Brett

 

I buried those toys deep in the dresser for the time being, fuck Heath and his stupid props. The days were easier than the nights, but we did alright, slipping back into the same routines we’d been in before he ever landed in our space. We were patching up a wound with a useless excuse for a bandage, throwing ourselves into making the hotel the place to be for our straggling guests and dreaming up plans for the future, but it was the best we knew.

Maybe we’d have got somewhere if a chef of any actual calibre had shown up for an interview. Grace remained smiling through the whole sorry process, shrugging off yet another fast food chicken applicant as a temporary blip in our recruitment plans.

“They’ve got to be out there,” she told me, even as her shoulders sagged at his exit. “We just need to find them.”

I nodded my agreement, wishing I shared even a scrap of her forced optimism.

“Maybe we should try a newspaper further afield to run the advert?” she asked. “I mean it’s commutable, for the right person. Maybe we should even advertise in the city and offer accommodation as part of the salary package?”

It was there that I drew the line. No random asshole was moving into our tense little chicken coop alongside us. No brooding city chef with an ego to match his superior palate, waltzing in to shove the cat amongst the pigeons when we were struggling to keep our shit together as it was.

She rolled her eyes as I grunted my aversion to having a member of staff under our roof.

“It’s standard, Brett. We work in hospitality. Loads of hotels have live-in staff.”

“Not this one,” I argued. “No fucking way.”

She’d folded her arms as I hoisted boxes of breakfast supplies up on our kitchen shelves, leaning her hip against the worktop as her eyes scorched my every move.

“Maybe she’ll be a girl chef,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be you I’ll have to be mindful of the next time someone enigmatic walks through the door.”

“It isn’t me you’ll have to be worried about,” I snapped. “My come face is my fucking come face. Don’t expect you’ll find me morphing into some kind of fucking porn star in some other woman’s pussy.”

Her lip trembled before she bit it, and I cursed myself under my breath.

“Jesus, Grace, I’m sorry,” I said, realising how often I had to say it these days. “I’m just feeling the fucking pressure, that’s all.”

It was true as well. I was feeling the pressure. Not of cash nowadays with Thomas Heath’s dirty reward safely stacked up in our bank account, but the rest of it. The new hotel opening down the road. The prospect of never being as good with my wife as that sack of shit was that night. The thought that we’d trashed a decade of closeness by letting a slimy cunt like him come between us and leave his mark.

It was an ugly mark. Slippery when wet and hard to pick up and cast away, blooming its disgusting pock-filled face in bed at night, goading from the side-lines as we attempted to find the same old groove we gelled in before.

We were having sex every night when the bar closed as standard, throwing ourselves into each other’s arms as if a token bump and grind could recapture the magic. I would have believed it if I hadn’t been burned by the full potential of Grace losing her mind for the right man.

For the first time in forever I was plagued by the notion that I wasn’t the right man.

I was also plagued by the never-ending desire to jerk myself off at the thought of her with Thomas Heath’s smug cunt fingers stretching her wide. It wasn’t a guilty pleasure, it was a revolting one, but it was an addiction I couldn’t shake off for the life of me. My early morning wood would throb at the memory of seeing her bucking on his dick, but over the weeks it switched from a memory into a full-blown fantasy.

No red line. No stupid rules from Heath’s cunt of a mouth.

Just us, and her — two men competing to drive her wild, only this time I’d come out on top. I’d learn from his deviant ways and forge a path of my own, pushing her further with me alongside him than he ever could alone.

Taunts of two in one were the sure-fire way to get her whimpering over these past weeks — the only real taste of her newly revealed inner slut I’d seen a glimpse of since his departure.

She wanted it.

I wanted it.

But there was no way I’d fucking suggest it for real. Not now.

It was in bed that night after the chef argument that she flopped down beside me after riding hard on top. She caught her breath and stared at the ceiling, uncharacteristically quiet as we let our exertion settle.

“You think about it, don’t you?” she said. “About me and him.”

“I wish I could stop fucking thinking about it,” I replied. “I wish we’d never done it in the first place.”

“You’re not alone in that,” she told me, and her voice was stretched thin with pain. “Fuck the fifty grand, it was never worth it.”

It brought a smirk to my face to rival his, remembering loud and clear how the sack of shit had goaded us with the same hard truth before we’d gone through with the dirty deed. Cunt.

I wondered if he was thinking about us, far away in his swanky London pad. Maybe he was onto his tenth married couple since us by now, barely even remembering our names.

But I knew that was bullshit as soon as I thought it.

I still didn’t know how he knew us, either of us. I’d done some more digging online and found nothing other than that mutual friend from Grace’s sister’s school year. I didn’t even know the girl myself.

It was a mystery, but one that was still bugging me weeks later. I imagined it was bugging my beautiful wife just as bad.

“He’d have offered us more,” I said to her. “Whatever it would have taken to get your knickers off in front of me.”

She scoffed at the suggestion, and I knew in her head she was weighing up his cash investment against her worth and finding herself lacking. That was another load of utter bullshit about this whole shit storm — that she didn’t think she’d earned the money.

“I mean it,” I told her. “He’d have given us whatever it took. He wasn’t some random seeking out a few days of quiet on the coast. He was after us. Specifically us.”

She didn’t argue with that, wrapping her legs in mine as she snuggled into me. I put my hand on hers and squeezed, solid in sentiment if not in the finer daily details.

“But why? What did we ever do to him to bring him calling?” she asked after a pause.

“Good question,” I said.

But was it a good question? Was it even worth thinking about?

“We should sleep,” she commented as if dismissing my unspoken query, and then she sighed. “Sarah wants to head down with the kids next week, just for the one night. Maybe I could ask her about Polly Piper. She might know something.”

My gut lurched at the thought of digging into a sandbox full of shit, but our ostrich stance was getting us nowhere. Nowhere good.

“She’ll think you’re crazy, asking after some random guy from London and some girl she knew from high school.”

“I am crazy,” she whispered. “We’re both crazy, and he’s the guy who’s driving us mad.”

I didn’t have anything useful to add to that reasoning, so I didn’t.

Maybe Grace’s sister would be able to shine a light on the slick city dickhead. And if not, at least Grace could get some of the bullshit off her chest by trying.

Hell knows, we needed all the relief we could get.