The Dating Game

by Avril Tremayne

  There was a momentary hesitation, like a half-sound of nothing, from Lane’s end. And then, ‘Erica says she’s been having trouble getting through to you on your mobile,’ Lane said, ‘so I thought …’ That sound again. Tentative. Perhaps a hint of … of distress? ‘I thought I’d call you at work. I hope it’s okay, to do that. I mean, I know it’s not—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Lane,’ Sarah cut her off, because they never fenced around each other like this and it was excruciating, ‘we’re not all OCD about taking personal calls at work.’ Oh God, that was horrible. Just a horrible, jeering thing to say. Tone it down. ‘But … yes, my mobile’s been playing up.’ She felt the heat of a full-scale blush race into her face at the untruth. ‘I’ve been super busy but I’ll call Erica when I get a minute now I know she’s been trying to reach me.’ Liar. Coward. Deceiver. ‘But I’m still super busy, so—’

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ Lane, promised. ‘I just wanted to thank you for the introduction to Felix that night at the art gallery. The conference in Beijing has come through. I’m on the panel, and I’ll be flying over there two weeks from today, so … so thank you. I … I hope I’ll see you before I leave. Maybe we could—’

  ‘I’m glad it all worked out,’ Sarah said, cutting her off because she did not want to be making plans to see Lane. She knew she should have left it at that, rung off and got back to work, but something, something bad inside her, made her add, ‘So have you got a ride to the airport sorted out?’

  ‘A ride? It’s not for two weeks. Or … or are you offering …? No, of course you’re not, are you, you can’t dr—’

  ‘I mean you’re still under contract to Adam right, so are you expecting him to take you? Or are you going to ask David Bennett?’

  Sarah heard the breath Lane drew in, and that was a first because Lane’s calm-down breaths were always silent; the fact that this one wasn’t told a terrible story. ‘Sarah,’ she said then, oh-so-calm but she wasn’t fooling Sarah, ‘I don’t really understand what happened that night at the gallery, but I promise you—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Sarah said. She covered the mouthpiece then had a faux conversation with the air around her about a new business pitch loud enough for it to filter through her hand to Lane, and she didn’t care that everyone in the office was looking at her as though she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had lost her mind. Or was in the process of waving it goodbye at least. After one minute and three seconds of throwing around phrases like ‘target audience’, ‘publicity opportunity’ and ‘launch strategy’, she uncovered the mouthpiece, said, ‘Sorry, Lane, gotta go, late for a meeting,’ and slammed the phone down.

  Sarah spent the next five minutes reading a document on her desk without taking in one word, then got up, went to the bathroom, locked herself in a cubicle, and burst into tears. Talk about delayed reaction. It had just been so unexpected, that phone call. She hadn’t been prepared for it after three weeks of living in her David Bennett bubble. And she’d handled it so badly. She’d hung up on one of her best friends. Was this the end of their friendship? It felt like it, it really did.

  I don’t really understand what happened that night at the gallery …

  Well Sarah knew.

  She’d stormed off in a temper because Lane had chosen David over Adam, even though Lane had always said David was the end game and Adam was the practice guy—no subterfuge about any of it; and then Sarah had done a deal with David herself with plenty of subterfuge about it; and now the guilt was crushing the life out of her.

  It had been bad enough when it was just the painting involved, but she’d had to go and compound her guilt by having sex with the guy—a blatant betrayal of the girl code and the sister code! Her friend’s crush, her brother’s enemy, and she’d taken him for herself for no better reason than that she’d wanted him so much. And she had no idea what David thought about what they’d done but the way he’d kicked her blind didn’t suggest a repeat performance was likely, and it was all so overwhelming, and she had nobody to ask for advice about it because her mother wasn’t here and her brother would be furious and her friends would never speak to her again if they knew the truth, and she missed them all so much, and she hated herself, and no wonder she was bawling her eyes out. For herself, for Lane, for Adam, for her lost friendships and for a man who only did one-night stands and would never want her again. And she could not stop crying.

  A thousand years later—that’s what it felt like—she came out of the cubicle with no answers but an aching head, feeling brittle enough to break in two if anyone said a cross word to her. She checked herself in the mirror over the sink and saw that she was bypassing sociopath on the way to full psychopath, and although she did her best to effect a repair of her ravaged face, she knew she wasn’t really in a Frisk & Frolic mood.

  Which she proved very ably that afternoon by telling an important aviation client that their safety record was abysmal and no PR stunt would salvage it. When the client called Sarah’s boss directly afterwards to sack them, her boss had told her not to sweat it, despite Frisk & Frolic having bent over backwards to get that client on the books—and Sarah’s misery was complete.

  Sarah prided herself on the fact that however disastrous her dating life, she had always, always been on top of her game at work—and now, for the first time ever, her tough-as-nails boss was treating her with kid gloves. She was an object of pity, a person others made cups of tea for and patted on the shoulder and told not to worry, all would look better in the morning. It was excruciating. Unbearable, agonizing, mortifying.

  Especially since things didn’t look better in the morning.

  After another sleepless night they actually looked worse. She knew that breezing into David’s apartment at 8:00 p.m. as though nothing had happened on Saturday night was beyond her meagre acting abilities.

  In fact, she didn’t really want to breeze in as though nothing had happened, even though she was very sure that would be what David expected. Because something had happened. Something that had been important enough to her that she’d betrayed her friend and her brother. Something that would have been wonderful if David hadn’t stomped out looking like grim death. Something momentous enough to make him look like that. What had it meant to him? What did she mean to him?

  Surely such questions were worth exploring, worth discussing, worth confronting. She had no idea what the outcome of such a discussion would be; she only knew she had to have an outcome. Even if that outcome was that David never wanted to see her again after tonight.

  Okay, maybe she didn’t need precisely that outcome, because the thought of never seeing David again made her want to vomit. Or die. Or vomit and die. But she was as certain as she could be that if they didn’t talk about it, in three weeks’ time, she and David would go their separate ways and never see each other again anyway, and all she would have done was delay the whole vomiting/dying thing. If she were going to vomit and die anyway, she might as well get it over and done with fast.

  But as she was giving herself a pep talk on her way to work—complete with lame assurances that should everything go belly up with David, at least she could take the first steps towards putting her fractured relationships with Lane and Erica back together—Adam called her with a double whammy of bad news that changed everything: Lane’s mother had died, and in all the follow-on stress he’d confessed all to Lane and Lane not only had not forgiven him—or Sarah!—for the deception they’d perpetrated on her, but she’d dispensed with Adam’s services as well (AKA dumped him—and there was nothing of the ‘conscious uncoupling’ about it).

  Adam didn’t have time to talk it through—he was too frantic with worry over Lane—but he wanted Sarah to know so that if Lane called her, she could tell Lane he was trying to get hold of her and to please pick up her phone, answer the door, see him.

  Before Sarah’s head had stopped spinning, Erica called—and this time, Sarah didn’t even think of not picking up.

  ‘Have yo
u heard?’ Erica asked without preamble.

  ‘Adam just called me. Is she okay?’

  ‘No she’s not fucking okay.’

  ‘Her mother—’

  ‘Yes, and Lane has no one to help her through it because I’m in Hong bloody Kong.’

  ‘I’ll go and see her.’

  ‘She won’t let you in, Sarah. I’m not even sure she’ll let me in when I get back. Don’t you get it? She knows. She thinks we’ve all been laughing at her behind her back, like the time DeWayne Callaghan posted that crap about her sexual performance on Facebook. Only this is worse, she says, because her friends did it to her. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck. I told Adam never to let her find out, but he had to go and unburden himself, and now I can’t fly back for two days and she’s on her own.’

  ‘Her brother—’

  ‘Brad is an absolute mess. I’ve already tried him. She’ll be the one supporting him, not the other way round. God, we’ll all be supporting him soon enough, I can see it already.’

  ‘I—I’ll call her, then. And Brad, too. Try, at least.’

  ‘Yes, all right, try. Brad might pick up; I doubt Lane will, though. But Sarah, whoever you get, whatever happens, do me a favour and don’t make things worse.’

  Sarah’s heart was racing. ‘How could I make it worse?’

  Slight pause. ‘Okay, listen to me. Adam’s offloaded one lot of guilt onto her, at the worst possible time. If you end up offloading your own conscience onto her too just now, I’ll kill you.’

  Sarah’s legs went to water. ‘You know.’

  ‘Of course I bloody know. Come on, that name! Lucas Green? Way too MI5 for a real person. And then of course, there were the dimples.’

  ‘The dimples! I told him you’d guessed!’

  ‘I did an internet search afterwards to be sure, and there he was on the bank’s website in all his gorgeous glory. I’ve been wondering ever since why all the secrecy about a simple painting, and I think I know the answer to that too. But at this point, Sarah, I do not give a flying fuck about what you’ve been up to, because the other thing I know, and I know it absolutely, is that Lane is in love with your brother, not David Bennett. Lane wants only Adam, and she is going to get only Adam if I have to gift-wrap him and send him by courier. So let’s concentrate on salvaging that relationship as a first step, and everything else, including Mr Bennett, might fall into place if we’re all very lucky.’

  ‘And if we can’t salvage it?’

  ‘We have to. You have to.’

  ‘Me?’

  You started all this by serving up Adam on a platter for her. It’s now up to you find a way to make the meal palatable. I’m counting on you to come up with one of your world-famous convoluted-as-fuck crazy plans.’

  ‘But I—I don’t know what to suggest!’

  ‘You’ll think of something. I have to go, but don’t let me down on this, Sarah. Do—not—let—me—down.’

  Sarah wished she could go off to the bathroom for another cry after Erica’s call, but she couldn’t afford the luxury. She had a lot to make up for, a lot to think about. All day, various plans formed in her head only to be rejected. Little by little, piece by swirling piece, the right elements started to materialize … only to dematerialize.

  It wasn’t until she reached SydneyScape Apartments that she realized why the plan wouldn’t take a definitive shape: she’d been trying to fit five pieces into the puzzle when there was room for only four. The main puzzle piece was Lane. And Lane was sandwiched between two other pieces—David, as the man she’d wanted all the way through this drama, and Adam, the man she’d hired to help her reel David in. The last piece of the puzzle was sex. Sex was the catalyst for this situation—since it had been a disastrous sexual experience with DeWayne Callaghan that had set Lane on the path to improving her prowess in the first place—and the reward, which was always meant to be sex with David—and the means to an end, which was three months of sex with Adam.

  Sarah’s problem was that she’d been trying to slot herself into the puzzle too, when the reality was it was complete without her. She was the fitter-together of the pieces—nothing more than that. And the moment she arrived at that conclusion, she knew exactly what she had to do.

  But realization was one thing; acceptance quite another—so she was feeling emotionally fragile by the time she exited the elevator on David’s floor.

  When she was confronted by the sight of David waiting for her at his open door as usual, looking elegantly, imperturbably, chronically bored, his casual ease underscored by the glass of wine in his hand, she had to force her feet to keep moving forward. She knew David was well-versed in the art of interacting with females after taking them to bed and it therefore must be second nature to him to be blasé when coming face to face with someone he’d had sex with four nights ago, but the stark contrast between his indifference and her own four-day state of unrelieved chaos was like a slap in the face.

  Almost gagging on a repressed banshee-like scream, she walked into the apartment. She would have liked to have tossed David an unconcerned smile as she passed him, for the sake of her pride, but that was a step beyond her.

  ‘I left the sweater in the spare room, so change in there,’ he said, and his voice was as disinterested as she’d ever heard it.

  As far as post-sexual-apocalypse ice-breakers went, it was revealing. Last week, she’d been in David’s room. This week she was in the spare room. Margaret’s room. The room for women David liked, but in whom he had no sexual interest. Rebel, the only woman he’d ever loved, would never have been relegated to the spare anything.

  ‘I’m going to need wine,’ she told him.

  ‘Already waiting for you in the studio.’

  ‘A bottle, not a glass.’

  ‘Okay, a bottle.’

  ‘Maybe a cask.’

  And David laughed.

  Laughed!

  It was the proof she needed that Saturday night was nothing but history to him. If he could laugh like that the very next time he saw her after that experience, there really was nothing to discuss. All that was between her and David was a painting, and now—more than ever—Lane and Adam. And if she vomited and died in David’s apartment, leaving him to deal with her lifeless corpse on a Wednesday night, he had only himself to blame.

  ***

  As soon as Sarah was out of the room, David stopped fake-laughing and drank his whole glass of wine down in one go. And it was Henschke Hill of Grace Shiraz—a wine that didn’t deserve such cavalier treatment.

  He’d been so sure that acting as though nothing had happened between them was the right approach. But the moment he’d seen Sarah walking towards him, pale, anxious, and looking like she’d keel over at any moment, he’d wanted to hug her, and kiss her, and tell her everything was all right. He couldn’t, though, because everything was not all right. Everything was a bloody mess.

  And because the mess was his fault, the onus was on him to fix it, to get them back to where they’d been before he’d moved the goal posts on Saturday night.

  The burning question was how he was going to do that, when the thought of listening to her wax lyrical about her dates with other guys made him want to punch the wall. For all he knew, she could have been out with three different guys since Saturday night. For all he knew, she might have had sex with all three of them, too.

  Oh God, he needed another glass of wine.

  He was just raising his refilled glass to his lips when Sarah came into the studio. The sight of her in his sweater shook him, in a worse way than it had last week. Probably because he’d spent the past four days repeatedly fondling it, visualizing her in it, needing to see her in it, wanting her in it, even sniffing it once—all right, twice— in a moment of abject weakness.

  Maybe he should have kept her in the red dress after all. Or maybe he would have actually slept with that, which would have been worse.

  ‘The paintings in the spare room,’ she s
aid, as he gulped a mouthful of wine. ‘You changed them. Or added to them, at least. I saw Margaret’s portrait in there, and the two from your bedroom. The landscapes, the ones you painted.’ Her eyes went to the corner where the painting of Margaret, the paintings of Rebel, had been stacked last week. There was nothing there.

  ‘That’s right,’ David said cautiously, and waited on tenterhooks for her to ask about the Rebel paintings. Could he lie, say he’d thrown them out? Maybe, if he could control those two giveaway blinks of his, the ones he’d never had a clue about until Sarah had pointed them out.

  But it seemed that no lie, no explanation, would be required, because Sarah didn’t ask about the paintings. And contrarily, that irritated the hell out of him. Why didn’t she ask? She asked about every other damn thing under the sun all the damn time. She’d examined those paintings so carefully last week. What had changed? Why was she no longer interested?

  She motioned to the chaise longue. ‘So, I guess …’ She headed over there, sat, and took up the pose he’d had her in last week. ‘Like this, right?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t working,’ David said, just because he could, dammit. ‘Try—um—lifting one foot onto the chaise and … and hugging your knee.’

  She did as she was told. ‘Is this okay?’

  ‘No,’ he said, because not only had he gotten a fleeting glimpse of lilac polka dotted panties when she moved, but a good length of thigh was now exposed, too.

  ‘Wrong leg?’ she asked, changing without waiting for his confirmation, and giving him another flash of the polka dots between her legs. ‘How’s this?’

  He made some weird, strangled ‘Ergh’ sound.

  ‘No?’ she said. ‘Just as well, because it’s not comfortable and I don’t think I’ll be able to hold that position for long. Let me try something else.’

  He watched as she shifted on the couch. Legs open (Help me, God). Legs closed (Thank you). Open (Arrggh). Closed (Ahhh). Open (I’m going to have a fucking stroke).