Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [30]
However, when he turned his plain-speaking on Tara, in a subtle attempt to change the balance of power back in his favour, the others really took against him. But by then Tara was in too deep. Thomas had rescued her when she’d thought she was facing into forty-five years of spinsterdom. She’d become addicted to his devotion, and if he had any criticism of her, she’d do her best to address it.
She’d been going out with him about a month the first time she let slip that he was annoyed about her weight gain.
‘How dreadful,’ Liv said, in shock. ‘He is supposed to love you for you.’
‘But he’s only telling me because he cares about me,’ Tara insisted. ‘And he’s right. I have put on a few pounds. Which I’m going to lose.’
Liv clenched her hands in frustration. ‘After what Alasdair did you have the self-esteem of a gnu.’
‘You mean a gnat,’ Katherine interrupted, gently.
‘Thomas is merely a bully, don’t surrender to him,’ Liv urged.
‘Ah, now,’ Tara said softly, ‘I know you’re upset by what he said about your height. And, Katherine, I know you’re upset about what he said about your chest. But, in fairness, he was just being honest. Isn’t it refreshing to be around someone who lets you know exactly where you stand?’
Katherine had decided there and then that she was going to move out and buy her own place.
‘I love his strong views,’ Tara admitted, dreamily. ‘I love the way he’ll take a stand and not back down. Don’t you think his confidence in himself and his own rightness is very sexy? Speaking of sexy, he’s like a madman in bed, day and night… Are you OK, Katherine? You’ve gone very red in the face.’
‘I’m fine,’ Katherine muttered. If she had to listen again to how great Thomas was in bed, she’d scream.
‘Besides,’ Tara said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘if Thomas sometimes hurts people, it’s not his fault.’
At their sceptical expressions, she launched into the story of his mother leaving him. ‘Maybe if our mothers had left us at such a formative age, we’d be going around speaking as we find too.’
Though Fintan, and to a lesser extent Liv, tried to talk sense to her, they were wasting their time. Soft-hearted Tara was on a mission to love Thomas better. Even at his most hard-to-please – and he became progressively more hard-to-please as, over the months, he retrieved all the power he’d given to Tara in their early days – Tara couldn’t help but forgive him.
She saw the abandoned boy in the adult Thomas. Was it any wonder if he occasionally lashed out after that ultimate betrayal?
And there was a consolation prize. Loyalty was very important to Thomas. He demanded fidelity, but he also promised it.
11
When Tara got off the phone from Katherine and ventured back into the kitchen, Thomas was up. Staring into the faux-rustic bread-bin that he’d bought at King’s Crescent market for 99p.
‘This bread… but it was open last night.’
Tara was clutched by the cold hand of fear and began pawing for her cigarettes. Why had she just put the bread into the bread-bin as it was? Why hadn’t she recreated the scene as she’d found it when she got up this morning?
‘Is this a new sliced pan?’ he hooted incredulously.
‘Yes,’ Tara said. She couldn’t manage the energy to lie or to say something funny.
‘And where’s the other one?’
Tara thought she might say that it had gone off and she’d thrown it out but she was too depressed to bother. ‘I ate it.’
He looked at her, goggle-eyed, open-mouthed. He was so shocked he could barely speak. ‘Nearly an entire loaf?’ he stuttered. ‘But why?’
Tara felt a merciful bout of flippancy. ‘It was there, I was lonely,’ she quipped.
‘It’s nothing to laugh at, Tara,’ he exploded.
‘Ah, come on.’ Tara grinned. ‘I’m starting right now. Starvation for me. And I’ll do a step class after work tomorrow.’
*
All day a malaise lay on them. As if the damp grey morning mist had found its way into the flat, curling itself around them, lacing the air with doom. Dissatisfaction radiated so strongly from Thomas, Tara could almost see it. He was like a chimney belching grey clouds