Hope strained to get closer to Wilson, not even kissing him now, but simply breathing heavily against his open mouth as his fingers moved faster, went deeper, echoed in the touch of her own hand as she rubbed his wet-tipped cock.
Then he crooked his fingers inside her to hit a spot that Hope had only read about in magazine features titled ‘10 Ways to Spice up Your Love Life’ and ‘The Sex Trick Guaranteed to Give You an Orgasm Every Time’.
Her free hand gripped Wilson’s quiff, trying to hold him still as she stiffened against him, toes curling, muscles clenching, her fingers involuntarily tightening around his cock so that when her brain was able to fire on all cylinders again, she realised that Wilson had come too. She also realised that his fingers were still moving on her, inside her to catch every last flutter.
Hope waited for the shame and the embarrassment to kick in, but they were nowhere to be found. But yes, she blushed a little when Wilson finally released her, then sucked her juices from his fingers with the same look of quiet appreciation he usually showed for ancient malt whisky.
‘Thank you,’ he said, dropping a kiss on each one of her drooping eyelids.
AT SIX THIRTY the world outside was dark and muffled by a blanket of heavy snow. Wearing thick socks and with socks stuffed into the toes of a pair of Wilson’s boots so she could walk in them, Hope made it to his car unaided.
Then it was a slow, perilous drive to Holloway, Wilson’s ancient Saab protesting loudly with every metre. When they turned into the square where Hope lived, the car skidded and she gripped hold of the dashboard as Wilson swore loudly but managed to keep them on the slippery road.
‘You will be careful driving back,’ Hope said, as he walked her the last few steps home, even though she’d told him that she could manage. ‘Promise me you’ll take it slow.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Wilson said with a frozen grin as they reached her door. All the lights seemed to be off, so Hope reckoned she could sneak in very quietly and Jack would be none the wiser. It would be a secret between her and Wilson, which was wrong, but she also liked the idea that she and Wilson shared a secret. ‘So, what happens next?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hope said, because she really didn’t. She’d been fixated on the idea that she could somehow trick Jack into staying with her for so long now that, apart from making lists, she hadn’t really thought about what her life would be like without him. She probably wasn’t ready for another relationship right away, but the thought of spending more time with Wilson was a pleasing one. ‘What do you want to happen next?’
‘I want you not to answer a question with another question,’ Wilson said, but he smiled at her. ‘I’m up for seeing you again, maybe having some of those one-night stands we talked about a while ago. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t hang out now, is there?’
Hope bent down to tug off Wilson’s boots. ‘No reason at all,’ she agreed. ‘Unless I have another emotional freak-out and decide to join a nunnery instead.’
‘They’d kick you out within minutes for having impure thoughts.’ They were both talking in whispers now. ‘You’re going to have emotional freak-outs. It’s all part of the process. Anyway, love, you were having emotional freak-outs long before you broke up with him indoors.’
Hope tried to scowl but her heart wasn’t in it. The sky was lightening from a dark, dense navy to a Wedgewood blue; a reminder that the night was almost over and it was the dawning of a brand-new day and brand-new resolutions.
‘I do also have moments of great calm,’ Hope insisted, but Wilson didn’t look as if he believed her, and both of them were shivering now. ‘I’d better get inside and you should go. I don’t want you freezing to death before you even make it back to your car.’
‘Well, give us a kiss first, then.’ Wilson already had his hands on her hips to bring her closer and was this the worst betrayal of all, passionately kissing Wilson on her own doorstep while Jack was sleeping just a few feet away?
‘Jesus! What the actual fuck?’
Except Jack wasn’t sleeping, because he’d appeared there on the doorstep, grey with tiredness like he hadn’t slept, and was staring at Hope, still in Wilson’s arms, with equal parts horror and disbelief.
Hope stared back at Jack as Wilson’s arms fell away, and then she turned to look at Wilson instead. Whatever final niggling doubts she might have had about Wilson exacting a painstakingly planned revenge were swept away by the discomfited expression on his face.
‘What the fuck?’ Jack said again. ‘I thought you were dead or stranded somewhere, and all the time … what the fuck have you been doing?’
‘Well, we went for our Christmas meal, then we went on to this club …’
‘We? Who’s we? I know you weren’t with Elaine because I phoned her,’ Jack barked.
‘I was with Wilson,’ Hope explained rather pointlessly.
‘Who you said you weren’t going to see again!’
‘But you were the one who said I could!’ Hope bit her lip so hard that she almost drew blood rather than remind Jack that he’d said he didn’t have a problem with her hanging out with Wilson, because he trusted her. ‘But I haven’t been, until last night.’
‘Yeah, well, you more than made up for it, didn’t you?’ Jack was in jeans and a jumper, so Hope didn’t know if he’d been to bed yet. Normally he didn’t even know what the morning looked like much before eight and it wasn’t even seven. He had his hands on his hips as he glared at her, and all he needed was a rolling pin to complete the picture of the wronged spouse. ‘So, again, what the fuck have you been up to?’
‘Maybe now isn’t the time, when Hope’s standing in her socks in the freezing cold,’ Wilson pointed out from where he stood behind her.
Jack drew himself up until he was at least 5 inches taller, and showed all his teeth in a fair approximation of a snarl at the inference that he didn’t care about Hope’s physical wellbeing like Wilson did.
‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ Jack said belligerently. Hope heard Wilson snort, and she wasn’t sure if Jack had too, but she put one frozen foot forward.
‘Shall we not do this on the doorstep?’ she suggested, trying to push Jack’s rigid body aside so she could get through the door. But then she turned back to Wilson, and this wasn’t how their goodbye was meant to go. It was meant to be far more Brief Encounter than this excruciating, embarrassing scene. ‘Look, I’ll … well, I’m sorry. I’ll call you, OK?’
‘No, you bloody won’t!’ Jack exploded and he grabbed Hope’s hand and yanked her into the hall.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ Wilson asked quietly, but it was the kind of forceful quiet that would have made all the hairs on the back of Hope’s neck rise up if they weren’t already vertical. ‘I can come in if you want.’
If possible, Jack became even more furious. Hope had never seen him like this, with fists and jaw clenched so tight, his face bright red with anger. ‘Of course she’s going to be all right,’ he hissed, as if he was too angry to even shout any more. ‘I’m not going to hit her because I would never, ever do that, and you don’t know anything about me, and I’ll tell you something else, you know fuck all about Hope, too.’
That wasn’t even a little bit true. Yes, Jack would win every time if they went on a Mr and Mrs-style gameshow and he had to answer questions on her favourite food and what side of the bed she slept on, but Hope knew that when it came down to it, after all those years, he didn’t have a clue about what was really going on in her head or her heart, whereas Wilson already seemed to have a grasp on the basics.
‘You sure about that, are you?’ Wilson asked in the same scarily quiet voice, because he might have the inside track on Hope but he didn’t seem to realise that he was deliberately goading Jack. Or maybe he did.
Jack started to say something, but it was mostly ‘fucking’ and ‘wanker’ with a few other swear words thrown in at random.
‘That’s enough!’ Hope shouted in her most teacherly voice. S
he pushed Jack down the hall, turned to give Wilson one last helpless, hapless shrug, and shut the door in his face.
‘You fucked him, didn’t you?’ Jack demanded, as Hope brushed past him and walked into the kitchen. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Of course I didn’t,’ Hope said immediately, and it was the truth. The right answer – except Jack was asking the wrong question. She hadn’t fucked Wilson, but she’d still cheated on Jack.
‘But you spent the night with him?’ His voice was quietening down at last. ‘You slept with him.’
She hadn’t done that either, and unless Jack kept playing Twenty Questions and eventually managed to stumble on the exact truth of what she’d been doing with Wilson, Hope could get away with it. Because all he’d actually seen was a kiss on a doorstep.
‘Look, he came to dinner with us and then the two of us went to a club in Camden,’ she hurriedly clarified. ‘And I was only going to stay for an hour but I started doing tequila shots …’
Jack moaned like he was in pain. ‘You’re an animal when you drink tequila!’
Hope decided to ignore that little aside. ‘So I stayed longer than I meant to, and when we left at two, it had been snowing and we couldn’t get a cab or a bus, so we had to walk to Wilson’s. I mean, I couldn’t walk home in these, could I?’ She produced her ruined shoes, which she’d stuffed into her handbag. They were still soaking wet and the soles had curled up like medieval jesters’ shoes. ‘And yes, I was with Wilson and … well …’
She could just say that nothing had happened. She could. Already she’d given Jack far more explanation than he’d given her about spending night after night and lunchtime after lunchtime and snatched hours here and there with Susie, but the words were stuck in her throat. Because something had happened and to deny it, even to save her own skin, was like admitting it hadn’t meant anything – when it had.
‘I didn’t shag him,’ she said. ‘We sort of fooled around, but I don’t really want to talk about it.’
Jack had been leaning against the kitchen door but now he slid down until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest. ‘I can’t believe that you’d do this after all that we’ve gone through. After all the things you’ve said … why? Because you were mad at me for not coming to your carol concert?’
When was Jack going to get it into his head that it hadn’t been a carol concert? It had been a flaming Winter Pageant, that she’d put her heart and soul into – it really wasn’t the issue right then, but still … ‘You knew how much the Winter Pageant meant to me, and you couldn’t even be bothered to stop drinking for long enough to see the last half-hour, so yeah, I was pissed off with you, but it had nothing to do with that,’ Hope said, and she didn’t even dare snap at Jack. Getting angry with him when he was so obviously upset would be like chucking petrol on a barbecue. Instead, she opened the fridge and started taking out the Tupperware boxes containing her cupcakes
‘So, why? To get back at me because of Susie?’
Hope looked up in surprise. ‘Of course not,’ she said, and she thought it was the most truthful thing she’d said so far. ‘Not everything is about you and Susie.’
‘Then why? You can’t fancy him! He’s such a pretentious wanker.’ Derision curled itself around every word. ‘That’s what you used to say.’
It had been a long time since Hope had seen Wilson as nothing more than a retro hairstyle and a permanent sneer. She could hardly even recognise Wilson from Jack’s description, because he wasn’t like that at all. He was kind and considerate and funny, and yeah, still a little intimidating but it was a very, very sexy kind of intimidating – and she couldn’t tell Jack that so Hope got the butter from the fridge, pulled out a mixing bowl and the special jar of sugar with vanilla pods in it that she used for baking. ‘You know I’ve been hanging out with him a bit,’ she said at last, as she doggedly creamed butter and sugar to make frosting. ‘I got to know him better.’
‘Do you hate me so much that you’d do this to me?’ Jack asked, and she could hear his voice thickening and if he cried, then Hope would cry too.
‘Jack,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the bowl. ‘I really don’t mean to be nasty, but this wasn’t about you. It was about me and Wilson, and well, you don’t really have any right to be giving me a hard time about this. You don’t want to be with me, you want Susie, so what I do with other people really isn’t your business any more …’
‘I can’t believe that you’d throw that back in my face.’ Jack wiped the face in question, and if he wasn’t crying then it was only through a superhuman effort. ‘What I did with Susie was completely different.’
The only way that Hope could see that it was different was that at least she’d resisted that wicked little voice in her head egging her on. And she might have finally given in, but that was only because in the deepest, darkest part of her heart, she knew that Jack was never coming back to her. She could have had sex with Wilson weeks ago, for that matter, but she hadn’t because she’d wanted to do the decent thing by Jack. Whereas Jack hadn’t even considered doing the decent thing. He’d met up with Susie to buy Hope’s birthday present and ended up getting his rocks off like a free gift with purchase of a pair of Stella McCartney shoes, which Hope had now given to the local Cancer Research shop. That was how it was different.
But she wasn’t going to drag this up all over again, because there was no point any more. Jack had already chosen his future and Hope … well, her future was shadowy and undefined but least she had options. Even so, she didn’t want it to end like this, with rows and recriminations and bucketloads of regret. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she meant it. ‘I am so sorry that I’ve hurt you. It wasn’t my intention.’
‘Well, it sounds like I was the last person you were worrying about,’ Jack said, dragging himself to his feet. ‘And your “sorry” means fuck all. You can’t just say sorry and think it’s all squared away. It isn’t.’
Hope began manically chopping chocolate. ‘I know that, but I am sorry, Jack. And yeah, I suppose my timing was a bit off.’
‘You went out and threw yourself at the first bloke you could find,’ Jack said savagely. ‘And I’ve spent all bloody night worried sick about you.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Hope said and she was crying now, tears plopping into the bowl of chocolate that she was trying to melt over a bain-marie. The plan had been that after she’d made the frosting, she was going to make icing so she could put everyone’s initials on a cupcake, but fuck that. Why did she always have to make everything so complicated? ‘I’ve been really selfish and thoughtless and I’m sorry.’
She dropped her wooden spoon, even though she was meant to be frantically stirring the melted chocolate so it wouldn’t go lumpy, to go over to Jack standing in the doorway, because he was hurting and Hope still loved him, which was why she wanted to take the hurt away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, because if she kept saying it, then eventually he’d believe her. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She went to touch his arm, but he flinched and it wasn’t because her fingers were sticky with butter, sugar and chocolate. ‘Don’t,’ he bit out. ‘I don’t want you near me right now. I can hardly bear to look at you.’
Hope shut her eyes, and when she opened them she wished she hadn’t, because Jack had never looked at her like that before, like she was a dog turd that he’d found smeared to the sole of his favourite pair of limited-edition Converses. ‘I forgave you,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And I agreed to let you go.’
‘No, you didn’t. You’d never have done this if you really had forgiven me. What were you thinking? That you could go out and shag someone else and we’d be even?’
‘We can get past this,’ she insisted. ‘We got through everything else. We both know that we’ll still be friends when this has all blown over, so will you please stop looking at me like that?’
‘Fine! That I can do,’ Jack said and strode out of the kitchen and down the hall.
br /> The front door closing behind him had an awful note of finality in its loud thud.
HOPE WASN’T QUITE sure how she made it through the day without bursting into tears.
She was sleep-deprived, that was a given, and the hangover kicked in as she walked into school with her cupcakes and their lumpy frosting – only to bump into Elaine who proceeded to give Hope a tongue-lashing that rivalled anything that Caroline Delafield had ever come up with. She was ‘selfish, feckless and any fool, even Marta, could see that you’re self-sabotaging your relationship with Jack because you don’t have the guts to break up with him’, Elaine told Hope, after she’d frogmarched her into the staff toilets.
‘It’s not like that,’ Hope said, although she could see that to someone who hadn’t been told that Hope had been dumped by Jack a fortnight before, it might look that way.
‘And what about poor Wilson? Lovely bloke. Doesn’t deserve to be treated like that,’ Elaine continued, shaking her head and tutting. ‘I have to say, I’m seeing a whole new side of you, and I don’t like it very much.’
There wasn’t much that Hope could say in her defence, not even that Wilson had been very happy to be treated like that, but the bell rang while she was stuttering her way through a half-hearted defence of her reprehensible actions and she had to scurry off to her classroom.
Blue Class refused to be quiet in deference to Hope’s fragile state. They had three and a half hours before they were done with school for three weeks, and they wanted to tell Hope exactly what they were getting from Father Christmas, at great length and in excruciating detail. They also wanted to discuss how much they’d rocked the Winter Pageant, and what on earth Timothy meant when he said it was statistically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver presents to every child in the world – even allowing for different time zones, and the fact that Santa could change reindeer every hour. ‘And, Miss, how do reindeer even fly, anyway? How do they get up in the sky and stay there?’