Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming. Cathy Kelly
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gazed up at him happily, eyes tracing the familiar lines of his face and loving what she saw.
‘Izzie, I need to know why you came to the museum last night,’ he said.
‘What?’ she asked, her happy daydream crashing to the ground. ‘Can’t you guess?’
‘Well, no.’
This time, she sat up and pulled the sheet protectively over her breasts.
‘Oh, come on, Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s not rocket science. You’re one of the smartest people I know. Surely you can figure it out.’
‘You wanted to look at my wife?’
He couldn’t say her name: couldn’t say ‘Elizabeth’. As if saying it here in Izzie’s apartment would taint her. Elizabeth was the one to be protected, not the other way round.
Izzie shivered at what this meant.
‘I could look at her in any magazine, Joe,’ she said calmly. ‘I wanted to see you together – don’t you get it? You and her, together. Wouldn’t you want to see me and him together, if I was the one who was married?’ she asked incredulously.
‘If you were married, we wouldn’t be together,’ Joe said bluntly.
‘What?’
‘I wouldn’t want to share you.’ He shrugged. ‘That wouldn’t be an option. I’d never see someone who was involved with anyone else.’
Rage boiled up inside her.
‘You bastard!’ she hissed. ‘I get to share you, but you’d refuse to share me. You are so hypocritical.’
‘Me, hypocritical? I don’t think so.’ Joe’s eyes were like cold steel and they bored into her.
Izzie was shocked by the ferocity of his glare.
‘What I didn’t think we were getting into was you turning up like a stalker to watch me and my wife with our friends.’
His words actually hurt her physically. She hadn’t known words could do that.
‘I can’t believe you’re saying this to me,’ she said. She no longer felt angry, just very scared and very shocked. This was not how it was supposed to be. Where was the Joe who’d looked down on her as they’d made love, as if he’d like to gaze at her face with love for ever.
The words just slipped out. ‘I thought you loved me?’
The silence gaped like one of the valleys near the New Mexico pueblo where she’d been just days before. Outside, police cars roared past, droning sirens into the afternoon.
‘I thought you and Elizabeth were just together for the kids? That’s what you told me. Is that the truth or not?’
‘Izzie –’ he began, ‘I do love you, but it’s not that simple.’
And then she knew for sure. Carla had been right. He hadn’t loved her. He’d loved making love to her, sure, but as for the Real Thing – that was all one-sided. Her side.
‘Don’t say anything.’ She scrambled out of the bed, dragging the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body like an Egyptian mummy. She didn’t want him looking at her naked body ever again. She felt so ashamed: ashamed, humiliated, stupid. He’d used her. She loved him, thought he loved her too. But she was wrong.
‘Let’s not fight,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t come here for that.’
The shred of dignity left to Izzie stopped her saying: What did you come here for, then? Because the answer was simple: to fuck you, my handy little girlfriend. That’s all she was. A convenience store – available for late-night drinks, dinner and free sex. For the first time ever, she had respect for the hard-boiled identikit New York girlfriends of married men. At least they understood the rules of the game and they considered it a profession. Get your man and get something from him. She’d considered herself different: his true love. She was his equal and she wasn’t the sort of woman who wanted things from a man. She wasn’t in it for gifts – she was in it for love. Except he was in it for something different. No shit, Sherlock.
‘No,’ she said, reaching inside herself and finding one last thread of calmness. ‘Let’s not fight. I have to pack.’
Pack? She didn’t care if she travelled on the flight without a single item of luggage but the clothes she stood up in. Still, it was a good excuse.
‘Of course,’ he said, sliding gracefully out of the bed. He was such a handsome male animal, she thought, watching him. Everything she found physically attractive: no fat, just hard muscle and a hard business brain, and now – she’d just found out – a hard heart.
‘What time is your flight?’ he murmured.
‘Five forty tomorrow evening,’ she said.
‘Nothing earlier.’
‘No.’
‘If you want, I could get you on the private plane,’ he said.
Like a computer finally downloading a big email, the litany of vicious things she’d planned to say earlier came online in Izzie’s brain. The thread of calm vanished.
‘But not the company plane, right? That might really let people know that you were screwing me. No, you’d have to take a favour from someone or else pay to fly me home, because God forbid that any of your employees should find out about me, the boss’s whore.’
‘Izzie,’ he said, sounding hurt, ‘I never made you feel that way, I never meant to.’
‘I know, but that’s still how I feel,’ she said.
‘Guess we’re fighting after all.’
‘No, you’re leaving,’ she said. ‘In fact, I am too. I’ve got things to buy.’ She grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants from her closet and went into the tiny bathroom. Twenty seconds later, she emerged, wearing the tracksuit and her hair messy from where she’d hauled it over her head. Who cared about her hair? Bed-hair and life-is-over-hair looked pretty much the same. ‘I’m going. You can let yourself out.’
‘Don’t go,’ he said urgently.
‘Tough, I’m going,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wait here and listen to more of your lies.’
‘They’re not lies, Izzie. I love you, it’s just difficult now. Complicated –’
‘I’ll undo some of the complications, then,’ she snapped. ‘Consider me out of your life, Joe. Does that make it easier?’
She snagged her purse from the hall, grabbed her keys and was gone.
She ran down the stairs to the street in case he came after her, and then ran two blocks to a coffee shop they’d never been to together, just in case he came after her.
But he wouldn’t, she realised, as she stood at the counter and tried to summon up the brainpower to actually order something.
‘Er…skinny latte, please,’ she said to the barista.
Joe wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t want an emotional girlfriend who had expectations: he wanted an easy lay who wouldn’t cause trouble. Or did he? She’d trusted him, had been sure he was telling the truth. But if he was, and if he loved her, wouldn’t he walk away now to be with her?
She sat at a table and stirred sugar into her latte. What a hideous day this had turned out to be. First, darling Gran: now, this.
‘Oh, Gran,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ve let you down so much. Let both of us down, actually. Bet you thought you’d taught me better, huh?’
A mother with a baby in a stroller and several bags of groceries underneath, sat tiredly down at the table beside her. Izzie watched the mother and child