And to think of how I had laughed at all the other women who had fallen for him over the years. Little did I think it would happen to me. Doubtless there was a great lesson to be learned from it—don’t mock lest ye be mocked yourself, or something like that.
I couldn’t think straight because the sharp tearing pain of jealousy was driving me demented.
Worse than the jealousy was the fear that I had lost
Daniel forever. It had been such a long time since he’d been out with anyone, that I had started to think of him as mine.
Big mistake.
I did the most foolish thing I could think of—I called him.
He was the only one who could comfort my pain, even though he was the one who had caused it. It was an unusual situation to cry on a friend’s shoulder about my broken heart, when the person whose shoulder I was crying on was actually the one who had broken my heart. But I never seemed to do things normally.
“Daniel, are you alone?” I expected him to say no.
“Yes.”
“Can I come over?”
He didn’t say, “It’s late” or “What do you want?” or “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
He just said, “I’ll come and get you.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll get a taxi, I’ll see you soon.”
“Where are you going?” Karen caught me trying to sneak out the front door.
“Out,” I said, with a soupçon of defiance. Misery had made me less afraid of her.
“Out where?”
“Just out.”
“You’re going to see Daniel, aren’t you?”
She was either very perceptive or else highly paranoid and obsessed.
“Yes.” I met her eyes.
“You stupid bitch, you haven’t got a chance with him.”
“I know.” I made for the stairs.
“Are you still going?” she asked in angry surprise.
“Yes.”
“DO NOT GO,” she barked in staccato fashion.
“Says who?” By then I was halfway down the stairs, where it was a lot easier to be brazen.
“I forbid you to,” she said.
“I’m going.”
She was incandescent with rage. She could barely speak.
“I don’t want to make you see a fool of yourself,” she finally managed to sputter out.
“Maybe not, but you’d love to see me make a fool of myself.”
“Come back here!”
“Get lost,” I said bravely and bolted.
“I’ll wait up for you!” she screamed. “You’d better come home…”
Chapter 84
In the taxi, on the way over, I decided that the only thing I could do was tell Daniel why I was so upset—despite the Greek chorus in my head begging me not to.
“You know that the last thing you should ever do is tell the man you’re in love with, that you’re in love with him!” they sang. “Especially, when he’s not in love with you.”
“I know,” I said in exasperation. “But it’s different with me and Daniel. He’s my friend, he’ll talk me out of it. He’ll tell me how horrible he is to his girlfriends.”
“Get someone else to talk you out of it,” they sang. “There’s a world full of people—why pick on him?”
“He’ll take away the pain, he’ll make me feel better.”
“But…”
“He’s the only one who can,” I said with firm finality.
“You’re not fooling us,” the chorus sang. “We know you’re up to something.”
“Shut up, I’m not,” I protested.
I understood that Victorian stuff about, “He must never know how much I love him, I could not bear his pity.” Especially if the man wasn’t very nice and would laugh and tell his friends about it when they went shooting grouse. But it didn’t apply to me, I decided. I didn’t need my dignity with Daniel.
When he opened the door to me, I was so happy to see him that my heart leaped.
Dammit, I thought, so it’s true, I really am in love with him.
I ran straight into his arms—being his friend had lots of advantages that I had no intention of giving up just because he had gotten himself a new girlfriend.
I clung to him tightly and—to give him credit—he clung on to me pretty tightly also.
He must have thought that I was behaving most oddly but, being the decent kind of guy he was, he went along with it. I would explain in a little while, I decided. But for the moment I was staying where I was. He was still my friend, I was still allowed to be hugged by him. And for a few moments I could pretend that he was my lover.
“Sorry about this, Daniel, but I need you to be my friend.”
A lie of course—but I couldn’t really say, “Sorry about this, Daniel, but I want to marry you and have your children.”
“I’ll always be your friend, Lucy,” he murmured as he stroked my hair.
Thanks for nothing, I thought uncharitably. But only briefly. He was a great friend—it was hardly his fault that I’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him.
After a while I felt strong enough to disentangle myself from him.
“So what’s wrong?” he asked. “Is it your dad?”
“Oh no, nothing like that.”
“Tom?”
“Who? Oh no, poor Tom, not him. Why do the ones we don’t love always fall in love with us, Daniel?”
“I don’t know, Lucy, but they do.”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought nervously. I took a deep breath. “Daniel, I need to talk to you.”
But when I actually tried to tell him what was wrong with me, it wasn’t as easy as I had thought it would be. In fact, it was really awkward and embarrassing.
The romantic idea I had harboured of flying to him and expecting him to magically kiss away my pain had evaporated. He had a girlfriend, for God’s sake. I was only his friend. I had no rights over him. What could I say?—“Daniel, I want you to break up with your new girlfriend.” —Hardly.
“Lucy, what do you want to talk to me about?” he asked, after the seconds had ticked by and I still hadn’t said anything.
I looked at my hands for ages before I found the right words.
“Charlotte said she met you with a girl and I was, um, jealous,” I finally managed to blurt out. I couldn’t meet his eyes, and I cringed.
Maybe telling him hadn’t been a good idea.
Maybe it had been a very bad idea.
I shouldn’t have come, I realized, I must have been crazy. I should have just gone to bed and waited it out. The pain would have gone eventually.
“Only because she was short with dark hair,” I added quickly, in an attempt to recover lost ground and lost dignity. I had been wrong about the dignity—I did need it with him. “I’ve no problems with you screwing around with big blond girls, but I keep remembering that night out at Dad’s when you turned me down and I thought it was because I wasn’t your type. And it didn’t feel very nice when Charlotte said that the girl she met you with looked a bit like me, because what was wrong with me…?”
“Oh, Lucy.” He kind of half-laughed. At me or with me? Was it good or bad?
“I suppose Sascha does look a bit like you,” he said. “I hadn’t noticed, but now that you mention it…”
Sascha. Why couldn’t she have been called Madge?
“Anyway, that’s all that was wrong with me,” I said briskly, in a very belated attempt to recover lost ground. “Nothing at all the matter, I’ve overreacted as usual. You know me. Well, it’s been good to get it off my chest. But I must be off now…”
I stood up to leave and if I had left then, that second, I would have missed the arrival of my anger. But no, I met it at the door as it staggered in, gasping and panting, worn out from the crosstown journey. “Sorry, I’m late,” it wheezed, clutching its chest. “Awful traffic. But I’m here now…” And with that I turned around on Daniel with sudden fury.
“You could have just
told me, you know, that you had a new girlfriend. Instead of giving me all that…that…crap,” I spat, “about me needing to get out more. You only had to tell me that I was cluttering up your life and that Sascha needed you more than I did. I would’ve understood, you know.”
He opened his mouth to say something but I beat him to it.
“If you wanted me out of the way, then you only had to say. Did you think I’d mind, did you think I’d be jealous? The nerve of you! You think you’re gorgeous, don’t you? That every woman is crazy about you.”
Once again he tried to say something, it seemed to be some sort of denial, but he didn’t stand a chance.
“We’re supposed to be friends, you know, Daniel. So how could you pretend that you were concerned about me? That you cared about me?”
“But…”
“When it’s obvious that the only person you care about is yourself!”
That was the part in most arguments when the angry shouting changes into tearful wobbling. This one was no exception—you could have set your watch by it. My voice veered off the trembly end of the scale and I realized that I was dangerously close to crying. But still I didn’t leave. Like a fool I was waiting in the hope that he might be nice to me, that he might say something to make me feel better.
“I wasn’t pretending,” he protested. “I really was concerned for you.”
I hated the look of pity on his face.
“Well, there’s no need,” I said nastily. “I can look after myself.”
“Can you really?” He sounded pathetically hopeful.
How dare he! “Of course, I can,” I threw at him.
“That’s great,” he said.
How could he be so cruel, I wondered, as pain tore through me.
Easily, I realized. Very easily. He’d done it lots of times
to lots of other women, why should I get special treatment?
“Goodbye, Daniel. I hope things work out for you and the beautiful Sascha,” I said sarcastically.
“Thanks, Lucy, and the best of luck with rich Tom.” He matched my sarcasm.
“What are you being so nasty about?” I asked in angry surprise.
“What do you think?” His voice had suddenly gone up several decibels.
“How the fuck should I know?” I shouted back.
“You’re not the only one who’s jealous.” he yelled. He looked furious.
“I know I’m not!” I said. “But, to be quite honest, Daniel, Karen isn’t really my concern right now.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “I’m talking about me! I’m fucking jealous too! I’ve spent months waiting for the right time, waiting for you to get over your dad. I did everything I could think of to stop myself making a pass at you. I was so patient, it nearly killed me.”
He paused for breath. I stared at him, unable to speak. Before I could take it all in he began shouting again.
“And then!” he roared into my face. “And then, when I finally manage to convince you to start thinking about having a relationship with a man, you go and get off with someone else. I meant me, I wanted you to think about having a relationship with me, and instead some rich, lucky bastard gets you!”
My head raced as I tried to take it all in.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, why is Tom a lucky bastard?” I asked. “Because he’s rich?”
“No!” Daniel shouted. “Because he’s going out with you, of course!”
“But he’s not going out with me,” I said. “I only went out with him once and that was just to annoy you. Not that it worked.”
“Not that it worked!” sputtered Daniel. “Of course it worked. I got so drunk on Sunday night that I was too sick to go to work on Monday.”
“Really?” I asked, momentarily sidetracked. “Were you throwing up? That kind of sick?”
“Couldn’t eat a thing until Tuesday evening,” he said.
There was a little silence and for a moment we were just Daniel and Lucy again.
“What was that part that you said about wanting to make a pass at me?” I asked.
“Nothing, forget it,” he said sulkily.
“Tell me!” I shouted.
“Nothing to say,” he muttered. “It was just that I could hardly keep my hands off you, but I knew I had to because you were so vulnerable. If anything had happened with us I’d always be afraid that you had only done it because you were all mixed up.
“That was why I gave you that talk about coming back to the land of the living,” he said. “I wanted you to know your own mind and be able to make decisions so that when I asked you out and if you said yes, I wouldn’t feel like I was taking advantage of you.”
“Ask me out?” I said, carefully.
“Out-out,” said Daniel, sheepishly. “As in boyfriend and girlfriend out.”
“Really?” I asked. “Are you serious? So all that stuff about me meeting people wasn’t just to get me out of the way to make room for Sascha.”
“No.”
“Who’s this Sascha anyway?” I asked jealously.
“A girl from work.”
“And does she look like me?”
“I suppose there’s a superficial resemblance. Although she’s not half as beautiful as you,” he said idly. “Or as funny or as sexy or as cute or as smart.”
I sat very still. That sounded promising. But not promising enough.
“How long have you been going out with her?” I asked.
“But I’m not going out with her.” He sounded annoyed.
“But Charlotte said…”
“Please!” Daniel put his hand to his forehead, as if he had a headache. “I’m sure Charlotte said plenty and you know how fond of her I am, but she doesn’t always get things right.”
“So, you’re not going out with Sascha?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t think it was fair to go out with her when I’m in love with you.”
My brain went into shock. The words hit home long before the feelings arrived.
“Oh,” I said in surprise.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I would have settled for him having a little crush on me.
God, this was great.
“I shouldn’t have said that.” Daniel looked miserable.
“Why not? Isn’t it true?”
“Of course, it’s true. I don’t go around telling women I love them at the drop of a hat. But I don’t want to scare you. Please, Lucy, forget I said it.”
“I will not,” I said irritably. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Really?” he said hopefully. “You mean you…”
“Yes, yes.” I waved my arm distractedly. I wanted to think about what he had said to me. I had no time to bother with him.
“I love you too,” I added. “I think I must have for a really long time.”
Happiness and relief began to trickle through me, increasing to a steady flow, then gushed as though from a broken pipe. But I had to be sure.
“Are you really in love with me?” I asked him suspiciously.
“Oh God, yes.”
“Since when?”
“For a long time.”
“Since Gus?”
“Since long before Gus.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because you would have screeched with laughter and humiliated me…”
“I would not have!” I was outraged.
“Yes, you would.”
“Would I?”
“Oh yes, Lucy.”
“Well, maybe I would,” I reluctantly agreed. “Oh, sorry, Daniel.” I was passionately apologetic. “But I had to be mean to you, because you were just too attractive. And that’s actually a compliment,” I added.
“Really?” he asked. “But all the guys you went out with were completely different from me—how could I compete with someone like Gus?”
He was right—until recent
ly I couldn’t have coped with a boyfriend who didn’t have a terrible credit rating and a drinking problem.
I thought about it some more.
“Are you really, really in love with me?”
“Yes, Lucy.”
“No, I mean really?”
“Yes, really.”
“In that case, can we go to bed?”
Chapter 85
Astonished by my brazenness, I took him by the hand and led him into his bedroom.
I was torn between acute lust and acute embarrassment. Because I was afraid that it could still go horribly wrong.
It was all very well for him to go around telling me he loved me, but the real test, the real issue was the bed one.
What if I was terrible in bed?
What about the fact that we’d been friends for more than ten years? The potential cringe factor was high. How could we possibly be all gooey and romantic about each other and not laugh?
What if he thought I was hideous? He was used to women with huge breasts. What would he say when he saw my fried eggs?
I was so nervous that I almost changed my mind.
But not quite.
I had a chance to sleep with him and I fully intended to avail of it. I loved him. But I also lusted after him.
However, after the flying start where I brazenly took his hand, I ran out of trollopy steam. Once I got him into the bedroom, I didn’t really know what to do. Should I drape myself seductively on his duvet? Should I shove him onto the bed and jump on top of him? But I couldn’t, it was too mortifying.
I perched on the edge of his bed. He sat down beside me. God, this was so much easier when I was drunk.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“What if you think I’m hideous?”
“What if you think I’m hideous?” he asked.
“But you’re gorgeous.” I giggled.
“So are you.”
“I’m so nervous,” I whispered.
“I am too.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“But I am, honestly,” he said. “Here, feel my heart.”
That made me edgy. In the past I had submitted my hand for the alleged feeling of a heart and instead my hand had been placed on the young man’s erect member and then rubbed up and down said member at high speed.