The One That Got Away (13 page)

It’s him again.

I don’t even have to think about it – I hit delete. I want him gone, want to make him vanish without trace.

I drop my phone on the sofa as if it has burnt me and walk out of the sitting room. Upstairs in the bathroom, I pull the light
on, my trousers off and then yank my top over my head. Unhooking my bra and slipping off my knickers, I climb into the bath,
turn the dial and gasp as the cold water from the overhead shower stings my skin. As it begins to heat up, I get the soap
and start to scrub. I rub so vigorously, with a slightly too-coarse flannel, that my inner thighs turn pink. Then I rinse
and rinse myself. Over and over again until I feel sore and my fingers, clutching the showerhead, are going wrinkly. I turn
off the water and climb out, shivering on the bath mat. The mirror has steamed up and as I wipe across it,
my mascara-ravaged face stares back. I still don’t feel clean.

I reach for some loo roll, scrape the stubborn makeup off and drop the tissue in the bin. Then I run a scalding hot, very
deep bath and get in. The water rises over my shoulders and I don’t look down my naked body, I just close my eyes.

But as I lie there, I remember waking up in the dark hotel bed next to Leo and
crying
… I think I cried and he comforted me … and that’s when he kissed me …

Oh God, STOP … my eyes rush open and I gasp out loud as Mel bellows, in what I know is her son’s bedroom, ‘Time to go to sleep!’
through the stupidly flimsy walls, before starting up a rousing rendition of
the wheels on the bus go round and round
, which doesn’t strike me as a bedtime sort of song.

Leo is the last man who touched me. Not Dan – Leo.

I quickly rear up and out of the water, slopping it over the side as I thump first one, then the other foot down on to the
bath mat and reach for my towel. I don’t want to lie there any more. Wrapping my body tightly, I walk into our bedroom and
pull the curtains shut. Then I dry myself off, slapping on cold body lotion and, before it sinks in properly, step into my
PJ bottoms. I begin to rake a brush through my wet hair before reaching for the hairdryer.

I have been very drunk like that only once before, at university where about four hours vanished from my life after I got
stupidly sunburnt, took a couple of ibuprofen to dull the pain and then had a bottle of wine before
going to the end-of-term ball. I went from having a good time, to feeling drunk, to finding myself on my back, half-conscious
in the toilets with several strangers’ faces looming over me asking me if I was OK. I’d not been able to answer – just lain
there with the vague feeling my skirt was rucked up and I probably ought to sort it out. Then Abi and Rose had appeared. I
don’t remember anything more about the evening than that. The morning afterwards, the whole episode was frightening enough
to make me vow I’d never do it again.

My hair is almost done when I feel a change in the air within the house. Just as I switch the dryer off to listen, Dan suddenly
appears in the bedroom doorway eating a packet of Wotsits, and makes me jump.

He grins. ‘Didn’t hear me come in then?’

I shake my head.

He crosses the room and kisses me. ‘I’m a bit crispy. Sorry.’ He puts the empty packet down on the chest of drawers and takes
his coat off, slinging it on the bed. ‘You been back long?’

‘No, about half an hour.’ Which, technically, is true.

He leaves the room and from the bathroom calls, ‘Did the car hold up? Traffic all right?’

‘It was fine.’ I hurriedly put the hairdryer back on, to prevent any more discussion.

He comes back in, yanks his shirt up and begins to unbutton it before slipping his trousers off. He reaches for a T-shirt
from the ironing pile and pulls on a pair of jeans last of all. As I turn the dryer off he comes round
and draws me into a hug. ‘I missed you,’ he says and kisses the top of my head.

‘I missed you too.’ I close my eyes tightly and cling to him. His T-shirt smells cleanly of washing powder.

‘It’s been a funny old week, hasn’t it?’ he says. ‘Still, Friday tomorrow. I thought we could do something this weekend just
the two of us. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’

‘Very.’

The doorbell rings downstairs. ‘Aha!’ he says happily. ‘That’ll be Tesco’s. Are you going to come down? I’ll stick the kettle
on.’ He hastens from the room leaving me just standing there, an oily black seam of guilt opening up within me, the like of
which I’ve never, ever experienced.

When I first met Leo, and he began bombarding me with illicit and intoxicating text messages telling me he wasn’t able to
stop thinking about me … what was he supposed to do, walk away from the love of his life knowing I was all he’d ever need?
All I had to do was say the word and he’d be there for me … I’d felt guilty about his poor girlfriend; but not enough to ignore
him. I was too breathlessly excited and absurdly flattered that he’d been so obsessed with me. When Leo falls – he falls hard
and fast.

But this? This is a different kind of guilt altogether. My eyes fill with tears and I have to cover my mouth with my hand
to silence myself. This is Dan; it is
us
. A drunken moment in a hotel room and the quality of light in our marriage has changed for ever.

I hate Leo for that, almost as much as I hate myself.

* * *

When we get into bed – having got through eating tea on our laps, Dan asking me painfully innocent questions about how the
conference was – I shiver with the cold and he reaches out for me. ‘Shall I warm you up?’ He hugs me and plants a kiss on
my nose. ‘Arggghh!’ He pulls sharply away from me. ‘Your feet are freezing! OK,’ he braces himself. ‘Go on then, put them
on me … FUCK!’ He laughs and then his kind brown eyes search my face as if he is reminding himself of me. ‘The things I do
for you!’ He kisses me again. ‘Love you.’

‘I love you too,’ I mumble, trying to smile and not cry.

He kisses me again, properly, and I am now so desperate to annihilate everything else, blast it all away and make him what
is real, I kiss him back with such energy he almost stops in surprise, although his hands can’t help tightening round me in
response to my urgency.

Afterwards, trying not to look at the condom wrapper on the floor of our bedroom because it is too horrible a reminder of
earlier, I lie there in our bed listening to Dan moving around in the bathroom and clutch the duvet to me. I want to tell
him everything. I desperately want to come clean … but that is exactly the problem; telling him will not undo what I’ve done.
And there is no way he’d possibly be able to understand or forgive me, I am sure of that. It would only devastate him. I am
going to have to learn to live alongside it, that will be my punishment.

He comes back into the room and gets back into bed.
‘Moll, I know we’ve sort of glossed over it, but that row on Tuesday night …’

‘I’m so sorry about that,’ I say immediately.

‘No – I should be apologising to you!’ He exclaims. ‘I flew off the handle, I let what I wanted get in the way of everything
else.’ He looks so genuinely worried; the guilt and the need to do something to make everything all OK overwhelms me, I just
can’t bear it.

‘The thing is Moll,’ he begins, ‘I know we’ve said that …’

‘Dan,’ I interrupt him. ‘You’re right. We should have a baby. We should start trying, tomorrow in fact.’

He looks confused, ‘But—’

‘I really want us to.’

I don’t actually have to say more than that, because he pulls me delightedly to him, and the expression on his face is all
the proof I need that I have done the right thing.

‘You’re going to start trying for a baby?’ Joss’s voice on speakerphone echoes around the car as the road rumbles away under
me. ‘Are you serious?’

There’s a long pause, in which I can’t think of anything sensible to say.

‘Do you not think,’ Joss adopts an unusually careful tone, ‘considering that the night before last you had sex with your ex,
there’s a chance this may not be the best time to make such a big decision?’

‘We were always going to have kids, Joss, it was just a question of when,’ I reply quickly, trying to pretend I haven’t heard
what she’s just said. ‘I know I’ve been putting it off but … look, I can’t talk about this now, I’m in the car, I’m not sure
where my meeting is and I’m already late.’

‘All I’m saying is stop and think if this is what you actually
want
. Have you told Bec yet?’

‘Told her what?’

‘Well, everything. About Leo for a start.’ Her voice darkens.

I shake my head emphatically. ‘No, and I’m not going to. I don’t want anyone to know about this. You’re the only person I’ve
told. Please Joss – it’s got to stay that way.’

‘But it’s
Bec
.’

‘The more people know, the higher the chance that it could somehow come out, and Dan must NEVER know about this. I’m ashamed
enough as it is, I almost wish you didn’t know to be honest. I just want to forget the whole thing ever happened.’

She snorts sadly. ‘Well that I can understand.’

Thinking about it again makes me want to vomit, and I get a moment of horizontal vertigo. The car feels static, like it’s
the trees and other cars on the dual carriageway that are rushing past
me
. It is a horrible sensation and I know instinctively that I have to pull over for a moment.

‘Moll?’ Joss says. ‘You still there?’

I swing on to the hard shoulder and lurch to a stop, my head thudding back lightly on the headrest. I can hear my own breathing.

‘Molly! Talk to me!’

‘I think I’m going to hurl, hang on a minute!’

Joss pauses. We sit there in silence, me on the road, her
somewhere in London. ‘Is that the morning-after pill, d’you reckon?’ she says. ‘Bec would know.’

I ignore that. ‘I didn’t eat breakfast and I’m very tightly wound up. That’s all.’

‘You haven’t actually
been
sick, because the last thing you want is …’

‘I know,’ I cut her off quickly, before she can finish that sentence. ‘Trust me, I know.’

Eventually I find the dreary, anonymous roadside hotel and get out of the car. It’s a thick, cold, nothing sort of day which
can’t really be bothered to get properly light. Everything feels leaden, even the seagull wheeling above my head is squawking
lethargically like it might just fall out of the sky.

When I finally make it to the meeting room I see I’m the last to arrive. There is an empty seat between Pearce and Sandra,
the only one left, so I walk round and slide into it as quietly as I can while apologising to Antony, whose flow I have broken.
‘Sorry, I got stuck in traffic.’

‘No problem,’ he replies smoothly. ‘We haven’t started the debrief yet.’

Everyone waits as I place my bag down quietly, trying to avoid any further interruptions, but the bloody thing falls over
and disgorges its contents on to the slightly sticky carpet. Pearce silently leans to the side, retrieves my phone and wordlessly
passes it to me. I take it and our fingers touch briefly. Sandra’s eyebrow shoots up obsessively, right into her blonde hairline,
and she crosses
her arms. So that’s how she and Pearce are now. That conference has got a lot to answer for.

I put my mobile in my lap for a moment while I try to scoop everything else up off the floor without causing a fuss, but unfortunately,
a tinkly girly sound – which sounds like it’s coming from my crotch – announces the arrival of a text message. Antony sighs
pointedly.

‘Sorry.’ I try to get myself together and hurriedly grab the phone. ‘I’m, er, waiting on an important feedback call from a
GP who is about to place a large order. That’s his answerphone message buzzing in I expect.’ I make a show of inspecting the
screen in a businesslike fashion, but stupidly open the text menu. Sandra is there like a flash. ‘No, it’s a text,’ she cranes
over my shoulder. ‘Subject matter “You’ve not been away from my mind …’” she reads out loud. ‘Ahhhh!’ Her beautiful face contorts
into a nasty smile. ‘How sweet.’

‘Who says that
wasn’t
the GP?’ Pearce jokes and everyone laughs, except me, because I know exactly who the text is from and I need to read the
rest of it, but now I can’t. ‘Molly has them all eating out of her hand.’ Sandra looks incredibly pissed off that Pearce has
stood up for me in public, pursing her blow-job gob into a sulky pout.

‘Yes, well let’s just turn our phones off shall we?’ Antony says crisply, like the school teacher who is perfectly capable
of losing it, but hasn’t quite hit the irritation level required yet.

Sandra hasn’t given up though and tries a different line
of attack. ‘I expect that’s hubby checking up on you, isn’t it? Are you feeling better now, Molly? You’ve been really poorly,
haven’t you? Ill
all yesterday
.’ She flicks her long blonde hair back and fakes a look of concern. Everyone shifts awkwardly in their seats. Its tantamount
to actually saying, ‘So did you get so wasted on Wednesday night you couldn’t be arsed to drag yourself out of the hotel bed?’

Antony turns to me in surprise.

‘Did you manage to get to the doctor’s?’ Sandra asks innocently, and takes a sip of her tea.

‘Yes, I did,’ I say, keeping my voice steady. ‘It’s always sensible to get checked out after a car accident, and what with
spending all afternoon in the doctor’s waiting room it was just like being at work really.’ Why did she have to do that? I’m
no threat to her. And while it’s a relief to have such a convincing excuse, its not so great to have to remind everyone I
bashed up my company car the day before yesterday. She’s such a bitch.

Antony looks at me worriedly. ‘Right, well, if you’re quite finished, Sandra? You know you might think about directing some
of that concern and energy towards improving your rather low call-back rate.’

That wipes the satisfied look off her face and he launches into the conference debrief and then the territory reports. When
we finally arrive at lunch, Sandra and I are the only ones still alert; me because of the text I’m dreading reading, and Sandra
because she’s been angrily
simmering in her seat waiting for her big moment. Sure enough, she snatches her bag up dramatically and makes a show of flouncing
out in a huff.