Raff threw another tea towel at him.
“This is going to end badly.” Lisa pressed a palm to her forehead. “I can feel it.”
Once he and Bonnie were living and working together, cracks did begin to show. She wasn’t into rough sex the way he was; she found it boring and even worse, embarrassing. So they compromised. Once a week Max would tie her up and in return he’d sit through the ridiculous vampire shows she liked. Easy. Well, not easy but doable. Nobody got everything they wanted, at least not all the time. That summer he proposed and Bonnie said yes. His mum was overjoyed, Raff and Lisa were quietly apprehensive. A church was booked for autumn and the big day arrived in the blink of an eye.
He still recalled with painful clarity the moment he doubted everything. He’d been standing at the altar when a tall girl walked into the church. His heart almost stopped—that slender face, the long brown hair. She was a stranger but she looked so familiar. He turned to Dean, who was clicking the ring box open and shut with single-minded childishness. “Do you know the girl in the green dress?”
His best man frowned. “Who?”
“The tall girl, she looks like someone I know.” Max squinted into the pews. “But it can’t be…can it?”
“Look, mate. Did you invite this bird to your wedding?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why would she be here?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. And suddenly he wanted to run, to push his way out of the church, knocking over aunts and half-forgotten cousins until he was in the street. “Dean, what am I doing?”
“Huh?”
“What am I doing? I can’t get married.”
Dean patted him on the back. “Thought so. You want me to go find Bonnie and tell her?”
The tall girl turned and Max saw she had a beauty mark above her mouth, like Cindy Crawford.
“Oh, Jesus, it’s not her.” His body relaxed like a wrung sponge set free. “It’s not her. Thank fuck.”
Dean snapped the ring box closed. “You still wanna call off the wedding?”
“What?No.”
He frowned. “Then why are you acting so fucking crazy? And why did you tell me at your buck’s night that you and Bonnie never fuck with the lights on anymore?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Max whispered. He glanced over at his future mother-in-law, who was sitting in the front pew in a lavender suit. She waved and he plastered a big smile on his face. “I’m getting married and that’s it.”
“You sure?” Dean asked, looking uncharacteristically concerned. “What about this tall girl?”
“In the past.” Max adjusted his tie. “Bonnie and I are getting married and that’s it.”
And married they were. Max only half remembered the ceremony, full of guilt as he was, but when the priest said “you may now kiss the bride” he’d turned to Bonnie and laid the biggest, wettest kiss possible on her mouth, vowing he’d never doubt them again.
Married life shouldn’t have been different from living with one another but it was. Every decision he and Bonnie made seemed to take three times as long. Words like “bored” and “annoying” started cropping up in conversation and before long they were butting heads like a couple of angry bulls. The rope in his bedside drawer went unused and he spent all of Bonnie’s vampire shows dicking around on his phone.
Soon even dirty talk got on his wife’s nerves. "It feels like I'm in a porno. Can’t you just be quiet?”
So he learned to screw in silence, a string of filthy words running through his brain. Two people, two separate worlds. They were dawdling down the inevitable road to divorce, too proud to admit things were bad when he caught Bonnie and Constable Scott Peterson going at it in his bed. Max wasn’t really surprised. Bonnie had always loved sex, the sweat, the passion, holding each other afterward. Their sex life had been stagnant for months and if she wasn’t getting it from him, he might have known she was getting it from someone else.
She packed a bag that night and left and Max didn’t resent her for it at all. He’d been just as fed up with their listless marriage but where she’d had the guts to cheat, he’d just lain in bed at nightthinkingabout cheating. He let out a sigh, staring between the shelves of the property office at the woman who haunted his feverish, self-administered hand-jobs. He was surprised Julia hadn’t heard about his separation, if only for the fact that it was such prime gossip. He’d gotten more than his share of sympathetic and not so sympathetic looks around the station. Dean claimed he was too good-looking for people to feel sorry about him being made a cuckold. Max didn’t agree but it did seem at times that everyone was just a little too happy to hear the gory details of how his marriage had ended. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell Julia about his divorce. When he opened the door to the property office, she’d seen someone impressive and whole and despite the fact that made him sound like a middle-aged man who was a failed erection away from buying a Harley, it had felt good. Too fucking good. Max’s eyes were finally growing heavy and he yawned. Tomorrow he’d get up and talk to Julia like a friend. He wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t think about kissing her. That tall girl was a stranger and he needed to let her go.
Chapter 10
SCRABBLE,scrabble, scrabble.
Julia sat bolt upright, ignoring the pangs of her whiskey-numbed brain.
Rats, it’s just rats, she thought before she realized rats was the worst possible thing it could be. Unblinking eyes, sharp teeth, the noises they made that suggested they were everywhere at once.Scrabble, scrabble.