She was wearing cream silk, very plain, with the watery aquamarines he had given her in her ears and at her throat. Bless her heart, she smiled with unaffected pleasure when she caught sight of him in the doorway. The frustrated temper eased a little. When she made her way over to him he even managed a decent smile.
‘Hi, Carla. You’re looking very glam.’
‘Thank you, Jay. How are you?’
‘Fine. You?’
‘Better every day,’ she told him gaily.
He looked at her searchingly. ‘Is that true?’
Her eyebrows flew up. ‘What’s happened to you, then?’
Jay was confused. ‘What?’
‘You don’t ask uncomfortable questions like that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, for one thing it’s not polite. For another, you don’t want to know the answers.’
He blinked.
Carla smiled, putting an exquisitely manicured hand on his arm. ‘Jay, we were an item for six months. In all that time I told you a lot of comfortable platitudes. You never questioned them once. So what’s with the tell-me-the-truth game?’
He said slowly, ‘I hurt you a lot, didn’t I?’
Carla shook her head, smiling steadily. ‘You’re a fun date and a terrific lay. And you never make promises you can’t keep. I had my six months of fantasy. My friends envy me.’
Jay was shaken. He said to the look in her eyes, ‘I never realised—’
‘I did,’ said Carla, suddenly curt. ‘My risk. My choice. And it was worth it. Don’t you dare be sorry for me.’
The party seethed around them. He said in a rapid under- voice, ‘Can I give you dinner after this? Can we talk?’
‘No.’
He was taken aback.
She looked past his shoulder, the smile firmly in place. ‘I’ve moved on, Jay. From the sound of it, you’re doing the same thing.’
‘What?’
‘Going back is no solution. We may not be too happy at the moment. But we’ll come through that.’
Someone was coming over, going to join them. She took her hand off his arm. The smile she gave him was wide and friendly. And if her eyes were a bit too bright, well, no one but Jay would have noticed. Jay, after all, had looked into her eyes, up close, a thousand times.
He felt like a heel. The worst heel in the world. This woman slept in my arms and I didn’t take care of her.
Carla shook her head at the look in his eyes. ‘The past is great compost, Jay. Leave it to do its work.’
She turned to the new arrival, delighted, made introductions, and then drifted away. He did not see her again.
He had not intended to drink, so he had taken his own car. He sat in it, the top down, savouring the night air, trying to wrestle his thoughts into coherence.
He could not. All he could think of was what he had done to Carla. And, almost worse somehow, how Zoe had looked when she’d walked away from him today.
Is there no end to the damage I do?
He made up his mind.
The roads were nearly empty at this time of night. He had a brief flicker of unease about turning up on her doorstep unannounced. But he did not have a phone number for her. He had never had to call her. He would just have to take a chance that she was in—and willing to open the door to him.
Zoe was doing the week’s ironing. She liked ironing normally. She used it to work out her problems. It was mindless and soothing. Besides, everything ended up looking wonderful and smelling better.
But tonight, for some reason, it wasn’t working. She burned a tee shirt she needn’t have tried to iron. And then the catch on the ironing board didn’t engage properly and when she pressed on a particularly dense bit of quilted jacket the board collapsed. She saved the iron and kicked the jacket clear. But she ended up sitting on the floor with a nasty burn on her arm, where she had not quite fielded the iron fast enough.
She felt very cold and shaky. She recognised it. Shock.
‘Or another petty feminine neurosis,’ she said aloud bitterly.
She had been trying to whip up indignation against Jay all evening. It was surprisingly difficult. The sneaking suspicion that he was right kept flitting across the back of her mind. Well, a bit right. Maybe.
She leaned sideways and pulled out the plug of the iron. Then she set it carefully on its end, in the corner. Her hands were shaking. Shock, definitely. Low-grade but still shock.