She’d had a clumsy heavy-petting session with Graham Hollingdale, of all people! She’d have to get a new bed.
How utterly disgusting. How utterly humiliating.
She looked at her boss, lying on Dan’s side of the bed, his hands crossed comfortably behind his head, and felt ill.
How much lower could her life sink? Self-disgust filled her mouth. Dirty-gray, sordid misery wrapped itself around her.
“I thought you were married,” she said coldly.
He smiled. “Oh, that’s O.K. I’m poly.”
“You’re who?” Was he trying to say that he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body?
“Poly. Polyamorous. It means ‘many loves.’ If you’re poly, you believe in having committed relationships with more than one person. My wife and I are both poly.”
“So, you’re swingers.” Cat began to shift unobtrusively as far away as possible to the other side of the bed. Thank God no bodily fluids had been exchanged.
“Ha! Everybody thinks that!” Graham sat up with enthusiasm, a finger held in the air. She wished he could show this much enthusiasm for her marketing plans. “Not at all! Swinging is just about sex. Polyamory is about sharing your love with more than one person. It’s about romance!”
“This is romance?”
“Not yet, Catriona. Not yet. My wife will always be my primary partner, but I would be honored if you would consider a poly relationship with me as a secondary partner.”
Cat stared at him.
“I’ve always felt we’ve had real chemistry.”
She was flabbergasted. “Really?”
“Really.” Graham beamed. “I could commit to you fully, on Wednesdays. Wednesdays would be just for us.”
This was becoming surreal.
“Graham. Last night, was ah—great. But I don’t think I’m a poly sort of person. I have this thing about monogamy. Just ask my husband. My ex-husband.”
“Oh, monogamy.” Graham looked slightly disgusted by the word. “Polyamory is so much more enriching. I can give you a Web site address.”
“And Wednesdays aren’t good for me.” Laughing would be a big mistake.
“Oh well! I can look at my schedule!”
“Actually, Graham, can I ask you a big favor?”
“Of course.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Do you think you could leave now?”
Venus on the Dance Floor
Christ! Get it off! I hate this song! “Venus”!
It reminds me of this time I went to a nightclub in the city. I was with a group of mates and we were watching these three girls dance.
They weren’t bad, so I think, I’ll have a go. Worth a go. So I boogie on up to ’em, feeling like a complete loser, like you do. One of ’em smiled at me and I’m thinking I’m in like Flynn. And then this bloody song starts and I became invisible! They went right off, laughing, screaming, and doing these really over-the-top sexy dances. No way could you break into that little circle. All they could see was one another. So I had to slink on back like a total dickhead. My mates never let me forget it. For years afterward, whenever I walked into the pub, they’d be singing lines from that song.
Never tried to pick up a girl on a dance floor ever again. Scarred me for life, mate. I’m not kidding ya.
CHAPTER 19
I am doing nothing wrong, thought Lyn. She sat at her desk listening to the distant, singsong sound of her computer dialing up its Internet connection.
She wasn’t hurting Michael. The only person who could conceivably think that was, well, Michael. She knew he’d be hurt. If the situation were reversed, she’d be hurt.
But it was nothing. The whole thing was nothing.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t told him straightaway about the “blast from the past” e-mail from her ex-boyfriend Hank. She’d even printed off a copy and coyly presented it to him. Michael had been obligingly macho in his response.
“Hmmm. ‘Fond memories of our time in Spain.’ This guy better watch himself!”
Hank’s erotic appearances in her dreams weren’t the problem. After all, more often than not, Michael also featured, looking on with benign approval. (In one he cheerfully mopped the kitchen floor and said “shift your feet” while Hank did interesting things to her up against the fridge.)
Everyone knew that sexual fantasies were perfectly acceptable. Healthy. Even necessary!
Michael probably had them about Sandra Sully on Channel 10. Lyn often caught him smiling fondly back at the television while he watched the late news.
So the fantasies weren’t a problem. (In fact, their sex life had picked up recently. What did it matter if the credit went to Hank and Sandra?)
And the problem wasn’t that she and Hank were now e-mailing quite regularly. Hank was happily married. He wrote in rather dull detail about his wife and his two little boys. There was even talk of him coming to Sydney for business.
The betrayal was simply this:
She had just written an e-mail to Hank about her “little problem.”
Her secret little problem with parking lots.
It had happened twice more since the first time with Maddie. Once she was in an underground parking lot in the city, running late for a meeting. The next time she was doing the grocery shopping. Both times had been equally horrific. Both times she had been convinced, no, this time, I’m really going to die.
Now, hilariously, she was avoiding parking lots—pretending that it suited her to walk an extra two blocks with a stroller and a laptop. She even found herself looking the other way when she drove past one. Oh, what’s that interesting billboard over there? she would think, swiftly turning her head, as if she could put one over on her sensible, sane self.
Nana Leonard, Maxine’s fragile, wispy mother, had been a nervous woman, or as Frank so delicately put it, “off her bloody rocker.” She became breathless and dizzy in shopping centers, and the older she got, the less and less she ventured out of her home. Nobody ever used the word “agoraphobia,” but it was there in the room with them, a silent, hulking presence, whenever they had a conversation about Nana. “She said she wouldn’t come to afternoon tea after all,” Maxine would say tersely. “Tummy bug.”
By Lyn’s calculations, when Nana died, she hadn’t left her house in two years.
Mental illnesses were hereditary. What if Lyn had been the one marked at birth to end up “off her rocker”? The one the wicked fairy godmother had cursed, This one shall be the nut case!