Family Affair by Elle M Thomas
Chapter 9
Declan
Mase walks into the pub, and I see him a split second before he spots me. He is alone, making me worry that something is wrong with Liv. The smile he greets me with suggests that he is happy, meaning Liv is fine, if absent. He sits next to me at the bar and immediately orders us both a drink and grabs the bar food menu.
“Olivia will meet us there. She worked late.” He frowns.
“You’re not enjoying having your wife as the boss of her own company?” I laugh making my brother’s frown deepen.
“I didn’t fucking think it through, did I? She is happy though and it was only because there’s been a problem of some sort. Nathan seems happy with Olivia at the helm.”
I nod thinking that our former stepfather, Christian’s father-in-law. and now the junior partner in Liv’s company, Nathan, will be more than happy to let my sister-in-law run things while he plays golf. I wonder if I should tell Mase about Christian’s visit and the frown potentially causing permanent creasing to my brow alerts him to my confusion.
“What? You’re surprised he’s happy with my wife’s work?”
I laugh at his bristling mood at the idea that I might have been in anyway criticising Liv.
“No. I was thinking about Christian. He came to see me, while you were on honeymoon.”
My brother looks less than impressed but not entirely surprised.
“He suggested a little reworking at the club.”
“I hope you told him to fuck off!” my brother snaps.
“Not quite, but I did say I’d probably go to Liv first. How is it going to work with him and Liv?” I ask because no matter what else Christian is, he’s family, kind of, but he is involved and woven into the fabric of our immediate family.
“I anticipate it being awkward for a while, but ultimately she’s my priority so if he chooses to make it too awkward, he will have made his own choice I suppose. Can we talk about something else because I still don’t get his open hostility and total opposition to my wife and thinking about it pisses me off?”
“Okay,” I agree and address the niggle in the back of my mind about the evening that lies ahead. “Mase, tonight, please tell me Liv isn’t going to try and fix me up?”
With a shake of his head and the running of a hand through his hair he shrugs. “I’d like to say no. I have told her to mind her own business and she felt bad for Anita when she found you with Lindy and Laura,” he says with an arched brow.
“I felt shit about that. I thought she’d already left. I wouldn’t have done that to her, although she’s seeing someone else anyway.” I sigh thinking that the churning in my guts feels a lot like pain when I think of Anita with someone else.
“Yeah, but I think it was casual,” he says, revealing that it is over by speaking about it in the past tense. “Nigel was pissed off about it, but she’s a grown woman at the end of the day. Let’s eat and then if you want to dissect you and Anita again, we can, but whether Liv tries fixing you up or not, you need not to make my sister-in-law feel any shitter than you already have.”
He’s right. I know he is and yet I can’t guarantee that I won’t say or do something in the future that makes her feel bad. I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens. Like I told Anita, I’m not like Mase. I don’t want or need to make this perfect family he has his heart set on and always did have. We are the product of a broken home, well maybe not quite, but divorced parents. Our mum married four more times and our stepfathers were okay, and we always maintained a relationship with our own dad but this whole need to be with one person and for it to be enough is not my thing.
Mase married his first wife even when he realised he shouldn’t. They should have remained business only. He insists that when he met Liv it was a lightbulb moment, a second of complete clarity and he is happy, sickeningly so, but I don’t believe that everyone has that one person and at what point is that soulmate simply a case of settling. He calls me cynical, and I am, but maybe that’s not why I see things the way I do. Could it be that Mase and I are two different sides of the same coin? Whereas he wanted to prove our parents, their divorce and statistics for kids of divorce wrong, I am happy to accept that all relationships are flawed and that I will never, ever settle for one person to make me complete, no matter how good the sex might be and the best sex I have ever had was with Anita. I can’t even describe what it is or how it makes me feel. I just know that when I kiss her, touch her, fuck her, everything makes sense. When I watch her climbing higher and higher until there is only one way for her to go and that is into a spiral of pleasure and arousal, she brings me to my knees. Knowing that I have done that to her. The feeling of being inside her will remain with me for the rest of my life. The perfection of how she holds me; soft and warm, tight, and yet gentle. She really is a conundrum.
“Come on, what do you fancy?” Mase asks, breaking my thoughts and all I can think of is her, Anita. She is very much what I fancy. I then see the menu in my brother’s hand and realise he means food.
Anita
Olivia is in the kitchen, finding us something to eat. Some kind of pasta is how she describes it and then explains that Mona, hers and Mase’s housekeeper, cleaner woman has left it for us. She looks nervous, on edge and I have no clue why, although I have wondered if she and Mase have had a disagreement since he is meeting us at the club and not having dinner with us.
Conversation is unusually sparse over dinner and it’s not until we are in the bedroom getting changed that the usual topic of my love life is broached, by me this time.
“I properly ended things with Jack. No more going back,” I seem to announce.
Liv seems quite shocked by that information. Her wild swing to face me and gaping mouth suggests shock. I don’t wait for her to question me; I continue to explain.
“Mum and Dad were pleased when I told them. Jack was nice, but he is just out of a long-term relationship, and he wants fun. I want fun, but if I am going for fun, I want it to be toe curling fun.”
“Like Dec?” Liv asks optimistically making me shake my head.
“Nah, I mean Dec can give me the toe-curling fun for sure, but I don’t want to go from that high to the low of feeling like a whore and knowing he won’t see me as anything more than a quick shag puts me off, plus I can’t, won’t share him with the blondes.”
“Hmmm,” Liv replies, thinking for several long seconds. “Maybe you should tell him that. That you want fun, but exclusive fun, if that’s what you’re really saying.”
“I have no clue what I’m saying because I am a rubbish judge of character,” I admit and can feel tears pricking my eyes as I drop onto the huge bed that my sister and her husband share. “My lover at uni, he was married, and I was in what I thought was a monogamous, loving relationship only to discover that for him I was no more than fun.”
“Shit!” Liv sighs as she sits down next to me. “I am so sorry that you ended up in that position. Did he go back to his wife?” she asks and although it is a simple question, I am incapable of replying so allow my tears to silently roll down my cheeks and nod. She pulls me in for a hug as she asks, “You loved him?”
“I thought I did, yes. I did, but I can see now that it was infatuation. A naïve misinterpretation of love and he couldn’t go back, he never left her.”
Liv nods. “I went out with Sara’s brother, Ridley and we were both young and immature. After Ridley I met Brad and we were together for a couple of years on and off, but they were nothing compared to Mase. He is like my first grown-up relationship so maybe your boyfriend, the married one was like that, young and innocent.”
Her expression is one of understanding and compassion, but she is totally wrong where my married man and I are concerned. She clearly thinks he was young and married and I need to set her straight.
“No.” I shake my head. “He was older.”
“Oh, he wasn’t a student?” she asks and then aghast continues. “Anita, he wasn’t a tutor, was he?”
I laugh. In many ways shagging a tutor would have been far less shocking than what actually happened, but she doesn’t need to know that, not yet. Not ever. Nobody does.
“No, he wasn’t. I met him in the bar where I worked. He bought me a drink and we chatted. Shit, how stupid was I?” I ask my sister, but she has no clue what I am really asking her, so I expand. “He told me that he was getting a divorce. That his wife was demanding and was preventing his access to his child. I believed him. I had no reason not to. He came in a few nights a week for about a month, and it was then that I agreed to go out with him. I should have suspected something was off because he either booked a hotel room for us or we went back to my student accommodation, never to his place. Oh, bloody hell.”
“What?” Liv asks taking my hand in hers.
“I was so stupid. He always left, afterwards. How did I not realise he was still living with his wife and having sex with her?” I ask myself rather than Liv who is shaking her head.
“No wonder Dec’s suggestion hit a raw nerve.”
“Hmmm, except it didn’t, not on that level. The sex wasn’t even that good. Why won’t I take what Dec offers when he gives me toe curling and yet with others like my married man and Jack I have accepted so much less than that?”
She doesn’t reply. Neither of us say anything as I absorb my own thoughts and realisation but it’s still Liv that speaks.
“Are you reconsidering things with Dec?”
“I dunno, maybe.” The truth is that all I can think of is Dec, day and night. Especially at night when I lie in bed alone and all I can think about is lying somewhere, anywhere with him, even if it’s only for a short time. “You know before when you said that kissing Mase feels like the difference between a boy and a man?”
She nods and grins, clearly thinking of Mase’s kisses.
“I get that now, now that I think about it, really think about it. Others have kissed me and yet when Dec kisses me it’s as though he means it.”
There, the words are out and honestly if Dec walked in here now, I would be incapable of doing anything other than kissing him, long and deep until we end up naked and lost in the other. Until neither of us could see, think, or feel anything that wasn’t each other and what we make together. My thoughts are getting more intensely sexual as I think I can feel his hands on me stroking, touching and caressing and then I hear something that breaks my wandering mind, it’s Liv. Turning I see her crying.
“Oh Liv,” I say as I pull her in for a hug, unsure why she’s crying, especially when I replay my words.
“Sorry. I kind of cry at things now. I’m not really a crier but what you said about Dec kissing you like he means it,” and then she’s off again. Tears and crying fill the room. “These fucking hormones need to stop this shit.”
I laugh at her turn of expression but her repeating my description of Dec’s kiss only makes me imagine his kiss once more and I really hope Liv has lined up some double date with an eligible bachelor, although I suppose Dec is technically an eligible bachelor, even as a man whore.