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“Sorry,” Dan called. Ant heard keys jangling, then, “Move, Jeff,” then the door was open, and Ant knew what’d taken Dan so long. He had a freshly fucked look about him, screwy hair, heavy lids and half-dressed, a smile so smug it could rot your jaw.
“I’m interrupting.”
Dan laughed. “You sure are. I‘d have left you out here but Alex wouldn’t let me.” He swung the door open and stepped back, taking Jeff by the collar to give Ant space to move through the doorway. Alex was in the kitchen, fully dressed and brushed but her eyes were big and bright with left-over desire.
She said, “You’re not interrupting,” but she blushed the same shade of pink camellia his mum loved. She handed him a coffee. “Have you eaten?”
He threw his suit coat over the back of a chair and unbuttoned his cuffs to roll his sleeves up. “No, but I’m cool.”
“I can make you an omelette, ham cheese and mushroom?”
Dan sat at the table. “No, don’t feed him. This is meant to be a quick stopover. Quick, Ant. Like you said, you’re interrupting.”
“Dan.” Alex smacked the back of Dan’s head, then pushed her fingers through his hair and bent forward to kiss the top of his head. It was hard to tell whether Dan liked the smack, the hair pull or the kiss more. He grinned, like a satisfied bastard, whose girlfriend had just moved in. “Plan on getting indigestion, mate.”
Ant sat. Alex started on the omelette Ant wasn’t sure he’d be able to eat. His stomach was full of self-loathing. Old Dan, pre Alex, would’ve gotten him drunk right about now and all of this would’ve gone away. New Dan was less forgiving, but forgiveness was the last thing he needed.
“I fucked up,” he said.
“How?”
“Look she’s a prickly little bitch and...”
Dan cut him off. “You fucked up, but now you’re going to blame her for it.”
“Right. Shit.” Ant sighed.
“Start at the beginning,” said Alex. She waved a tomato at him and he nodded. He’d probably have nodded at having his balls removed if she suggested it. Except now he thought about it, Bree had already done that. She took his promotion first, then she took his self-respect.
He stood up. This might be easier if he was moving. “I never even got close to finding out for sure if someone’s roughing Bree up.”
Dan refilled his coffee cup from the plunger pot. “Why not?”
“She got to me.”
“You said she was five foot nothing and reserved.”
“Not that a well prepared five foot nothing couldn’t do you some harm, Ant,” said Alex.
“He’s a tree, Alex,” said Dan.
“So she’d be packing a chain saw.”
They laughed, but Ant wasn’t seeing the humour. It was Bree’s humour and then her anger that’d derailed him. None of it reserved. “She was different to what I expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“For a start she was threatened by me and then she was funny and kind of vulnerable and then she totally lost it with me. I never expected any of that. She was supposed to be all business, straight up and down and Frosty the Snowman.”
If Dan and Alex ever had kids, the expression on Dan’s face would be the one his teenager would come to know as the one right before things got ugly. “When you say you threatened her what do you mean?” His voice was so even, his posture so relaxed, but it was a party trick, masking his ability to have you skewered and writhing on the spike of your own dumbness before you even knew he was gunning for you. This is what he’d come to Dan for, the brutal stripping of his own defensives. Didn’t mean he had to give them up easily.
“I surprised her in a really small meeting room and I closed us in because I wanted to keep it private. She kept asking me to open the door but I didn’t. And since I’ve never sought her out for a private discussion before I guess it was threatening.”
Dan looked at Alex. “That’d do it,” she said.
He turned back. “You said she was funny and vulnerable and she lost it.”
“She was funny right up until she called me arrogant, entitled and a walking bag of pissed off.”
