouraged that part of my brain, my stupid, hopeless brain, to run wild, to fantasize at will about what it would be like to be with this man, especially after the embarrassment of my failed engagement. He could have just been a friend.Shouldhave just been a friend. Because now, what is he? And what am I?
Something burbles up inside me, hot bile forcing its way up my throat, and I bolt toward the ladies’ room. I shove open the door and find the room mercifully empty. My mind reels as I throw myself into a stall and drop to my knees. As I sit and wait forthe sick to come, the face that swims into my vision isn’t Lachlan’s but Steven’s. I think of our last conversation, in our living room. After months and months of me hoping I was wrong about him having an affair, of hoping that if I just waited quietly, patiently, he would come home. After I was wrong about everything. After he said he was leaving me for good, for real. It’s funny, but even now, I’d only ever thought about that conversation having two participants: him confessing the affair, me nodding mutely on the couch. Him deciding to leave, me lacking any energy to fight it. But of course there was a third person there, in spirit if not in body. Her.Her. The woman my fiancé was actually in love with. Had Steven done the same thing as Lachlan, beg her to ask him to leave me? To give him permission to quit fucking around and end it? The implicit absolution of all guilt, because they were doing it all in the name of love?
The thought of it triggers my stomach once and for all, and I cradle the toilet bowl as the night comes back up. It’s brutal, stinging my throat and watering my eyes, and I can’t stop. I’m sobbing now, hot tears dripping onto the toilet seat, my forehead clammy with sweat, my hair sticking to my skin. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. The hubris of thinking I could just start my life over, and how that’s ended up with me on the disgusting floor of the women’s room in a slick nightclub in Liverpool, totally alone.
But then, I’m not alone. There’s a pair of hands at the nape of my neck, strong, capable hands that swoop my hair back from where it’s fallen around my face and run soothing fingers across my brow.
Lachlan. I can’t believe it, but I’m so relieved he followed me. My stupid heart has overruled my stupid brain and I’m glad he’s here.
But the voice that accompanies the hands does not trill itsRs softly, does not make me think of windswept glens and deep blue lochs. No, the voice that accompanies the hands comes from much closer than that. Granby Street, born and bred. The Boy King of Liverpool.
“It’s okay, Abs. Get it all out,” says Kieran Campbell.
I pull my head out of the toilet bowl and look at him, and the sight of his earnest young face scrunched up in concern is devastating. I slump onto the floor and put my head in my hands. This is all too much; I have no idea what to do. “Thank you,” I say through my fingers. “I’m so sorry you have to see me like this.”
“Don’t worry about it, mate. We’ve all been there, yeah?” He pats my shoulder in a way that indicates it’s a thing he thinks he’s supposed to do, all stiff and formal.
“We’ve got to get you out of the ladies before you get tweeted about as some kind of sex pest,” I say.
He has a sweet smile, this kid. Kind of crooked, totally earnest. “Always on the job, hey Macca?”
