Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [208]
He went chalk white. ‘This is to do with your dykey friend, isn’t it?’ he said angrily. ‘You were all on for it before you went to the bathroom.’
‘I wasn’t, and it’s nothing to do with anything except your lack of sex appeal.’ She smiled prettily at him. ‘Sorr-ee!’
‘You’re a lying bitch.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that.’ She was suddenly icy. ‘How dare you?’
She flashed him a grade three look and he recoiled in unexpected shock. She was like an animal!
‘How dare you treat me the way you did all those years ago?’ A grade four was dispatched in his direction, and his breath deserted him. She was like a mad animal. Crazed. Rabid!
‘And how dare you come back here and behave as if you hadn’t done anything wrong? How dare you?’
She took a deep breath and hoped she could pull it off – she’d been out of practice for a while. She clenched her jaw and with monumental effort flung him the Medusa look. From the satisfyingly terrified expression on his face she knew she’d hit home.
He was astonished with fear. She was evil. Evil.
‘I’m off,’ he said.
‘I thought something smelt funny.’
‘Bitch,’ he muttered.
He passed Tara who was sitting in the hall like a guard-dog. ‘Bitch,’ he muttered, again.
‘Prick,’ she said, cheerfully.
Roger in the flat below nearly had a heart-attack from the slam Lorcan gave the door.
Tara and Katherine looked at each other. It could have gone either way with Katherine, until Tara started to laugh heartily, then so did she.
‘I’m so glad,’ Katherine convulsed, ‘that I got to use the Medusa look, seeing as I always practised it with him in mind.’
‘Very good. Now, are you going to ring Joe or call over?’
‘You think I should forget about the Angie thing?’
‘Katherine!’
‘OK, OK, it’s forgotten.’
79
Lorcan strode up the cold, dark road, energized by furious self-righteousness. The outrageous cheek of the woman. How dare she? He’d only came on to her to get one over on pretty-boy Joe Roth and because he’d been bored. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been seen dead with her.
He hadn’t seriously considered her as Amy’s replacement, had he? Of course not. OK, he had to admit, she was cute enough looking, she’d have done for a fast fuck and he’d been interested in what had happened to their baby. But not that bloody interested. And what kind of woman would consider aborting her own child? Even worse, what kind of woman would considering aborting one of his children? Sick, that’s what she was.
Lorcan conveniently forgot that he was a proponent of the locking-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted school of contraception and marched priggishly into the night.
A powder-blue Karmann Ghia roared past, briefly distracting him. Lorcan enjoyed a good car as much as the next man. Just as he recognized Katherine behind the wheel, he also saw that she was laughingly giving him the finger!
What was happening?
What was the world coming to?
On he stalked, the shock of Katherine’s rejection continuing to assail him with fresh blows. It had never happened before. It had literally never happened before. He was thirty-nine years old and, in living memory, a woman hadn’t ever turned him down. Perplexed, unnerved, he ran his hands through his hair trying to calm himself. And his powerful striding faltered and stumbled as a street-lamp revealed a clump of red tresses tangled up in his fingers. Jesus Christ! I mean, Jesus Christ!
A woman had just told him to sling his hook. His hair was deserting him. He had no job. Suddenly all his angry energy dissipated and he felt terribly old. Old and frayed and past it. Knackered, exhausted, depressed.
Then he thought of Amy. Sweet Amy. Patient, good-natured, loyal Amy. She wouldn’t turn him down. She’d welcome him back with open arms, soothe away the hurt, boost his morale. What had he been thinking of when he’d decided it was time to grant her her freedom? He’d been out of his mind!
He started to hurry towards her. He must have been mad to have dallied with Katherine. And that girl, Deedee, he’d been with earlier in the evening. Amy was much more beautiful. In fact, once