Thursday January 9th
Cate had bought skimpy lingerie: a black lace bra with strategic flowers that barely covered her nipples, matching panties, garter and stockings. She was wearing a black polka dot blouse with a floppy bow, a tight black pencil skirt and black fuck-me stilettos. She’d blown her glossy, black hair so that it was poker-straight and had painted her lips dark-red. The look she was going for was naughty secretary and she got more than a few appreciative glances as she took the ferry across to downtown Seattle.
The ferry ride seemed to take forever. She stood near the front of the boat, her red lacquered nails drumming against the wooden window frame as she waited impatiently for her first view of the impressive skyline. She was so excited to see Kian’s reaction; her tummy felt like it was doing a never-ending array of backflips.
The physical side of their relationship wasn’t everything. What Cate really craved was a chance for their hearts and minds to reconnect as well as their bodies. With the help of Remy and a dose of absinthe, she might have stopped wallowing in the role of neglected wife but that didn’t mean that the circumstances which had helped to create that feeling - the demands of Kian’s career and their three children – had magically just disappeared. She needed more than just a quick conversation which threatened to be interrupted at any moment.
When they’d first got married, Kian hadn’t been very good at expressing his feelings with words, preferring to use his body instead. He’d said once that when he and Cate were intimate, it was how they fought, how they made up and how he showed her that she was the single most important person in his life.
If she was going to have to wait another eight days until their romantic weekend away before she could have a real conversation with her husband, she needed to feel close to him in whatever way she could now.
He was always her husband and the father of her three children but if he couldn’t be her best friend right now, she needed him to be her lover. She wanted to look into his dark eyes and know without a shadow of a doubt that she was everything to him. She wanted to feel it in the tight grip of his hands on her skin and the rapid beating of his heart.
She’d checked with Anna before she left the house that he didn’t have any meetings scheduled for this afternoon.
But when she got to the offices, Anna apologised and said that Kian had decided at the very last minute to make a trip down to Tacoma to check up one of their newest investments.
“Cate, what are you doing here?” Ben asked, coming out of his own office, which was right next door to Kian’s.
“I just thought I’d stop by and see if Kian wanted to get something to eat,” Cate lied. Even though her long, black coat was buttoned up to the neck, she still felt really obvious in her high heels and red lipstick. “It’s no big deal. I was over here anyway. I had an appointment over at the market.”
Ben must have sensed her disappointment because he said. “I’m free for the next hour. Did you want to grab a slice of pizza at Giovanni’s?”
At the mention of Giovanni’s, Cate’s stomach grumbled loudly and she realised that she’d been so excited about surprising Kian that she hadn’t actually eaten anything since the leftover macaroni cheese she’d reheated for dinner the previous night. But she was definitely overdressed for Giovanni’s in her polka-dot blouse and high heels.
They’d stumbled across the small pizza parlour by accident after they’d spent the day setting up Ben and Kian’s new offices several months ago.
The five of them – Cate, Kian, Ben, Erin and Anna - had been ravenous with hunger after a day of heavy lifting and shouting at the telephone company. Ben had wanted to try the Korean BBQ joint which had opened up a couple of blocks from their new offices. Cate had been reluctant, as the lone vegetarian in the group; she’d known that she would struggle to find anything she could eat there.
The heavy wooden door to Giovanni’s had been propped open with a stone statue of a cocker spaniel, which had immediately drawn Erin’s attention because she’d had a much-loved dog of the same breed called Monty. As they’d got closer, the delicious smell of rich tomato sauce and gooey cheese had made their stomachs rumble in unison.
Many years ago, Cate, Kian and Lola had holidayed at a villa in Italy owned by her brother-in-law, Vincenzo’s family. Vincenzo’s aunt, Lucia who’d lived nearby had invited them for a meal one night.
Cate and Kian had been having problems – he was distant and drinking a lot and she would find out a few months later that he’d cheated on her with one of his sister’s friends. When it was time for them to leave for Lucia’s, Kian still hadn’t returned home so Cate and Lola had gone by themselves.
Remy had been there with Rocco and Luca. Lucia had prepared a veritable feast for them and for a couple of hours, sat around the solid wooden table which had been in Lucia’s family for generations, Cate had been able to forget about all the stress which was waiting for her back at the villa.
She’d immediately got the same comfort from Giovanni’s as she’d felt that evening many years ago in Lucia’s farmhouse kitchen.
It didn’t matter what time of day it was, there was always something delicious either just coming out of the oven or bubbling away on the stove. The walls of Giovanni’s were covered with sepia-tinted family photos.
The owner, Serafina (the original Giovanni’s grand-daughter) had welcomed them like family and they’d soon been crowded around a wobbly table with a red and white chequered tablecloth, their elbows knocking into each other as they’d tucked into huge slices of pizza dripping with mozzarella and rich tomato sauce and washing it all down with full-bodied red wine served in mismatched glasses.
The pizza there was so good that when Remy, Vincenzo, Rocco and Luca had visited Seattle for Christmas, Cate had taken them to Giovanni’s. Serafina had even managed to charm Vincenzo, who usually grumbled that nobody could make pizza as well as his mama.
Ben wouldn’t notice and Anna (who’d agreed to come with them) was much too polite to say anything but Cate knew that her slutty outfit wouldn’t escape Serafina’s attention. As tempting as it was, she wouldn’t be able to hide under her wool coat for the entire meal. Apart from the fact that she would look like a weirdo, it was so warm inside Giovanni’s that even if she tried, she’d probably faint with heat exhaustion.
Fortunately, she remembered that she’d left a jumper and some ballet pumps in Kian’s office the last time she’d stopped by the office so she swapped out her sexy blouse for the pale lilac jumper and her heels for the ballet pumps, wiped off her lipstick and ran her fingers through her hair so it didn’t look quite so straight.
Afterwards, she was so glad that she’d accepted the invitation. It had been fun to sit around a table with other adults and eat food which was still piping hot from the oven instead of meals for one that had been reheated so many times they had the texture and flavour of soggy cardboard.
When they left Giovanni’s, the sky was pitch-black and it had started raining. The rain was so cold; it felt like needles stabbing their skin.
Ben had to get back to the office; he had a call with the management team at one of their fledgling start-ups in San Antonio.
Cate and Anna waited in the bright, shiny lobby of the skyscraper, where Kian and Ben’s offices were located on the fifteenth floor. It was only a short walk from Giovanni’s to the ferry terminus but Anna insisted on arranging a town car to take Cate home. “You and I both know that Kian would kill me if I did anything else,” she said when Cate tried to protest.
Cate narrowed her eyes, “are you absolutely sure you don’t know what Kian has got planned for this super-secret weekend away?”
Anna giggled, “I think we both know that I am the absolute worst at keeping secrets. Within like five minutes of my parents confirming that there was no Father Christmas, I’d basically spoilt Christmas for every other child in my class. All I know is that he’s asked me to completely clear his schedule for that weekend. If I knew anything else about what he had planned for the two of you, it would be as visible as black marker pen written on my forehead.”
Cate looked closely at her friend’s forehead, “it’s all clear, I believe you.”
“Ugh,” Anna frowned at the rain battering against the plate-glass windows. “Remind me again why I didn’t stay in California?”
Cate laughed. “Didn’t you say that it was safer for everyone if you were at least two states away from Buck?”
“Hm,” Anna weighed up the two things. “Year-round sunshine but close proximity to jackass ex-boyfriend and his fiancée, aka my stepsister.”
Anna might joke about it but Cate could still see the pain flickering in her friend’s emerald-green eyes.
She had to admit that she’d been a little bit apprehensive when Kian had said that he was thinking about hiring an assistant. It was ridiculous because he’d been a professional footballer for most of their marriage. If he’d wanted to cheat on Cate, he’d had so many opportunities over the years but apart from that one very painful mistake after the World Cup in Portugal, he’d been completely faithful to her.
But just because she trusted him didn’t mean that she wanted a nubile young woman, whose body hadn’t been changed by three pregnancies, sitting outside his office every day, tempting him.
Since Kian and Ben were going to be busy interviewing potential candidates, Cate had offered to help out and man the front desk for them. She had to admit that the offer hadn’t been completely altruistic since it also gave her the perfect opportunity to spy on the man or woman who would be working so closely with her husband. She tried to tell herself that she was just being protective of her family but she knew that she was only one step away from buying a bunny on the way home to boil in a big saucepan (despite the fact that she’d been a vegetarian for years).
Before the last interview of the day, she’d bumped into Anna in the ladies’ toilets. She’d been frantically trying to repair her eye make-up with the tips of her fingers. Cate had handed her a make-up remover wipe and Anna had confided in Cate, thinking she was a stranger, that she’d just found out five minutes ago that her ex-boyfriend was getting married. The bride-to-be was her stepsister.
During the lavish party her mother and stepfather had thrown to celebrate Anna’s graduation from Stanford, she’d walked in on her boyfriend of five years having sex with her stepsister on her bed.
When you’ve been cheated on, when your heart has been shattered into so many pieces it seems impossible that you’ll ever be able to find them again, you feel an instant bond with somebody that’s going through the same thing.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do about the wedding?” The douche-canoe ex-boyfriend and the stepsister were getting married on Valentine’s Day in Anna’s hometown just outside San Diego.
Anna shook her head, her gorgeous, auburn curls bouncing up and down on her slender shoulders. “I’m still trying to decide between taking a nice, sharp pickaxe or a nun chuck as my date.”
“OK but since prison-orange isn’t really your colour, why don’t you take Julian up on his offer? He might be a total man-whore but he’s kind of hot, he’ll definitely make all of your ex-friends rabid with jealousy.”
Anna quirked a perfectly-plucked eyebrow, “you think he’s hot, huh?”
Cate laughed, “if you like guys with dirty-blonde hair and green eyes so intense it feels like he could make your clothes fall off just by looking at you, flannel shirts which do absolutely nothing to hide the bulging muscles underneath, well-worn jeans and scuffed boots.”
Cate tried to stifle a giggle as she watched Anna blush. “If you like that type of thing then objectively, yeah he’s hot. Fortunately, my tastes fall more towards tall, dark, handsome and hideously overworked.”
When she’d first moved to Seattle, Cate and Kian had thrown Anna a party at their house to welcome her to the city.
Julian was a successful music producer who’d worked with all the great, only-need-one-name artists. They’d met him through Jax, Liv’s husband. After Jax had left the boy-band, X13, Julian had produced his first solo album.
Cate didn’t see Julian and Anna leave the party together but when she’d taken the trash out early the next morning, she’d found them adorably curled up together under a blanket in the back of Julian’s pick-up truck, which was still parked in their driveway.
“No,” Anna shook her head again. “If I take Julian to the wedding with me, I’ll have sex with him again. It’s inevitable. Like you said, all he has to do is look at me with those incredibly sexy green eyes and my fingers move of their own accord and start unzipping my dress. No. I can’t allow that to happen. I’m not the sort of girl that has friends with benefits and Julian definitely doesn’t do relationships. If I have sex with him again, I might as well just put my heart right back in the blender. I’ve already cried too many damn tears over men who don’t deserve them. I need to focus on my career instead.”
“So you’re going to go to the wedding on your own?” Cate asked softly.
Anna set her jaw, “Nope, I’m going to get a really nasty flu bug that weekend, which means that I can’t possibly fly back to San Diego and I’m going to spend the entire weekend on my lovely, squashy sofa with an absolutely massive bottle of tequila and Michael Fassbender’s back catalogue for company.”
“Not you too,” Cate winced at the mention of Michael Fassbender. “It’s like the zombie apocalypse. Seriously, what is it with this guy?” Liv was also obsessed with him.
Spending time with Ben and Anna had been a nice distraction but as she sat in the back of the town car on her way home, Cate couldn’t shake the disappointment that yet again, despite all her best efforts to be sexy, she’d still be going to bed alone that night.