Fast Women (30 page)

Jack pulled out a chair for Olivia, and she laughed up at him as she sat. He bent and kissed her on the top of her head, and Suze was torn between pain and rage.

"I'll kill him."

"I'd work out a plan on that one," Riley said. "Unless, of course, you want to go to jail."

Jack went to the bar, and Suze watched Olivia. She wasn't strictly beautiful, but she was young and slender, and Suze felt like a lump. "No wonder."

Riley glanced at her. "What? Olivia? Stop beating yourself up. You're a class act. She's a promiscuous moron."

"Sort of like Jack," Suze said savagely, and Riley laughed.

"Exactly," he said.

Suze felt a little cheered, even as she watched Olivia. "I thought you wanted to fuck me against a wall. That doesn't say class act to me."

He didn't say anything and she turned to see what was wrong. "You make too many assumptions," he told her. "Is he sleeping with her?"

"That assumption you can make."

"Are you positive?"

"Yes."

His voice was sure, and Suze felt sick. He'd seen them, and now she could see them, coupling in her mind's eye, and it was horrible, gross, disgusting, shameful…excruciating.

Riley nodded toward the bar where Jack was standing. "You want to confront him?"

The thought made Suze sicker. "No."

"Then my work is done. I'll take you home."

Jack sat down across from Olivia and raised his glass.

What would he do if he glanced over and saw her? He'd told her once that he always knew when she walked into a room, even if his back was to her, he always knew. The bastard.

"Yes," Suze said. "Take me home."

They were halfway across the bar when she looked back at Jack one more time and caught his eye. He froze for a moment and then put his beer down and headed for them, his face flushed.

"Hold it," she said to Riley, and he looked back and said, "Oh, hell."

"I knew it," Jack said when he was in front of them. "I knew-"

"I hired him," Suze said $qtly, cutting him off. "Just like Abby and Vicki. This guy is going to retire on your lack of morals."

Jack looked past her to Riley, lowering his head a little, so mad he must have forgotten he was there with, somebody else, too. Who the hell does he think be is? Suze thought, and then he took a step toward her, and Riley pushed her out from between them, blocking her from Jack with his shoulder.

"Don't even think about it," he said to Jack, his voice loaded with contempt. "I'll take you apart while they both watch."

"You've been waiting for this," Jack said, sounding as cocky as ever. "Fifteen years I've had her and you've wanted her. You think you're going to get her now?"

"I think now she gets what she wants," Riley said. "I think that's not you anymore. And I think it's about time."

"I want to go home," Suze said to Riley, and Riley turned his back on Jack, putting his hand on the small of her back to push her gently toward the door.

"It's my home, too," Jack said from behind her. "I'll-"

"Not anymore," Suze said. "The dead bolts will be on." She looked past him to Olivia, watching them with her tongue touching her top lip like a little cat, and then she turned toward the door, Riley behind her like a wall, blocking out disaster, steadying her when she stumbled.

When they were outside in the cold, he said, "Are you okay?"

"No," she said. "Take me home."

When he pulled up in front of her house, she got out and was surprised when he did, too. "Go on," he said, giving her a gentle push toward the house. "Not a good time for you to be alone. Call Nell and I'll stay with you until she gets here."

She unlocked the door and let him into the house, trying not to cry, trying to concentrate on her anger. "You probably think I deserve this."

"Did I say that?" Riley said, annoyed. "I did it, too, I did this to Vicki."

"Aren't you in enough pain without beating yourself up?" Riley said, following her into the dining room. "Jack's a lowlife asshole, he's always been a lowlife asshole, and he always will be a lowlife asshole. Blame him."

"How about you?" Suze said, wanting to fight with somebody. "You spied on me in a motel room. You're not exactly on high moral ground yourself."

"I was working. You were the one stripping for somebody else's husband in a rented cheerleader uniform." Riley stared at her china cabinet. "What the hell are those things with feet?"

"I didn't rent it," Suze said. "It was my uniform. I was a senior cheerleader."

Riley exhaled on a sort of sigh. "I don't believe you. Here's a guy in his forties-"

"He was thirty-nine."

"- chasing a high school senior. That didn't strike you as wrong?"

Suze sat down, miserable. "Nothing about him struck me as wrong. He was the most amazing man I'd ever met." Oh, lack.

Riley snorted. "Pederast."

Suze frowned at him, distracted for a moment. "I was eighteen. And weren't you just dating a college junior?"

"Don't change the subject."

"And you're what? Thirty-five?"

"Four," Riley said. "It didn't work out. She was too sophisticated for me."

"Hard to believe." Suze slumped back into her chair. "Give Jack her number. Maybe he'll leave Olivia for her." She felt her throat tighten and swallowed. "You know, I really believed him when he said I was different. When I turned thirty and he didn't leave the way he'd left Abby and Vicki, everybody was amazed, but I wasn't because I knew he loved me." Her eyes got hot and she could hear her voice thicken. "And then he left me anyway." She bit her lip to keep from crying-crying in front of Riley would be just too damn vulnerable, the hell with him-and then she heard him say, "Oh, hell."

"I'm not crying," she said.

"I know I'm going to regret this," Riley said, "but he didn't leave you."

Suze glared up at him through her tears. "He didn't? Well, that's great news. What the hell is he doing with Olivia then?"

"He's making a preemptive strike. He's been faithful for the whole fourteen years he's been married to you. I know because I tried my damnedest to find another woman. There wasn't one. There really isn't one now. He knows you're going to leave him, so he's booking first. It makes him look like a scum, but it doesn't make him look like a middle-aged loser."

Suze surged up from her chair, enraged. "I wasn't going to leave him. I loved him. You don't know-"

"Did he want you to get a job?" Riley said.

"Oh, come on. Sitting on a barstool while you eavesdrop is not a job. It's not even an adventure."

"Did he object?"

"Yes," Suze said, getting madder as Riley got calmer. "So you're saying I should have stayed unemployed-"

"What did you do with your paycheck?" Riley said.

"What difference-"

"You opened a checking account, didn't you? Not a joint account. One just for you."

"I was making a hundred bucks a night," Suze snarled. "I don't think he missed it."

"You got a job without telling him, you opened a checking account without telling him-"

"Women do that every day. It does not constitute desertion."

"Who bought the cups with the feet?" Riley said, pointing toward the china cabinet and Suze saw her twenty-seven little pottery cups running in front of the china, running over the china, the whole cabinet in flight.

"If I was afraid somebody was going to dump me," Riley said, "and she started to collect those things, I think I'd start dropping them."

"He did." Suze swallowed. "He dropped one, but I glued it back together."

"When did you start buying them?" Riley said.

"September." Suze let her shoulders slump, rocking a little on her feet, and then she felt Riley's hand on her back, warm and solid.

"He didn't start seeing Olivia until the end of November," Riley said.

She winced at the name, the pain slicing through her because she wasn't braced for it. "If he wanted to leave, he didn't have to go to her," she said. "You can't tell me that he didn't look at her and notice she was younger and firmer and-"

"No guy would prefer Olivia to you," Riley said, sounding disgusted with her. "Stop wallowing."

Suze ignored him and faced the truth: She'd ended her own marriage, and now she didn't even have Olivia to blame for it. lack. "I hate this." She turned around to face Riley, a little surprised to find that he wasn't standing close. He'd seemed so close. "And it's all my fault."

"No, it isn't," Riley said, exasperated. "You married a guy who was so controlling that normal everyday life threatened him. You quit your job and close the checking account and then what? You going to sit in this dining room for the rest of your life, looking at those blue plates? Because I'm pretty sure you'll have to give up all those cups with feet, too. They creep me out, and I'm not trying to hold on to you."

Give up the cups? "I need Nell," Suze said and burst into tears.

"Hold on." Riley backed up a step. "Just wait a second." She heard him retreat into the kitchen and dial the phone. I traded in the only man I've ever loved for a checking account and a bunch of egg cups, she thought, and then she put her head down on the dining room table and howled.

A few minutes later, when the worst of it was over, she lifted her face and Riley stuck a box of Kleenex under her nose. "Nell's on her way," he told her, sounding as if he couldn't wait.

"Sorry about the crying," she said and took a tissue to blow her nose. "That must have been awful."

"Yes, it was. Don't do that again. Would you like a drink? Or something?"

She sniffed again and tried to smile up at him. He looked trapped and wary. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Riley, I just cried, that's all. My marriage died, I'm allowed to cry."

"Sure you are. Save it for Nell. She'll be here in about half an hour. You sure you don't want a drink? Because I do."

"Why half an hour? It's not that far."

"Gabe was with her at her place. They were fighting over us not telling you and then they…stopped. She's getting dressed."

There, Suze thought as she sniffed again. Nell had found somebody else. She hadn't curled up and died when her marriage ended that Christmas, she'd

"Oh, God," Suze said. Nell had waited two years. It was going to be another two years before she wasn't alone again.

And all Nell had had to get over was that worthless Tim. She was going to have get over Jack. "Oh, God."

"What?" Riley said.

"It's going to be two years before I have sex again," Suze wailed.

"I'll just get those drinks," Riley said and escaped into the kitchen.

Suze sat on the stairs at midnight and patted Marlene while she listened to Nell tell Jack exactly what kind of cheating, disgusting, degenerate weasel he was through the locked door. She'd put the dead bolt on, and she wouldn't let him in, and eventually, he'd given up and gone somewhere else, probably to Olivia.

"Tomorrow you get a lawyer," she told Suze, coming up the stairs to her.

"Tomorrow I have to go to work," Suze said. "I have a teashop to run."

"You can call a lawyer from the teashop," Nell said, and then stood by her the next day while she did.

Suze's days dissolved into a blur of blended teas and Margie's cookies, drinks at the bar as a decoy for Riley, painful discussions with the lawyer, and long talks with Nell, who never got tired of listening, even when Suze kept going back relentlessly to the same themes.

"I'd be ready to kill me," she told Nell on Valentine's Day. "I know I keep saying the same things, but I just can't seem to get unstuck. I know I should file for divorce, the lawyer says it's time, but I just can't seem to-" She broke off. "I'm so sorry."

"You're doing better than I did," Nell said. "I didn't say anything at all for a year and a half. What do you want for dinner?"

They were at Nell's, something that made Suze feel guilty because here was Nell, finally happy with a good man to love her, and there was Suze, planted in the middle, like the toad in the fairy tale, spoiling everybody's good times. "Listen, it's Valentine's Day. I can go home."

"Over my dead body," Nell said. "How about stir-fry? I can do that fast."

"Sure," Suze said and wandered into the living room to pat Marlene again. It was amazing how therapeutic patting a dachshund could be, even one with an attitude as bad as Marlene's. She stopped by Nell's china cabinet and looked at Clarice's dishes. The Secrets houses stood alone on the hill with their lonely smoke plumes and depressed the hell out of her, so she looked at the Stroud cartouches instead, the cheerful little orange-roofed house inside the perfect little squares. For some reason they were worse, that lonely little single house trapped inside the square, everything so tidy, everything so impossible. Maybe that was what she was doing, trying to keep everything tidy, outlined in black. Your husband cheats, so you get rid of him. That was cartouche life, not real life. Real life was messy, complicated by doubts and regret.