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The elevator dings, and Mal gets out, walking right behind us, even taking Callum’s suitcase and rolling it along the corridor. “Before I forget, there’s been a change of plans,” he says. “Richards is throwing a party tonight in his penthouse after all. Stars are coming from all over Europe. I think Alex Winslow is cutting short his vacation with his wife and kids in the south of France just to say hi. It’s going to be wild, and therefore not a place for a sweet lady like our Rory.”
He knows there’s no chance in hell I’m going to leave the hotel now. This is the stuff Ryner dreams about. The kind of crazy, old-school, rock-star party full of familiar faces, where people swing from chandeliers and write songs in the corner of the room and create plaster molds of penises and drive Rolls Royces into swimming pools.
We stop at Callum’s door. I look up at him and play with my nose hoop. He shakes his head with a smile.
“Let’s stay and go to the party. Who cares where we are, as long as I’m inside you?”
Mal is standing in front of us, watching the entire exchange. I want to throw up. I don’t know why Callum said what he just did, but that makes me feel even worse than I did a second ago.
I rise on my tiptoes, giving Callum a chaste peck on the cheek.
“Let’s get inside,” I whisper brokenly.
I slam the door in Mal’s face, leaving him out. Physically. Figuratively.
Leaving him with the lies.
With the secrets.
With the weight of his affair with married Maeve.
And the guilt of keeping Kath’s death from me.
With our sins.
When I turn from the door to face Callum, I drop the charade.
“We need to talk.”
Present
Rory
I never get to tell Callum about what happened with Mal. As soon as we shut the door behind us, he gets a call he has to take and locks himself outside on the balcony. He uses his hushed, I’ll-make-meatballs-out-of-you, hedge-fund-analyst tone that makes my skin crawl.
The phone call lasts nearly two hours and reaches octaves better suited for the jungle. I feel sorry for him that he has to work on New Year’s Eve. But by the time he’s done, I’m getting ready to hop into the shower before the party.
When he walks back in, his face flushed and pouty, he glances at my half-naked figure and perks up, plastering a lazy smile where a scowl rested seconds ago.
“Me. You. Shower. Sex. Let’s go.”
“We need to talk.”
“I don’t reckon anything is more important than a quick shag, especially with your hipbones poking out Bella Hadid-style. Despair suits you.” He runs his tongue over his upper teeth. “Go on. You can’t tell me you haven’t been longing for my cock all this time.”
I sit on the edge of the bed, hunched and defeated, racking my brain for how to deliver the news—how to rip us open like a mummified body and dump all the internal organs.
I hate that Summer was right in her prediction.
The napkin didn’t mean nothing.
It meant everything.
Mal warned me years ago that he was going to break whatever I had going with someone else if we met again.
And he kept good on his promise.
Callum tugs at my sleeve, and there’s something in his expression that makes my heart rattle my ribs like they’re metal bars.
I burst out in tears, covering my face, feeling ashamed not only for what I did to him, to me, but also for being such a coward. For not coming clean like a grown-up. He stands there, the summer blush vanishing from his face, watching me.
“All right then, no shagging. I didn’t think the idea would upset you quite so much…” He scratches his head, trying to make light of things. “I did give my willy curls a good trim, if that’s the reason you’re distraught.”
I try to laugh to make him feel better, but the truth is, we don’t have time right now to have the conversation we obviously need to have. I slip into the shower and turn the water to sizzling hot, staring ahead at the powder blue tiles with their tiny cracks of old age, wondering when it all went so wrong.
I know exactly when. The minute I took this job.
Because being around Mal and not wanting him is impossible.
I can deny myself of a lot of things, but he’s never been one of them.
Mal makes me burn. Crackle. Melt. My love for him is thick and sturdy. Metallic and alive. A beating organ, co-existing with my heart.
I get out of the shower and face Callum, who is choosing cufflinks from a little velvet box he takes with him everywhere.
“When we get back, we really need to talk,” I mutter.
He answers without turning to look at me, his voice surprisingly dead.
