Tempting Fate

by Jane Green

  Claire shakes her head. ‘Oh, Gabby. You know this is how these things always start, right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No one thinks they’re going to have an affair. Everyone starts by thinking it’s just a fun flirtation, or a new friendship, that they’ll never let anything happen. So they pretend to be friends, even though the only thing these two people have in common is a mutual lust, which eventually has to ignite. It’s one of the laws of the universe. They have an affair, and mitigate it by deciding that it isn’t just an affair, that this is their soulmate. They aren’t supposed to be married to the lovely, stable lawyer in boring old Connecticut; instead they are meant to be living with the dangerous, unstable, inappropriately young surfer in San Diego, or wherever it is the interloper happens to be from. They blow up their marriages, leaving devastation in their wake, to run off with said surfer, only for them both to discover, several weeks, months, but no more than a year down the line, that in fact they have nothing in common other than that lust, which has now, shock horror, completely disappeared.’

  ‘Claire, I –’

  ‘Then they realize what a terrible mistake they’ve made, which is when they go back to their husband, tail between their legs, begging to be allowed to come back, telling them how sorry they are, what a terrible error of judgement they made. The husbands have invariably moved on, and these women spend the rest of their lives beating off sad, middle-aged, professional singles at the handful of bars around town. It happened to Alison and Denise. Oh, and Cathy. Same story. There. That’s my cautionary tale for you. I shall say no more about it.’

  ‘You’re so convinced. You don’t really know what happens behind closed doors.’

  Claire shrugs. ‘It happened to my sister. Who’s now in a crappy walk-up apartment in Pelham Manor, taking any job she can find and bitterly regretting leaving her rather wonderful husband for her metal teacher. The thing with Rodrigo lasted six months. Her husband has now remarried and had a baby, and the new wife, ten years younger, is living the life my sister should be living – in the Upper East Side apartment with doorman, nanny and housekeeper. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.’

  Gabby laughs nervously. ‘That is so not going to happen to me.’

  ‘So stop the emailing,’ Claire says. ‘How would you feel if Elliott was emailing a younger, gorgeous woman? If he insisted they were just good friends it wouldn’t make you feel any better, would it?’

  Gabby shakes her head. This has occurred to her. Particularly the last email referencing their ‘friendly’ kiss. It wouldn’t do for Elliott to read that. Not at all. But there’s no way Matt is her soulmate. So this would never follow the trajectory taken by Claire’s sister. How ridiculous.

  Although … she has indulged in the odd fantasy of what it would be like to live in Malibu, to be Matt’s … partner. Not at the expense of leaving Elliott, though. Her fantasy is more of a daydream about a life entirely different to her current one.

  Sober, reasonable Gabby knows these are only fun fantasies, that she is not seriously thinking she and Matt may be an item. Sober, reasonable Gabby recognizes she is obsessed in an unnatural and unhealthy way, and that it can’t go on much longer.

  Sober, reasonable Gabby is hoping that, perhaps, after the twenty-third, she’ll be able to let go of it entirely.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Darling? Your car’s here,’ Gabby calls up the stairs before opening the front door and gesturing to the driver, holding her fingers up to let him know Elliott will be down in five minutes.

  ‘I wish you were coming,’ Elliott says as he comes down the stairs, carry-on bag in hand. ‘I know we wouldn’t have seen each other much, but we could have had dinner together at night. Now I’ll have to go out with a bunch of boring old doctors.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Gabby snorts. ‘The last conference you went to you ended up drinking and dancing all night. If I recall correctly you came home saying something like you hadn’t had so much fun in years.’

  Elliott laughs, dropping his bag on the floor to encircle his wife’s waist with his arms. ‘Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?’

  ‘Yes. You told me yesterday.’ Gabby smiles, still delighted.

  ‘It’s true. The older you get the more beautiful you become.’ Gabby declines to point out that this is, in fact, largely due to the Botox, Perlane and Sculptra; but she is grateful that it worked, and that he hasn’t realized.

  ‘Have a safe flight,’ she says, then kisses him deeply. ‘I love you. And behave yourself.’

  ‘I will,’ he says with a grin, picking up his bag and taking it to the car, blowing her a kiss as he is driven out of the driveway, leaving Gabby, finally, entirely alone.

  I want to see where you live.

  Gabby has already planned dinner when the text arrives, coming up with a small hole-in-the-wall place in Bridgeport, a place where they are unlikely to run into anyone they know. But Matt is saying he wants to see her home. Where she lives with her husband and daughters. That doesn’t feel right. That feels … wrong, too intimate.

  Why would you want to see where

  I live? I’ve already described it

  to you.

  Why wouldn’t you want me to see

  where you live? I want to see the

  books you read, the paintings on

  your wall, the food in your fridge.

  Gabby smiles when she reads that. She’d love to see his home, for exactly those reasons. She wants to see who he is when he isn’t out in the world, composing himself, carefully contorting himself into the man he wants others to think he is.

  And who is she? She asks herself this as she walks around her house trying to look at it through his eyes, wondering what a newcomer might infer from what he sees.

  The paintings in the house are, indeed, almost unanimously reflective of her. Elliott, never particularly interested in art, has indulged her love of drawings. Sketches of people, delicate line drawings of cities she has been to, life studies in pen and ink fill every available wall space, apart from one wall in the dining room. This is where they hung the huge oil cityscape that Elliott fell in love with. He insisted on having it, despite having to pay a small fortune, and Gabby has never grown to like it.

  Books line the bookshelves, along with various objets they have collected over the years. Ammonite fossils, small pots, porcelain sculptures of chickens that make her laugh. A bronze hand, fingers outstretched, filled with yearning. A bottom shelf crammed with old paperbacks she used to read as light relief from the heavier, hardback literary tomes that are required reading for local dinner parties. These days her lighter reading is all done on the Kindle but she has never got round to giving these paperbacks away. She takes them now and stuffs them under the sofa. No one needs to see those – they make her look flighty and insubstantial.

  Why do you even care what he thinks? You are, after all, ten years older than he is, which automatically makes you substantial. Less substantial, she smiles to herself, than she was three weeks ago. She hasn’t weighed herself, but her jeans are loose, and her cheekbones more pronounced than ever; surely they would not be that pronounced from Perlane alone. Getting down on her knees, Gabby pulls the paperbacks from beneath the sofa and puts them back.

  I’m not doing anything, she thinks. We’ll have a quick drink here, then go out. No romantic fires, no candles. This is not a seduction. I’m not even that comfortable having him here, she realizes, as the day progresses and her butterflies start to multiply. I can’t wait to see him, but in my own home? Not so much.

  Gabby is ready by six forty-five. Tonight she is dressing down. Tonight she can dress down because her weight loss has given her a confidence she was missing before. In jeans and a T-shirt, she accessorizes with a long thin strand of tiny labradorite and seed pearls looped around her neck.

  She looks at herself in the mirror, and even she is impressed. But the shoes have to go. Barefoot is better, at least when he
gets here. That way she will look as if she’s made no effort at all.

  Her heart almost bursts out of her chest as she hears a taxi pull up and a door slam, then her own doorbell is ringing, and she is suddenly so nervous she feels as if she might throw up.

  She doesn’t. She walks downstairs, forcing herself to take deep breaths, and opens the door to find Matt grinning at her. And then she is grinning back, and she isn’t scared, or nervous, just truly, deeply happy to see him, and they step towards each other and hug, and it doesn’t feel inappropriate, or wrong. It feels lovely, and very, very right.

  ‘You look amazing!’ Matt steps back and looks at her. ‘Did you change your hair? Something’s different. You look so beautiful.’

  ‘I lost some weight,’ Gabby says. ‘And a good hair day. That’s it.’

  ‘I love that I’m here! Your home! I can’t wait to get the full tour.’

  ‘Do you want some wine first?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says, following her into the kitchen, admiring the Aga stove she insisted on having to remind her of her childhood home, even though it was the most expensive thing in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m sure I have a bottle in here,’ Gabby says, rooting around in the fridge, but knowing full well there is a bottle in there, exactly where she placed it this morning. She turns and reaches for the corkscrew, stepping back as Matt steps in to take both corkscrew and bottle from her hand. He smiles down at her as he uncorks.

  When she goes to get glasses from the other side of the kitchen, Gabby is aware Matt is watching her walk. It makes her feel sexy, and young, and more alive than ever before. There is a charge in the room that touches everything; a charge that has given both Gabby and Matt permanent smiles, smiles that occasionally dissolve into embarrassed laughter as they catch each other’s eyes. They are both relieved, excited, drunk on the chemistry. Gabby is busy pretending to be someone she may not be, and Matt is too caught up in the thrill of the chase, the lure of the unobtainable being not quite as unobtainable as he once thought.

  ‘Do you want nuts?’ Gabby pulls out a packet, but Matt shakes his head.

  ‘I’m good. Here,’ he says, handing her a glass of wine. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers,’ she replies, and holds eye contact with him as they both sip, then she is the first to look away. ‘Do you want to see the house?’

  ‘You know what I really want to see?’

  Please don’t say the bedroom, she thinks. That would be so predictable, and so sleazy. And I would have no idea what to say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The barn. I want to see your work.’

  Gabby’s shoulders instantly relax.

  They put down their glasses and she leads the way outside and across the garden to the barn, wrapping her arms around herself against the evening chill.

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ she teases, pausing by the door.

  ‘This is your space, right? This is the place where I’m really going to be able to tell who you are.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she groans as she pushes the door open. ‘You’re going to think I’m a disorganized, crazy mess.’

  She stands there, Matt next to her, as he slowly looks around, impressed. He takes in the old beams, the workbenches, the furniture. He asks her questions about the furniture, exclaiming with delight over her work, the painting techniques; he is drawn to the noticeboard on which she has pinned photos of her befores and afters.

  ‘What’s up there?’ He points to the staircase.

  ‘Bedroom and bathroom,’ she says. ‘Supposed to be for guests but they always end up staying in the house. It’s too far away for most people. I love it, though – I sneak in a nap from time to time.’

  ‘Let me see!’ he says, heading for the stairs.

  ‘Matt, there’s nothing to see. It’s very dull.’

  ‘Come on. I want to see.’ He’s upstairs, and in the doorway of the bedroom before she can say anything else.

  Gabby walks up and watches Matt as he stands in the doorway surveying the room with pleasure. The rest of the barn is natural wood, but in here she colour-washed the walls a pale grey, the same colour as the pretty antique iron bed. An old pine dresser sits at one end of the room, and there is also an antique wing chair, covered in a natural soft linen, and an antique Swedish Mora clock. The bed is covered with a soft matelassé bedspread and piled with plush white pillows; a sumptuous blue and white quilt is folded at the foot. It is picture-perfect, and its simple charm gives Gabby a deep sense of calm every time she walks in here.

  ‘See,’ she says. ‘Nothing to write home about.’

  He walks into the tiny room. ‘Not true. I bet that bed has a story.’

  Gabby laughs. ‘Only that I found it at a tag sale when we were first married. I fell completely in love with it and forced my husband to sleep in it, even though it was way too small. I painted the iron, and now … it’s here.’

  ‘And the clock?’

  ‘That was my mother’s. They decided to reorganize a few years ago and my mother did something uncharacteristically generous – she sent me a few pieces that had been my favourites when I was a child. That clock had been in my bedroom, and I always loved it.’

  ‘Now it’s in your bedroom here.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The air is very still. Gabby knows she cannot step further into the room, knows, in fact, she should leave now and walk down the stairs, back to safety, but everything is frozen, and she isn’t able to move. She can hear everything. Even, it seems, the particles of dust flying in the evening light; Matt’s breathing; her own heart pounding in her ears.

  It happens very slowly. Matt’s head coming towards hers, bending, dropping the gentlest of kisses on her frozen lips. She stands, not moving, feeling on the edge of a terrible precipice, unable to go forward, definitely unable to go back.

  And then she is kissing him back, and it is her tongue in his mouth, her groan of anticipation, of desire, of longing that comes out first.

  They are tangled in each other’s arms, and she is feeling his body, so young, so hard, such an unbelievable turn-on. When he pulls his T-shirt off she actually gasps, unable to believe how smooth his skin is, how taut, how firm.

  Gabby is no longer a forty-three-year-old housewife, no longer a mother, no longer dull, well into middle age. She is thirty, twenty, eighteen. She is wild and ferocious. She doesn’t care about stretch marks, or sags, or pouches; she cares only about pleasure, giving and receiving more pleasure than she had thought possible.

  She tears off her bra, not thinking, not planning. Nothing exists beyond this room, beyond this beautiful man who is exploring her with his fingers, his mouth, who is writhing when she flips over and does the same to him.

  This isn’t lovemaking. This isn’t the safe, familiar routine she has with Elliott. This is raw, animalistic. Gabby slides her fingers into places she would never dream to probe with her husband, laughing as he moans in surprise. And pleasure. She licks, and swallows, and engulfs, her appetite insatiable, her energy unstoppable.

  Finally he is above her, his eyes locked with hers as he slips inside, moving slowly while she closes her eyes, groaning in pleasure before she opens them to lose herself in his gaze.

  There is nothing in the future, nothing in the past. Just the two of them, just this moment, and let this moment, these moments, go on for ever and ever, for she can suspend her life during this, can suspend everything as long as they are here in this room together, releasing all the pent-up attraction, longing, the weeks of flirtation; but after this?

  After this?

  Afterwards, Gabby gets up from the bed and goes towards the bathroom. She may have lost several pounds but, naked, she knows she cannot pull it off quite so well. She has no butt any more, just a flat slab where there used to be a peach; her varicose veins are clearly visible. Undressed, she looks like the middle-aged woman she is.

  She doesn’t care.

  Numb, she walks into the bathroom, staring deep
ly into her eyes in the mirror as she washes her hands, unsurprised that all she sees is shame.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Something is different about his wife, but Elliott is too frightened to ask what it is. It started a few months ago, around the time she went to be interviewed by the man who started that website. Man. Hardly. Elliott Googled him extensively and is pretty confident that ‘boy’ is the right term for him.

  It was clear to him that Gabby had developed a crush. In some ways he understood it. This young fellow had clearly flirted with her, and, almost in her mid-forties, she had been flattered and had reacted to it inappropriately. Not that he knew this for certain, but she had a lilt in her step that she hadn’t had for years, and she had started taking care of herself in a way she hadn’t before.

  Gabby had worn make-up and fluffed her hair and done those things when they were first married, but after years of him telling her he preferred her natural, with no adornments, nothing artificial, she finally believed him. Up until a few months ago, he couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn make-up.

  What that man, boy – Matt – had obviously done was wake Gabby up, make her nostalgic for her youth. Why else would she suddenly start wearing tight jeans and high-heeled boots, putting on make-up, blowing out her hair? Why else would she stop eating carbohydrates and turn down chocolate, even her beloved Butterfingers?

  Why else would she spend so much money at the dermatologist, then lie about the procedure? Elliott had phoned the office to question the bill, which seemed outrageous for a minor procedure even in this day and age, even in this town.

  Botox, Perlane, Sculptra. He hasn’t even heard of the last two and he’s a doctor. No wonder she looked so fresh, so young. No wonder she seemed to glow. For weeks she seemed to glow, then, suddenly, she plummeted.