Chapter Text
Kate met Tom on a Wednesday.
It was the first clear day in May. All of spring, the sky had ached, its belly swollen and bruised with storms. The day she met Tom, the sun finally licked through the clouds, the warm vein they had been missing all season.
He popped up, unexpectedly, on an email chain already suffocated with unfamiliar names. Thomas Dorset, Special Counsel (Dispute Resolution, Tax Litigation) at Humboldt & Footman LLP.
Kate, a newly minted senior associate, was leading buyside on an acquisition of a mixed use development in west London and just one week’s worth of due diligence had already dug up a rabbit’s warren of undisclosed issues, one being a dormant HMRC investigation into the group relief claimed on interest deductions for the debt originally used to acquire the portfolio.
Tom’s firm – opposing counsel, acting sellside – was a notorious engine room, a white-shoe multinational headquartered in New York rather than London, although they were running the English-law governed deal out of their Moorgate office. The corporate partner, Lionel Fife, was slippery as tallow, hair yellowed like margarine and thickly spread with pomade, his smile lubricated with layers of polished sleaze. His hair and his words hung greasily in the air, the scarlet wing of his tongue dangling out of his mouth like a pendulum and the seam of his lips perpetually moist. He liked to wet his mouth after speaking – and he liked to speak.
Fife made it clear from the conception of the deal that he didn’t think much of Kate, or the fact that the lead buyside partner, Kate’s mentor Agatha Danbury, trusted a senior associate enough to leave her to handle the weekly all-parties’ calls. Kate would finish up on a point with one of Fife’s juniors and only then would he leak in,
And just checking, you do have authority from your client to negotiate the arrears policies? Really?
Why have you included a wrong pockets clause when the company being carved out is essentially a shell? Did you speak to Agatha about that first…?
I think we ought to hold the pen on the deferred consideration mechanism – we’re talking about some rather complex drafting. Have you done that sort of thing before, hmm?
When it came to that first diligence call, they ploughed through the employment liabilities (well yes, there is a defined benefit pension scheme but we didn’t think it needed covering in the vendor due diligence because it’s being wound up this month, did we really need to waste my employment colleague’s morning on this?) and by the time they got to disputes, Kate had scratched angry cobwebs into her upper thighs. Fife introduced Tom in dulcet tones, ah, and this is Tommy, old pal of mine from our Oxford days – he litigated me out of a few tight spots then and the poor chap is still doing it years on, only nowadays he at least gets paid handsomely for it. And he’s become far more judicious in his choice of client!
A gale of male laughter billowed and when Kate’s expression remained set, Fife said, not an Oxford girl, were you, Kathani, a statement, not a question, and punctuated with a deliberately ambitious pronunciation of her name.
Kate didn’t falter, just said mildly, Cambridge, and Kate, respectively, before she addressed Tom directly, well, in relation to the tax liabilities, the expectation on our side is a hold harmless and a full indemnity, I’ll take instructions offline regarding limitations on claims but we really do need to see the tax vendor due diligence report as a priority and Fife had drawled, you’ll get it when you get it, to which Tom had hurriedly cut him off and sent her a bilateral email afterwards to apologise, even cracked a joke before he waved her off with a friendly lower-case “-t” at the end.
Kate met Tom two months later, as August picked away the dry scab of July. They’d closed that deal on the eve of the bank holiday, Fife dialling into the completion call whilst hungover and suspended up the slopes in Aspen, his voice hard with frost as he barked, is that it, are we finally fucking done, and then put the phone down just as Kate was dutifully thanking everyone for their collective efforts and teamwork in getting it over the line.
Tom called her a week after that. Measured and methodical as he was in everything, but this was back when she’d have called it thoughtful - seven ‘o’ clock on the dot, early enough that he could bank on Kate still being in the office, late enough that she’d likely be finished with client calls for the day. And Kate had still been in her office, one eye fidgeting with the muesli bar she’d meant to eat three hours before, the other on a glaring redline, when her phone rang.
She answered it with one hand, tucked it under her chin and ripped the edge of the wrapper off with her teeth. ‘This is Kate speaking.’
‘Kate, it’s Tommy. Err…that is, Tom Dorset,’ he blustered, all in one breath. ‘From Humboldt & Footman.’
Kate had spent the last hour on a drip-feed of her fourth coffee of the day and her heart choked a little – because in her mind, he could only be calling if –
‘Oh god,’ she said, throwing the muesli bar down and pushing back from her desk. She stumbled over to the window and closed her eyes. ‘Please don’t tell me that we’re going to have to put in a claim under the W&I already. Has your client received something from the revenue?’
‘No,’ Tom chuckled, and she could hear his fingers scuttling nervously against his phone. ‘Nothing like that. I promise I wouldn’t drop that news on you with a cold call on a Friday evening. This call is not remotely tax or deal related, in fact.’
Her pulse shook with relief and Kate’s laugh snagged in her throat. ‘Then this isn’t a recruitment attempt, is it?’
‘Well, it’s no secret that I think you’re great,’ said Tom easily. ‘It’s been a pleasure to work with you. But no. I couldn’t try to poach you in good faith, Kate – you’d be working in Fife’s team, after all, not mine. I don’t get the impression you’d be all that receptive to such a proposal.’
‘No comment,’ she said offhandedly, and Tom belted out a laugh and praised her diplomacy.
‘So if you’re not calling about Project Nectar…’
‘That’s correct.’
‘…or Fife and anything tangential to him...’
‘Certainly not. I wasn’t planning for him to form any part of this conversation, in vain it seems. I’m trying to stay in your good books, Kate.’
Pacing the length of the window, Kate fiddled with the ends of her hair. ‘Then this is a…personal call?’
‘It is. I hope that’s not…intrusive. And it’s abundantly clear from this conversation so far that I’ve somewhat blindsiding you, so feel free to put me in my place if this is unwelcome. But I said I think you’re great, and I do. And I would really like to take you for a drink.’
Kate looked overhead at the horizon, at the damp clime, broken clouds hanging like crystals over the vapoured cityscape. All day, the sky had throbbed with rain, but it was clear now, if a little moody.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘When?’ Tom repeated. He paused, and then, ‘well…this is awfully forward of me, but…I don’t suppose you’re free tonight? I’ve just got to put a call into a client first, but I won’t hear back from him until next week. And I know a lovely place, walk-ins only, smack bang in the middle of our offices.’
Kate’s evening plans were the third turn of a stale management warranty deed for some corporate support deal that had been trundling along since blue Monday and some staler stodge from the staff restaurant that she’d only toy with until it crusted around her fork. So she’d said yes, and joined him twenty five minutes later in central in laddered tights and her curls corkscrewed by the wind, and Tom had met her at the table with a bottle already on ice, never mind that it was some pretentious label that tasted juvenile, not like wine, but childish and nectary, like strangled grapes.
Never mind, because his fingers dithered around the throat of the glass as he handed it to her, the corners of his mouth clumsy with a smile when he said, golly, I didn’t really think you’d say yes and I’m woefully out of practice at all this, sorry, and he didn’t say a word when her phone went off in the middle of his story about an overseas share register his trainee had accidentally brought inland and the roughly three million pound stamp duty liability it had triggered, and Kate had stepped away to answer it. When she came back to the table he’d made her a clumsy origami swan out of her napkin. He was restless, Tom, his mind and fingers always busy with some clever magic. And though that same restlessness lived in Kate, hers was by nature destructive, or so she’d always been led to believe by everyone except her own father. Indeed, the last time she’d spoken to the Sheffields had been a run-in at the Waitrose fish counter just days after the court issued Edwina’s decree absolute and the dead-eyed trout had screamed at Kate that she’d “shipwrecked” her sister’s marriage as her limp sole of a husband silently placed bagged monkfish into their trolley.
But Kate liked Tom. She liked the way that his face had been fondled by age, how it had smoked rings of grey into his hair, rings that blew into brown eyes that warmed her steadily, like the burnt tobacco that spilled from the end of his spent cigarettes. She liked the lines that lightly scored those eyes and the way they tipped into his mouth when he smiled. She liked his rusty laughter, how it creaked through each cog of his chest and the wandering way that he talked. She liked him.
She wasn’t a litigator but nevertheless, outside of the courtroom, Kate didn’t believe in settling. Her father liked to say that she possessed her mother’s romantic soul and even after the both of them were long dead and gone and buried she thought of her amma’s words often, when we are together, the rest of the world goes quiet.
If that meant Kate fluttered through attachments, if it meant that every few months it was time to grow wings again and after the third or fourth time she made one of her “great escapes” as her friends dubbed them, if Sophie, loose-lipped after two or three break-up margaritas, fingers pebbled with salt, stuck one in Kate’s face and called her a “bolter”, she didn’t care. If the sex was frequent but lukewarm, if he said he was fond of animals but grumbled when Newton jumped onto the bed, if she could map out in her mind’s eye the next six months but not six years, then she simply didn’t waste her time.
Her father had been ill for nearly all of Edwina’s life. On his bad days he referred to his damaged heart as a piece of rotten fruit, once after a check-up that he refused to talk about, he crushed an overripe pomegranate between his fingers to demonstrate instead, tearing the pulp into bleeding strings. Kate and Mary had watched as his hand wept clots of something sticky and scarlet and neither of them had known what to say. In actuality, his heart was a rusty engine that finally blinkered out in the middle of Kate’s law degree, back when she was still working towards qualification and years away from earning any real money. With a swallowed tongue, Mary had been forced to curtail decades of estrangement and bend both knees in exchange for her parents’ financial support, including fortnightly dinners at their frostbitten Hertfordshire estate and allowing them to parade Edwina before the po-faced sons of their crusty upper-crust friends. The boys were harmless but humourless, soft edged like wax figures, their bowstring lips and their uninspiring countenance, and it didn’t take much prodding from Kate before they were steaming and sputtering like teakettles, their faces erupted red. The “Eton mess”, as she liked to refer to them, though not directly in front of the Sheffields. Kate’s deference was not to them but to Mary and the plans she and Edwina had made for her future. The Sheffields would pay her sister through university so she need not take on hefty student loans like Kate had – something prestigious that complemented a glass of port raised in her honour at dinner parties, like engineering, economics or law – and for the wedding they made clear was to take place within a few years of her graduation.
Mary’s father, the Rt Hon Lord Sheffield, had a flirtatious grasp on fidelity but he stayed faithfully married to the notion that Kate was simply a non-entity. He would shuffle right by her, his mouth scabbed around his pipe as he sucked noisily on the tail. His only acknowledgment of her existence was the angry rippling of his jowls when she entered a room. Conversely, Lady Sheffield, a greying shrew whose nose and mouth were pinched and whiskery, saw her all right, but communicated with her only by proxy, in carrying whispers to her daughter as Kate stood just inches away, she’s so tall and dark, where exactly was her mother from? What languages does she speak? She’s how old?! When do you expect her to take a husband?
Oh, Kathani loves her independence, she’s never really cared to be tied down, Mary had breezed and it was this that had hurt her more than anything the Sheffields could have said or done, for their good opinion she had never expected or sought, but to be so wilfully misunderstood by her own mother cleaved her heart into an open wound. Edwina had found her half a hour later, skipping stones across the Sheffields’ enormous pond, stroking the back of her knuckles over the decorative stone turtles as their scalloped backs baked in the sun.
‘She was just trying to steer their attention away from you,’ Edwina had said from behind her, twisting a finger into Kate’s curls, like she used to when they were girls. ‘But you don’t really care about getting married, do you? I mean, you’ve never said you wanted to. And you never bring anyone home. You don’t even really date.’
But Kate did want. That had always been her problem, that she wanted when she shouldn’t, wanted what she shouldn’t. She was too much and she wanted too much. It was a dangerous affliction and incurable.
It was why she allowed herself, finally, to land on Tom’s gentle shores. He unearthed years of unspent longing and gave it a home. He gave it, gave her, somewhere safe to roost. He learned what she liked and how she liked it – in bed, for breakfast, at the end of a fourteen hour workday. He could be precious about some things, like the way they stacked the freezer and the first time Kate nicked a pair of his socks he had been uncharacteristically surly about it, his skinny legs stiffening like reeds when she propped her feet on his lap. He didn’t like her collection of wine glass charms, even her favourite one with the gilded K, he never appreciated the whimsy, said the constant clinking set his teeth on edge. He liked to roast his own coffee beans on the weekends and if it meant Kate had to take Newton for an extra-long walk because she couldn’t stand the overly rich smell of it, like soaked earth, how it clung to the back of her throat, she didn’t mind until she did. Tom hadn’t seemed bothered that she never drank his homemade blend, though he’d always try, good-naturedly, to get her to taste it. Until he didn’t, but by that time Kate was – Kate was –
It was why she let him call her Katie in the treacly hours after they were intimate, why every now and then she stopped by their local merchant for that terrible bottle from that first date just so she could hear Tom’s delighted laugh when he rummaged in the wine fridge for an apéritif and found it, a warm white light blinking back at him.
It was why when Edwina chose her celebratory graduation dinner to reveal her engagement, they’d had their biggest row in all their years of sisterly spats over “borrowed” camisoles and who Newton loved more. Her sister had refused to look Kate in the eye all evening, just knocked back glass after glass of champagne and when they’d got home Kate had tried to calmly open a conversation and her soft-spoken sister had thrown her clutch across the room, and her cheeks sequined with tears, she had seethed, I knew you wouldn’t support me, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you! The condition of their reconciliation a week later had been Kate’s silence on the matter going forward.
It was why even as, months later, dawn blinked through the window, even as she brushed gold on Edwina’s face Kate had told her, don’t do this because of those people, let me look after you, we don’t need their money now, there’s no reason for us to ever have to speak to them again. Only her sister had writhed out of her arms, recoiling like an angry snake, her eyes wet and shiny like scales, her babyish round cheeks still wet with turmeric and hissed you have no idea of the expectations placed on me, Kate, and less than twelve hours later she did it anyway. Louis Lumley was a milquetoast, mild and creamy as the insides of a mollusc and indeed, what he had to offer Kate’s sister had the breadth and permanence of a single swallow. They married at his parents’ charming country estate in Surrey and if any of the guests noticed that the bride barely exchanged two words with the maid of honour all day, then most of them were too polite to comment.
It was why she moved in with Tom after five lazy months and accepted his ring after a hasty ten. They were at home, nestled into the emerald bowels of the sofa they’d picked together, the one she'd later find out he had thought was a bit gauche but he only thought fit to tell her that months down the line when they were fighting –
‘How do you like the wine?’ he said, squeezing her thigh.
‘It’s not the one we opened yesterday, is it?’ Kate wondered, nosing the rim of her glass. ‘It’s delicious, though.’
Tom patted her leg. ‘Good. I felt like something special tonight.’
Kate smiled indulgently at him and took another sip, only when she lowered her glass, he was watching her imperiously, his eyes nudging her to look down.
He’d hooked the ring onto her wine glass charm. It was sweet and subtle, and then he held her hand and said a lot of lovely things that she struggled to remember a few days later when she was telling Sophie the story, but never mind that, because when she was watching him stoop down to one knee, she could see it, years later, them intertwined on the sofa that she didn’t know he hated and all that would have changed was a few more lines on their faces and their fingers collared with matching gold bands.
And it was why Kate hadn’t listened when her little sister, far too young to be a jaded divorcée, had tried to return the favour. Her arms sweated around Kate, she dragged her into some gungy bar in Shoreditch for “quality time”, plied them both with cheap shots and suddenly yanked her off the dance floor, her hair a sticky thundercloud and her dark eyes overcast, and begged her, promise me you’re not settling for him, didi, not like I did, Kate sucked her olive stick clean and cupped Edwina’s button chin, said no, of course I’m not, and it wasn’t a lie then, but when she did the same thing ten months later over a spritz, nibbling on a lemon wedge this time, and Tom told her with a curdled mouth that he’d always hated that habit of hers, by that time Anthony Bridgerton had walked into her life and fucked it – and her – six ways from Sunday, and it was no coincidence that by that time, it had been a lie longer than it had been true.
~
Kate meets Anthony on the last Saturday in July.
Three months later, she’s in his bed, in his arms. She asks him a question she ought not to, and then another, and Anthony nuzzles into her neck and murmurs, since that very first meeting in the park. Kate is staring at the ceiling and Anthony’s lounging on his side and leaning into her, one hand softly cupping her breast, rolling her nipple between his fingers, the other propping up his head and his molten, half-lidded gaze, one leg overlaying hers.
Kate whimpers, her breasts still swollen from the way he was grasping them earlier when she threw him on his back and rode him hard and fast. Anthony’s mouth, candied pink with her, replaces his fingers and he wraps his tongue around her nipple and sucks languorously as he skates his hand up her thighs, purpled with stained glass bruises and sticky with him. ‘Fuck,’ he groans around a mouthful of her tit. ‘Knew you’d be perfect if I ever got to have you.’
Anthony doesn’t know it, he can’t ever know it, but he’s already had her. Over and over.
He had her that day at Genevieve’s when Tom didn’t show, and he had her during those two, sweltering hours in the car that felt like ten sunlit minutes. He had her afterwards, at his mother’s house, his flickering, candlelit smiles from the head of the table, his what he’d intoned quietly to Violet as they were leaving and he thought Kate was out of earshot –
And he had her six hours ago, at Kate’s birthday dinner. After her friends spent half the evening watching her watch the front door all night, willing the wrong man to come. When Anthony, exhausted and gorgeously dishevelled from the two flights he’d taken to get there, had knocked on the door and she’d thrown her arms around him and they’d both pretended he hadn’t his dragged his nose up her neck and inhaled. When he let his hands drop from her waist and swallowed hard, roses in his cheeks as he tossed back half of his drink in one go, licked his lips and told her, ‘you look…really good,’ the angry tick of his jaw when he realised Tom wasn’t there.
When he’d sat and talked and laughed, that rich, full-bodied laugh, all the more potent with his hand resting on Kate’s knee the entire night. When he’d engaged her friends in real conversation, listening with rapt attention even when Alice’s stories took a fourth or fifth detour, though every time Kate sneaked a glance at him, Anthony was looking back at her intensely, his fingers speared on her leg.
What he’d said to her as he left, hours after everyone else.
Idly, Kate wonders if Tom’s made it yet. If he’s swept though the door, primed with a sweeping apology, to an empty flat wherein lies the first evidence of her betrayal.
If he’s found the cadavers of the evening on a white tablecloth badly bruised with her favourite wine: the glittering contrails of wrapping paper, the glasses filmy with lukewarm tequila and lime ovaries, the sweet cling of rose petals in the air from all the flowered bouquets, their colourful heads raised as if in chorus, singing a spring symphony.
If he’s read the note she pinned to his coffee machine before she slipped into that cab to Anthony’s, staying with a friend, Newton with me, please don’t call.
If he’s tucked himself up into the lonely corpse of their bed, free to kick off all her decorative cushions, because he’s never really liked them, said they added an extra twenty minutes every time he made the bed. If you were a client, I’d be billing for those extra twenty minutes. Six minute intervals, Kate, that’s a charge out of thirty five minutes. If, as he lowered his head into his pillow, he caught sight of the pink tulips Kate had carefully placed on her bedside table, perfectly centred.
This marks the first time she’s thought of Tom since Anthony pulled her over his threshold and pressed her up against the wall, where they kissed ravenously until he grabbed her hand and laid it over the thick bulge in his jeans.
Maybe it’s because once Anthony started talking he couldn’t stop, when he had her puddled in his four-poster with her legs speared over his shoulders, muttering ‘fuck, you taste better than I ever imagined,’ as his hot, supple tongue was deep in her cunt, his huge hand wrapped almost entirely around her thighs. As Anthony massaged her clit with his thumb he tore his shining, scarlet mouth away and hissed a question and Kate had said ‘never more than two,’ she’d never been wet enough for more, but then Anthony was kissing every almond contour of her jaw as he fucked her with three fingers and Kate was keening as his callouses rubbed deliciously inside her. When she suddenly clenched around him, yanked the damp curls at his nape and screamed ‘god, Anthony,’ as she came, the glint in his eye was maniacal, smacking his lips like the cat who got the cream (and he was).
Anthony smiled drunkenly as he lapped up her slick from each of his fingers in turn. His arrogance could not be countenanced – that would set a damning precedent – so when he crawled up the bed and settled himself in the cradle of her hips, his cock so hard and flushed that it bruised her stomach, Kate had let Anthony kiss her only once, marrying their mouths with something hot and treacly, before she rolled them over and clambered on top of him. Anthony had gone without resistance, spread out on his back with his dick straining upwards, staring at her with his mouth slack, rubbed red with her lipstick. He looked delicious, curls sticking to his sweat-pearled temples, jaw pink and scratched and twitching in tandem with his cock.
When Kate placed a hand over his rampaging heart and they locked eyes, Anthony moaned and reached for his glistening tip as he said violently, ‘fuck, I need you,’ but she swatted his hand away. ‘Wait,’ she said, and Anthony’s head collapsed back onto the pillow with a muffled string of curses. ‘Where do you want me?’
Anthony had growled and reached for her arse, trying to sit her right where he wanted her. ‘Kate, don’t tease,’ he warned. ‘I’m too close.’
Kate had laid a wet kiss on his heaving abdomen, blinked coyly up at him and asked, ‘do you want it here? ’and Anthony groaned and writhed and pleaded, ‘fuck, lower, just suck me Kate, please-’
Kate and ghosted her hand up his thigh and Anthony’s cock jumped. ‘You can come in my hand if you want,’ she said sweetly and closed her fingers around the warm velvet of him. His cock throbbed angrily as Anthony ground out, ‘I don’t,’ though he was thrusting into her hand as she pumped him. His forehead was veiled with sweat as he worked his jaw and grunted, ‘Kate, I want to come in your-’
Before he could finish, in any sense of the word, Kate had smiled and softly kissed the head of his leaking cock, thickly jewelled with pre-come and the noise Anthony made was bestial, his hips canting off the bed. Kate withdrew her lips from him and he whined, low and desperate. ‘Stay still, Anthony,’ she said coolly, ‘or I’ll stop.’
She dragged her tongue up his shaft, kittenish licks, murmured ‘good boy,’ when this time he sank his fingernails into the cotton matt of bedsheets to keep from thrusting and Kate didn’t miss the way his cock jerked at the praise, his pupils blown so wide that only a halo of hard amber remained.
When Kate finally took the tip of him in her mouth and suckled him, Anthony threw his head back, burrowed his hand in her hair and moaned ‘oh fuck-! Yes, just like that-’, and wrenched his eyes open, propped up on his elbows so that he could see himself caught between her lips. Anthony made the filthiest noises as she sucked him off, the stormy blue veins in his neck bulging as he cupped her head and guided her up and down his cock, his mouth stuck in the shape of her name, and then suddenly he squeezed her hand and with enormous effort he was peeling her off, and gathering her into his arms, panting, ‘I want to come inside you, is that-’
Anthony didn’t ask, saved them both that unspeakable conversation, just rifled in his bedside drawer for a condom and then he was arranging Kate on her back, wrenching her legs apart as she pulled him down, harshly so that she could slip her tongue in his mouth as his large hands bracketed her head.
‘Kate, are you sure?’ Anthony said, breathing raggedly as he loomed over her. His eyes were pitch black and at half-mast. ‘We don’t have to –’
Kate raked her silver nails down the small of his back and he groaned. ‘This is what I came here for.’ she said, and for a split-second Anthony had stilled, a disquiet in his expression, that telltale crease appearing between his brows. ‘Do you want this?’
And then it was gone, the dark tempest in his eyes raging anew, and as Anthony pushed inside her he muttered, ‘wanted this, wanted you for months,’, like it hadn’t only been three since he’d met her, but then he was moving inside her and they were both moaning, whatever foreboding Kate had from that confession was lost to ether and the vigorous pace at which Anthony was fucking her.
‘Kate,’ he praised her, again and again, scalloping her throat with his teeth and she doesn’t have to tell him not to leave a lasting mark, ‘Kate, Kate, Kate.’
He pounded her into the mattress like he wanted to leave his impression in her anyway, like he hadn’t already.
‘More,’ Kate implored him and Anthony swore and obeyed, his eyes dark and laminate as his thumb and forefinger took turns with her clit. He was learning her, the cadence that made her mewl and scratch his shoulders into lace.
Anthony watched her hungrily, as she started to fall apart, his lips parted. He wasn’t far off, his voice tapering off as he snarled, ‘that’s it, you take me so well.’
‘Fuck, Anthony, don’t stop,’ Kate whispered hoarsely, and wrapped her legs around his waist though his skin was so buttered with their sweat, they nearly slid off, ‘want you deeper, want to feel you in my throat.’
Anthony mouthed at her earlobe, his thrusts increasingly stuttered as he tried to stave off his release, his voice breathy as it trickled into her ear, ‘come for me, baby, I know you’re close, fuck, I can feel you squeezing me-’.
Kate had been loath to take his orders even then, but he worked her clit with a third finger and she swelled and crested around him like a wave. He barely ground out, ‘Fuck, Kate,’ before Anthony’s orgasm crashed into him and he collapsed on top of her as he spilled into the condom, heart and cock pulsing as one.
In the deafeningly silent aftermath, Kate started to edge away from him but Anthony reached for her at the last moment, fingers steepled around her arm like in prayer. He was silent but there was nothing contrite in his flexed jaw, the bloodthirsty rise and fall of his chest. His gaze was penetrating even for a man who hadn’t been inside her just minutes before.
She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and let him coax her into the crook of his arm, kiss her clammy forehead. Just the one time, Kate could give him that and hope that Anthony felt it, the finality, in her body as he stroked her limp curls away from her forehead and said something indistinct.
And that brings them to now.
Now, caged in his embrace, Kate thinks about Anthony, about each hair smoked down his chest, each burnt wick of his lashes as he buries his face in her neck and inhales greedily, as he teases the sweat-slicked skin between the ridges of his teeth, his cock hard again, a hot and heavy press against her leg.
‘What did you think?’ he says. At some point he disentangled himself and he’s hovering over her, dipping his head to kiss her as his thumb works her open again. Anthony’s grinning, his smile sharply edged as it glints above her, because he knows. He continues anyway. ‘…when we met?’
~
When Kate meets Anthony, she’s climbing the final leg of her afternoon run, Mary’s garment bag slung over one shoulder. She’s picking up speed, her feet kneading the track, softened into dough by the acidic yellow sunlight. After weeks at the mercy of a beating, apricot sun, the grass is jaundiced, perspiring with dandelions and weeds. She’s wearing her favourite white set, the one with the petalled edges, as she bobs along the path like a freshly plucked daisy.
Just ahead, there’s a gap-toothed schoolgirl wobbling along on a bright pink bike, a sweet couplet of elderly ramblers and two other runners. A woman in beige ambling along with a yappy beige dog on a beige lead, squawking at squirrels twice its size.
And a man on the other side of the path, stomping toward her. His face is mostly obscured by his phone, his thumbs scuttling across the screen, his jaw fixed. With each bad-tempered stride, his Ralph Lauren polo strains across the sturdy branches of his broad shoulders and what promises to be a sturdier chest. His hair is a dense, damp forest of chestnut roots, with buttery pecan curls that canopy his forehead. Kate lingers on the soft pink glacé of his full lips, the well-cut contours of his chin as he works it.
Her attention diverted entirely, Kate skims him over, appreciatively eyeing the large hands cradling his phone, the faint blue cables of the veins that stick out of his arms. The cream Ralph and a Warden Brooks gym bag – a Yank, she thinks, dismally? But the deliberate air of minding his own business, the determined gait and the Burberry gilet would suggest otherwise.
Kate veers further off her side of the path as she continues to watch him. At the same time, he picks up his pace, still punching out what seems to be quite the lengthy diatribe. If she had to guess – a hard-nosed capital markets slut, hair still a wet smear from the gym and probably on his way to whichever private equity workhouse he devotes his Saturday mornings. He probably already has eleven potential Raya girls vying for tonight’s spot under his arm in some corner of the Ned, his smile as glitchy as the lighting, babying a stiff old fashion in one hand and the cradle of her hip in the other. There’s probably one stirring in the thousand thread-count sheets of his four-poster right this second, about to wake up to the cradle of mahogany grain and his customary last night was fun, help yourself to coffee, maybe see you around text.
But – pot, kettle, and all that.
And, as Kate continues jogging, she looks down and her sun-soaked diamond winks at her. A one-and-a-half carat reminder that she shouldn’t really be looking at him at all.
But she’s still getting used to the cold bone of the ring that now bridles her finger. She had taken it off last week to oil her hair because it always snagged in her curls and Tom had come into the bathroom while she was halfway through her routine, his mouth small and wrinkled. He hadn’t been upset, just mildly chastising, you’re not supposed to take it off, Kate, that’s sort of the point.
Kate blinks up, realising she’s migrated into the middle of the track. She’s only a few short strides away from smacking headfirst into capital markets man. He still hasn’t looked up from his phone once – she’s close enough to him now that she can see his lips twitching silently as he dictates his thoughts into what must be the world’s lengthiest, crankiest email.
She looks away just as her left foot catches on the her shoelace – chewed into tassels by Newton. She stumbles and instinctively, her hand flails out for something – anything – to break her fall. It happens to be a hard shoulder she was admiring just seconds before.
Much like the convertible bonds he probably dreams about, the man yields surprisingly easily, the both of them toppling to the ground. Him sprawled on his back with his legs arrowed outwards, Kate puddled on her front, head caught in her arms.
‘Ow – fuck!’
‘Oh, Christ-’
Kate, actually, she thinks but does not say, as she lifts her head up. The deep crease in his trousers and between his brows, the way he’s painstakingly inspecting the Kate-shaped scuff in his penny-coloured oxfords – her glib attempt at humour is unlikely to be well-received. Meanwhile, he still hasn’t looked up at her. Instead, he struggles upwards, his chest heaving, and emphatically rubs his upper arm.
Inclined to be conciliatory, Kate hops quickly to her feet and sticks out a hand to help him to his.
‘That was my good shoulder.’ he mumbles, to himself more than anyone else.
‘I’m sorry, are you-’
‘My phone,’ he interrupts, foraging around wildly in the grass for it. ‘Where’s my phone?’
Kate glances around and grimaces, dropping her hand, when she spots it wedged underneath his foot. The screen is in bits, bowed in the middle and sparkling with broken glass.
‘Oh. Err…’ Kate hesitates and then, deciding she can’t really make this situation worse, says idly, ‘would you like the good news or the bad news first?’
‘Excuse me?’ he glowers up at her, but the sun is overhead, a hot, bloodied yolk, and even with a hand raised to his brow, she can tell that he is having a hard time making her out.
‘Well, the good news is that I can still beat my personal best,’ says Kate lightly, peering at her watch.
He sucks his teeth noisily, still squinting up at Kate. ‘…and the bad?’
‘Well…your phone is fucked,’ she says evenly.
His eyes bug comically wide. Kate watches with fascination as a bright blue vein breaks in his forehead and points wordlessly to his feet. Breathing hard through his nose, he snatches up the broken phone and turns it over in his fingers, even shakes it as though that’ll make an inch of difference.
‘It’s dead,’ he says unnecessarily. There’s something endearingly serious about his expression as he stares down at the smashed screen. ‘I was midway through an email.’
Midway? Kate manages to hold back an undignified snort.
‘You could always try turning it off and on again,’ she says, swinging her foot back-and-forth.
‘That’s not amusing,’ he says irritably, still inspecting the cracked screen. ‘Now I have to start again and the board meeting is this afternoon-’
It’s Saturday, Kate nearly says and once again, doesn’t, because how many of her own weekends has she spent similarly, wading through the thick cement of some tedious transaction document for a partner who will probably just reply three hours later with a blank email, subject line: scanned my comments in, can you put this into clean and get to the client asap?
‘-not that I’m not thrilled about spending the better part of the day explaining why they shouldn’t incorporate as a bloody unlimited partnership. It’s like nobody’s heard of the corporate veil-’
Kate startles. ‘Fuck,’ she says again. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
‘-but if I have to push this meeting one more time I’ll – what? What’s the matter?’ he says abruptly, and he pulls himself stiffly to his feet.
‘My ve – my bag, I dropped it,’ Kate says, turning away from him. ‘Large grey bag on a hanger.’
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him pointing into the thicket of yellowed grass just off the track. ‘Is that it…?’
Kate follows the trajectory of his neatly manicured finger and her mouth falls open. Her bag has capsized in a muddy creek. She curses again, under her breath this time, and barely hears capital markets man striding over and leaning over her shoulder to inspect the damage.
‘…do you want the good news or the bad news first?’ he says, with barely concealed glee.
‘That’s not funny.’ Kate bites out, without looking at him. ‘That’s my little sister’s wedding veil.’
‘Oh.’ he sounds genuinely contrite. ‘Well, it’s in a garment bag, there’s a chance that-’
Kate ignores him and bends over, paddling her hand in the dirt to fish the bag out. Silently, she holds it up, a leaky pocket, in front of her. The mud has sluiced through the fabric, and the veil has sunk to the bottom in a sodden brown heap.
‘It’s ruined.’ she says flatly. She hears his sharp intake of breath, a beat, and then,
‘You could try turning it-’
Kate wheels around and jabs a finger at him. ‘Don’t.’
The sun no longer in his eyes, he is free to cast them over her face
He blinks once. Then twice. And his brow miraculously unfurrows itself, his back composes itself into a hard note, his lips lifting into a infuriatingly attractive smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and it could almost be sincere if it weren’t for the gleam in his eyes. ‘We haven’t been formally introduced. Anthony.’
He offers her his left hand, strong, prominent knuckles.
Kate almost doesn’t take it, she knows what he’s about after all, but she did break his phone and unravel his board meeting. She’s all too familiar with the monotony of typing the minutes out, checking three times that they’re Companies Act compliant, poring over illegible scans of constitutional documents to scout out any tripwires, only for the directors to just ignore the entire bloody thing –
‘Ahem,’ Anthony says, smirking when Kate jumps. His arm is still extended. ‘Your name?’
Kate takes his hand, ironing out each groove of his palm with her customary grip, but Anthony doesn’t even wince. ‘Kathani.’ she says, indifferently.
A broad smile ripples across Anthony’s face.
‘Do you come here often, Kathani?’
~
Three months later, she is recalling that question, sprawled out on his chest as Anthony rests his arms against the mahogany grain of his headboard.
‘You know what I thought of you,’ says Kate, leaning on her elbows, planted either side of his torso. ‘I think I made it clear in the bar later that night.’
Anthony shakes his head, a smile prising up the corners of his mouth. ‘Yes, you did. I wanted to be so angry with you after that.’
‘You were,’ Kate reminds him, quietly. She thinks of the corrosive words they exchanged just a week later. ‘Remember my engagement dinner?’
Anthony clenches his teeth, his arm tightening around her waist. ‘I was angry with him that night. Not you. I didn’t handle it well and I was a dick. But he didn’t even seem to notice.’ he says viciously.
Kate’s fingers nip at his dark sprig of chest hair, peering up at him through her lashes. ‘Could that be because you’re always a bit dickish?’
‘Not intentionally.’ Anthony says, defensively, and when she simply arches a brow he concedes, ‘well, all right. The majority of the time it isn’t intentional, but I wasn’t…in a good headspace that night.’
Kate has no desire to return to it either.
‘Then what did you think?’ she asks, and feels him relax beneath her, his head lulling back. ‘When we met?’
‘I told you that I wanted-’
‘Not that. I know that. You just spent the last three hours proving that. What did you think.’
‘I thought a lot of things,’ he says, and cups her face, tracing his thumb over her jawbone. ‘I thought you were beautiful. I thought you were aggravating. I thought you had no right to make me think about you that much. And I thought you were way too fucking good for Tom wanker Dorset.’
Kate has no choice but to meet Anthony’s eyes. She chooses to ask, even knowing his answer could be calamitous, ‘you wanted me even then?’
‘Yeah, and even after you threw a drink in my face, too.’ he says, his lower lip lowered sulkily, though when Kate leans forward he kisses her back and makes a petulant noise when she pulls away, only to nip at the reddened lobe of his ear with her teeth and hum,
‘You deserved it.’
‘It was an aperol spritz, Kate. My favourite shirt is still sticky. And orange.’ he grumbles, as he toys with the ends of her rumpled curls. ‘Just the sight of it reduced my housekeeper to tears. I had to offload it onto Colin!’
‘Had to?’ Kate laughs, and laughs harder when Anthony scowls and pinches her backside. ‘And stop lying, that definitely wasn’t your favourite shirt.’
‘It was!’ he argues, his hands skimming up and down her bare back, ‘I wore it all the time when I was in New York. I nearly bought it in all five colours…if only I’d had the foresight.’
‘So it was your “on the pull” shirt.’ Kate deduces, eking out each word. ‘And…you wore it to meet your best friend’s fiancé.’
Anthony rolls his shoulders back, and shrugs unabashed. ‘I wouldn’t call it that. Besides, I got a face full of your cloyingly sweet cocktail for my troubles.’
‘Why on earth would Colin agree to take it from you?’
Anthony snorts. ‘Trust me, he’s never worn anything that nice in his life, stains and all. You should’ve seen him after he got back from his last globetrotting fuckabout. I don’t know what was worse, the goatee or having to sit through his five hundred travel slides.’
Kate, vis-à-vis his sister Hyacinth, has seen all the glorious technicolour shots of Colin’s interminable gap years. The goatee, now thankfully stuffed in the throat of a pipe somewhere en-route to the Thames, was definitely worse.
‘All right, enough dodging the question,’ Kate flicks his nipple, hard, and Anthony yelps and glares at her. ‘I don’t want to hear about your brother when we’re about to have sex.’
Anthony grins devilishly and leans in for a kiss. ‘We are?’
‘Well, that depends on your answer,’ Kate says, a white lie that clearly does not convince him, because he simply leans in to kiss her again. Further undermining her own authority, she snakes her hand between them until her fingertips brush against his half hard cock.
Anthony sinks his head back with a guttural groan as she starts to stroke him. ‘I – ah, fuck – I went home and stalked you on the internet.’
Kate’s wrist stalls, and he tries to catch his breath. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t ever done that before – took me all night to make a stupid account only to find out your pictures are behind some kind of privacy wall – fuck, Kate – fuck, that feels good-’
~
One night, Anthony Bridgerton is bored in bed, and he stalks his oldest friend’s new fiancé on the internet.
Only a year before that, his therapist had crackled into his ear, you're in no position to be anyone’s boyfriend as his car groaned over a third speed bump, and that had suited Anthony just fine, he was sustained on the grease of a mercenary weeknight fuck and two deals closed per quarter.
And yet, six months later and he’s crumpling on Kate’s doorstep, face guttered with rainwater and his hair in wet splinters, begging her to end it because he can’t, and somehow don’t marry him because I love you becomes just tonight. And suddenly, it hardly matters that in Anthony’s head they met first and that day in the park, maybe Kate dropped a dog lead instead of a veil, that when he pressed it safely back in her hand his thumb caressed a ringless finger, that the night in the bar she still threw her drink in his face but it becomes a treasured anecdote that a beaming Anthony tells at their wedding, it hardly matters because Kate is hauling him over the threshold, yes, just for tonight. One last time.