Straight Talking by Jane Green Read Free Book Online Page B

sorry-I-can’t-chat-right-now-but-I’m-thinking-of-you kind of call?
    Too busy to chat is crap, but I agreed with him, I bloody agreed with him and told him it was OK, but “Next time you should be a bit more considerate. I
was
worried.”
    “Hopefully there won’t be a next time,” he said, and he climbed into bed and rolled over, giving me a perfunctory peck on the lips as he did so. I lay awake for hours trying to figure out what he meant.

    I cooked for Simon, I cleaned for Simon, I took care of Simon. I took his clothes to the dry cleaner’s, and sure enough, you clever readers, that was the beginning of my end.
    Everyone checks their boyfriend’s jacket pockets when they’re taking their clothes to the dry cleaner’s, don’t they? Don’t
you
? Not even when two weeks before he spent most of the night absent without leave, and has subsequently acted like a moody bastard, putting it down to work worries?
    I was just doing my girlfriendly duty, for God’s sake, I mean, he might have left money in there, Simon was so scatty. Aha, he has left money in here I thought, drawing out three photographs from his inside pocket.
    I didn’t think anything else after that, I just sat down very quickly, holding the photographs and thinking nothing very much really.
    You think you’ve got it, don’t you? Ha! You haven’t. You think I was holding pictures of Simon in bed with some bimbo, both of them caught in an erotic embrace, or some such similar damning evidence.
    Nothing so obvious, and in some ways I’m still convinced that what I found was worse. What I found left room for questions. The questions that can never be satisfied by answers, the questions that keep you awake every night, analyzing every possibility, trying to rationalize what they mean.
    She was a very beautiful blonde girl. Not, like me, strikingly attractive with a hell of a lot of makeup and newly highlighted roots. She was naturally beautiful. Long blond hair, straight, and it looked natural from what I could see. She was wearing only a tiny bit of makeup, with just a smudge of taupe lipstick. She looked like a model, and she was sitting in Café Rouge in Notting Hill—before you ask I recognized the decor—it was nighttime and she was smiling into the camera.
    And in the second one she was talking animatedly, as if the photographer had just picked up his lens and shot her in mid-flow, and in the third one she was rubbing the back of her neck with one hand, and looking coyly, flirtatiously, beyond the lens and presumably into the eyes of the photographer. Simon. Who the hell else could it have been?
    A man doesn’t carry around a photograph, let alone three photographs, of a woman unless she intrigues him, unless she’s got under his skin. I didn’t know who she was, but I knew instantly she’d wormed her way in, she’d caused his moodiness toward me, and I knew she wasn’t going to be going away, at least not without a hell of a fight.
    And I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t think I needed to. I thought Simon loved me, and I thought, oh how stupid I was, I thought love was enough. But do you know the worst thing about looking at the photographs and feeling these feelings? The worst thing was that if I was a bloke I’d feel the same way. If I was a bloke and had to choose between me and her, I’d choose her. No contest.
    When Simon came bounding down the hallway I walked out to greet him holding the photographs in front of me, showing him the evidence.
    “What’s the matter, Fanny? What are those?” He went to put his arms around me and vaguely looked at the pictures.
    “Oh yeah. Tanya.”
    “What the fuck do you mean, ‘Oh yeah. Tanya.’? Who the fuck is she and what the hell are these pictures?”
    When a man is innocent, he quite rightly says what the hell were you doing going through my jacket pockets. When a man is guilty he’s too busy trying to think up a story to even bother attacking you for looking in the first place.