Page 167 of Easy
I’m still conflicted as I reach the garden gate.
To the left stands a confrontation, a fight that could be a constant in the coming months. To my right stands an escape from it all; a return to my previous life. A boring norm. And behind me is Dan. Would he be my past or where my future stood?
I hear him on the garden path, the soles of his highly polished shoes rough against the stones. He pauses halfway down; is he unsure of his approach or giving me space? I can almost see him without turning, hands in his pockets, feet planted firmly apart.
My hands tighten on the cold metal of the gate as he begins to move again.
‘Don’t go.’
It’s almost as though he were speaking to himself, his voice is so quiet. Emotion strangled those words, his lungs tight and without the capacity for breath. I hadn’t meant to allow him to touch me, but the need for this was so ingrained.
It begins to rain—not in earnest, but one of those summer showers lasting mere seconds before moving on with the clouds. Drops glisten like tears on the skin of my bare arms as Dan’s fingers wipes them away. I don’t watch, unable to stand the sight.
‘Stay,’ he whispers.
‘But she’ll always be there, won’t she?’
‘I’ll move. Buy another house—our house.’
‘You would move from Hal?’ My laugh is rueful, and I feel him still. He wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Not for me, at least. No, it was time to put up or shut up. Or get in the car and leave. It never would’ve lasted, anyway.
I open the gate, his shoes scuffing behind me, his arms falling away.
‘I can’t live like this. It’s hard enough coming to terms with who I am, hard enough sharing my life with you, without some fucked-up bitch playing games with my head.’
Yet my feet turn instinctively left.
The door, painted pillar-box red, is solid under my fist. It opens to a hallway almost identical to Dan’s. The décor is different, a heavy brocade covering the walls, and was that an umbrella stand? It takes me a moment to move my gaze down.
‘Hal, honey, is your mom at home?’ The boy nods solemnly, his gaze, so like his father’s, seems to pierce my façade. But I won’t cry. Not now. ‘Could you ask her to come speak with me, then go see your dad? Tell him to look in my big bag upstairs. There’s a package in there with your name on front.’
I thank divine providence for the arrival of the Legos I’d ordered, apparently released in the States a month before the UK. Hal had stared at the website covetously, complaining the piece wouldn’t be available here until the new school term had begun. I’d meant it as a surprise. I wished I could’ve delighted at the light in his eyes.
Haste and excitement hurls the little boy down the hall where he disappears through a door. A moment later, he bounds back, shooting me a shy smile. Belle followed the boy, gliding along the hall rather languidly.
‘Can I help you?’ she drawls as Hal dashes down the garden path.
‘You sure as fuck can’t help yourself,’ I spit against my better judgment. I hadn’t planned on this. Any of it. Working on instinct seemed the only way.
The bitch actually smiles, and for a moment, I almost forget I’m the non-violent kind.
‘Darling, I don’t know what my husband—’
‘Don’t even try. I know what this is, and I can read you like a smutty little book.’ Belle’s eyes glitter at my disdainful look. ‘The locks will be changed this week, and you’d better damn sure believe if I so much as get a whiff of your perfume in there, you’ll be feeling my right hook.’
‘You think you’re special? How sweet.’ Belle’s hand flutters in the air, and I long, suddenly, to snap it from the wrist. ‘Darling, the man is a whore—insatiable. He truly can’t help himself. He’d fuck you then fuck me without coming up for breath in between.’
She looks like she’d actually enjoy that. Without so much as a ripple in my expression, I carry on.
‘You fucking wish. Step one foot in that house without an invitation and I’m fucking up your life. Do you really want copies of all those photographs sent to your family?’ The box on the top shelf of Dan’s closet. If he didn’t want me looking, he shouldn’t have left it there. ‘Your friends? Your colleagues?’ I let my eyes travel over her with contempt. ‘Pretty pink Belle . . . who’d imagine she’d like it rough and messy?’
Belle’s face pales under her peach-coloured blush, no doubt recalling a nakedness covered in rope. Writhing against the bed, skin adorned by lipsticked insults, spittle, and cum. Bruised by anonymous fingertips and teeth.
I’d seen the photographs. I’d looked at them all. Conflicted and jealous—a hundred more emotions that day.
Gratified by her pained expression, I don’t wait for her response, but what happens next does so in a blur of motion as I step forward with an open palm. Gratified further, the colour back on at least one side of Belle’s face, I turn and head down the path, glad of the shrubbery shielding the houses in this very upper middle class neighbourhood.
Dan steps into the street as I turn a right out of Charles’s garden gate. He stands back, expression guarded, almost surprised as I take another right, making my way along the garden path of his house.
