About Last Night (25 page)

She’d had bad dreams every night, and she’d hardly slept. She’d spent her days wandering through the museums of Florence, Nuremberg, Madrid. Mom had tried several times to get her to come back and live with her, and sometimes she would for a while, but it never worked. She’d been toxic.

Placing her hands over Nev’s, she pressed his fingers into the side of her stomach where dozens of lines interlaced and twined together toward her navel. Number four. “This one’s supposed to be a labyrinth. Because I was so lost, for such a long time.”

She looked at their hands. Looked at her dirty pink ballet flats, delicate shoes never meant to be actually worn anywhere. Looked up for a bus, hoping for an escape before she had to say the rest. The cavalry didn’t come. She pushed Nev’s hands off her and turned around.

Whatever that expression was in his eyes, it wasn’t love. It was something new. Something sick and disappointed she’d conjured up.

“My mom tried to call me to tell me she had cancer, but I didn’t call her back. I hardly
ever called her back. By the time I found out about the chemotherapy, she’d already lost her hair. She was dying, and I wasn’t grown up enough to answer the fucking phone. I moved back here and took care of her. I was determined to prove to her I could do one thing right, and I hoped … I think I hoped if I pulled myself together she wouldn’t really die. Like maybe it was just a test, you know?”

He didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t a test. She died. It was slow and painful and completely unfair, and I was no comfort to her whatsoever. A week after the funeral, I got the tattoos. Then I got a job at a yarn shop, and later at the V and A. I got a life. I pulled my act together. It’s been two years. I’m broke, on the verge of being unemployed, and I just spent the weekend lying to a bunch of strangers because you asked me to.”

She paused, wondering if he deserved to be knifed after all that shit she’d just dumped on him. Probably not. Probably he didn’t deserve any of this. He was a banker. He was City. Just because he’d disappointed her—just because she loved Nev better—didn’t mean she got to punish him for being who he was.

She heard shifting behind her, and Nev’s eyes skated over her shoulder to where the bus had to be approaching.

Cath pulled her shirt over her head and wrestled her arms into the sleeves.

He didn’t deserve it, but she knifed him anyway. “I honestly thought you were the best person I’ve ever met. Which just goes to show you my judgment is as shoddy as ever.”

“Don’t do this,” he said.

“I have to. It’s what I do.”

When the bus pulled up to the curb, she got on it.

Chapter Eighteen

Cath nearly walked in front of a cab. She stepped off the curb after glancing to the left, having forgotten the traffic came from the other direction in this godforsaken country. The unlicensed taxi had to swerve, and the driver leaned on his horn in anger.

She blinked, slow and stupid, and took a step back. Her body felt as if she were controlling it remotely and the signal was poor. Heartbreak had made her a zombie.

Normally, she was good at this. She made her mistakes, and then she drew a line to separate the past from the present and walked away. If she felt pain, it was faint and empathetic, as if it were someone else’s. The pain of Past Cath. The Ghost of Christmas Cath.

Maybe she’d fallen out of practice, or maybe it was because she’d fallen in love this time, but this pain, this Nev pain, was a mangling, keening, unmanageable beast. It lived in her chest and her skin, in all her nerve endings and the space behind her eyes, at the nape of her neck and in the balls of her feet. Everything screaming out, telling her to fix it quick, because she couldn’t possibly be expected to carry on like this.

But she would. The control center in her skull said she’d get better eventually. It promised a broken heart couldn’t kill her. She would get used to it, as hard-core monks must once have gotten used to their hair shirts and their daily flagellations.

All night long, her brain had picked over the corpse of her relationship with Nev. She’d lain awake, thinking about the New Cath Reform Project, about her life and her work and what the future would hold. Her brain had plans. If only it could keep her body from throwing itself in front of moving vehicles.

She put one foot in front of the other and shambled gracelessly into the office, where she found Judith sorting through dozens of pairs of knitted socks and stockings on the table.

“I thought you weren’t coming in today.”

“I wasn’t.” Cath dumped her purse on the floor and surveyed the limp, lifeless hosiery. Judith planned to include a feature on socks in the exhibit, but she’d struggled to come up with a way to make them interesting. The subject of hand-knit socks made the eyes of all but the most devoted knitters glaze right over.

“I thought you were in the countryside with Banker Ken.”

“I was.”

In order to avoid thinking about Nev, Cath put on a pair of gloves and picked up one of a pair of kilt hose. Knit in the traditional cream wool, the stocking was absurdly long and nearly as big around as her waist at the top. It must have been made for a very tall, very brawny Highlander. She wondered if the dolt had known that whoever knit him these socks loved his hairy kilted ass. No woman would make dressy kilt hose for a man she didn’t love. There were tens of thousands of stitches in the damn things.

But even love had its variations. Had the artist spent the eternity of rounds counting all the ways she adored him, or had she resented the waste, knowing he’d only sweat in her masterpiece and wear through the heels in no time flat?

God, even kilt hose depressed her.

Judith gave her an inscrutable look. “I got a strange phone call this morning from Christopher.”

“Oh?” She tried to sound as though she cared, but her voice had all the verve of a funeral director’s. She was going to have to get better at faking things if she planned to survive this breakup.

“Richard Chamberlain called him at home last night and said he’d be making a hundred-thousand-pound donation to our exhibit. Any chance you had something to do with that?”

She crushed the stocking in her hand, suddenly nauseated. Richard had called last night? But that was long after she’d left, long after he’d learned who she really was. Why would he do that?

Maybe he’d done it out of duty. He’d felt honor-bound to make the donation despite his
disappointment in her, so he’d gotten it over with as quickly as possible. The thought upset her so much, a helpless, mewling cry escaped her throat, and she covered her mouth with her hand, breathing in the smell of musty wool.

“You can’t take the money,” she said through the stocking. “I’m sorry, but it’s all a big mistake.”

Judith gave her a long look, then resumed peering at a red patch of darning on the toe of an undistinguished man’s work sock. Someone had embroidered a tiny, perfect owl onto it. Another
I love you
rendered in stitches and string.

“The money is a done deal,” Judith said. “I would be congratulating you, only you look like you’re about ten seconds from offing yourself.” She frowned deeper and mumbled, “Maybe you should tell me what happened.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

They played with socks, pretending absorption.

She’d spent six hours yesterday on buses and trains, aimlessly traversing the countryside north of London, trying to wipe Nev’s haunted expression from her mind.

He’d left seven messages on her phone before she turned it off. She hadn’t listened to any of them. She was tempted to throw the phone away in order to eliminate the possibility.

“We broke up.”

Judith scratched behind her ear and said nothing. They were deeply inept at this, both of them. Sharing information with emotional freight was well beyond the bounds of their limited friendship.

“It was for the best,” she added.

Judith snorted.

“The whole thing was a mistake.” She wondered who she was trying to convince.

Her boss walked around to her side of the table, and for an awful instant Cath thought Judith might try to hug her. Instead, she gently extricated the stocking from Cath’s strangling
grip, laid it flat on the table, and smoothed out the wrinkles Cath had made in the fabric. “It didn’t look like a mistake,” she said.

“Yeah, well. Looks can be deceiving.” She thought of how he’d seemed to her before she knew him, cold and polished as a marble statue at the train station. How he really was when they were alone. Hot and messy. Intense and conflicted. Vulnerable and real.

Judith said nothing. She began pairing the socks and placing them in piles.

“We can’t take the money,” Cath told her. “I couldn’t stand it.”

“We need the money. Unless you committed a crime to get Chamberlain to promise that donation, we’re accepting it.”

“I’ll quit.” She said it quietly, but she meant it, and Judith must have heard the conviction in her voice, because she stopped fussing with the socks and stared.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I absolutely would.”

“You’d never find another job. You’ve been killing yourself for months to turn this crap job I gave you into a career. You’re almost there. Why would you sabotage that over a donation?”

“I won’t if you don’t make me. I’m going to get the money. I’m just not going to get it from Richard. I have a plan.”

Judith folded her arms over her chest. “Let’s hear it.”

So Cath told her. She’d worked it out around dawn—what she needed to do to bring in the stream of visitors required to get their catalog into print. It would involve writing some new copy, and they’d have to tweak the displays a little, but mostly it would be a matter of putting herself out in the public eye and using the only currency she’d ever been any good with: sex. Only this time, she’d be smart about it. She’d channel Amanda’s showmanship and Judith’s ruthlessness, and she’d do it in the service of something she really believed in.

“It will work,” she said finally, still unsure whether Judith’s lack of expression was a good sign or a bad one.

“It might. It’s both our asses on the line if it doesn’t.”

“Yeah.” She hadn’t thought of that. But she could do this. She was smart enough, savvy enough to pull it off. Stupid at love, but competent in her work. The work would save her. She needed it if she was going to keep herself from flailing around in pain. She needed to prove to herself that she could do something right.

“I’ll talk to Christopher this morning. If he approves it, you can give it a shot.”

Christopher would approve it. He’d been after them to sex up the exhibit from the beginning.

“I won’t disappoint you.” She grabbed Judith’s arm on an impulse and found that her skin was as warm as anyone’s. Why that surprised her, Cath couldn’t say. Maybe this was what it was like to lose your mind. You still felt perfectly lucid, but you had crazy-person thoughts and a body as twitchy as a rabid raccoon’s.

Judith gave her hand a pat. “You never have.”

“It’s the wrong color. This wall is meant to be Honeyed Almond. It’s the far one you were to paint with the gray. Do it again,” his mother said. “Do them both again.”

When the workman opened his mouth to protest, she said, “Tonight, or you won’t be paid. And do it properly this time, with two coats.”

Evita walked away from the laborer, who sighed and checked his watch. Clearly, he’d been hoping to get his work approved so he could knock off by four o’clock. Now he’d be here half the night.

“Honestly, these people are idiots,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the cavernous space to hear. Her heels tapped as she crossed the concrete floor to badger the lad Nev had hired to do odd jobs. “Gary, tell me you aren’t touching those price lists with your filthy hands.”

Nev turned to his father. “If she carries on harassing them this way, I’ll have to hire all
new people before we open.”

“Don’t worry,” Richard said. “She’s excellent at buttering them up after she’s destroyed them. By Friday, they’ll move heaven and earth for her. Now, where do you think you’ll hang the work portraits? Over there? I think the light’s better on the east wall …”

Nev let his mind wander as his father offered his opinion about the best placement for the pieces. He couldn’t be bothered to care, really, so long as the five paintings that mattered most went up front and center.

A hand gripped his shoulder, and his father said, “Nev?”

He looked up into brown eyes as familiar to him as his own. “Sorry. I’m rather distracted. Hang them wherever you like.”

“Have you invited her?”

It was the first time Dad had mentioned Cath since the morning she’d left, when Nev had walked back into his parents’ house, packed up their things in silence, and returned to London. He’d phoned her over and over again, knowing all along that she wouldn’t pick up. It was a mercy she hadn’t. He’d left messages, rambling incoherently, too dumbfounded and enraged by everything that had passed between them to make any sense. Finally, the battery on his mobile had gone flat, and he’d opened a bottle of whiskey and drank until he passed out.

When he woke up, he’d had a hell of a headache, but he’d also had the presence of mind to understand what he’d somehow missed the day before. He’d been acting like a complete and utter wanker.