Chapter 12
“Who are you sleeping with?” Georgie demanded. The two of them were weaving their way out of Nova Cinema toward the little patisserie where they always got coffee after a movie.
“Fuck, George, don’t you at least want to pretend to talk about the movie?”
“The lighthouse is sad and so am I. Who are you sleeping with?”
“A gentleman never tells.”
Georgie snorted. “You weren’t nearly so gallant when we were at uni. Anyone I know?”
“No.”
He could feel his friend staring at him. Georgie had intense single-lidded eyes, as meticulous at spotting anomalies in her personal life as they were spotting damaged heart valves in her patients. “You like her, whoever she is, don’t you?”
Ty groaned. This focused scrutiny was why he’d wanted Georgie’s husband to join them tonight, but Dave hated arthouse films. “They’re always about the fucking ocean,” he said. “Why are they always about the fucking ocean?”
To be fair, this movie had been about a couple finding a baby by the ocean. Ty circumvented a cello player busking behind a woollen hat, hoping that Georgie would take his silence as a hint and drop the matter.
“Tyler. Answer me.”
He looked sideways at her. Like Middleton, Georgie looked much younger than she was; her pale skin was as unlined as it had been when they’d met at an orientation party. They had almost nothing in common, the Queensland farm boy and the Vietnamese-born yuppie, but they’d gotten on like a house on fire. They studied together, backpacked through Asia together, even lived together for a while in their twenties before Georgie’s cat addiction drove him to more hairless pastures. There had never been any sexual attraction between them. The idea of Georgie calling him ‘Daddy’ made Ty want to puke and Georgie swore she was still traumatized from the time she’d accidentally seen his dick in the shower. Still, she was his oldest friend, something that had given Veronica no end of grief. That, and the fact he and George once made a drunken marriage pact, agreeing they’d get hitched if they were fifty and single.
As the one to uncover Veronica’s cheating, Georgie seemed to think she was personally responsible for finding him another fiancée. She constantly badgered him about dating and now she’d (rightly) guessed he was sleeping with someone, she was desperate to find out who it was. Ty knew he had no obligations to tell his friends—or anyone—about Middleton, but Georgie was crafty. If he didn’t throw her a bone there was every chance she’d use her brilliant cardiologist brain to access the information by stealth and uncover a lot more than he was comfortable with her knowing. The sensible thing to do was talk. “You’re right,” he told her. “I’m sleeping with someone.”
Georgie let out an excited squeal.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Ty warned. “It’s just sex.”
“That could turn into more!”
“It won’t. She’s twenty-five and we work together.”
“Ooh, risky.”
“You would know.”
Before she met Dave, Georgie had had a disastrous fling with a twenty-three-year-old nurse. It had ended on what George called ‘bad terms’ and Ty called ‘a clusterfuck.’ There had been stalking, threats of libel, and constant drama. Thoughts of things taking a similar path with Middleton made him break out in a cold sweat.
Georgie sighed loudly. “How could such a beautiful man be so clueless?” she asked, clearly referring to the nurse.
“Because his life’s passion was skateboarding and he still lived with his parents?”
She made a face. “Yeah, I always forget that. So, how’s your bit of fluff, then? Nice?”
Ty eyed his best friend suspiciously. “Nice enough. Don’t even think about calling GGS and trying to find out who she is.”
Georgie scowled. “Well, when can I meet her?”
“How about never? Unless you feel like stopping by her place and cheering me on while I—”
She punched him hard on the arm. “You’re so gross. Fine, so it’s not serious and I don’t get to meet her, but promise me you’re not being a man about this?”
He knew what she was asking, knew why the answer meant so much to her. “I promise. I’ve been very clear about what this is and isn’t. We’re having fun and she knows it’s not serious.”
Georgie visibly relaxed. “Good, I don’t want a repeat of The Incident.”
Ty reflexively rubbed his eyebrow. “No one does.”
In his second semester of uni, he’d slid into some bad behaviour. He’d held the urge to fuck at arm’s length for so long that when the dam burst, he had no self-control. It was all too easy for him to take girls to bed, and soon the regularity with which he could get his dick sucked made a pig of him. He screwed two, or three times a day, and still went out to clubs and parties, looking for more. Georgie, who knew he’d come to uni a virgin, let it go for a while, but soon their friendship became strained. She thought he was being an asshole, sticking his dick into anything he could and not giving a damn about anyone’s feelings but his own. It was true, he had girls crying outside his dorm so often the spot became known as ‘the fountain,’ but he didn’t care. It felt too good, and as he told Georgie, if girls couldn’t handle no-strings sex they shouldn’t be fucking him in the first place.
The good times ended the night she came to his dorm room for a study date and found him fucking one of her best friends—the sister of a girl he’d hooked up with two nights before. Georgie snapped. She threw a copy of Intercourse at his head, shouted “who the fuck are you?” and ran away, vowing their friendship was over. After a week of intense groveling on his behalf they made up and Ty promised not to let things get that out of hand ever again.
“You better not,” Georgie had told him. “You can have sex with whoever wants to have sex with you, but there’s no need to be a cunt about it.”
It was a philosophy Ty had tried to respect ever since.
“You know I still can’t find that copy of Intercourse,” Georgie said as they entered Monique café.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ty told her, inhaling the scent of fresh coffee and warm sugar. “If I fuck up you can always hit me with a hardback of The Feminine Mystique.”
“True.”
They ordered coffee and cannoli and sat at their usual table by the window.
“So what gives the girl away?” Georgie asked.
“Huh?”
“What reminds you she’s ridiculously young? Is she broke? Living with her parents? Posts every dump she takes on Instagram? Plays with fidget spinners?”
“I said she’s twenty-five, not five,” Ty said indignantly. “She’s a civil engineer. She has her own place and she likes nature documentaries and making biscuits.”
“She’s not a bitch?”
“Fuck no. She’s sweet as anything, would give you the shirt off her back if you asked. She’s a little bit weird but that’s part of her charm. She’s from the country, one of those big Catholic families.”
“Ah,” Georgie said knowingly. “So she’s batshit in bed?”
“You have no fucking idea.”
Ty kept waiting for the day when Middleton wouldn’t be astonished by his ability to make her come, but it never arrived. Every time he got her off, she swooned. Her blissful bewilderment made everything they did so much hotter. He felt like a god who’d come down from heaven to teach mortals about sex.
“So,” George said, interrupting his wistful recollection of Middleton on all fours. “Is she pretty?”
“Gorgeous,” Ty said absently. “Real girly, you know? Long brown hair and freckles. She’s shy, you can tell she doesn’t know how attractive she is, but when she smiles—”
Ty caught sight of his best friend’s smug expression and realised he’d been had. “You’re a bitch, Georgie.”
She laughed. “I am, aren’t I?”
“I mean it. I’m never telling you shit ever again.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic! I only did it because I can tell you’re really happy for the first time since Medusa left. If this girl is mature and cute and you like her…?”
“Not going to happen.”
Georgie put both palms on the table. “But what if—”
“She does roller derby,” Ty interrupted. “You know that game where girls in fishnets and roller skates try to knock each other over?”
Georgie’s hopeful expression faded. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. And she…” he struggled to think of something else that would convince her that he and Middleton were a bust. “…she wears headbands with sequins on them.”
Georgie looked like the government had declared a nation-wide embargo on coffee beans. “You can’t marry a girl who wears sequin headbands!”
“Yeah. No shit.”
Their order arrived and they both took big bites out of their chocolate cannoli.
“You never get dessert,” Georgie said, bits of pastry flicking out of her mouth. “What gives?”
Ty shrugged. He’d been craving custard ever since that first plate of slice at Middleton’s place. The taste was bound up in the bone-deep satisfaction of lying on her couch, his lifelong fantasy fulfilled. Although he’d have a hard time explaining that to his GP if his cholesterol shot up fifty points.
“About your fuck-buddy…” Georgie swallowed the last of her cannoli and picked up her second. She always ate like it was going out of style and yet remained rake-thin, another unforgivable offence in Veronica’s eyes. “…you’re just going to wait for the sex to run out of steam?”
Ty nodded. In truth, he had no idea what he was going to do. Before Middleton he’d been living on a steady diet of irritation and apathy. Now he lived in a parallel dimension where outwardly everything was the same and inwardly things couldn’t be different. The smallest things made him feel good—duck curries, good coffee, drinking a beer in the shower, football games where you jumped to your feet and swore at the TV. He was sleeping better, hitting the pool almost every morning the way he had before Veronica left. The reflection in the mirror was frequently as clear-eyed as it had been in Middleton’s bathroom. He was happier and could understand why people like Georgie would think that made Middleton his dream girl, but they were wrong.
What he had with Middleton worked because it was void of relationship shit. A couple of nights a week, he fucked her senseless, then they watched documentaries and got takeout. They didn’t discuss work or politics or whose turn it was to do the dishes. They took a holiday together in the middle of her lounge room and everyone knew holidays had to end.
So where did that leave them? Ty couldn’t see the sex running out of steam, it was just too fucking good and even if it did, who knew how long that would take? He couldn’t spend years fucking Middleton. He was already far too possessive. His idiotic suggestion she go to another man to get eaten out was weighing on him like a tonne of bricks. The solution was simple—go down on her—but the thought of putting his mouth between Middleton’s legs and nuzzling that sweet pink place made him feel woozy. It was too intimate. He couldn’t do it to her for the same reason he couldn’t spend the night or cuddle. It would shove him over the invisible line separating fuck-buddy from lover, holiday from real life.
“Ty?” Georgie poked him with her dessert fork.
“Huh?”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you officially too old to go to the movies on a school night? ”
“Fuck off, you’re a week younger than me.”
“Yeah, but you have more wrinkles.”
Ty shot her a nasty look. “What were you saying to me, Georgie?”
“I said, ‘if you’re really not interested in dating your side piece then be kind to her. Teach her everything you know. I’m sure her future husband will thank you for it.’”
Ty took another bite of cannoli and swallowed without chewing, trying to force down all the things he wanted to say.
“Are you okay?” Georgie, asked, her sharp eyes scanning for whys and hows.
“I’m fine. By the way, I still haven’t written another chapter.”
That did it. For the rest of their coffee date, Georgie berated him for not trying hard enough with his manuscript, and he was free from further discussions of Middleton and why the idea of her getting married turned his guts to lead.
The next day Ty sat at his desk neglecting designs he should have been proofing and emails he should have been sending in favor of torturing himself with images of Middleton and her faceless, asshole husband—marrying him, fucking him, going to the Eiffel Tower with him and posting dumb pictures on Facebook. He knew she would date after he was gone, hoped she would date even, but something about the thought of her with a husband did his head in.
By early afternoon he had the answer, though he didn’t much like it; if she got married, it would be to a man like him. Middleton wasn’t the kind of girl who settled. She walked the extra block to get good coffee from Galvano’s. She took the time to mark up her designs by hand so that every detail was flawless. Her clothes were always ironed and her patent leather shoes shiny with polish. She served her tea in fancy mugs and her desserts on fancy plates. Now that he’d shown her how good sex could be, she wouldn’t want anything less. Her husband would be her Daddy, her last and only Daddy. That shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. It fucking ate at him.
As he sat, fuming about Middleton’s relationship with her future husband, a much wiser part of Ty told him things needed to end. He’d had amicable fuck-buddy arrangements before and while he was always a little possessive of the women he slept with, this was different. He’d been thinking of Middleton as a refuge, a place where he could relax and be himself as he could nowhere else, but really she was a crutch. The smart thing to do would be to disentangle himself from her before either or both of them got hurt.
He pulled out his phone to suggest they get a ‘this has been fun, but I need some space’ coffee and found she’d sent him a picture text.
Last week he’d laid her on her living room rug, written ‘Daddy’s girl’ on her tits with lipstick (a cheap, cherry-coloured one he’d bought from the chemist) and jacked off onto the letters. He hadn’t realised she’d taken a picture of the damage and yet there it was, his words and his come glistening all over her perfect breasts. Her message was three words long—punish me tonight?
Ty groaned and decided the smart thing could always wait until tomorrow. I’ll be there at seven, he wrote back. Just you fucking wait, Middleton.
“Yay,” she wrote. “See you soon.”
When Ty was with the MFB, one of the things he loved most had been coming in from a job and pulling off his uniform. The relief of being able to move without fifteen kilograms of damp, smoke-saturated gear was ecstasy. It was also the closest thing he had to describe how he felt knowing he had a date with Middleton.
Another bad sign.
Ty shoved his phone in his desk drawer and attempted to do some work. He was only just settling in when Johnno, the big boss, appeared in his doorway. “Got a minute, Hendo?”
“Sure thing.”
Johnno swaggered into the room. He was an enormous man, even taller than Ty with a bald head and a big round middle which he seemed to deliberately emphasise with too-tight shirts. A week ago Middleton had said he reminded her of Humpty Dumpty and Ty hadn’t been able to think of anything since. He cleared his throat. “What can I do for you, boss?”
“What can’t you do for me, Hendo?”
Johnno stood in the centre of the room, rocking his bulk backward and forward.
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall…
“S’pose you know about the Walker-Mills pitch tomorrow?”
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…
Ty cursed Middleton’s imagination. “Er, yeah, Stormy’s on it, right?”
“He was until I found out WM are sending Daniel Warhurst to negotiate.”
“Shit.” Stormy and Warhurst had a long-standing feud over a bungled fibreglass order and could barely be in the same room together. “Who do we put up instead?”
“I’m thinking Middleton could take the wheel.”
Ty felt the usual stab of panicky surprise at hearing his lover’s nickname at work, then recovered when he realised the conversation wasn’t about him doing unspeakable things to her. “Sounds good. I’m sure she’d appreciate the experience. You want me to have a word with her? I can move some stuff around, go into the presentation with her if you think she needs the support.”
Johnno gave him the kind of shifty grin that usually precipitated a visit to a strip club. “Here’s the thing, Hendo—actually, hang on a sec…”
He strode over to the door and pulled it shut with a snap. Ty’s stomach roiled. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course.” Johnno turned to face him, his smile shiftier than ever. “Just wanted to say, you know how Warhurst has a bit of an eye for the ladies?”
“Yeah,” Ty said, though he’d have phrased it ‘Warhurst can’t confine his dick to places where it actually belongs, like his pants and his wife.’ “So you do want me in the meeting with Middleton? Make sure he doesn’t pull any funny business? ”
“Not exactly.” Johnno continued rocking on his heels. Backward and forward, backward and forward. Ty waited for him to keep talking. His guts were heavy again and not because of Middleton’s imaginary spouse.
“Word on the street is Warhurst likes ‘em young with brown hair,” Johnno said, staring out of Ty’s window.
“And?” Ty knew he was being rude but he couldn’t handle the suspense.
“And, we’ve been having a bit of trouble with WM lately, I reckon having Middleton pitch will soften him up, metaphorically speaking. What do you think?”
Ten years ago, Ty’s crew had been assigned to a fire at a canning factory. The situation had been contained and all the fireys and cops were bantering back and forth, discussing who’d give statement to the journalists hanging around. Then a grinding metallic screech had cut through the air like a blade. Someone started to shout the word ‘backdraft’ but before they’d gotten half of it out, the building exploded. The force of it had been so strong it knocked Ty to the ground, and when he got to his feet, all he could hear was the whine of his inner ear cells dying. He could hear that ringing again now.
His boss wanted to use Middleton as fuckbait. His boss wanted to use Middleton as fuckbait and he was confiding in Ty as though he was sure he would think it was a fantastic idea.
“Hendo?” Johnno raised a brow at him. “What do you think?”
Ty wondered what Johnno would do if he just stood up, walked around his desk and hit him dead in the stomach. What did he think? He thought serving Middleton up like she was a fat juicy steak would have gone against his moral code even if he wasn’t attracted to her, but the fact that he was attracted to her; had in fact slept with her, bruised her skin, eaten her food and seen her hedgehog pajamas made him so angry he thought he was going to fucking explode.
He opened his mouth to tell Johnno he was as big a pervert as Warhurst—only stupider—when common sense tapped him on the shoulder.
Ty wasn’t an engineer by trade. He’d studied law and political science at university, trained as a chef, then joined the MFB. When his body was wrung out from firefighting, and he desperately needed a job it had been Johnno who’d hired him despite his negligible qualifications. It had been Johnno who promoted him within six months and let him take all his yearly leave at once so he could travel. Ty had been to his house, had dinner with his wife and kids. He’d always considered him a solid acquaintance, if not a friend. He was in his late sixties. Maybe he didn’t know what he was—
Inside his head Georgie gave a high mocking laugh. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s doing is wrong! He’s just a widdle business baby!
Shut up George, Ty thought. I need to concentrate.
He mustered every ounce of his self-control and said, “I don’t think that’s a smart idea.”
Johnno looked taken aback. “Why not?”
“If Warhurst says anything inappropriate, we could have a serious HR problem on our hands.”
Johnno laughed. “Middleton’s a good girl, she won’t say anything.”
Ty gripped his thigh under his desk and squeezed so hard it hurt. He didn’t know what was worse, the blatant disregard for Middleton’s wellbeing or hearing Johnno call her what he himself had called her a roughly million times, good girl.
Ty took a deep breath. “Remember when Harry Telfer groped that waitress at the end of year Christmas party and she pressed charges?”
Johnno gave a sympathetic groan. “Had to sack him and we lost three major deals.”
“Right. The last thing we need is that kind of shit happening again. If this Warhurst prick wants to see some T and A, have Dutchy take him to the strippers. We’ll make the sale either way, Walker-Mills always buy with us. It’s not worth alienating Middleton or sending her off on stress leave if the presentation goes sour.”
His boss blinked at him, as though the pitfalls of encouraging sexual harassment in the workplace had never crossed his mind. “That’s a fair point, Hendo.”
The tension in Ty’s chest eased a little. “So can Dutchy take the pitch? I think he’s free.”
“S’pose.” Johnno made a noise like an irritable old elephant. “That’s the problem with having females on staff, isn’t it? They come with their own little set of problems.”
The ringing in Ty’s ears started up, louder and more urgent than before. He stood.
Johnno frowned at him. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Bit tired, I might go get a coffee,” he improvised, his blood pumping hard in his ears.
“No worries,” Johnno said easily. “One more thing, the Pinkleton job up in Queensland, looks like it might be a big one, two weeks or more. I know it’s below your pay grade, but Kingsolver’s wife’s just about due and I know you’ve got family up that way. Would you think about going?”
“Sure,” Ty said, his head too full to process any new information. “I’ll let you know.”
“No problem. If you do decide to go, book your flights and bill ‘em to accounts. See you this arvo.”
With that his boss swanned out of the room, not a care in the world. As soon as he was gone Ty shoved his hands into his hair. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
He wasn’t stupid; he knew GGS was a bit blokey, a bit old fashioned, but he hadn’t thought his boss would treat Middleton like she was a bikini-clad promotional model ‘let us design your apartments and you might get a feel of our only female engineer’s tits!’ And sure, he’d stopped Johnno from pimping her out but he’d also deprived Middleton of a chance to pitch to a big company solo; an opportunity he was sure she would have wanted.
Ty decided he would go and get himself a coffee, if only for the chance to stretch his legs and make some sense of this mess. He grabbed his coat and headed out to the street. The winter air went some way toward clearing his head.
He could fix this, he decided. He’d email a few clients and suggest Middleton could handle their orders. He’d set up some training courses for her and ask her to pitch to someone who wasn’t a fuckin’ perv. Or let her decide if she wanted to do it and then sit in the corner of the room and glare at every motherfucker who couldn’t keep their eyes and mouths to them-fucking-selves. If anyone said it was favoritism they could go fuck themselves. Middleton was a solid engineer and she’d been at GGS for over two years. It was high time she moved up the greasy corporate totem pole. Feeling slightly better, Ty ordered a large latte and stood in the waiting area. He was scanning a discarded newspaper when his phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He pulled it out and when he saw the name flashing up on the screen, dropped it. The device hit his foot and bounced, skidding across the marble floors and between the legs of a woman in a pencil skirt.
“Shit, sorry!” Ty bent to retrieve it and the woman shrieked and backed away.
“Shit,” he said again. “Shit! Fuck! Sorry!”
By the time Ty recaptured his phone, it had a chip in the screen and a brand new voicemail message. He shoved it deep into his pocket, collected his coffee, and headed back out into the cold. This time the icy wind barely even registered.
It had been Ty’s experience that few exes stayed away for good. A supernatural force seemed to compel them to make contact months, or even years after the breakup, to dip a toe into the waters where passion had once flowed. It was always a stupid idea. As Victor Frankenstein could attest, reanimating a corpse was a fucking minefield. Failed relationships were better off dead, in Ty’s opinion, and he’d thought Veronica had agreed. She’d given him his ring back and left him to his misery. Except now she’d decided to put electrodes to the rotting remains of their relationship and give it a small, tentative pulse. Swearing, he stepped into the doorway of an abandoned bookstore and dialled his voicemail service. The seconds it took to connect felt like an eternity and then,
“Hi Tyler, I was just ringing because…because I don’t know why I’m ringing.”
Veronica’s voice was thick as marmalade, the way it always got when she’d been crying for hours. It was unnerving how he could still predict each little gasp and pant, how familiar she sounded.
“I’m so sorry. I was crazy to do this. Ignore me, forget about me, I’ll never call you again.”
The line disconnected.
She wanted him back. Ty wasn’t egotistical; he knew her, knew the way her mind worked and calling him and leaving this message was exactly what this was. Two and a half years they’d been separated. Twenty-eight months since she’d torn out his insides, stuffed them into the toilet and hit flush. She was a wife now, a mother and yet she was calling him, making her name flash up on his phone as ‘Veronica Chapel’ when they damn well knew it was Veronica Boyle.
Ty’s fingers shook as he deleted the voicemail, pent up anger tremoring out from his chest into his limbs. It was all too much. Georgie’s saying Middleton’s husband would thank him one day, Johnno’s suggestion they use her looks to make a little money, and now this. The incomprehensible return of the woman who’d broken his heart.
Ty pulled off his coat, suddenly so hot it was stifling. He needed to blow off steam, needed a release. It was stupid. Reckless. It flew in the face of his promise to treat Middleton with the respect she deserved, but then there were times when she got off on disrespect. He hoped this would be one of them. He unlocked his phone and texted her to meet him in the GGS storeroom fifteen minutes from now.