Page 25 of The Marriage Bid
She stopped abruptly. “Did Seb put you up to this?”
“Seb?” I don’t know why it bothered me to hear her call him so informally. “You’re on a nickname basis with my brother now?”
She blanched. “No. Does he not like being called that?”
I licked my gelato to hide my relief. “He prefers it, actually, but only with friends and girlfriends. Colleagues and business partners are forced to use the full name.”
“Right… your brother’s weird.”
“It’s called being a Hawthorne. We all come with our quirks.”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
It was my turn to be surprised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
We had strolled down a lane with fewer people. There was less jostling of the crowds, but we had gotten closer to each other and were practically brushing arms. “I don’t, actually.”
Saffron shook her head. “Of course you’ve forgotten.” She stopped again.
I went to stand in front of her. “You know, you’re going to have to be more specific if you want me to remember.” Licking my gelato. Deliberately teasing her.
“Our first night together. You’re telling me it’s normal to have sex with your wife and then toss her to the wind for the next five years?”
“Do you still think about that night?”
Her cheeks reddened. She tried to cover them with her hair, but I had already seen her reaction. “What was that all about?”
Saffron was a little girl with a crush on me for a long time. That’s how I knew her. When she sent me a letter asking me out to prom, I thought it was cute. She was a cute kid to me and nothing more. But then a friend of mine found out and read it at assembly in front of the entire school. I confronted him later. And when I dragged him to her class so he could beg for her forgiveness, she had already gone. And when she got older, our families being in similar circles all the time, I came to learn more about her and her modeling career. And the crush she had maintained for years.
All that would not have mattered if she hadn’t lied to her friends and family that we were dating when she was sixteen and I was twenty-one, making me out to be a pervert. Sheimmediately rescinded the lie, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Even that would not have mattered if she hadn’t ended up finding a way of coercing me into doing so. But what sucked about all this was that as she became a grown woman, my feelings for her changed.
When I saw her again at another party years later, Saffron was then a model, and a sexy one at that. She had grown into her height. Her gangly legs were now shapely stilts that made any red-blooded man conjure up images of the pair wrapped around his waist. The pimples and adolescent skin conditions that plagued her in her youth were gone, leaving smooth alabaster skin I craved to touch. Annoyance had turned into desire. And try as I might to get rid of it, I couldn’t. It was also difficult to put her out of my mind when her very image was sensually plastered on every bus, billboard, and bus-stop in the city.
“I did what I wanted to do for a long time,” I said finally. “Is there anything wrong with that considering the money I paid you?”
“You make it sound like I am a whore.”
“Last I checked, sex workers don’t cost fifty mil and a Sword of Damocles.”
“I told you I am not the one blackmailing you. If I knew, don’t you think I would have done something about it?”
That was one part about it that made little sense. For someone who had little control over me and wanted a divorce, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But who else had the material if not her?
“What did you do with all the money?”
“I blew it all on shoes.”
“Ha ha. Very funny.”
“That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?” She began walking again. I trailed behind her.
“Not at all.”
“Sure, sure.”
When I caught up to her side, she jumped when our shoulders touched. Interesting. She wasn’t as aloof to me as she was pretending to be. “No seriously, what did you do with it? Because if you still had it, I doubt you’d have gone to my brother with a begging bowl.”
