Second Chance - Jane Green [66]
‘It was rather, wasn’t it?’ She shoots him a smile as she disappears through the doorway. What she doesn’t tell him is that she closed her eyes – just twice, and only for seconds at a time – and imagined it was Will. Not that she is planning an affair – God, no!–but she just wanted to see what would happen if she did it. What the hell.
Isn’t everyone entitled to a little fantasy now and then?
Across the pond Saffron is indulging in a little fantasy of her own. P’s wife is away filming, and he’s staying with Saffron while she’s away, at least for tonight.
Saffron has ordered his favourite from Wolfgang Puck, currently being picked up by Samuel, to be dropped off at Saffron’s and heated up when P arrives. Alcohol-free beer is in the fridge, the logs have been stacked in the fireplace ready to be lit just before his arrival. Jack Jones is emanating softly from the Bose speakers – a gift from P when he realized all she had were tiny iPod speakers that made everything sound tinny.
Her legs are newly waxed, her nails newly painted and her hair newly highlighted. She hasn’t seen P for two weeks and, as always, is almost dizzy with excitement at the prospect of seeing him, and not just for the evening but for the whole night.
No make-up, though. P loves her natural. He tells her frequently he loves her best first thing in the morning when her hair is messed up and her face scrubbed clean. He loves her in old sweats, baseball caps and his oversized sweatshirts. That’s how she looked when he fell in love with her, he tells her, seeing her at meetings looking as if she had just fallen out of bed.
She wonders sometimes whether their incredibly intense attraction for each other would wane if they were together all the time. She suspects it would not. They have shared so much together on such an intimate level in the meetings, how could it possibly wane when she knows him better than anyone else in the world, and he, her?
Her fantasy tonight is much the same as it is every night. That he realizes the futility of staying in a marriage just for the sake of his career and finally decides to leave. That he moves into this little house – and it would be this little house; Saffron has no desire to step in and take over from his wife as lady of the manor – and that they fall asleep every night, wrapped around one another.
The fire is lit, the food warming gently in the oven, the setting is perfect. When P rings the doorbell, Saffron runs down the stairs like an overexcited teenager, flinging her arms around him in the hallway and kissing him for hours.
She cannot believe how much she loves kissing him. Her previous relationships, previous flings, have wanted to move straight on to the main course, but P, so starved of affection in his marriage, loves nothing more than lying in her arms on the sofa, just kissing, well into the small hours.
He loves being loved. Of course, he is one of the most-loved stars of this generation, but that is not love. When he married his wife, he loved her and, naively he now thinks, he thought that she loved him.
He married her because she made him feel safe, because he thought they would be a good team, and because wherever he was weak, she seemed to be strong.
Where he could be, particularly in those drinking days, self-important and pompous, she seemed grounded and down-to-earth. She had an amazing perceptiveness and wisdom, and he loved taking her to business meetings with him, listening to what she thought afterwards, knowing that she invariably had insights that were spot on, that he would never have thought about.
He loved her business mind. That she set up her own production company and immediately set about buying scripts. That she would lie in bed for hours, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, pencil in hand as she made scrawling remarks on the manuscripts she would read endlessly.
In those early days, he would often reach out for her, slide a hand up her thigh, and lean over and kiss her neck, but she would shake her head distractedly and move away