Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [74]
After an hour passed, Katherine had to acknowledge that Joe wouldn’t be visiting her today. That it seemed he’d given up on her. Relief clashed with disappointment. He’s a wimp, she thought. What’s an accusation of sexual harassment to a real man?
With an effort she switched her focus back to work, but her concentration was patchy. To the outside world she looked like a woman immersed in amortization calculations, but her head was full of exclamation marks. I can’t believe he’s just given up on me! Just like that! He was cracked about me yesterday! I was the sunshine of his life, he said!
She kept flicking glances, checking on him. In case he’d changed his mind. She happened to be watching when, across the office, Joe took off his jacket, tugged his tie loose and rolled up his sleeves. Though she didn’t want to, Katherine stared hard. At the hair on his forearms, the skin silky underneath, the muscles bunching and lengthening every time he picked up the phone or clicked his mouse. His chrome watch sat heavy on his wrist. There was nothing wimpy about his arms.
That really irritated her. He presented himself as Mr Safe, Mr Too-Thin-to-Be-Macho. But, lean though he was, he had strength. Those arms were the arms of a sexy man… Oh, no! Back in your box, she admonished her recalcitrant feelings, back behind bars.
As she finished for the evening, Joe and his team were making noises about going to the pub. Hair of the dog, and all that.
Joe called, ‘Hey,’ and Katherine looked up. At long bloody last, she thought. And prepared to play hard to get. No point giving anything away too easily. But Joe’s eyes skimmed over her and moved further along the office. ‘Hey, Angie,’ he called again. ‘Coming for a drink?’
Katherine’s stomach contracted. Angie was a copywriter. She was dainty, dark-haired, pretty and so new she hadn’t yet been rechristened with regard to her sexual propensities.
‘Why not?’ Angie smiled.
Katherine waited for Joe to suggest that she come too, but the air resonated with his silence.
She shoved in a disk to back up her day’s work and deliberately, with cold pleasure, hardened her heart. Joe Roth was an asshole. To think she’d felt sorry for turning him down! It hadn’t taken him long to get over her. Clearly, small and skinny was his type, and he’d moved on to the office’s new small and skinny woman.
He’d just been playing games with Katherine, and the minute she’d become interested, he’d have run off and left her with reopened wounds. He only wanted her because she was unavailable. Men were such children, their grass was always greener.
She’d had a lucky escape.
She finished backing up and threw the disk into her drawer with force. When she got to the lift, they were all there, Joe laughing at something Angie had said, his head close to hers. Katherine wanted to turn back, but that would have been even more excruciating. Stiff-faced, she went down with the merrymakers, all of whom kept saying that they could murder a pint.
‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Myles suggested to Katherine, in the hope of cheering Joe up. Then he immediately regretted it. What if she accused him of sexual harassment?
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she murmured, and waited for Joe to weigh in and try to persuade her. But he said nothing and she brimmed over with rage. Shallow swine. As she got out of the lift, she threw, ‘Have fun,’ over her shoulder and wondered how it hadn’t choked her.
On Wednesday evenings, Katherine usually went tap-dancing. Losing herself, clattering along to ‘Happy Feet’ with six other women with flared shorts and fantasies of a happy childhood, while everyone else en route to the normal aerobics classes looked into the studio and sniggered.
Then after the class she often went out with Tara, Liv and, sometimes, Fintan and Sandro. But today she just wanted to go straight home. Too distressed to feel guilty, she flung