Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [183]
‘You don’t have to tell me every morning, Katherine,’ he said, gently. ‘I know. But I wish we didn’t have to be a secret from everyone we work with. Are you ashamed of me?’ He laughed, but she realized there was real hurt in the question.
‘No,’ she blustered. ‘Of course I’m not ashamed of you. I just don’t like people knowing my business. I have to maintain an air of authority at work and if they know I’m boffing you they’ll think I’m human. Next thing they’ll be trying to pull fast ones with their expenses and overspend the accounts…’ She thought about it for a moment. Perhaps she was being too uptight. What the hell? ‘OK, so long as we don’t actually walk in together.’
They’d been seeing each other for almost five months now and, as far as Katherine was concerned, every day was another miracle. If only she’d known last November that they’d still be an item come April! A lesser man would have run screaming from all the drama in Katherine’s life, but Joe had just rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. He’d witnessed first hand Tara’s post-Thomas shenanigans, hadn’t balked at listening to her tales of woe and had refereed the occasional, late-night tussle where Tara tried to wrest the phone from Katherine.
More importantly he was very supportive to Katherine in her dealings with Fintan. He never complained about the amount of time she spent with him and seemed happy to devote plenty of his own time too. He didn’t even object when Fintan flirted outrageously the first time they met.
‘Thank you,’ Katherine had said, as they drove away.
‘For what?’
‘For not getting uncomfortable when he gave you the come-on.’
‘What’s to thank?’ Joe had asked. ‘A good-looking man flirts with me? I’m flattered.’
‘Well, you’d better get used to it. I think he likes you.’
The intensity of emotion and events acted like a pressure-cooker, so that Katherine and Joe had become very close very quickly. She’d never had a relationship that had lasted as long as this one. And it was a long time since she’d trusted a man as much as she trusted Joe. Not that she trusted him much. ‘But I trust you enough to tell you I don’t trust you.’ She laughed.
‘Thank you.’ He was utterly serious. ‘And take your time. I’m not in a hurry, plenty of people trust me.’
Though she guarded her past as though it was a precious jewel, eventually she felt that she had to stop being so cagy about her family set-up. She knew all about his, and her dead silence whenever parents were mentioned began to feel like overreaction. So one day she sat him down and spilled the beans about her mad mother and her lack of a father. ‘I thought you were going to tell me you’d murdered someone,’ he exclaimed, when, after a dramatic build-up, she finally managed to blurt it out. ‘Why do you act like it’s something to be ashamed of?’
‘You mean it isn’t?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But I’m illegitimate.’
‘You’re Katherine Casey,’ he replied.
Even though she had to go to bed for a couple of hours from the exhaustion of the revelation, Katherine began to inch her way into a fear-free life. While Joe reached a new understanding of what she was all about.
70
‘Something weird’s after happening,’ Tara said to Katherine.
‘What?’
‘I think I’m over Thomas.’
‘Great. Well, it was bound to ease off. As Joe says, “Time wounds all heals.” ’
‘No, I don’t just mean it’s got easier,’ Tara insisted with intensity. ‘I mean when I woke up today it was all gone.’
It wasn’t like those mornings when she woke up and had a few confused seconds during which the pain was absent, but then quickly rushed into focus, like a photograph developing, until the agony had returned in all its sharp definition.
‘It’s gone, like a puff of wind,’ Tara said. ‘My life with him seems like it belongs to someone else, and it seems so sensible to be over him because he just didn’t deserve me.’
‘You’re preaching to the converted.’
‘All I feel