so I married her, I “reinvented myself” and now here I am. And here you are.’
As he spoke she felt the ghosts of his past swirl around. She saw him look at her, really look at her. He wasn’t looking at her like a boss, he was looking at her like a man.
‘Here we are indeed,’ she said, and she glanced around with a nervousness that she wasn’t sure was real.
‘So, you see, I’ve bought the T-shirt with the whole marriage crap. It doesn’t really do it for me now that I’ve grown up. No offence,’ he said.
‘None taken. For the record, I may work at one end of the marriage production line, but I’m well aware of how it can end up.’
‘Things didn’t work out for you either, did they?’
She flushed. She hated bringing all that up again. Not here, not now.
‘Things worked out,’ she said, but she couldn’t meet his eye.
‘Still hurts, huh? You’re not alone. Men can tend to have the upper hand in relationships. Things seem a bit less complicated for us.’
‘That’s just an excuse for dishonourable people to act in a dishonourable way,’ she said, and there was the bitterness in her voice, still there because she really didn’t buy the argument that men were different from women. There were people who were good and there were people who weren’t. There were good men in the world, like her father. The trouble was, they all appeared to be taken…
‘OK. I hear you. But relationships come in many forms. I’m not saying it’s OK to lie, but if everyone is clear about the boundaries, who are you to judge?’
‘Not everyone is as clear about the boundaries as you think they are,’ she said.
Nikos looked at her with understanding painted in his eyes.
‘That Tim guy,’ he said, quietly. ‘What did he do to you?’
She’d told no one apart from her mother the facts of that night, but somehow the whole story had made it around town before she’d even taken her ring off and flushed it down the toilet.
‘It’s no secret. We were going out for four years, engaged for two and he left me five weeks before we were due to get married.’
He nodded. He reached over and squeezed her hand, but she drew it back again quickly. ‘I’m sorry, but people split up, all the time. It happens. Better that it happened before you got married than after.’
‘I know that. And believe me, I thank my lucky stars every day now. But it was how he did it. We were out for dinner. He ordered fillet steak, medium rare—he even said that—and then he just excused himself to go to the bathroom and never came back.’
She’d sipped her gin and tonic, watching the light dance off the self-same engagement ring, and feeling so proud and pleased that she would soon have a golden band there beside it. And she’d sipped some more as she’d waited on Tim, and then some more until she’d finished her drink. And then she’d realised, he was away too long. Far too long.
The shame, the humiliation. How long she had sat there, calling for help. ‘My fiancé is stuck in the toilet…something must have happened to him. Please call the police…he’s been abducted…’
All the silly nonsense she’d convinced herself was true until, gently but firmly, the police officer had told her he had driven away in his own car—and had shown it to her there on the CCTV.
‘That’s pretty tough. You mean you didn’t actually split up—he just split? Was there someone else?’
Nikos poured a little more wine, the gentle slosh of liquid in the glass a mesmeric accompaniment to his words.
‘I think so. I heard he went abroad, met someone else, a woman with children of her own. He’s only been back in the country a few months.’
She wasn’t going to tell him about the email he’d finally sent a month later. Saying it was all her fault, that she wouldn’t listen. She’d driven him away.
‘Rubbish,’ her mother had said.
‘I’ll kill him if I get my hands on him,’ her father had said.
‘And yet you’re “pure as the driven snow”. Wasn’t that what he called you?’
So he’d heard that. She wondered what else he’d heard. She swallowed and looked away.
‘I might not have had the same experiences as some other people.’
‘Experiences?’ he asked. ‘What kind of experiences are we talking about?’
How could he lace a simple word with such meaning? The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, a shiver ran through her and she forced herself to stare at her wine glass. She was hardly going to tell him about her sexual experiences, or lack of.
‘I don’t really care for the things other people care for.’
He watched her as he poured her another glass of wine. His eyes sparkled wickedly in the candlelight. He was as intoxicating as the wine. One more lingering stare and she’d be drunk. She reached for the water.
‘You’ve been a good girl your whole life long.’
And look where it’s got me, she thought, but sipped her water, said nothing. Being good was the only way she knew how to be. She didn’t ask for it to be this way; she simply couldn’t imagine any other way.
Her teenaged years with Tim had been innocent. They’d had their fun, but she’d been told by her mum and Nonna what wearing white meant. It had been drummed into her, like her date of birth, her address, her vital statistics.
All she’d wanted was to wait until they were married. What was so wrong with that? Why couldn’t Tim do the same?
‘Have you ever stepped onto the dark side, Jacquelyn?’
She swallowed, looked at him hard.
‘I’ve never been tempted,’ she said.
He smiled then and all over his face was temptation. In every hard line of his jaw, every brooding inch of his eyes, in the devilish swirl of his tattoo, she could see now, clearly, the other side of Nikos Karellis. The profit-driven retail mogul was gone and in his place was the Sydney Hell’s Angel, and there was nothing remotely gentlemanly about him.
No more polite tolerance, no more board-meeting manners, now she was picking up something else entirely. Now he was seeing her as a woman, and nothing else.
Her heart thundered in her ears. Her body was swirling, she felt drunk, out of control, exhilarated, afraid.
‘Never been tempted?’
He pushed away his plate and sat back, one hand resting on the white linen cloth. She shook her head. Things were shifting, the ground moving from under her, the world reforming into another place entirely. She was suddenly conscious of her legs, bare, her arms resting on the chair, her spine erect, the bodice of her dress
