‘Pat!’
‘Don’t worry. Night. Go on with you. Kiss and make up.’
‘Thanks,’ I whispered, making a quick getaway towards the communal door of the block.
Once inside, Dan sank down on to the sofa, put his head in his hands and moaned, ‘Fuck.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘He won’t say anything. D’you want coffee?’
‘Please.’
He was less tense, though still pale, by the time I put the cup into his hands.
‘Talk about a sobering experience,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ The two glasses of wine were a distant memory.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking. What a fucking prat. Of course the car park had CCTV. Of course it did. Shit.’
‘Dan, stop it. It doesn’t matter. The concierge has probably forgotten all about it by now and Patrick promised not to say anything. It’s fine. Let it go.’
‘The concierge and Patrick are probably wanking right now to the memory of your bare arse over the car bonnet.’ He put down the coffee and buried his head in his hands. ‘Fuck,’ he said again, drawing out the vowel sound in desperation.
‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. It was a silly mistake – everyone makes them from time to time. Even me.’
I hoped my little postscript would lighten his mood. If there’s one thing I’d change about Dan, it’s his tendency to agonise over every single little error.
‘Pip, it’s my job to exercise good judgement. I didn’t exercise good judgement. I feel like my whole career is built on a lie.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, get a grip,’ I said, cross now. ‘You’d had a few beers and you were a bit pissed off. And you were off-duty. It has nothing to do with your competence as a police officer. Please!’
‘I should never have put us in that position. I could have been arrested. We both could have been arrested. We still could!’
‘Dan.’ I tried to speak very slowly and clearly, although my temper was riding up hard, snatching at the edges of my self-control. ‘The concierge won’t do anything. Patrick won’t say anything. He might tease you a bit in the locker room, but that’s as bad as it’ll get. I’d swear to it. Can we please just forget it now?’
‘I could have been charged with assault. It is assault, isn’t it? Technically, it’s actually assault, what I do to you.’
‘Christ, if a bit of consensual spanking is assault, pity the poor bloody judges. The courts are going to be busting at the seams.’
Dan stopped angsting for a while and drank his coffee, staring out at the black night beyond the window.
‘I really am sorry I had that second glass of wine,’ I said. ‘I wish I hadn’t.’
‘I don’t know why you had the first.’
‘There’s never enough decent non-alcoholic stuff to drink at parties. I can’t drink Coke all night. I’d never sleep.’
‘That’s a line of defence, if not a particularly stunning one.’
‘I think you’re turning this into a crisis when you don’t need to. It isn’t. It’s a silly glitch, that’s all. And you were only trying to do the right thing.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But when I get mixed up with the right thing and the bloody stupid thing, perhaps it’s time I accepted I’m not cut out for this.’
‘Oh, really? What, for …?’
‘Domestic discipline,’ he elucidated. ‘To do it properly, I have to be, like, infallible. Don’t I? I have to know what’s best all the time. And I don’t, Pip. I don’t always know.’ He wrung his hands, breathing fast, almost on the verge of tears. ‘Sometimes I haven’t got a fucking clue what I’m doing or why …’
I put down my coffee and flung my arms around him. He responded in kind and we held each other tight on the sofa while he worked at choking back his dismay.