The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Forty-Three

So it is that Fia discovers Benjamin’s family has a cabin in Greenport, Long Island.

So it is that he ends up outside her apartment in a rental car at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, sunglasses on, windows rolled all the way down.

It’s a Toyota Camry, and they are headed for the Queensboro Bridge, but as she gets into that car, Fia feels as though she may as well be hopping into a convertible to be whisked off to Monaco.

They put the radio on, chatting idly, and as Manhattan begins to recede behind them, there’s the sense of an exhale. Both metaphorically and literally, they are getting further from ZOLA by the minute – further from the people they each have to be there. The relief, the sense of escape, is so real that at some point, Fia laughs out loud, just from the sheer joy of it.

‘What?’ Benjamin asks, squinting over at her.

‘… Nothing,’ she replies, with a little shrug. But they’re both smiling now.

She watches as the buildings gradually start to get lower, further apart, and by the time they’ve hit two hours of driving, it’s all wide lawns and Saturday morning soccer games, banks and grocery stores with lots of parking outside. Fia has no idea how much property costs on Long Island – it’s probably crazy expensive – and she’s heard there are a lot of racists out here – but it sure feels nice to have some extra breathing space.

Of course, not for the first time, it occurs to her that she could have nothing but breathing space, if she went back to Ireland. Not for the first time, she pushes that thought to the back of her mind. She still hasn’t replied to Ryan Sieman’s text. Neither has she replied to the feeler email that – sure enough – Damien McNulty in the Dublin office sent her earlier in the week. There will be time, she tells herself, to think about all that once the summer’s over.

She sneaks another glance over at Benjamin now, taking in the way his elbow is propped on the open window frame. His hand lightly grasps the steering wheel, his head bobbing along with the music a little, and she feels something vibrate inside her.

It’s hard to explain how appealing she finds it, that he can rent a car in Manhattan and pick her up at her door and drive into the unknown, weaving in and out of traffic with ease. The same sequence of events would feel essentially impossible for Fia. And that’s even if she were driving in Dublin, on the correct side of the road, never mind here, where she’d be driving on the wrong one. Unfortunate as it is for the cause of women drivers everywhere, the fact of the matter is that she – a woman – is not a good driver, nor an enthusiastic one. Something she’s always appreciated about New York, in fact, is that there is really no expectation a person will drive. The assumption, in fact, is that they will not. Not driving does not immobilize a person or infantilize them in the way it sometimes seems to in Ireland.

That Benjamin can drive, though. That’s sexy to her. When he stops to refuel and then reverses back out of the forecourt, one hand on her headrest as he looks out the rear windscreen, she honestly nearly loses her mind.

‘Hey, Fia?’ he says, once they begin to see signs for Greenport.

‘Yeah?’

‘Just so we’re clear, you know how I said the place was rustic?’

‘Yeah …’ she replies.

‘That’s, like, actually rustic, okay? Not, like, Instagram rustic.’

‘So, what? You’re telling me there aren’t going be any macramé wall hangings?’

‘… I don’t even know what that is, so no,’ he says.

She thinks for a moment. ‘Is there running water?’

‘Mmm, you sometimes have to take what you get in terms of temperature, but yes.’

‘Are there any dead animal carcasses knocking about? Mounted on walls or what have you?’

‘What? No.’

She chuckles. ‘Then we’ll be fine.’

Based on this conversation, she still doesn’t have any clear sense of what to expect, but soon, they come to a little town – or village might be more accurate. It has a marina and a main street full of trinket shops and eateries, and Fia can hardly believe that they are still in New York – New York State, at least. This place feels more like how she’s always imagined Rhode Island or Maine. People are strolling around with takeaway coffees, enjoying the midmorning sun, and Fia begins to suspect that she could be sleeping in a tent tonight and, still, she would love it here.

That said, it’s nice that she is not sleeping in a tent. Away from the main drag, and down one windy side road, then another, Benjamin eventually pulls up alongside a tiny little house. It’s made of timber, with a wraparound porch, and as they make their way inside, it’s immediately clear that Benjamin wasn’t lying. The interior is not quite Scandi-chic – or, at least, not yet. It’s more of a work-in-progress, and a very petite one at that. Still, though. There are gnarled wooden beams and a comfy-looking couch and huge stack of books piling from the ground up in the corner. Much as with the town itself, Fia can sense herself being won over almost instantly.

Walking around, her overwhelming feeling, in fact, is that she’d quite like to get her hands on this place: re-tile the kitchen maybe, source some hanging baskets for the porch … It wouldn’t take much.

The tour is a fairly swift affair, given the size of the place, and when they arrive at what appears to be the sole bedroom, Fia stops in the doorframe.

‘Oh, Benjamin,’ she says, all mock concern, giving it everything she can muster. ‘There’s only one bed. What ever will we do?’

A look of much more genuine worry crosses his features. ‘Yeah. I was thinking that, if you want, I can sl—’

It’s sweet, and Fia so charmed by him, by this entire experience, that she hears herself let out a little giggle. Sincerely. A giggle. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she interrupts whatever proposal he might have, pressing her lips to his.

As ever, it takes no time at all for Benjamin to respond in kind, for the energy between them to shift into something feverish, something frantic. He grasps for the hem of her dress, clutching a fistful of the material against her thigh as they kiss, his other hand in her hair, and Fia senses heat rising inside her. Just the certainty that they are totally alone here – that nobody they work with is going to pop up or pop in – is so incredibly freeing.

They pull apart for air, and her glance flicks over towards the bed again.

‘I’m sure we can make this work,’ she breathes out.

‘I feel so much better,’ she mumbles against his skin, once the two of them are lying boneless and sticky-sweaty, sheets tangled around their limbs.

And it’s true. Fia’s whole body feels heavy and wrung out, but her mind is clearer than it’s been in a long time. She feels, finally, like she could properly concentrate on something. She doesn’t really want to have to concentrate on anything too strenuous, as it happens. But this past week – maybe longer than a week – it has been as though she actually, physically, couldn’t – not fully. Her brain has just been so foggy.

She’s partially blamed the heat – and truly, this past week in Manhattan, it has been hotter than hell, not a breath of fresh air to be found anywhere in the city. But, also, she’s known that it wasn’t the heat, not really. She’s known what she needed. The phrase getting it out of her system has crossed her mind.

And she really thought that once might do it – enough to scratch the itch, allow her to return to her usual self, call it quits with Benjamin before he calls it quits with her. Now, though … that just seems slightly premature. It seems, more than anything, like such a waste. They’re here for the whole weekend, after all.

The thing about good sex, Fia thinks, is that communication is key. Asking questions is definitely to be encouraged. But sometimes, at the same time, a person wants to be surprised. Sometimes, a person wants their partner to take charge, to seem a little unbridled – or, in the alternative, to let themselves be led, to yield their own power willingly. One way or another, to just know. It is, in Fia’s experience, almost impossible to create that balance of dialogue and intuition if it doesn’t exist to begin with.

And, with Benjamin, it exists more perfectly than she’s ever known it.

‘Maybe we should have just done that the very first day you arrived at ZOLA,’ she continues, shifting to prop herself up on her elbow, looking down at him.

That the frustration between them may always have been – at least in part – of a very particular sort … it does feel like they’ve passed the point of deniability there.

Benjamin grins. ‘So, you don’t want me to sleep on the couch, tonight. Am I picking that up right?’

She lets out a little hum, as though she’s considering it. ‘Well, why don’t we see how the day goes?’

She can’t keep a straight face though, and when he pulls her down on top of him again, half-kissing, half-tickling her bare skin, neither of them can do anything but laugh.

‘Where do you sleep, though?’ she asks him then, once their laughter has faded, once her capacity for rational thought seems to have somewhat returned to her. ‘Like, when you come here with your parents?’

Benjamin hesitates. ‘Uh … yeah. About that. When I said this was my family’s place … it’s actually my place. I, uh, ended up with some spare cash a couple years back – before I started law school – and I bought it.’

Fia just looks at him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Hmm. Okay. You ended up with some spare cash. That doesn’t sound dodgy at all. You know lawyers can’t also be criminals, right, Ben? Or they can, but it’s sort of frowned upon.’

He just chuckles. ‘It’s all pretty much gone now. I mean, I’m not choosing to live with Vasyl as some sort of personal penance. After I paid for my tuition at Columbia, there wasn’t much I could afford to buy in the city, except maybe a parking space … but then, I saw this place.’

Fia lets out a little exhale of disbelief. She thinks back to the day he first arrived in her office – to her assumption that he was living off his parents, that his summer associateship was all by their arrangement. There does not seem to be a limit to the number of ways she can be proven wrong about this guy. Of course, he has managed to neatly circumvent the matter of where exactly the money – and by Fia’s calculation, it has to have been quite a lot of money – came from. She does notice that. How much money did video game people make? Had Benjamin invented some sort of video game? Fia doesn’t know. But, at least for right now, if he doesn’t want to discuss it, then she doesn’t want to, either. What she’s learning about Benjamin is that he gets to things when he’s good and ready.

‘So, hang on,’ she replies slowly, as though she’s piecing a jigsaw together in her mind. ‘You made a shit ton of money, and you decided to spend it on … law school and property investment?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh my God. Are you a grown-up, Benjamin? Is that what you’re telling me here?’ she asks, and she lets her eyes widen dramatically. ‘Do you have house insurance?’

He laughs. ‘I do, but mostly I just hope that covers my own fuck-ups. My adventures in DIY have been … something.’

At this, she lets her gaze travel through the bedroom doorway and out towards the little hall. ‘Yeah, what’s happening there?’

In her direct line of vision, Fia can see five thick stripes of green painted on the wall, each one similar but different.

‘Oh, I was just trying to pick a colour. In, like, February. Sometimes I get a little … sidetracked.’

Fia points at a pale sage. ‘I like that one in the middle. D’you want to do it today?’

Benjamin lets out another laugh, this time of undisguised surprise. ‘You want to help me paint?’

As it happens, Fia has never painted anything in her life before. She knows nothing about primers or masking tape or exactly what process and equipment is most likely to yield good results. Yet somehow, today, it strikes her that people can just have a go at things things – grown-up things, for which they’ve been given no advance permission slip. They can get in cars and just drive; they can buy ramshackle cabins in the middle of nowhere. Trial and error and enthusiasm – these have never seemed, to Fia, like the hallmarks of adulthood. But she’s starting to think that, actually, they might be the secrets at the heart of the whole gig.

And so, painting a small hallway in Long Island sage green, this afternoon.

She gives a shrug. ‘Why not?’