I say yes to the nightcap. I follow him to his office. I fetch us glasses from the kitchen, and we drink the wine out of water tumblers. I’m wearing lipstick, and I leave a pink kiss on the edge of the glass.
We talk about work stuff, mostly. Laugh about the kids that do our heads in, complain about the ever-changing government guidelines, compare our least favourite parents. My cheeks are flushed pink and I’m drunk on half a bottle. Maybe a little more than half. I don’t keep track of how often he tops up my glass and his.
It happens very naturally. His hand on my thigh. It takes me too long to realise it’s strange.
I stand, move away. He follows me.
‘Addie,’ he says.
‘I should go,’ I say.
I turn towards the door.
He pushes it closed, over my shoulder, his body against my back.
‘This has been such a long time coming,’ he says in my ear. ‘Hasn’t it?’
There’s a cold sort of dread in my stomach. He’s right, I knew this was coming. What else had I expected? I feel like I’m slipping, or perhaps like I already slipped and now I’m falling, fingernails grasping for something to hold.
His lips are on my neck. I can feel desire, quiet and low, but above that I feel desperate disgust. At him? Myself?
I know when he pulls me back against him, against his hardness. I don’t want this. Fuck. I can’t do this, the thought makes me feel sick, the wetness of his mouth on my neck is like a tarantula across the skin.
‘No,’ I say.
I say no.
Dylan
Luke calls me around seven, and he tells me that my father is cheating on my mother.
I sit, slowly, on the edge of the sofa. For a long while I say nothing at all.
‘Dyl?’ Luke says. ‘Dyl, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been dreading this phone call.’
I feel like my head is full of whiteness; I’m not exactly surprised, but it’s horrifying, like being told you’re not who you think you are at all.
‘She knows?’ I manage.
‘I told her before I told you. I thought – I guess I thought she should know first. She was totally in denial. I couldn’t convince her.’
I’m only half listening – a sudden rage is rising up my body, freezing hot, like ice burn. I’m so rarely angry that I hardly know how to hold the feeling: it seems to have found its way into my throat, my ears, the little capillaries spreading through my lungs.
‘I don’t think she’ll ever leave him, you know,’ Luke says. ‘She just didn’t want to hear it.’
A message comes through from Marcus; I check it abstractedly, hardly seeing it at first.
You need to come to Addie’s school. She’s there with Etienne, and . . . it doesn’t look good.
The picture comes next. Through the window, the warm glow of the office inside, with the two of them sitting side by side, drinking wine out of tumblers, his hand resting on her upper thigh.
‘Luke?’ I say. My voice is strangled. ‘I have to go.’
I press the off button to turn the screen black, then sit with the phone cradled between my hands, staring down, heart big and sick in my chest. The phrase seeing red has never meant anything to me before, but now I understand. I saw the image for less than a second but it’s drawn on the inside of my eyelids like sparklers in the night.
Eventually, after those long, stifling seconds of stillness, I grab my coat and pull on my shoes – so slow, so mundane, as if my world isn’t ending – and I run for the car.
Addie
He nips me with his teeth.
I turn in the cage of his arms. It’s worse. He pushes up my skirt, hand running up my thigh, pulling my leg so that the muscle along the back of my thigh wrenches with a shot of pain, and I’m bunching my fists now, trying to turn my head aside, and I’m clear, I couldn’t be clearer. I’m pushing his chest. I’m talking, I think – Stop it, please – and our teeth clatter, a dull thud inside my head as he keeps pushing his lips down on mine.
‘I know you want this,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t you?’
It’s a sound outside that makes him turn his head aside for a moment. We can’t see the window from here; he takes half a step back, then pauses, unsure. I remember something from long past. Self-defence classes in school, maybe. The fist that was pushing at his chest unravels and I grab his shoulder while he’s unsteady and my skirt is already up around my thighs so I can bring my knee up hard between his legs and watch him fold over, letting out a noise like an animal and – finally, as I sob – letting me go.