“Don’t be. It’s just one of those things. Let’s talk about something else.” I moved to roll off him, but he held me there.
“I love you.” He pulled me down for a kiss. His words caused a flow of pleasure inside, it felt so good to hear the words and feel the sincerity behind them.
“I love you too,” I said, as I sank into him, not sure whether it was the endorphins talking or whether I just might mean it.
Chapter Sixteen
ONE CAN’T HOLD REALITY at bay forever, and the fact that Anders and I were both recognizable meant that eventually rumors would get out. I think it took so long because not many American programs are shown on television here, so not everyone would recognize him, and not everyone is interested in food, so they may not have known me.
It started out on the Internet, of course. There were always rumors about Anders hooking up with some starlet or other. Rather than give in to the unsettling doubts, I decided to just ask him about it, but he brushed it off.
“They need something to fill their pages; that’s all. Some of it is true, but it’s old stuff from years ago that they’re recycling. That one there?” He pointed to the picture of a tiny blond girl. “We went on exactly one date three years ago. This one,” he said as he pointed to another, “we were in a movie together, and those are stills from when we were filming. I never saw her outside the set.” I looked at them all and couldn’t help but notice that they were all small, perfectly formed blondes and couldn’t have looked less like me.
The next time Anders visited, he rented a serviced apartment with a full kitchen. For the first time, we had a whole weekend together, as Jack was in the US for a conference for a week. He let me in the door, kissing me breathless up against the closed door.
“Hello, honey. How was your day?” he asked with a smile against my mouth. He slid his fingers into mine and led me into the kitchen. He’d been shopping, and the groceries were still on the bench.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“Let’s see if we can do the domestic thing together. We can pretend we’re doing it for real.”
“Oh.” The thought of living with Anders was so tempting and scary at the same time, and it felt like the stakes had just been raised.
“I’ll cook for you tonight, and you do tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Sounds fabulous.” I pulled him to me for a kiss and ran my fingers in his hair. He groaned and grabbed my hips, pulling me tightly against him. I could feel his arousal against my thigh.
“You’re so hot, woman. I want to take you now, from behind, over the bench,” he growled.
“Okay.” I smiled in delicious anticipation.
It was one of the best weekends of my life—cooking and sex with Anders with no time limit or need to rush off. We lazed around naked in bed, talking while the Norwegian cinnamon buns I was making rose, the beautiful yeasty aroma mingling with the scent of our coffees. The freshly baked buns proved an aphrodisiac as we ate them hot in bed, the laughing lust in Anders’ eyes turning me on.
“My God, you can cook!” He licked his lips, cleaning off the buttery cinnamon crumbs. “Guess what I’m good at.”
“I don’t know. What?” I smiled at him.
“Making you come.” He jumped on top of me, pinning my arms to the bed.
“But I haven’t finished my bun yet!” I protested, still holding part of the pastry in my restrained hand.
“You can finish it later.” He kneed my legs apart and, with a single thrust, drove up inside me, still wet and swollen from our last session. The intense pleasure of it made my eyes roll back. He stroked hard and slow until I was gasping for more.
“Anders. Please,” I groaned. He withdrew suddenly, and I made a mewling noise, wanting him back. He flipped me over, raised my ass into the air, and plunged into me again, his fingers finding my clit. I came almost instantly, shaking and throbbing as he kept going. He removed his fingers from my sensitive folds to grab my hips with both hands.
“You feel so good. So warm and wet. I could stay inside you forever.” He buried himself over and over, and I could feel myself building again at his hot words. He started moving even faster, the slap of his body into mine moving me up the bed until I braced my arms against the headboard. The feel of him was intense but so good.
One of his hands slipped backward and traced the line between my buttocks. As his fingers found the bud of my ass and pressed lightly, I squealed.
“Stop that!”
“What? This?” He did it again.
“Yes, that!”
“Don’t you like it? I thought it enhanced a woman’s pleasure.”
“It just feels weird.” I squirmed a bit, trying to get away from his finger. It didn’t hurt, but I wasn’t so keen on the idea.
“Hasn’t anyone taken your ass before?”
“No!”
“So, I could be your first?”
“What? No, I don’t do that.”
“It can be good. Let me just show you with my finger.”
“Just your finger?”
“Yes.” He leaned over me and nipped my ear, sending shivers down my spine. “For now. I promise you’ll enjoy it.”
“Okay,” I breathed out, apprehensive.
He straightened up and, still moving in and out of me, used some of my lubrication to coat his finger. He moved it upward and circled my ass, making it pucker.
“Relax,” he said, stroking my back. I tried. He moved his finger slowly in and out in time with his thrusts. The sensation was different but surprisingly erotic. I relaxed a bit more, and his finger moved deeper. The orgasm seemed to come out of nowhere, hitting me hard, overtaking all my senses in an incredible release until I was a quivering bundle of shuddering nerves, unable to move other than to twitch.
“Oh, fuck, yeah!” Anders groaned as my internal muscles clenched around him, and he came pumping furiously before collapsing on top of me. We lay that way for a few minutes, catching our breath.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, kissing my hair before rolling off me and pulling me to spoon against him. “If you moved in with me, we could do this all the time.”
“Remind me to make you buns again.” I leaned back and kissed him too, avoiding an answer.
The gossipy pieces about us started to get more frequent and detailed. Then, a week after it happened, an item came out on one of the gossip sites about our weekend at the apartment. The fact that the information they had was correct was even more startling. I was used to the trashier papers just printing what they liked. No one ever tried to correct them or take them on; it just made it worse. But the information they had was too close to be an accident. I would have thought I’d been phone tapped, except some of it had never been in a phone call. I then thought about the apartment being bugged, but how did they know we were going to be there?
I had no real fears that Jack would see it, as he would never look at that sort of thing, but the danger was that someone else would and tell him about it. When Lindsay arrived at my front door at eight in the morning, I knew I was in for a bullocking. Part of me was just surprised it had taken so long.
“Are you having an affair with Anders Larsen?” she demanded, walking in and closing the door behind her. Fortunately, Jack had already left for work and it wasn’t school holidays so the boys were away. Her scrutiny was fierce and unflinching, and despite myself, I wilted slightly and could only nod. I led the way back into the kitchen and started making us both a coffee.
“You are supposed to let me know what’s going on! I was completely unprepared when I got a call from a reporter this morning asking for a comment. Do you know how bad that looks?” she railed.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling chastised.
“Just because you’re doing something like that doesn’t make you a bad person. I’m not here to judge you,” Lindsay drawled, flicking back her dark red hair, a frequent action when she was annoyed or unsettled. I looked closely at
“my” publicist, though she was actually employed by my publisher to look after me as well as several other less troublesome authors. I could only watch her blearily in the weak early morning light. I hadn’t slept well and was feeling a bit under the weather. I was still in my pajamas, though at least they were nice ones.
“We can work around this, but you have to tell me everything,” she announced in a strident voice. “The only thing I can’t handle is a surprise in tomorrow’s papers. It’s bad enough that it’s on the Internet before I heard it from you.”
I realized that it did make a publicist’s job difficult to be blindsided about a client’s activities, but from the client’s perspective, it’s not always your first thought when you do something nefarious to ring your publicist and brag about it, not if you’re a woman and aren’t the star of a popular TV show anyway. Very few people would try to argue that there wasn’t a double standard still firmly in place.
“I want you to tell me everything, now!” she demanded, completely in my face.
“I met Anders on holiday in France, and it started there, but we’ve been meeting up in hotels when he’s here too.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Since March. I last saw him a week ago.”
“Does Jack know? About the affair?” Lindsay lit a cigarette and started smoking absently. Seeing as she was here to save my ass, I didn’t think I could object. I grabbed a small soy sauce dish from the cupboard and slid it over for her to use as an ashtray.
“No, I don’t think so. We haven’t spoken about the rumors. I’m not sure he even knows. They’re not the kind of thing he ever pays attention to.”
“I’m not going to tell you to stop; that’s not my place.” She waved her cigarette at me. “But you have to take appropriate steps to hide it. Which hotels have you been meeting at?”
“Mostly the Mayfair. Sometimes Browns or the Berkeley.” I couldn’t tell her about the apartment; somehow it seemed too private.
“That’s good. Change around a bit and make sure you stay at the big ones with more than one exit. Whatever you do, avoid the small boutique ones. There aren’t enough guests to hide amongst. Also, try to make sure you have a back-up reason to be there if possible. You know, visiting a friend, doing some writing, consulting with the chef, whatever floats your boat. Just make it vaguely plausible.”
I just nodded, amazed that this happened enough that she had this kind of information at the ready.
“You have to figure out what you want in the future too, particularly if things are going to get serious with him. Leaving Jack for Anders would be an appalling career move for you.”
“He’s not that bad,” I said a bit churlishly. “It’s not like I violated Daniel Radcliffe and released a sex tape of it.” It was slightly willful to refuse to see what she was referring to, but a masochistic part of me wanted to hear her say it. Refusing to be side-tracked, despite being a huge Harry Potter fan, she went on in an accusatory tone.
“Your image suits an affair like a pit bull suits a tiara. There is just no way you can make it work. Do you really need me to tell you why he is not great for you?” She paused for a moment, looking at me deliberately. I stubbornly looked at the floor, feeling like a belligerent teenager being given an unwanted lecture. She sighed and continued. “He’s not great because he has a reputation for seducing woman and moving on quickly, bored once the chase is gone. That’s his image. Whether it’s actually true or not is irrelevant; it’s the image he’s willingly created and developed over a substantial period of time, and I can’t see that he would let all that effort go to waste now. To salvage both your reputations if you were to go public, there would need to be coordinated groundwork—you, on your husband being unable to keep up with your career and having to go it alone to events, and him, telling people how he’s looking to settle down. Otherwise, you’re going to look like the loser who left her husband and then got dumped if it doesn’t work out, on top of the hit you’ll take from the loss of your marriage.”
I winced, but I obviously needed to hear the brutal truth. I hadn’t thought through the consequences nearly enough, and it was sobering to hear that I might lose everything I’d worked for, which had kept my sanity for the last decade. Work wasn’t everything, but it was valuable to me, and I wasn’t willing to throw it away.
“People will forgive a lot of things you do for love,” Lindsay continued. “The only exceptions are where money or fame is involved. Then they become a lot more cynical, and the latitude you might otherwise get evaporates. The more money or fame, the less latitude. Unfortunately for you, you symbolize both money and fame, and you are going to be crucified if you leave Jack for Anders. The only way around it is to impose a buffer between the two of them, sufficient enough that people forget the rumors were around before the breakdown of your marriage. With the Internet, it’s unlikely, but the lines can be blurred, as long as there aren’t photographs. Nothing is more sordid than grainy images of people cheating in alleyways. You would be better off with a heroin addiction. People will forgive that a lot more easily.”
Ouch.
“Really? Heroin is less harmful for your image than sex?” I asked quizzically.
Lindsay nodded sagely. I wasn’t unaware that it would be far more sensible and less likely to be career suicide to stay in my marriage, stop seeing Anders, and try to salvage whatever was left. But easier was not what I wanted. What I wanted was Anders and my career, and to not hurt Jack or the kids in the process. I wanted my cake and to eat it too, and to not gain any weight in the process. The likelihood of keeping things as they were now for the long-term was almost non-existent. It might have worked for a while, but the rational side of me knew that eventually I’d find myself in a world of trouble. It looked like that time was fast approaching. Lindsay was right; I was going to have to figure out what I wanted, but right now, I really didn’t know who I would be willing to give up.
“How serious are things with Anders?” Lindsay asked insistently. I understood that she was just doing her job, but I couldn’t open up to her about things I barely wanted to admit to myself.
“It’s not going to become anything serious. It’s just good old-fashioned lust with an immensely hot man who happens to be on TV,” I lied. Anders was more than that, but as a long-term partner, I just wasn’t sure.
“So, you’re going to stay with Jack?”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “We hardly speak and never sleep together anymore. I’m not sure what’s left, if anything. I think the main reason we stay together is inertia.”
“Inertia can be a powerful force.” She ground out her cigarette and picked up her burgundy Mulberry bag. It almost tones in with her hair, I thought absently.
“I’ll leave you with some homework. The first thing you need to work out is whether you want to make things work with Jack or if you’re going to move on. We need to prepare our strategy now to minimize the impact of these rumors. The more coherent we make our statements, the easier they are to sell. If you do decide to leave Jack, we need to give it some time before going public with Anders, if he’s going to be your new boyfriend. Given the investment he’s made in his playboy image, you’ll have to make sure he’s on board with it, or it could all blow up in our faces.”
“I don’t know about Anders in the long-term. He lives on another continent, and the odds aren’t good that it will work out anyway.” I knew it was a realistic assessment of the situation, but it was hard to think about, particularly as we were still in that stage of being so happy together, where you can’t imagine you’ll ever feel differently about each other.
“I can’t tell you what to do; I can only make things easier with the media and the public and minimize the impact on your career. Unfortunately for you, what you’re selling is yourself and your lifestyle, so if you make big changes to that, it’s going to affect sales. There’s no guarantee that if you leave Jack you won’t lose everything. I’ll do my be
st, and staying with Jack would make that much easier. If you decide you want to stay with him, I’ll arrange invitations to some touchy-feely premieres where you can be photographed looking happy together. If you decide that you want to leave him, I’ll change the invites to you on your own and start dropping hints to the paps about him not being there to support you, etcetera. They will pass it on ‘anonymously’ to the gossip writers, and then we can ease into a separation. Maybe I can arrange a professional shoot in a magazine to get you out there as a single woman. If lover-boy is going to be around, we can move him into a supportive, new partner role in a little bit. Jack just wasn’t able to keep up, etcetera.”
God, it sounded so clever and sensible, but horridly cold and heartless. This was Jack we were talking about, and she was treating him like he was a bug infestation.
“In the meantime,” she continued, “if you are followed by photographers, be nice. Stop, let them get the photo. Be polite. If you cover yourself and run, they’ll think you have something to hide, and they’ll chase you. If you’re an asshole, they’ll sell the worst photos they take, and you’ll be out there forever looking appalling and drug-fucked or whatever headline they choose to come out with. Trust me, there are always bad photographs with your eyes half-closed or while you’re talking, and only through their goodwill will those photos not see the light of day. No matter what they say or do, you need to keep a smile on your face.”
My stomach went into free-fall, and I barely recall showing Lindsay out. I could no longer stay with my head in the sand; I needed to make a choice. My thoughts just kept going around in circles. I couldn’t make a decision. The thought of leaving Jack scared the bejesus out of me. The upheaval to our lives would be huge, and it wasn’t like I hated him or didn’t want to be around him. He was a good, if distant, husband and a great father to our boys.
Then there were the financial and social implications. We’d have to sell the house, and with the extra costs, we might struggle to pay the boys’ school fees and support two households. My income would likely drop substantially, further eroding our already shaky financial position. If Jack lost his job due to the credit crunch, we could potentially be in real trouble. But if you took away the money side of the decision, I would probably leave him. Unfortunately, the money side of things wasn’t going to resolve itself. Taking a risk, I decided to tell Bats. I thought she would be supportive of any decision I made, but it turned out, strangely enough, she was still cheering for Team Marriage.
Saint Kate of the Cupcake: The Dangers of Lust and Baking Page 14