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For a moment he’s almost child-like, awakening some dormant instinct deep inside me; the need to console is almost too strong to ignore.
I climb onto his lap, tucking my feet beneath me, and wrap my arms around his neck. He places his hands in the small of my back, burying his face in my shoulder.
Softly, I stroke his hair, murmuring sweet words into his ear. My fingers drag against his scalp, and I feel his breath hitch once, then twice.
What the hell is wrong? After a night of frantic lovemaking, it's almost frightening to realise he's so vulnerable, and I've no idea what to do.
“Tell me about your dream,” I whisper, not loosening my hold on him.
He looks up at me, blinking. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “The same one I always have. I wake up and she's there.”
I start to feel sick. “She?” I ask.
“Jane. She's there, holding me, I can't get out.” He's still so muted, his voice a monotone. “Her arm is pinning me down and no matter what I do, I can't
get her off me.”
His eyes are glassy, unfocused. I wonder how much he's been drinking. I've no idea what the time is. Although it feels closer to morning than night-time, the last thing I remember was falling asleep just after 1:00 a.m.
I cup his face with my hands, his half-beard scratching my palms. He looks at me as if I have all the answers, and I find myself wishing I did.
“Shh, it's okay,” I croon, as if I'm talking to my baby nephew. “It was just a dream, I'm here. You're going to be okay.”
When we kiss, there's a sweetness to it. His lips are soft, whisky-coated.
“Tell me about her,” I say. “Tell me about your wife.”
Callum says nothing, though his arms tighten. His wrists cut into my waist, almost hurting, but I can’t ask him to stop. Instead I continue stroking his hair as if he's a little boy, breathing in the earthy, masculine scent which tells me he definitely isn't.
It feels like forever before he finally speaks. “I graduated from University in 2003 and walked straight into a job at Richards and Morgan. Back then they used to take on about fifty graduates a year, it was the boom times. So there were a lot of us competing for the best projects, and trying to see who could drink the most on a Friday night.”
“Sounds familiar,” I mumble.
“I met Jane in my second week. She’d graduated from Cambridge the year before, although she was the same age as me. Even so, she had this air of ‘been there and done that’ I liked. It seemed a simple step to ask her out, see where things went.”
I don’t want to hear this, but I think I need to. This girl—this woman—has played a huge role in his life, leaving scars I didn’t know were there. I have to force myself to say, “Go on.”
“As I said, we all worked hard and played hard. Stayed at the office until ten, and then headed straight to the bars. Sometimes we’d have enough time to stumble home, take a shower and drag ourselves back into the office. It wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t healthy, but it was what everybody did. So that’s how I lived for four or five years.”
I can remember Lara telling me the same thing about her experiences working in the financial district. There was constant pressure to excel at everything, whether that was getting the most prestigious projects or being able to handle alcohol. Somehow it’s hard to picture Callum—this strong, big man—having to fight his way to the top. In my mind he was always there.
“But something changed?”
He clears his throat. “I changed.” He pours another splash of whisky into his glass. “I got bored of doing the same thing, day in day out. I wanted to be awake at work; I wanted to give my clients everything I had. I didn’t want to just coast along. A year later I was offered a promotion and a great job in the Edinburgh office, and I asked Jane to come up with me.”
“Did she?”
He looks down. “She didn’t want to. She liked being in London, she liked the party lifestyle. She found it a lot easier than I did to get up in the morning after a heavy night out. It took a long time for me to realise what she was doing to help her function.”
My heart catches in my throat. I know exactly how people cope with alcohol consumption on a night out. I’ve seen it before—the traces of powder, the glassy eyes. Cocaine can be an excellent anti-hangover cure.
“She was a user?”
“She didn’t see it that way. She thought it was a casual thing, something she did just to help her through the day. She swore she could stop whenever she wanted.” He laughs harshly. “Idiotic isn’t it? All addicts say the same thing, until somebody actually challenges them.”
“Did she stop?”
His pupils dilate as they take in light. He blinks rapidly as if to acclimatise himself. “We agreed to make a fresh start in Edinburgh. We got engaged, bought a flat, and started our new jobs. I thought everything was fine, that she was happy. I’d forgotten how good she was at hiding things.”
