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“Bastard? Is that the word you’re looking for? Because that’s bourgeois.” Her eyes were still wide, and her naïveté provoked him into wanting to shock her further. Shock her...show her who she was dealing with here. “It’s just sex, Romy, and nonexclusive at that. Hookup fits better than affair, trust me on this. And since Camilla hasn’t called me since that night, whatever she was, she’s not it anymore.”
“Not exclusive?” Pause. “You mean exclusive as in—”
“Monogamous.”
“You were hooking up with other women simultaneously?”
“Not at exactly the same time, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, that’s...something. I guess.”
“Although I have in the past. There’s nothing quite like a threesome.”
“Oh,” she said faintly, “I see. But...but not with Camilla. But doesn’t that mean—?”
“Camilla, of course, was hooking up with other men—she’s not at all bourgeois.”
“I see.”
“Good,” he said. “Now you know.”
“I just thought...”
“What? That I was an innocent, clean-cut boy?”
“I thought...at least you used to be... I was sure you were...monogamous.”
“Still am, on request. You want monogamy, you got it. That tends to get the cardinal rule broken a little faster, though, and that’s always the end,” he said, threading his voice with amusement.
“Cardinal rule? How do I not know about a cardinal rule after ten years?”
“You don’t know because you don’t break it, Romy. You don’t say it.”
“Say what, Matthew?”
“That you love me.”
Romy had this thing she did when she was trying to make sense of something that did not compute: a raised-eyebrow blink in slow motion, which he called her blink of insanity. She did it now. “A woman tells you she loves you, your instant reaction is to dump her?”
“I don’t like the word dump. It’s more what I’d call a withdrawal of interest.”
“Now, you see, I think a woman might still regard that as being dumped.”
“Then she’d be wrong, because dumping implies there was a relationship. And, like I said, I haven’t had one of those since I was—”
“Seventeen? She must have been some girl, the one you were with at seventeen, to be so hard to replace.”
“Oh, yes, Gail was some girl, all right,” Matt said, and although his voice was steady, the old sick rage he thought he was done with welled up in him.
Romy saw it, too. Or sensed it. He could tell. Ah shit. He braced for follow-on questions, holding his breath as she did the open-shut mouth routine...
But she must have decided that was one story too many, because with a slight shake of her head, she changed tack. “So when you are monogamous,” she said, “they fall in love...when? Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?”
He managed an almost-natural laugh. “You think I keep track?”
“Too many to keep track of? Maybe you and Artie could invent a track-keeping app.”
“Smart-ass.”
Pause. “So...how long does it take you to fall in love, Matt?”
“What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?” He tried out another laugh, but this one missed natural by a mile.
“Just a simple question.”
“Then here’s a simple answer—I don’t.”
“Not since you were seventeen, I suppose.”
Back to that. He pushed his chair back from the desk, then pulled it straight back in. Restless. Agitated. “It’s like this: both people in a...a...”
“Relationship?”
“...situation need to want the same thing or someone’s going to get hurt.”
“Are you saying you never want the same thing they do?”
“No, sometimes we want exactly the same thing, and that’s great.”
“But it’s never love?”
“Search your memory for a contradictory example, Romy. You won’t find one.”
“Well, that’s a shame, because you’ve gone out with a lot of wonderful women.” She sighed. “I hope you at least warn them up front what to expect.”
“Oh, I make it clear, what’s in it for both of us.”
“Sex.”
“Good sex. And fun. And respect. I’m not jealous or possessive, which means they can leave whenever they like, no questions asked. No stalking or bad-mouthing or revenge porn when it’s over. Friendship if they’re up for that at the end, although very few are and that’s okay, too. I just...don’t want them to love me.”
“And yet they do love you, Matt. I’ve talked enough of them off the ledge at the end to know it.”
He shook his head, dismissive. “They don’t stay on the ledge for long. And that’s because although they say they love me, they really don’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know they almost invariably speak those magic words at the peak of an orgasm, which tells me it’s about sex. And if they think sex is the way to my heart, they sure as fuck don’t know me well enough to love me. In fact, I’ll let you in on a deep dark secret about the way to my heart, Romy.” He leaned across the desk, confidante-style, and lowered his voice. “There is no way, because I don’t have a heart.”
“If that were true I wouldn’t have trusted you all these years and I wouldn’t be here now. I trust you, Matt. I trust you absolutely.”
“Trust in anything you like except my heart. Or my soul, come to think of it. I definitely don’t have one of those. It’s the Carter curse, inherited along with the hair. So don’t look into my eyes for too long or I’ll steal yours.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled mockingly. “Have you thought what’ll happen if you have a red-haired, soul-stealing kid? Will you reject the baby?”
She looked directly into his eyes. “I like your red hair. I want the baby to have it.”
That look, so serious and compelling, was like a blow to the chest, and it took Matt a moment to absorb the impact. Trust, she’d said she trusted him. And it was in her eyes. Even after everything he’d just told her. She was a babe in the woods, wandering through the forest in her red dress with no idea wolves were lurking behind the trees. She needed to be protected from the likes of him.
“Yeah well, I suggest you look past the red hair,” he said, “and understand that the only thing I have to offer is a very big cock.”
She surprised him by not flinching, by looking at him just as steadily, as seriously, as trustingly. “And if I were to say that I love your red hair? That I love everything about you? What would you do, Matthew? Would you dump me? And...and Veronica and Rafael and Artie and Teague? Would you dump them, too? Because I—they—we—all love you! How could we not, when you push and pull us to do things we never would otherwise? The baby you’re giving me, for starters.”
“I told you—that’s for me.”
“Then what about the time I couldn’t afford the airfare to Sydney for Frankie’s wedding, and lo and behold, a ticket materialized.”
“Air miles—it cost me nothing!”
“And Artie—the software that would have stayed in your heads if not for you. You made him rich.”
“Made me rich, too, and it wouldn’t have happened without his brain.”
“Then what about the Silicon Valley tech hub you set up and dragged him into.”
“That’s a partnership, benefiting me, too.”
“You pushed Rafael into entering that international writing competition, which he won.”
“He didn’t take much pushing.”
“You got Veronica the gig with the university’s Student Healthcare Outreach program because she needed a good deed on her CV.”
“Stop!”
“And Teague only snagged a spot crewing in the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race because of you.”
“Teague almost drowned!”
“He loved every minute of it! And he loves you. Like a brother. He’s told me so.”
“Goddammit, Romy.” He looked away from her, because that shook him. Teague. Teague, who’d seen more than the others, who’d guessed it all, who fucking knew. Teague might be the closest anyone had come to sainthood, but he wasn’t stupid enough to want a brother like Matt. Romy was deluding herself. He brought his eyes back to her. “You’re wrong. All those things...they’re nothing. I’ve done other stuff you wouldn’t congratulate me for, believe me.”
“What stuff?”
He had to force himself not to look away again; to do so once was barely acceptable; twice would give too much away. “Stuff you don’t need to know.”
“Why can’t I know?”
“Because you’d back out of this deal if you did.”
For a long moment she just looked at him. And then she sighed. “How am I supposed to understand why it’s so hard to accept that people love you if you won’t tell me?”
“You don’t have to understand, you only have to accept that to me, love is nothing but an overused word,” he said. “I love ice cream, oysters, pizza. I love cooking, sailing, camping. How’s anyone supposed to take that word seriously when it’s thrown out about anything and everything? So I’m asking you not to say it, the way you haven’t said it for ten years.”
“I must have said it before.”
“Not to me. And I figure if you were ever going to say it, you’d have said it by now. I don’t want to hear it, Romy, so don’t say it now.” He stopped to take a calming breath. “There are other words for what we have. More meaningful words. Words that can’t be desecrated. Words like friendship, camaraderie, affection. Be as creative as you want. Just don’t call it love.”
“Okay.” She held up her hands, palms out, surrender. “This is me not calling it love.”
“Good.”
“I hereby promise not to love you.”
“Great.”
“I refuse to love you.”
“Okay, I get it, Romy, give it a rest.”
“It’s not like I was going to propose marriage.”
“Fucking fantastic. Go you. Now, moving on!”
She snatched up the page on top of her pile. “Visitation,” she announced. “My lawyer thinks—”
“Not interested in anything your lawyer says,” Matt interrupted irritably. “I’ll just tell you what I want—access without restrictions when I’m in London.”
“I’m sure we can come up with a form of words to that effect,” she said, all business now. “You’re only in London for one week a year, so give me advance notice and I’ll make sure I’m not out of town.”
“It’ll be more than once a year. I’ll be over in four months’ time to look at premises, and then again two months after that to sort out tenancy agreements.”
“Premises? What have I missed?”
“Artie and I are opening a tech start-up hub in London similar to the Silicon Valley one. He’s taking the lead so he’s already over there, but once it’s up and running, I’ll be there on and off for the first year at least.”
“Okay. No problem. Like I said, advance notice, and I’ll make it easy for you to see the baby.” She shot him a curious look. “If that’s really what you want.”
“Why wouldn’t I want it?”
“You indicated on the phone you were looking for a no-strings godfather role. It’s a little...confusing, I guess, to hear you talk about unrestricted access. And I...I just think it’s a good idea to start as you mean to go on.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you don’t keep changing your mind—like, one year you decide to come every month, the next year you come once in the whole year. Children need certainty.”
“Okay then, how about we leave it at once a year, scheduled, and you decide whether or not to allow other visits on a rolling basis.”
“Fine. Then let’s move on to—”
