One Too Many

by Jade West

  I kept my business engagements clipped and curt, and my gym sessions isolated with earphones blaring my favourite songs. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Them. Couldn’t stop imagining another night pushing her body to her limits. Only this time, unlike all the others, I was imagining him — Brett — being there too.

  I’d have booked myself into a therapist if I thought they’d achieve anything whatsoever with a cynical bastard like me.

  I didn’t even have the kind words of my distant best friend to help ease my discomfort. I’d been the one to delete Polly from social media, but she’d made no move to contact me through other channels.

  I found myself staring at my phone whenever my workload had moments of calm, wondering if she was missing my virtual presence as strongly as I was missing hers.

  I was missing hers.

  She’d be on my mind late at night, just as soon as I’d finished shooting my load over fantasies of Grace Foster’s hungry pink pussy stretched wide. I’d find myself smiling sadly at childhood memories of her laughing at stupid jokes and pulling silly faces. Of scrabbling to finish her homework on the school bus, digging for answers from my nerd brain when hers was lacking.

  Polly Piper had been a constant in a life without basic constants. My only source of stability through my bitter quests of destruction.

  And she was gone.

  Without all doubt, she was gone.

  No calls, texts, or friend requests. No emails to my work address. Nothing but radio silence after telling me she was done.

  That little boy in me who’d hoped for more from our lifetime of closeness hated me enough to keep his distance. He was quiet, weeping in the far shadows where I couldn’t hear his cries. I was glad of it, even if my detachment from life wasn’t holding up as well as it should have.

  I knew his mind well enough to know how he’d interpret Polly’s silence during his fleeting moments of optimism.

  He’d say she was hurt beyond repair by my relentless pursuit of another woman, even if I did mean her no good whatsoever. That her drawing such a concrete line in the sand after all these years was testament to the strength of her emotions for such a fucked-up asshole as me.

  I’d never been an optimist, not in ways it mattered. My belief was in my own talent for wreaking havoc in other people’s lives. In my cold, hard intelligence and my application of strategies to everyday life. In business, in money, in cynical endeavours.

  Not in people. Not in love. Not in the ability of two people to weather the storms that came tumbling in around them, their fingers linked through the chaos tightly enough to stand shoulder to shoulder through it all.

  I didn’t believe in Polly Piper being the woman for me.

  I didn’t believe in Grace Foster being that woman, either — I just believed I’d enjoy my limited time destroying her marriage.

  Maybe it was already done.

  I checked up on Cliff House B&B through the online booking portal and found it functioning as normal. I discovered an advert for a chef position in their local newspaper and laughed to myself at their efforts.

  It would take more than an evening meal restaurant to bridge the gulf I’d left between them, but regardless, if that was indeed their hope for a brighter business future they’d be struggling all the same.

  That same advert was in the job section three weeks running, which can only mean one thing in recruitment.

  Nobody fucking suitable. Not in a hundred mile radius of that backwater backyard.

  It was that observation that piqued my interest enough to look at the state of the venture down the road from them. The budget hotel opening along the coast was bleating loud from their website, as well as having advertisements in the same job section of the newspaper crying out for staff for all roles within the hotel space. Maids, waitresses, bar staff. Cooks and gardeners and someone to maintain a swimming pool.

  Interesting.

  Navigating their online booking portal showed them full to bursting for three months straight after opening, but I’d been in business long enough to know the strength of illusion in corporate appearances.

  I called a contact in my property subsidiary, asking them to do some digging on my behalf in the hotel trade. They reported back their findings that same afternoon after a stint at the golf course nearest the hotel chain head office.

  The bookings were void. Faked to disguise the issues they were experiencing in opening such a small town venture. They’d refunded the initial rush of paying guests and moved them to alternative locations as a gesture of goodwill.

  There would be no hotel opening in March, nor April, either.

  The new date scheduled was mid-June, and even that allegedly had the management contact groaning at how they’d potentially have to pay agency staff to get the place up on its feet.

  I wondered if the Fosters knew about the change in their rival’s opening schedule. If it allowed them to sleep a little more easily at night, despite the more pressing issue of another man coming between them.

  I doubted it.

  They hadn’t done enough research to know about the looming rival in the first place when they went double or bust and invested the entire sum of Brett’s inheritance on the mortgage deposit.

  One hundred and seventy five thousand pounds handed over in its entirety, less than two years after his daddy’s death.

  I hoped he would be turning in his grave at the fuck-up they were making with his hard earned cash, realising in the afterlife just how much of a bull-headed loser his precious boy was after all.

  Brett was worth nothing. A failure with a face that fit, hurtling through life on the back of an unfounded ego.

  Soon he’d fall, and I’d be waiting, just as I had been for years.

  Smiling.

  Laughing.

  Bathing myself in delight after years of hate and spite.

  But not today. Today I’d be shutting down another cruddy little family business and swallowing up their life’s work with my gnashing corporate jaws.

  Today I’d be Thomas Heath Global, master of his whole sorry fucking universe.

  And today, most importantly of all, I’d be the man who waited. Patiently.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Brett

  I buried those toys deep in the dresser for the time being, fuck Heath and his stupid props. The days were easier than the nights, but we did alright, slipping back into the same routines we’d been in before he ever landed in our space. We were patching up a wound with a useless excuse for a bandage, throwing ourselves into making the hotel the place to be for our straggling guests and dreaming up plans for the future, but it was the best we knew.

  Maybe we’d have got somewhere if a chef of any actual calibre had shown up for an interview. Grace remained smiling through the whole sorry process, shrugging off yet another fast food chicken applicant as a temporary blip in our recruitment plans.

  “They’ve got to be out there,” she told me, even as her shoulders sagged at his exit. “We just need to find them.”

  I nodded my agreement, wishing I shared even a scrap of her forced optimism.

  “Maybe we should try a newspaper further afield to run the advert?” she asked. “I mean it’s commutable, for the right person. Maybe we should even advertise in the city and offer accommodation as part of the salary package?”

  It was there that I drew the line. No random asshole was moving into our tense little chicken coop alongside us. No brooding city chef with an ego to match his superior palate, waltzing in to shove the cat amongst the pigeons when we were struggling to keep our shit together as it was.

  She rolled her eyes as I grunted my aversion to having a member of staff under our roof.

  “It’s standard, Brett. We work in hospitality. Loads of hotels have live-in staff.”

  “Not this one,” I argued. “No fucking way.”

  She’d folded her arms as I hoisted boxes of breakfast su
pplies up on our kitchen shelves, leaning her hip against the worktop as her eyes scorched my every move.

  “Maybe she’ll be a girl chef,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be you I’ll have to be mindful of the next time someone enigmatic walks through the door.”

  “It isn’t me you’ll have to be worried about,” I snapped. “My come face is my fucking come face. Don’t expect you’ll find me morphing into some kind of fucking porn star in some other woman’s pussy.”

  Her lip trembled before she bit it, and I cursed myself under my breath.

  “Jesus, Grace, I’m sorry,” I said, realising how often I had to say it these days. “I’m just feeling the fucking pressure, that’s all.”

  It was true as well. I was feeling the pressure. Not of cash nowadays with Thomas Heath’s dirty reward safely stacked up in our bank account, but the rest of it. The new hotel opening down the road. The prospect of never being as good with my wife as that sack of shit was that night. The thought that we’d trashed a decade of closeness by letting a slimy cunt like him come between us and leave his mark.

  It was an ugly mark. Slippery when wet and hard to pick up and cast away, blooming its disgusting pock-filled face in bed at night, goading from the side-lines as we attempted to find the same old groove we gelled in before.

  We were having sex every night when the bar closed as standard, throwing ourselves into each other’s arms as if a token bump and grind could recapture the magic. I would have believed it if I hadn’t been burned by the full potential of Grace losing her mind for the right man.

  For the first time in forever I was plagued by the notion that I wasn’t the right man.

  I was also plagued by the never-ending desire to jerk myself off at the thought of her with Thomas Heath’s smug cunt fingers stretching her wide. It wasn’t a guilty pleasure, it was a revolting one, but it was an addiction I couldn’t shake off for the life of me. My early morning wood would throb at the memory of seeing her bucking on his dick, but over the weeks it switched from a memory into a full-blown fantasy.

  No red line. No stupid rules from Heath’s cunt of a mouth.

  Just us, and her — two men competing to drive her wild, only this time I’d come out on top. I’d learn from his deviant ways and forge a path of my own, pushing her further with me alongside him than he ever could alone.

  Taunts of two in one were the sure-fire way to get her whimpering over these past weeks — the only real taste of her newly revealed inner slut I’d seen a glimpse of since his departure.

  She wanted it.

  I wanted it.

  But there was no way I’d fucking suggest it for real. Not now.

  It was in bed that night after the chef argument that she flopped down beside me after riding hard on top. She caught her breath and stared at the ceiling, uncharacteristically quiet as we let our exertion settle.

  “You think about it, don’t you?” she said. “About me and him.”

  “I wish I could stop fucking thinking about it,” I replied. “I wish we’d never done it in the first place.”

  “You’re not alone in that,” she told me, and her voice was stretched thin with pain. “Fuck the fifty grand, it was never worth it.”

  It brought a smirk to my face to rival his, remembering loud and clear how the sack of shit had goaded us with the same hard truth before we’d gone through with the dirty deed. Cunt.

  I wondered if he was thinking about us, far away in his swanky London pad. Maybe he was onto his tenth married couple since us by now, barely even remembering our names.

  But I knew that was bullshit as soon as I thought it.

  I still didn’t know how he knew us, either of us. I’d done some more digging online and found nothing other than that mutual friend from Grace’s sister’s school year. I didn’t even know the girl myself.

  It was a mystery, but one that was still bugging me weeks later. I imagined it was bugging my beautiful wife just as bad.

  “He’d have offered us more,” I said to her. “Whatever it would have taken to get your knickers off in front of me.”

  She scoffed at the suggestion, and I knew in her head she was weighing up his cash investment against her worth and finding herself lacking. That was another load of utter bullshit about this whole shit storm — that she didn’t think she’d earned the money.

  “I mean it,” I told her. “He’d have given us whatever it took. He wasn’t some random seeking out a few days of quiet on the coast. He was after us. Specifically us.”

  She didn’t argue with that, wrapping her legs in mine as she snuggled into me. I put my hand on hers and squeezed, solid in sentiment if not in the finer daily details.

  “But why? What did we ever do to him to bring him calling?” she asked after a pause.

  “Good question,” I said.

  But was it a good question? Was it even worth thinking about?

  “We should sleep,” she commented as if dismissing my unspoken query, and then she sighed. “Sarah wants to head down with the kids next week, just for the one night. Maybe I could ask her about Polly Piper. She might know something.”

  My gut lurched at the thought of digging into a sandbox full of shit, but our ostrich stance was getting us nowhere. Nowhere good.

  “She’ll think you’re crazy, asking after some random guy from London and some girl she knew from high school.”

  “I am crazy,” she whispered. “We’re both crazy, and he’s the guy who’s driving us mad.”

  I didn’t have anything useful to add to that reasoning, so I didn’t.

  Maybe Grace’s sister would be able to shine a light on the slick city dickhead. And if not, at least Grace could get some of the bullshit off her chest by trying.

  Hell knows, we needed all the relief we could get.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Grace

  I greeted my sister with open arms and a screeching heart as her car pulled into the car park, needing the sibling companionship right then like I needed air. I hugged her tight enough as she stepped out of the driver’s seat that she made a joke of it, patting my back like I’d lost my mind as her girls ran on to Brett and told him how many sandcastles they were going to build.

  “Are you alright, sis?” she asked, pulling away with a smile like mine and quizzing me with eyes that knew all too well how to read my secrets.

  I hoped she wouldn’t manage it this time.

  “I’m alright,” I told Sarah and she raised an eyebrow.

  “We need some sisterly one on one time, I think,” she said. “And maybe a nice chilled bottle of white.”

  I laughed, nodding like a lunatic as I slung an arm around her shoulder and grabbed one of her overnight cases with the other. “Wine and time sound divine.”

  Brett had already set the girls up with lemonades and neon straws when we dropped the cases in the bar and took a seat on stools right next to them. Their happy chatter was a blissful relief, exactly the tension reliever we needed. I could see it beaming in Brett’s eyes just as bright as I felt it in mine.

  Family. There was nothing like it.

  We could do well to remember that when the spikes started prickling from the shadows.

  Sarah was just a bit younger than me, an accident of our parents by all accounts, but the best possible one. Her hair hung in waves like mine, her eyes a bit darker but twinkling with the same little glint of life mine did when I was on form.

  I knew she’d have a million questions I’d avoided by phone. Questions about our hotel neighbour dilemma and how the hell we got our hands on enough cash to pay her back in one lump sum.

  I’d been contemplating how much to tell her, but as she took a sip of her own lemonade through a neon straw to match the girls, I knew it was a redundant line of thought.

  She’d know everything by the time she left in the morning, maybe bar the grosser details of the filth our deviant guest had put me through.

  “How’s Doug?” Brett asked as he grabbed himself a bottl
ed water from the fridge. “Off on some techy course somewhere?”

  Sarah nodded. “Tech and male bonding, I think. All the guys from his office have gone.”

  I liked Doug, we both did. He was stable and kind and everything you’d ever want in a brother-in-law with two young kids and a mortgage to take care of.

  “Dad said he’d come next time and build a sand dragon,” Amy chirped up from two stools along.

  “Oh yeah?” Brett asked. “Well in that case maybe we’ll have to build a sand dragon in the meantime, set a high bar for your dad’s sand sculpting skills to live up to. He likes a challenge.”

  I laughed at the girls’ frantic nodding, falling in love with my husband all over again in that one beautiful heartbeat.

  We weren’t dead. Not even close. He was still everything to me, just as I knew I was everything to him when he smiled right back at me.

  This was just… a rough day at sea. Maybe a rough few weeks of it. The clouds would clear and the water would calm and we’d be right back on deck enjoying the sunshine, we just needed to believe it.

  I did believe it, with all my heart. It was just sometimes the grey of the storm seemed too threatening to pass by and leave us unscathed.

  Sarah must have caught the look passing between us, letting out a happy sigh as she shook her head.

  “You guys. Always so in love. Just wait til you’ve got kids to steal all your time from the lovey dovey stuff.”

  “Ewww,” the girls groaned, whispering how gross lovey dovey stuff was.

  They were growing up, too fast. Eight and six on their last birthdays, proper little girls now, even though they fancied themselves more like teens.

  Being around them transported me back to a forgotten world of our own, kids living life in a small town like it was the whole universe and we were orbiting planets colliding in school-yard chaos. Always so much school-yard chaos.

  Polly Piper came to my mind in a flash. I couldn’t ask Sarah about her, not with Brett and the girls in earshot, so I choked it back for later, focusing instead on the cool-uncle grin my husband had always been a natural with.