Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [57]
The whole thing had smelled of her youth. A meeting moved to the pub, others had melted away, an invitation had been extended, and accepted. She’d put in a call to the machine at home, from the ladies’ room—the meeting was overrunning, Andy should eat dinner without her, she didn’t know what time she’d be back. She was surprised at how easily the lie came out of her mouth. She’d gone back to Chris’s place. He lived in an old warehouse in Shoreditch. Just the space itself was sexy—high ceilings, brick walls; it was anonymous. He had almost no furniture. A couple of worn leather armchairs, an almost empty bookcase, a vast white bed, unmade and vaguely grubby.
The development took four months to complete. It was last summer. Lisa had sex with Chris regularly, once or twice a week all that time. She never fell asleep with him, she never stayed the night, and she never left a single thing that belonged to her in his home. They never ate dinner in a restaurant or watched a film together. She never met a friend of his or heard about one. By September, she knew him no better than she had in June. She knew how every inch of him looked and tasted and felt. But she didn’t know what the last book he’d read was, and she didn’t know where he grew up. He didn’t know, while they were fucking each other (and that was the only way she could ever describe it, even in her own mind) in the big leather armchairs, and the freestanding bath, and on the big white bed, that she lived with a guy. Or that her mother was ill. If he’d known, the time that she’d shown up, naked beneath a thin white cotton dress, and made him touch her, pulling at his jeans before they even got out of the lift, that her mother had died two days before, he might have thought she was messed up. Maybe she was.
There was no discussion about it coming to an end, as there had been no discussion about it beginning. She finished the apartments, and she stopped showing up.
She didn’t even understand it herself. The behavioral pattern was familiar. Before Andy, there’d been a lot of guys. At university, at work. She liked men, she liked sex, she liked to have fun. But she hadn’t ever been unfaithful to Andy. Until the first time, with Chris, she didn’t think she was capable of it. But it wasn’t just once. She had kept on doing it.
She couldn’t tell herself it was just lust. It wasn’t that simple. The sex was good, that was undeniable. She liked that Chris didn’t really want to talk to her. She liked that Chris was happy to keep it on one level, that he saw no need for their emotional relationship to evolve as their physical one did. But she knew it wasn’t about Chris at all. It was all so…straightforward and simple. Empty and clean. When he was inside her, his eyes bored into hers, but they saw nothing, because they weren’t looking for any of that. He did it because it was sexy, because he wanted to gauge her physical reaction to his touches, his tempo, his rhythm. He didn’t care to see anything beyond that. So it had been okay to stare back.
It was about Andy. It was about Andy loving her. It was about Andy wanting to marry her and make a life with her.
It was almost as if, by sleeping with Chris, she was trying to prove herself unworthy. Not good enough. Or trying to hold him at arm’s length…
She’d rehearsed telling Andy. Decided against it. It had ended, and she’d gotten away with it. He hadn’t caught her. No one knew. He never needed to. But it hadn’t gone away. Guilt gnawed. It was always in the way. It probably always would be.
She’d nearly told her mum one day. She’d come to visit