by Jackson Lear
Brooke stared back, waiting for Josh’s answer. “Is there an end to that coming soon or not?”
“Not really. Just wanted to see if you had a panicked look in your eyes or not.”
“And?”
Josh winked at her.
After an agonising wait that must have lasted for a million years, Brooke winked back. All at once, a thousand little bees buzzed within Josh’s chest.
“Let me know when you’re heading out,” said Brooke.
“Will do.”
Josh headed back to his office and purposefully refused to check over his shoulder for one more look at Brooke. It was only as he turned the corner that he heard her get back to work.
15
Anthony
It was Sunday. Anthony settled his beer onto the round table in the back of Hoolan’s beer garden. In two days its heavy oak doors would shut forever. Perhaps by Christmas it would be turned into a hair salon, or a high-end kitchenware store, or something else that was just as pointless for the two age-old friends. He cast a quick thought to the armoured knight standing in one corner, covered in cobwebs, holding onto a halberd to protect its patrons from the invading French. Or at least that’s how Dave described it. Maybe he was open to selling it, then it could stand guard somewhere in Woodards.
“I think I’m in trouble,” Josh said, after a quick sip of lager.
Anthony offered a solemn nod. “Work related, or ‘other’?”
“Other.”
“Does it have something to do with a hot blonde and her killer legs?” asked Anthony.
Josh gave him a quick nod.
“Ah. That combination is often trouble.”
Josh checked over his shoulder to make sure no one could over hear them. “I’m getting better at yoga. I no longer feel like the walking dead when we’re done.”
“That’s something.”
“But it’s a slow process losing the gut.”
“More salad, less carbs,” said Anthony.
“Yeah, unfortunately Hannah’s favourite foods include everything rice related, or potatoes, or pasta, which doesn’t really leave much else to eat.”
Anthony allowed them to fall into an uncomfortable silence as Josh was clearly stalling as much as possible. Pasta and carbs had little, if anything, to do with a leggy blonde.
Josh eyed up his friend before grumbling to himself. “Fine. Do you ever wonder if you married the wrong person?”
“Of course,” said Anthony, with little more than a shrug. “That happens a lot right before the two of you head into counselling.”
“And now?”
“Sometimes. She still has a temper. It’s almost broken us up a couple of times. The problem is she doesn’t realise how it looks to anyone else. It’ll burst out at stupid moments, say if someone cuts her off in traffic she’ll shout, ‘Oh that’s bullshit, why don’t you do everyone a favour and stay home and go fuck yourself.’ But she won’t just say it, she’ll shout it. And then she’ll just shout out ‘fuck you’ and quickly turn to me and say, ‘not you, I’m talking to him.’ It’s cute when you first start dating, but after a while I wondered if she was going to do that with our kids in the back of the car. It’s not the swearing I care about, it’s the shouting and attitude. I can see it happening even now. That one day will come along when she shouts at someone who’s in the worst mood of their life, going through the worst day in their life, and they might beat the hell out of her because their rage has reached breaking point and she just happened to provoke them. Possibly in front of our own kids.”
“Jesus,” said Josh, with his eyes raised and looking around in concern. “That’s quite some road rage.”
“It’s not just on the road. She’ll slam the dishes down as she’s washing up. She hates doing the dishes and she’ll let everyone know that she hates doing them. Every year she breaks a whole set. The kids are going to see her do that and it’s going to scare the hell out of them. They’re going to think that mummy’s rage issues are because of something they did and they won’t know that it wasn’t them that set her off.”
“Are you guys working on that?” Josh asked.
“Yeah,” said Anthony, with a heavy sigh. “I do a lot of the driving and I bought a dishwasher. Our counsellor asked us to write up a list of things we would like each other to work on.”
“What did she write for you?”
“That I should get my arse into gear and renovate the kitchen like I’ve been promising for years.”
“Well, if it’s anything like how your bathroom turned out, she has a point.”
“I burned through a whole year’s worth of annual leave on that job. Just once I’d like an actual vacation.”
Josh narrowed his eyes. “It wouldn’t also have anything to do with adding thousands of pounds onto the resale value, would it?”
“She said it once to her friends when she thought I was out of the room. She’s remained tight lipped about it ever since,” grumbled Anthony. “Oh, she also said I should cut back on porn. That was a hard one.”
“What kind?”
“Nothing weird,” said Anthony. “Straight, lesbians, some shemales in there. Okay, she did find one that blew her lid. It was a shemale fucking a guy. And I think I only watched it once. Every so often I go through all of the videos and delete the ones I won’t watch again and that was going to be one of them. And there are pictures of people who clearly aren’t pornstars with their hair and eyeliner all done up. There are selfies of someone I don’t know and Gemma came down hard on me because they looked like people I might know. Not do know, but might know. So if they came from some site, what site did they come from? How the fuck am I supposed to remember exactly where? ‘So you go to lots of sites?’ she asked. That one is a hard question to answer.”
“No kidding,” said Josh.
“I don’t know them, it’s some nineteen year old from Romania or a milf from the US. Gemma found it all and copied it so she could show our counsellor.”
Josh cast a thought back to whatever was on his own hard drive in various folders. “So there’s a lot of it?”
“Yeah. Why? How many videos do you have?”
Josh rolled his eyes up to the sky as he made a quick count. Even then it was just a shot in the dark. “Maybe a thousand.”
“Right, but it’s not like you watch a thousand videos a day.”
“Hell no,” Josh said, shaking his head. “Even at fifteen I wasn’t able to get through more than ten a day.”
“And that’s not even the whole video.”
“Nah, just a couple of minutes of it.”
Anthony leaned back and smiled. “See? That’s what Gemma doesn’t get. She’s fine with it in principle because ‘every guy watches porn,’ but if she sees it or catches me doing it then it’s hell.”
“Has she ever caught you?” Josh asked.
“She’s walked in on me a couple of times but didn’t know what I was doing. I’d be on the sofa, and this is winter, mind you, so we keep a blanket there. I was under the blanket with the laptop on top between me and the view of the front door. So if she came in I could slip the blanket up and there was no big deal, she wouldn’t find out. But she kept saying, ‘What if the kids find it, what then?’ Well, I expect I’d be a little humiliated but it won’t be the worst thing in the world that they’ll have to deal with.”
Josh peered at his friend. “Do you wash this blanket?”
“Of course.”
“Every time you jerk off?”
“I don’t always jerk off in the lounge, there isn’t much privacy most of the time. There’s more me time in the shower, but even then Gemma will come in to do her make up or whatever else and I have to turn around and continue washing myself.” Anthony fell into a heavy eye roll and shot a lengthy breath out. “Wait, weren’t we talking about you?”
“Briefly. Do you think she’s still checking up on you?” Josh asked.
“No. She doesn’t really think of it. I know her
and sex. While she’s on the pill she barely thinks about it.”
“Yeah, that one I know,” said Josh, with another gulp of lager.
Anthony looked back at his friend. It was time to push the issue. “At least you have an easier way out if you and Hannah call it quits.”
“I guess. We do have a mortgage.”
“Yeah, but no kids, no marriage. You guys can walk away a lot smoother than Gemma and I could.”
“Have you thought about walking away?”
Anthony shook his head. “I’d miss my kids.”
“What about seeing someone on the side?” Josh asked.
Anthony lowered his shoulders. “In a place this size you couldn’t get away with it. And I don’t think I could do a continuous affair on the side. A fling, maybe. I mean, in the whole realm of fantasy a fling could be excusable as a once off thing, but an affair requires dedication and a lot of commitment.”
“But if it was with the right person?”
Anthony blew out a laboured breath. “The right person?”
“You know what I mean.”
“If she does the splits at work while wearing a skirt then I can understand you being putty in her hands.”
“Maybe she’s really into me,” Josh said, with a wry smile. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
Anthony lowered his voice. “Given the perfect set of circumstances I think everyone would end up as a cheater. And that’s coming from someone who’s never done it.” He tapped the side of his glass and was met with a resigned look in his friend’s face. “So have you or are you about to?”
“I haven’t done it yet,” said Josh.
“Yet?”
“I’ve never had an affair,” said Josh.
“What about cheating?”
“Never.”
“Wasn’t there a time in Krakow?” Anthony asked.
“That was different,” Josh said, raising a finger to help himself explain. “We had been dating for six months when she called it off. Three weeks later she called it back on. For those three weeks I was single.”
“So while you’ve never cheated on Hannah, you’ve had sex with someone else since you started dating her.”
Josh drew in a deep breath. “You know how Lucy’s hen night in London is coming up?”
Anthony couldn’t help but wince. “Uh huh.”
Josh read the suspicious tone correctly. “Yeah. So. I didn’t think there was anything to this girl until about two months ago. I had a sex dream about Brooke. It was probably the most powerful one I’ve ever had. Full blown passion, mystery, romance. I dreamt that she curled her hair and told me she did it just for me. And the next day she actually came into work with curled hair. I blurted out, ‘Oh my god, your hair!’ and I had to quickly explain that I liked it because you know how girls are if you say something about how they look. Anyway, it was exactly as I dreamed about, which kinda locked in the whole fantasy. We bumped into each other later that day in the kitchen. She had the inquisitive look going on and asked what I was smiling about.”
“Oh fuck, you didn’t do her, did you?”
“What, you think I’m that much of an idiot?”
Anthony hesitated a little too long.
Josh glared in response. “We started talking about secret smiles and I had to come up with something. She had a book on her desk, pushed away into the corner. Unlocked and Broken. It’s one of these cat-and-mouse sexy mysteries between competing thieves. I told her I had just finished it. She lit up and started hitting me with all sorts of theories about who was framing who. I asked if she had gotten to the … have you read it?”
Anthony shook his head.
“Are you going to?”
“Probably not.”
“So Brooke goes with the whole, ‘oooOOOooo, there’s a sordid part? What happens?’ It’s a sex scene, basically. She sent me a text later that night. ‘Just read it. I’m starting to see a lot of Chester in you.’ Which for the life of me I don’t get, but fair enough, she seemed to be in a flirty mood so I emoticoned her back. The other day she told me she had a dream about me. As Chester. I told her I’d had one about her. As Brooke.”
Anthony paused with the glass in his hand. He jutted his lips forward and carefully lowered his glass onto the table, making sure it aligned perfectly in the centre of the coaster. “That’s ... not good.”
“It was in context of the conversation,” said Josh. “I didn’t just randomly throw out ‘Hey, I had a sex dream about you the other night, do you want to turn it into a reality?’ Come on.”
Anthony started counting down from five.
“Then she said we should get Rachel and all just have a threesome.”
Anthony winced and shook his head. “Not good at all.”
“She asked in my dream if she was any good,” said Josh.
“Now you’re killing me.”
“And I told her it was the best dream I ever had.”
Anthony plonked his elbow on the table and covered his face with one hand. He couldn’t even open his eyes. “And that was the very end of the conversation?”
Josh paused as he tried to find the right words to explain.
“Oh boy,” said Anthony, now bringing his other hand up to cover his face.
“She asked if it took place at work and I told her no, it was at my place. Then she said her dream was right there. On her desk.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
Anthony pulled his hands down over his face and dropped them to his lap. “Josh? Mate? Is this girl a crush, a fling, or the future Mrs Barton?”
Josh shrugged it off with no idea of where she would fit in. “Right now there’s a situation.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
“She’s married,” Josh said.
It took several seconds for Anthony’s mind to re-engage. “Married?”
“Yep.”
“Brooke?”
“The very same.”
“The one who brings you along to yoga twice a week.”
“Yeah. And she’s at the gym on the other two days I’m there.”
Anthony sighed and couldn’t seem to stop his head from shaking from side to side. “Really?”
“Really.”
“You couldn’t have led off with this when we first started talking about her?”
“I thought I had.”
“Nope. That’s something I would remember. I think you should throw a lot of caution at this, and ...” he trailed off and put two and two together. “Woah, woah, hang on. You started talking about Lucy’s hen party being in London.”
Josh gave his friend a curt nod. “Yeah.”
“And Brooke is married?”
“Yeah.”
“Shut it down,” said Anthony. “Bury those feelings and be the good guy.”
“I’ve been the good guy my whole life,” said Josh.
“Hardly,” said Anthony.
“With girlfriends I’ve always been the good guy.”
“Fine, with them you’ve been straight laced and occasionally honest, but at the end of the day I can only do so much, this has to be your decision. Just to let you know, an office fling is a terrible idea.”
“If management pulls me up on it I’m simply going to tell them to stay the fuck out of my personal life.”
The waitress came over, asked if they would like another drink, and Anthony decided that another lager was in order. Josh ordered the same.
“So what’s going to happen?” Anthony asked.
“No idea,” sighed Josh. “There is a window of opportunity and I certainly can’t break up with Hannah a week before Lucy’s wedding.”
“Sure you can. It’ll be an asshole move but it’s still doable. That’s if you want to break up with her.”
“I’m not sure if Brooke would break up with her husband.”
“So you’re going to find out what your options are before you make a move?” Anthony asked.
Anthony leaned forward and tried to shake all of the accusations from his mind and actually help his friend through the minefield. “Look, I know life isn’t black and white and I can give you all the advice in the world and never live any of it myself, so let’s have a look at the worst case scenario. Let’s say, tomorrow she comes up to you. She’s actively making the moves on you and she says, ‘I have a hotel room. Here’s the key. Meet me at six o’clock and fuck my brains out.’ What would you do?”
“I’d meet her at six o’clock,” said Josh, without missing a beat.
“Okay, that there is your answer,” said Anthony. “No one can talk you out of that, only you can, but I don’t think you will, because you often throw caution into the wind and face the consequences later. The only way you can walk out of there is if you discover something repulsive about her, like she has crabs or she’s covered in warts. Something like that. But unless she’s a crack whore living on the street then she’s probably going to be well prepared for you. Are you packing a condom?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this a recent purchase?”
“I’ve kept a condom in my wallet for sixteen years. I update them, but I don’t think I’ve ever used one from there.”
“Lovely,” said Anthony. “In option two, ignoring your little temptress for a moment, do you think you’ll be with Hannah in five years time?”
Josh stiffened and wished he had a better answer. “No.”
“Does she love you?”
“Yes.”
“Is she easy to live with?”
“Yes.”
“Is the sex good?”
“It’s all right.”
“Well then, you’ve got a situation,” said Anthony, as he leaned back in the chair. “I can tell you exactly what our therapist has said. And I’m a friend so if I cross the line here feel free to tell me to go fuck myself, so: are you looking for my help to find a way out of you and Hannah?”
Josh was hit by a puzzled look and had to think it over for a moment. “I don’t know. Are you saying you know how to break us up?”
“Nothing that could instantly tear you apart. You could even explain yourself out of Krakow because she dumped you and she later came crawling back. But if we were writing a pros and cons list about her then you’d want someone focussing on the cons. Is that what you’re looking for right now? My help in breaking you two up?”