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“As if it’s about fucking courtesy. Are you that fucking greedy for the money?” I stormed away, practically swung the office door from its hinges. I grabbed a wedge of notes from the till. Buck didn’t even flinch as I threw them in his direction. “If you’re that desperate for the fucking cash, Buck, then take it and get the fuck out of my face for the rest of the fucking day.”
Buck gathered up the notes with a sigh. He tapped them on the side, lined them all up, then left them there. He held up his hands. “Alright, I’ll leave it. Just forget I said anything.”
As if I’d be able to forget about this fucking mess anytime soon.
He got back to work without another word, and so did I.
I heard nothing from Darren for three days. I dropped the girls at the yard after school and he dropped them outside the house when they were ready to come home. That was it, no texts, no polite conversation on the front doorstep, nothing.
I saw him through the cafe window on Thursday lunchtime, making his way to the village shop for cigarettes no doubt, but he didn’t even glance in my direction, and I made damned sure I wouldn’t have been looking his way if he had.
Tonya said he was jealous. I told her that was ridiculous. It wasn’t me who’d wanted to marry the next person I hooked up with in his wake. It wasn’t me who was fucking the whole fucking village without a care in the world.
Darren Trent wasn’t jealous.
He was an asshole.
And he didn’t see me as a woman, not anymore. That was the bottom line. I was just Mum. That’s how he saw me, and in that deep dark place in my heart that’s how I’d feared he’d seen me for a long, long time. Since I’d had the girls, in fact. It never felt quite the same after.
Maybe that’s what killed us, ultimately.
Maybe I’d stopped being a woman in his eyes before I’d stopped being a woman in my own.
But I was a woman again now, even if he refused to see it. I kept hold of myself, kept putting that makeup on every morning, kept making the effort to feel like me.
And it worked. It really worked.
Maybe I didn’t care so much what Darren Trent thought after all.
I realised that was a lie when I found his truck next to mine in the cafe car park at closing. I walked quickly, straight to my door, ignoring him until he was out of his and close enough to my side that he could put an arm across the door handle. I ignored him like he didn’t matter, but my heart was racing and my mouth was dry, my whole body thrumming with anger and upset and something else.
“What?” I said, then looked around him, stared back at his empty truck. I’d asked Tonya to drop Mia and Ruby down at the garage, since I was working late, and yet there was no sign of them.
“They’re at Mum and Dad’s,” he said. “I’m here to see you.”
“Well, you’ve seen me now.” I went to push his arm away. He wouldn’t budge.
“I want to talk,” he said just as the sky opened up and started pissing itself down. Great. “Please, Jo,” he said. “Just get in the truck a minute.”
I made a big old sigh out of it before I relented. I hauled myself into the passenger seat, stared straight through the windscreen at the rain outside.
It took him a while to speak.
“Why do you want to do it?”
I shot him a look of surprise. “What?”
“The sex,” he said. “Why? I didn’t have you down as the orgy type.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you had me down wrong then.”
He smirked. “Thought I knew you pretty well, Jodie. You never fucking mentioned having a fucking gangbang. I’d have remembered, believe me.”
I relaxed into the seat, tried to work out the right words. “I didn’t think about it back then. We were… everything. And then we weren’t.” I paused but didn’t look at him. “Since then I’ve been… Brian wasn’t…” I sighed. “I didn’t feel like me. I haven’t felt like me in a long fucking time.”
“And now you do?”
I smiled, kept staring at the rain. “I’m getting there.”
“And banging four fucking guys will get you further there, will it?”
Four. He said four.
“I dunno, Darren. I just want to live again. Mandy Taylor shot her mouth off and it sounded good. It sounded really good. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop thinking about how good it would feel to live that kind of fantasy. I want to feel like that.” I took a breath. “I miss sex. I miss crazy, intense, fantastical, amazingly hot, fuck-me-harder sex. I’m still a woman, Trent. I still watch porn, I still get off every night to the thought of some crazy wild night where I get lost in the fantasy. I’m still…”
