Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [120]
‘And we’re as bad – I took him seriously for a while,’ Katherine admitted.
‘I could see that,’ Tara said. ‘I didn’t, of course.’
Then they howled once more at Fintan’s endearingly off-the-wall carry-on.
43
Lorcan was in bed with an exemplification of heroin chic: a pale-haired twenty-three-year-old ‘resting’ actress called Adrienne, who was the far side of anorexic. She was a great believer in mind over matter – the only way she could deal with her omnipresent hunger. It was also how she’d run Lorcan to ground. She’d kept bumping into him at auditions and, despite knowing he had a girlfriend, had pursued him relentlessly. Telling herself over and over to keep visualizing herself with him – the way she visualized eating three imaginary square meals a day, with imaginary snacks at eleven and four o’clock – and it would eventually become a reality. All she had to do was want him badly enough and he would be hers.
And it had worked! Which came as a pleasant surprise because she’d been using the same technique to try and get an acting job and had been so spectacularly unsuccessful that she’d ended up having to moonlight as a beautician to keep the wolf from the door.
In post-coital repose, their long limbs tangled, they lay on her second-hand futon. Not a buttock between the pair of them.
Adrienne thrummed with well-being. Now that she’d bagged Lorcan she couldn’t believe she ever doubted that she would. And she had no intention of standing for any nonsense from him. Start as you mean to continue.
She propped herself up on her bony elbow, the starved muscles in her arm trembling slightly as she leant her too-big-for-her-body head on her hand. ‘I hope this isn’t a one-night stand,’ she warned teasingly, looking down on him, stretched out in all his naked magnificence.
Lorcan laced his fingers together behind his head, displaying silky tufts of golden underarm hair. ‘A one-night stand?’ he echoed, in high-pitched surprise. ‘Are you kidding?’
Smugness bathed Adrienne in a warm glow. She’d been fairly certain she was on top of things with this man, but you never really knew…
‘I wouldn’t even dream of a one-night stand,’ Lorcan went on. ‘I don’t believe in them.’
Her confidence burgeoned and swelled, and she had a surge of contempt for all the women who let men ride roughshod over them. You wouldn’t catch that happening to her. No, sir.
‘I mean,’ Lorcan said, with a glinty smile, ‘an entire night? Are you mad? Who wants that kind of commitment?’
Even before Adrienne’s disproportionately large head had the chance to start reeling with confusion, Lorcan sprang gracefully from the futon.
‘What are you doing?’ She was panic-stricken.
‘Getting dressed.’
‘But why?’ Adrienne tried to sit up, unable to believe her surprise defeat.
‘I can hardly go home like this.’ He chortled, indicating his big, naked body.
As he scouted on the floor for his abandoned underpants, Adrienne stammered, ‘But it’s one in the morning. You can’t leave.’
She was too young and beautiful to be skilled at hiding disappointment. Not enough practice. Never mind, all in the fullness of time.
‘But I have to go,’ Lorcan protested, with affected innocence.
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ he bellowed, as if he’d never heard such a stupid question in all his life, ‘because my girlfriend will be wondering where I am!’
‘But you don’t live with her.’
‘I said I’d call to see her.’
Adrienne had retained a small pocket of hope that he might be joking, but as he pulled on his jeans and boots with head-spinning alacrity, she realized he was deadly serious and she’d been had. In more ways than one. Somewhere inside she began to weep. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ she threw at his back as, already fully dressed, he stood at her mirror.
‘Why?’ He sounded genuinely worried. ‘Is it because of my hair?’
She goggled, sidetracked from the you-must-be-very-unhappy-if-you-have-to-be-so-cruel speech she’d been about to make.
‘No,’ she managed, ‘not because of your hair. I pity you because you must be really badly messed up to behave –’ She stopped. The curiosity was too much.