Second Chance - Jane Green [79]
She has thought about telling Saffron because, given that Saffron is having an affair, she would understand all about temptation, but Holly trusts Olivia more, and trusts that Olivia will be discreet, will perhaps give her the counsel she needs to hear.
Does she need counsel? She isn’t sure. What she does know is that her feelings are all over the place. All she thinks about from the moment she wakes up in the morning until the moment she goes to bed, is Will. Nothing bothers her about Marcus any more. She finds that she is able to switch off, to float away to a daydream about Will, a memory of something he said, something they did, and the less she focuses on Marcus, the less of a problem he becomes.
She is still convinced this is innocent. Convinced that she and Will are just friends. Sure, there is a little harmless flirting, but that is all it is: harmless. Holly is not the sort of woman who would ever have an affair. Of this she is certain.
Not least because of her father, Holly has never been unfaithful in her life, has always thought of infidelity as the one transgression she would never commit. And even now, when she looks at Will and thinks he is quite possibly the most handsome man she has ever seen in her life, even now she knows she will not have an affair.
What has crossed her mind, what is crossing her mind more and more frequently these days, is that perhaps she married the wrong man. She never felt this attracted to Marcus, took it for granted that physical attraction was not part of the equation, but this friendship with Will has reawakened feelings, wants, needs she had forgotten she had. Wants and needs she pushed away into a compartment in her mind, telling herself she could live without them, telling herself they didn’t matter.
They matter.
It matters that she is not, as she presumed, dead from the waist down. And now that those feelings have been reawakened, she’s not sure if she can ignore them. Not sure she can spend the rest of her life sleeping with a man who makes her feel… nothing.
And the thought that she can’t seem to push away, the thought that wakes her up in the middle of each night and prevents her from going back to sleep is this: I think I married the wrong man.
This is why she needs to talk, this is why she’s sitting at her kitchen table, swallowing hard and taking a deep breath.
‘I have a friendship,’ she says awkwardly, unable to look Olivia in the eye, but knowing she needs to say something, knowing that Olivia is the right person to be talking to about this.
‘Great,’ Olivia says nonchalantly, alerted to something else when Holly finally looks up and meets her eyes. ‘Oh no! You mean, a “friendship”…’
Holly nods.
Olivia’s eyes widen. ‘Are you having an affair?’ Her voice drops to a whisper on the last word.
‘No!’ Holly says loudly. ‘Sssh. Frauke’s upstairs, I don’t want her to hear any of this. But no, I swear to you, I’m not having an affair. Though I am having a friendship with a man, and I just feel… incredibly confused.’
‘Confused because you want to be having an affair?’
‘No! Well… maybe. No, I don’t think so, I don’t think that’s what this is about.’
‘So what is it about?’
Holly sighs deeply. ‘Oh God, Olivia, I don’t even know. I just know that my marriage feels… I don’t know. Just nothing. It doesn’t feel anything. I don’t feel anything at all, and when I’m with this man I just feel alive. I feel young and free and as if anything were possible, and this awful thought just keeps coming back to me: What if I married the wrong man?’
‘Wow!’ Olivia exhales and sits back in her chair. ‘That’s pretty bloody huge.’
‘I know.’ Holly looks at her sadly. ‘It’s awful, and hearing the words out loud makes it more awful because it makes it real. But I had to talk to someone. I had to know what you think.’
‘What I think? I have no idea what I think. What do I think about what? Should you have an affair?’
‘No,’ Holly shakes her head, ‘I’m not going to have an affair, but the fact is I have this friend and, yes, I’ll admit it, I am