Love Rules

by Freya North

  Oh

  My

  God

  Table for Four

  ‘I can't remember it being this much hassle when I bought my flat five years ago,’ Thea declared with a sorry pout around the table.

  ‘You were a first-time buyer,’ Mark said soothingly, asking the wine waiter to bring whichever red he'd recommend.

  ‘But it's not like I'm in a chain,’ Thea protested, ‘my problem is that my buyer is a bloody lawyer and he's being exasperatingly finicky. We could be on the verge of exchanging contracts but he's not going to unless a structural surveyor has checked some minor detail or other.’

  ‘Has your offer been accepted on the place you like?’ Mark asked Saul.

  ‘No – we've upped it but they're sitting on it,’ Saul told him, squeezing Thea's wrist supportively.

  ‘It's Sod's Law – and it's down to the bloody postcode fiasco. Thea's trying to sell in a buyer's market and yet you're trying to buy in a seller's market. All in the same city,’ Mark observed. ‘Thea darling, if you sell before you buy, you can always store your stuff at ours.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Thea glumly because it was of little consolation just then. ‘They say that moving house is the most stressful thing we encounter after death and divorce.’

  ‘Better not die then – and keep cohabiting, rather than marrying,’ Mark laughed. He looked over at Alice who was gazing at her lap. ‘Are you OK, darling?’

  ‘What?’ She looked up and around the table as if she was startled to find herself there with them. ‘I'm fine. I'm fine. Just hassles at work – just had to text one of my editors.’ She brandished her mobile phone and then dropped it into her bag. Thea looked away from Alice's fleeting smirk. ‘Have you exchanged yet?’ Alice asked her. ‘Wasn't it meant to be this week?’

  Thea groaned, put her head in her hands, looked up and glugged gratefully at the glass of wine. ‘Don't ask!’ she said hoarsely, and then proceeded to repeat in great detail the stress and minutiae.

  ‘Did you get my text?’ Alice asked her, as if she'd not heard a word of Thea's rant.

  ‘What text?’

  ‘About my client?’ Alice said.

  Thea checked her phone. ‘Oh, it's here – I hadn't seen it.’

  lover boy's coming 2 UK nxt wk! ! ! ! ! ! !

  Thea read it and read it again. What on earth was she meant to say? Right then? Right there? In an upmarket restaurant with her best friend's husband in eyeshot of her mobile phone. ‘Right,’ she faltered, ‘right.’

  ‘He'd like to see you,’ Alice carried on blithely while Thea prayed that Alice's expression of triumphant glee was legible to her alone.

  ‘OK,’ Thea nodded slowly, ‘OK.’

  ‘Who's this?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Paul,’ Alice announced lightly, as if jogging Mark's memory that he knew him too. ‘I think Thea should assess him.’

  ‘Paul Who?’ Saul asked.

  ‘He's not part of the Adam team,’ Alice replied dismissively, ‘different department.’

  ‘What's his problem?’ Mark asked politely.

  Thea couldn't believe it was she who was starting to redden. Surely it should be Alice. But Alice was having great fun with her hidden meanings. ‘I've told him to be careful. I've told him he'll be flat on his back by next week – so I really think he'd benefit from Thea's evaluation.’

  Thea's appetite slumped. Luckily for Alice, Mark and Saul presumed Thea had lost it under the pile of faxes and hassle swamping her from the sale of her property.

  ‘Alice was in high spirits,’ Saul remarks, peeling off his clothes and slinging them onto the floor.

  ‘Manic, I'd say,’ Thea asserts, picking up Saul's clothes and adding them to a pile she's sorted to be washed.

  ‘Are things OK with her and Mark?’ Saul asks cautiously.

  Thea pretends not to have heard as she heads off with the laundry to the kitchen to load the washing machine, hoping to buy herself some time in which Saul might forget his question. He's in bed, when she returns, reading FHM.

  ‘New issue?’ Thea asks.

  ‘Do they?’ Saul looks up.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Issues – you said Alice and Mark had issues.’

  Thea laughs unnecessarily. ‘No, no! I asked if that FHM was a new issue!’

  Saul looks at the front cover and nods. Thea climbs into bed, faces away from him and yawns exaggeratedly at how tired she is. Saul puts down FHM and spoons up against her back. ‘Don't tell me you're turned on by some soft-porn pics in a bloody lads' mag!’ Thea exclaims, feeling Saul's hard-on nudging hopefully at the small of her back.

  ‘Don't be daft,’ he murmurs, nuzzling her neck, ‘it was the sight of you doing the laundry in the buff. Your gorgeous peach of an arse.’ And he is burrowing under the duvet to the object of his desire, kissing her buttocks and unexpectedly spreading her cheeks for a long lick downwards. Thea is pleased to close her eyes and swim into the physical sensations Saul is crafting; to propel herself away from the stress of selling her flat and the disquiet over her best friend's behaviour.

  Sometimes, Thea likes to be dominant during sex with Saul; she'll initiate it and call the pace and the positions. At other times, she craves utter synchronicity – that he desires her as much as she does him, that he wants to take her from behind at the exact moment she flips herself over, that she wants to suck his cock without needing to be asked, that their orgasms occur within milliseconds of each other. But there are also times, and just now is one of them, when what she needs is to be made love to. She wants to consciously detect that Saul loves and desires her absolutely, venerates her, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and all other people. And so Thea lies in his arms, being licked and kissed and adored and wanted.

  Post-coitally, with Saul on his back panting himself back to a normal heart rate, Thea snuggles against his chest. She cups her hand lightly over his cock still semi-hard and twitching lazily. ‘God, that was good,’ Saul declares. Thea smiles. Good.

  ‘Saul,’ she says in a quiet, little-girl-lost voice she is not in the habit of using blithely, ‘promise me we won't ever be like that.’ He twists his head down to look at her and she gazes up at him, with a beguiling bat of her eyelashes. ‘Like Alice and Mark,’ she says very quietly, all wide-eyed and winsome.

  ‘I thought there was something up,’ Saul declares. ‘What's going on with those two?’

  ‘I don't know,’ Thea evades, ‘nothing, probably. You know Alice. The point is, I never want us to loiter on that plateau of complacency.’

  Saul kisses Thea on the forehead. ‘I know what you mean – it was as if Alice was unaware that her husband was dining with us at all. They converse without really communicating – they didn't really chat to each other. They just made up the numbers for a table for four.’

  ‘I just want you and me always to stay close – and always truly feel in love,’ Thea declares. She kisses Saul back and turns to fall asleep, feeling a little happier and safer.

  P.I.C.

  ‘Cover for me!’

  Thea's heart dropped and she felt like hanging up the phone. She'd become reluctantly resigned to such a call from Alice, which wasn't to say she hadn't been deludedly hoping Alice might say Paul had changed his mind, or he was staying in Lancashire, or she'd changed her mind and was ignoring his calls.

  ‘Cover for me?’ Alice implored. ‘Please! Come on – you promised. You must honour our promise to be each other's P.I.C.’

  Thea suddenly deeply regretted that fateful school day in the second year when they had snuck behind the science block to smoke – daring each other, declaring they'd be each other's Partner In Crime, swearing solemnly that if one was caught the other would go down with her. But neither was caught and they puffed their way through the packet of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes over the next eight lunch hours. And after that, when it came to anything which implied risk or wrong, Thea and Alice committed to being each other's P.I.C. I'll do it if you do it. Come on, let's t
ry it! I won't tell if you won't. We'll say it was both our ideas! The difference now was that this was the first occasion in eighteen years that the P.I.C. was acting merely as lookout rather than collaborator.

  ‘It would be the one bloody week Mark isn't travelling,’ Alice bemoaned, ‘so cover for me, Thea. You have to.’

  ‘When?’ Thea asked out of a sense of duty, an unwilling partner in a crime she did not want committed.

  ‘Tonight! Tomorrow night! The night after!’ Alice's effervescence and excellent spirits were seductive and Thea had to sternly remind herself of the deplorable cause of Alice's mirth.

  ‘What's your story?’ Thea sighed.

  ‘Pilates tomorrow night – with you. And some late-night preview shopping thing at Heal's on Thursday night – with you. He flies back Friday afternoon.’

  ‘When does he arrive?’

  ‘Late tonight,’ Alice enthused.

  ‘You're not going to climb out of your window and steal away to him tonight, are you?’ Thea asked flatly.

  ‘No, I'll just about resist!’ Alice laughed.

  ‘You so owe me, Mrs Sinclair,’ Thea told her.

  ‘I think I ought to be Miss Heggarty for the next three days, don't you?’

  ‘I wouldn't mind going to that Heal's thing anyway,’ Thea justified. ‘Saul and I could look at dining tables.’

  ‘I made it up, silly!’

  ‘Alice,’ Thea cautioned, ‘are you sure you're doing the right thing here? Isn't it bloody dangerous?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘it is dangerous but I have to do it – I feel compelled to – so in that respect, it must be right even if, on paper, it's wrong and dastardly. I have to rid it from my system.’

  ‘I thought the one-night stand had done that,’ Thea reminded her.

  ‘So did I,’ Alice said darkly. Then she brightened. ‘Guess what!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I'm going to play hooky from work tomorrow afternoon and Thursday morning.’

  ‘Christ, Alice,’ Thea exclaimed, ‘you really need to tread carefully.’

  ‘Oh shush, Thea – you know you'll be gagging for details!’

  And that was it. That was just it. No matter how greatly Thea deplored Alice's actions and despaired at her abhorrent lack of morality, she did indeed crave details. The whole scenario was car-crash horrific, but like a terrible road accident, one is compelled to look. Because it's bizarrely life-affirming to gasp and recoil from something so appalling you can't believe it's real. And it's sobering to think thank God that's not me. And it's chastening to think I hope it never happens to me.

  Miss Heggarty and Mr Brusseque

  Alice's first thought was Christ, what on earth am I thinking, let alone doing? This isn't me. This really isn't.

  However, her need to live out her fantasy as a foxy temptress, to fulfil her desire for debauchery with the rock-climbing, nature-communing sex god, overruled her crashing dismay at where the dirty deed was to happen. Paul had given an address in Clapham – 23a Blanchard Road. It was the ‘a’ that unnerved Alice most. As the taxi stuttered its way along Blanchard Road, with the driver and Alice craning to see numbers, she kept her hopes up. The road was pretty. And quiet. That was a good start. The fare was expensive and Alice justified it would be money well spent.

  ‘Number twenny-free, darling.’

  Alice noted the scruffy front door and numerous bells and hoped they were but an ironic façade to a bijou residence. Perhaps the beer bottles and takeaway cartons tossed aside in the front garden were there as a cunning foil to would-be burglars. As she rang the bell, she lowered her expectations and just prayed that there wouldn't be batik bedspreads pinned up as wall hangings, or Jim Morrison looking down in his Jesus-like way from posters Blu-Tacked to the backs of doors. Please no CND symbols graffitied with marker pen onto the fridge door. And dear God, no patchouli joss-sticks.

  You're a snob, Alice.

  No, I'm not – I've merely outgrown the ‘dope-smoke digs’ thing.

  Been there done that?

  Exactly (though I've never used a bedspread as a wall hanging).

  But now you're a married woman of thirty-three living very nicely in Hampstead.

  Exactly.

  Sloping off work for a little light adultery in the after-noon.

  When Paul saw Alice through the spyhole, he hovered and stared. What a great suit. He watched Alice grow impatient, saw her looking with certain disdain around her. He grinned. He'd give her something to moan about. And just then, the expense of his trip over to England, the negotiation it had necessitated at work, the lies he'd told to Brigitte, whom he'd just started seeing, were all worth it.

  ‘It's not the Ritz,’ he said as he opened the door, bran-dishing his easy smile and looking Alice up and down like a tipster evaluating a racehorse, ‘but the sheets are clean and no one's here.’

  ‘I could've booked us into a nice hotel for the price of the taxi fare!’ Alice pouted, brushing past him and finding herself in a communal hallway badly in need of a Hoover. She primly offered her cheek for the kissing but Paul took her chin between his finger and thumb and turned her face towards his, sinking his mouth over hers, their tongues suddenly in a whirl.

  ‘Let's fuck,’ he murmured. Alice's desire to be in bed with him was so strong that she didn't notice the scruff of pizza flyers and general detritus littering the hallway, the rude waft of other people's cooking. It may as well have been the Ritz, for all the attention she gave the surroundings. The flat itself was unkempt with drab, tired furniture and unforgivable features such as the paper lantern with a glaring rip in it, a plate with dried HP Sauce left on the sofa. Alice did note that there were no ethnic bedspreads on the walls and for her, just then, this fact alone both rose-tinted the rest of the flat and justified her illegal exeat from her marriage and her career that afternoon. So, on a mattress on the floor, under two sleeping bags zipped together, Alice romped the after-noon away with her lover.

  It was only when she awoke with a start from a doze she couldn't recall slipping into, slightly chilly and aware of the irritating sound of Paul's semi-snoring, that it struck her she was on the other side of London to where she lived and worked and that her surroundings were categorically unpleasant. On any normal Wednesday, she'd be making her way home by now. An image of her sumptuous bathroom, the luxurious fluffy weight of her Egyptian cotton bath sheets came to mind. With it came a stab of guilt. But if she felt guilty it meant she was in the wrong and she wasn't prepared to own up just then. The best thing to do was to put it all out of her mind. And the best way to do that was to give herself something else to think about. So she rolled over and started to kiss and caress Paul. Soon enough they were fucking again and all thoughts of work, marriage and scuzzy bedrooms were flung far from her conscience.

  Every time the phone rang, Thea jumped, fearing it was Mark wanting to know if she'd seen his wife. What was tonight meant to be? The Heal's do or Pilates? Saul assumed that Thea's tetchiness was due to her anticipation that the phone would be the estate agent ringing with news, bad or good. She didn't tell him but she was almost relieved when it turned out to be the vendor's agent turning down their revised offer on the new property.

  ‘Come on,’ said Saul, ‘let's go out – let's go for a few drinks, perhaps a stonking hot curry, and not think about bricks and mortar.’

  But Thea worried they might bump into Mark, which was highly unlikely as he wasn't that partial to curry. ‘Let's catch a film instead,’ she suggested, thinking that she'd be safe in a dark cinema.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Saul, ‘Arnie's new film would be a welcome distraction. Let's go.’

  However, Thea suddenly thought what if Alice needed her? What if all had gone horribly wrong in Clapham? What if her phone didn't have a signal in the cinema? She couldn't risk that. ‘No,’ she flummoxed, ‘curry. Let's go local.’ Saul was now a little irritated but it was nothing a karahi chicken couldn't soothe.

  As Alice took a taxi all t
he way back to Hampstead, she began a text message to Thea but stopped mid-word. What was she meant to write? State the obvious – been shagging non-stop and now walking like John Wayne? Perhaps theorize instead – orgasms this good cannot be bad? Instead, she pressed the speed-dial button to phone Thea. But what would she say? We fucked until suppertime and then I tried to have a shower in a bath with scum-marks and one of those rubber shower attachments you bung onto the taps like a milking machine? Was she to tell Thea that the flat was rented by a bloke who was a friend of a friend of Paul's? That some bloke had arrived back at some point and was quietly rolling a joint on the sofa next to the plate with the dried-on sauce when she and Paul surfaced? Which precise details of the afternoon were worth recounting? The only people who knew of her whereabouts were she, Paul and Thea. And they all knew the purpose of the afternoon was solely sex and no matter how mind-blowing the orgasm, the mechanics of sex were pretty straightforward.

  All this thinking had passed the journey. Her cab was already travelling through Camden. She decided she'd send Thea a short text before she went to bed, confirming lunch the next day. Please don't let Mark be at home.

  Please don't let this be a day when he doesn't have to stay late for some conference call or other.

  Thea thought how Alice's teenage fluster and giggle the next day were actually quite endearing. If this Paul bloke was good for anything, it was reinstating her best friend's bounce and spirit.

  ‘God, I can't wait for you to see him!’ Alice declared, drumming her fingers on the restaurant table in the safe territory of Maida Vale. ‘I'm telling you, he's more gorgeous and sexy than anyone you'll ever have seen – in reality or on screen. Honestly!’

  ‘Shut up, you idiot.’ Thea poked her. ‘You sound like a teenager.’

  ‘He's here – here he is!’

  Thea was desperately disappointed. She was a firm believer in beauty being much more than skin deep. But she had to admit that Paul was quite spectacular looking, in a rugged, Timberland-branded sort of way. Not really her type at all – but unquestionably attractive and obviously smitten with Alice. He shook her hand and took Alice's in his which made Thea feel awkward.