Grace

 

Thomas Heath wasn’t at breakfast next morning. Brett and I hovered around the dining room, nursing hangovers right the way through the allotted time, but he didn’t show.

I took it more personally than I wanted to, as though he was taking a step back from us somehow, offsetting the easiness we’d grudgingly reached in each other’s company after a drink or ten.

He may not have shown that morning, but his parcels did. The couriers started arriving just after breakfast, dropping them off in one long troop at our reception desk.

It felt strange signing for the things he’d be using so filthily on my body.

All of them were in plain packaging and their discretion made me nervous, wondering just what was waiting for me inside. Whips, chains, donkey-sized dildos? A rainbow-tailed butt plug that plays music in your asshole?

I had no idea.

When we were kids, my sister rescued a canary from some family down the street who weren’t taking proper care of him. He would have these crazy moments in his cage when he first arrived, hopping from perch to perch so fast he was a bouncing pinball of feathers and squawks just busting to get free.

My heart felt just like that.

My pussy, well that felt like something entirely different.

Brett shook one of the smaller parcels when he passed by with a load of flattened cardboard for the recycling bin. He pulled a face at the thump of whatever solid item was inside.

“Maybe he wants to dress up as a rubber chicken,” he told me, with an easy laugh at odds with his hangover. “Maybe he’s been getting farmyard fantasy props. You can be the farmer, he can be a dirty little piggy boy.”

He snorted and raised his fists as flailing trotters until I rolled my eyes.

“As if,” I snapped, taking my hangover a whole lot worse than he was.

“Relax,” he said. “Anything too crazy and I’ll shove the whole fucking truck load up his ass before I kick him out on it.”

I don’t think he was even joking.

Late afternoon came and the deliveries eased off. Still there was no sign of our only remaining guest. I took the time to call my sister back home in Gloucestershire, reminiscing about the little yellow bird before letting her know the tides may well be turning on our quiet beach. It was exactly the call I needed to refocus my scattered senses, savouring the prospect of being able to return the couple of grand she’d lent us through sheer desperation a few months back.

The interaction did me some good. Enough that I made myself a tall latte and took a window seat in the empty bar while Brett busied himself in the cellar. I pinged a few of my old school friends on social media, no longer fearing the moment I’d have to tell them we were bailing on the dream we’d thrown everything into. I browsed other hotels on our online booking portal, seeking inspiration for some choice purchases once the cash was in our account.

And I stared.

Up at the stairs he may appear down at any time. Out at the rough white waves through the window as the sun sank beyond, hoping to catch sight of him enjoying the same view with a cigar and flyaway hair. But there wasn’t a sign of him. Nothing.

I considered calling his extension from the front desk and letting him know about his deliveries, but there was no way he wouldn’t be well aware what was due. I even considered rapping on his bedroom door and offering him them across the threshold as an ice-breaking gesture for the day, but I was too scared of his cold stare frying my heart alive.

Thomas Heath from North London was a very slippery fish indeed. The rum had opened him up enough to tell us about his flash apartment in the city, with its floor to ceiling windows and its twinkling urban skyline. Even now, I couldn’t imagine him with holes in his shoes back at whatever school he trudged along to every morning. London must have been a shitty place to grow up on the breadline. No wonder he’d made it his life’s mission to step up the financial ladder.

I typed his name into social media, seeing as I was still back and forth trawling my own timeline. I was expecting nothing, just a sea of Thomas Heaths from all over the world, but there he was, right at the top of the listings. One mutual friend.

I had to blink hard a few times over to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, but no. It was him. The same cold stare behind his expensive glasses, the same perfect clip of his dark sandy beard.

I couldn’t believe for the life of me that we had even a single friend in common, but there it was, the name in tiny italics.

Polly Piper.

I had to click on her name before I remembered her, and even then the recollection was hazy at best. She’d been a friend of my sister’s once upon a time way back when. In the same school year, the year below mine. A quiet girl with curly red hair and freckles. That’s the only real reason I remembered her. I scrolled through her profile to find she was still living in Gloucester, working at the bakery we used to grab a sneaky doughnut from on the way back home some days.

How the fuck did Polly Piper know Thomas Heath?

She had other friends in common with me, but nobody I’d really spoken to in years, just the same sorry batch of school mates you add out of courtesy when their requests come through.

I pinged through a message to my sister, but she wasn’t showing as online. She rarely was these days. Two kids and a full-time nursing job put paid to that.

Do you still speak to Polly Piper?

I switched back to Thomas Heath’s profile but it was a fortress of privacy. I could only flick through his profile pictures, of which there were just three. The original preened shot of him staring stoic at the camera. One of him in a suit with a couple of other guys also in suits, still with the same stern glare I’d seen so many times these past few days.

It was the third shot that took me aback, listed as three years previous. He was smiling on that one, his grin so much more natural than I could have pictured. His glasses were thicker and his hair was messy enough to give him an air of hipster on a Sunday morning. He was wearing a t-shirt, his toned arms tanned and rippled with fit-guy veins. The t-shirt wasn’t anything I’d have placed him in in a billion years.

People disappoint, pizza is eternal.

Just no. No way.

I was staring dumbstruck when Brett slid into the seat next to me and landed a big sloppy kiss on my cheek. I didn’t speak a single word, just angled the phone in his direction with my eyebrows up high.

He squinted, his own surprise registering obvious when he caught up with the plot.

“Got to be an old pic,” he said. “Teenage or some shit. No way that’s this past century, you don’t turn into that much of a prickly cunt overnight.”

I zoomed out so he could see the date and he squinted again.

His shrug was more throwaway than concerned.

“Something must have happened to him to make him change so much,” I said. “It’s just too weird.”

“Maybe he can relax in his free time.”

I pulled a face. “This is his free time.”

“Life, work, the pressures of being a mega millionaire. I guess they take it out of him. Poor asshole.”

I tipped my head toward him as I weighed it up, but it still felt weird. Pizza is eternal. I couldn’t even imagine him eating the stuff.

“I didn’t look him up on social media,” Brett told me. “Didn’t even think about it. Did check him out on Google though. He’s got more businesses than you can shake a stick at, loaded on top by some weird shit currency investment. He’s every ounce the lord of cash he makes himself out to be, don’t you worry.”

I laughed a little to myself, loving how Brett had done his research without saying a word.

“What?” he asked, and I laughed again.

“You didn’t say you were playing detective.”

“Didn’t want to talk about the cunt any more than necessary. Just wanted to know he could cough up the cash when the time came.”

“There’s much more than that,” I said, clicking away from his profile picture and back to the mutual friends screen. “We have a friend in common, Polly Piper.”

He jabbed a thumb at her image. “Who the fuck is Polly Piper?”

“A girl from the year below at school, my sister knew her. She works in the bakery on Church Row, just behind the main square. Red hair, remember her?”

His eyebrows knotted in the way I knew so well. “Not a clue. Small fucking world, though.”

“Too small?”

He shrugged. “Seven degrees of separation. Maybe he bought a donut from her once and she sent him a request. I expect he gets a few.”

“Feels close to home.”

He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. “We don’t know Thomas fucking Heath. Believe me, we’d remember. A guy like that’s not exactly easy to forget.” I let out a sigh as he nuzzled close enough to breathe in my hair. “I don’t know Polly Piper and it sounds like she’s not exactly high up your contacts list. If you think a guy like Heath is gonna go chow down on an iced bun and tell the world he fucked sweet Grace Foster from Churchdown High School up the ass while her husband watched, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

I hated how he did that. Put things in such a way that I sounded like a crazy.

He’d always done it, laughing at my interest in murder mystery serials on TV and shrugging off my finger pointing as I yelled out the potential culprits five seconds into episode one.

“Ping her if you want to dig for info,” he offered, too little too late.

It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t even know her, must have accepted her request years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever even hung out with her, she was friends with Sarah, but not good enough friends to ever come over.”

“Ping her anyway,” he said, but I shook my head.

“Hey, Polly. I’m about to fuck a guy I think you know. Thomas Heath? Anything I should know about him? He’s good for fifty grand, right?” My tone was sarcastic enough that Brett jabbed my ribs with his fingers and tickled hard.

“Smart ass. You’re the one who’s playing private investigator.”

“Says he who can list Thomas Heath’s directorships from memory.”

“You don’t know I can do that… I may have just been browsing…”

But I did know that. I knew everything about him. Including how much he liked my fingers to sweep up the sensitive skin on the nape of his neck. He shivered as I did it, eyes closing.

“I’m going to ask him,” I whispered, and his eyes opened.

“Don’t ask him. Don’t tell him anything about us. Not who’s on your friends list, not which school you came from, not how you know Polly Piper on his friends list. We want the asshole to disappear into the ether and never come back.”

He had a point.

I sighed and nodded as I clicked away from Polly’s picture, casting the handset on the table.

“Fine,” I said, and snuggled tight into my gorgeous husband’s side.

Just where I belonged.