On the Sly : The Grange Complex Book 2
On the Sly: Chapter 5

Ellie

Claire walked in with a tray of mini canapés and pizzas, smiling at me, interrupting our bitter exchange. I felt terrible, and I wanted to get out of here as soon as I could. My heart was fluttering. Andrew had seemed kind and loving and he kept telling me that his wife had never satisfied him, that he hadn’t slept with her for over a year. I was stupid enough to believe him, lying to my own friends to protect our secret. Now for the first time in my life I was ready to come clean and tell this woman who had invited me into her home and treated me kindly that I had fucked her husband.

Mack was like a wave of new energy. He wasn’t Andrew, but I felt so guilty that I still wanted him. I had nearly wrecked one family for what I thought was love. My first lesson in love was harsh enough and I couldn’t go through it again.

“So what did I miss?” Adrian asked, walking back to the living room. This whole situation was absurd and I couldn’t sit here and pretend that we were all going to be best friends.

“Claire brought food, but I can’t stay. I just realised that I have something that I have to take care of. Thank you for drinks,” I said and flew off towards the door before anyone could stop me. Adrian looked baffled, and Claire shot Mack a sharp glare, probably blaming him for scaring me off.

I slammed the door behind me, trying to calm my racing heart, and a sudden shot of anxiety attacked. My hands were shaking like crazy. Mack had no right to behave the way he did and I had acted on my emotions again. We had sex; it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Him lying about everything made me his accomplice in the deception, and that didn’t sit well with me.

That night I went to bed angry and overwhelmed with guilt. Claire was nice. It was a shame that she had no idea what kind of husband she was married to. The whole thing made me sick because I couldn’t deny that I wanted him all over again. My night was ruined. Around midnight I heard Adrian going back to his own apartment. Tears forced their way from my eyes. I knew that I shouldn’t have flirted with Adrian to get back at Mack. I had to speak to Claire and tell her the truth.

The next day I arrived at work with a headache. At my desk I took two painkillers and tried to work on an article that my boss so generously assigned to me. It was another boring story, this time about the upcoming strikes in the NHS. My father’s voice in my head reminded me that I should have chosen a law degree, because then I wouldn’t have this problem.

Deep down I refused to acknowledge that he was right, to accept that my whole life was in shambles.

“Have you read this? The whole damn scandal is so funny.” I heard the voice a few desks away from me. Mimi, the tall blond secretary that probably regularly fucked my chauvinistic boss, sounded excited about something. I lifted my head and scanned the room carefully. She was talking to Dean, a handsome reporter who took care of the sports section.

“No, what is it?” he asked.

“That rich daddy’s girl had an affair with a married man. They were caught in her father’s firm by the wife. Apparently the guy denied everything, saying that she seduced him. Can you believe it that people actually follow this shit?”

Mimi laughed, reading snippets of the article from the gossip magazine.

The colour drained from my face and I was ready to dive under the desk and never ever show my face in public again. It’d been weeks since my story filled the papers, and people were still reading about it. I had dyed my hair and wore glasses at work, hoping that I wouldn’t be recognized.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Yes, I was a home wrecker, but Andrew had seduced me to get back at his wife, and to get closer to my powerful father. It was just a game to him, nothing else. My whole life had fallen apart because of that stupid mistake. He sold the story to the papers, pretending that I was the one that initiated it, saying that I craved constant attention.

“People like real-life stories, Mi. Anyway, what’s happened to the girl?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Apparently she’s disappeared.”

I flew off my chair and hurried to the bathroom. I couldn’t listen to this anymore. Remembering how naive and stupid I was then, tears began streaming down my eyes. What was the point getting upset again? This whole thing was behind me now. I took what I could and moved to Edinburgh. My father told me to go to hell, that I should’ve been the one that died, not my younger sister. He always regretted that he was stuck with me after Mum left him.

And now I was proving that my father was right all along. I had barely managed to secure this job. My boss had no idea who I was. I wanted to show my uptight father that I was smart and able to make a name for myself, that I didn’t need his money to be respected.

In the ladies’ room I wiped the tears away and reapplied my makeup. I had a few small stories that I had to finish by the end of the week. My last conversation with my boss was pathetic. He promised me a column with Jordan, but so far nothing had come of it. All the men on the paper fought over significant stories and I was still a newbie and had no chance.

Worst of all, my head was screwed. Mack had been on my mind all day and every time I thought about his sexy eyes, I lost focus. It looked like my mistake of sleeping with him wasn’t going to just go away. I owned the apartment, so I was there to stay. He was off limits and that glorious night with him didn’t matter anymore. Everything had been going smoothly until I showed up at that damn party. I should have known that it was a bad idea.

Mack

Last night was a disaster. I wanted to talk to Ellie, but I couldn’t leave Claire alone with Lurkin. She could have taken care of herself, but after what had happened in the past, I wasn’t willing to risk it. My attempts at arranging a poker night in my place went nowhere. He wasn’t too keen, saying that he was busy. My frustration grew when Claire drank too much and started complaining to him that I wasn’t interested in doing anything together as a couple. She was starting to look pathetic. The evening was a total disaster. Adrian left around twelve looking slightly tipsy himself.

Scars from that day were opening up again and it was because of Claire. My wife had suffered. I’d had enough of watching scumbags like Lurkin walking free. Since I received his files, I had been looking forward to crushing him slowly and painfully.

Now I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for Claire to get out of the bathroom. Ellie hated me, and she had every right to. She hadn’t given me a chance to explain. Besides, what was I supposed to say to her?

This whole thing was too complicated.

“Tequila is a bitch. Can’t believe you actually let me drink that much,” Claire said when she walked into the living room wearing a white robe. I had stopped counting how many times she tried talk to me about Charlotte. Our conversations about her always ended up in arguments. I still blamed her for Charlotte’s death, even to this day.

“You should know your limits,” I snapped, boiling inside.

“What’s up with you today? Grumpy much?” she asked, walking around me. I should have told her earlier what I was expecting. Many things had changed, but she was delusional enough to believe that I could let go of that shameful scarred past.

I slammed my cup on the worktop, spilling some coffee, and frowned. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted.“You shouldn’t have invited Lurkin in the first place. We had everything laid out and you’ve done your own thing as usual.”

Okay, I was fucking losing my shit with her, but she had to know her place.

She put the espresso machine on and shook her head. “He seems clean and if we want to get anything out of him, we need to engage on a more personal level. This whole thing would have worked out better if you hadn’t interrupted me the whole time,” Claire said. “I was trying to have a conversation and you kept barging in. Who does that?”

“The other plan was more reasonable,” I argued, feeling frustrated. “And he would have engaged more with me if it wasn’t for that girl, Ellie. Why the hell did you have to invite her too?”

“Pull your head out of your ass, Tobias, for God’s sake. I’m in this shit with you. You have to start letting go of what happened in the past,” she said, raising her voice. “We have to be believable. Besides, that girl can be useful. We can use her to get to him.”

Ellie couldn’t be involved; no one else could. He preyed on women like her. Lurkin was mine to take care of. Besides that, she was too good for him. Maybe one night of great sex didn’t give me a right to lay claim over her, but Lurkin was dangerous and she had to stay away.

“No fucking way. She won’t be involved at all. Next time run your ideas by me first before you decide to screw everything up.”

Claire pressed her lips into a hard line, and anger flickered in her eyes. All right, maybe I wasn’t being fair, but I hated the fact that I was stuck here with her, this woman that I had no feelings for anymore. We had drifted apart years ago.

“You’re such an ass. I have explained to you before. She lied to me, told me that she was only going to look around. You can’t keep blaming me for what happened. There are things—”

I remembered that day like it was yesterday. Claire and Charlotte were called to the house in a suburb of Glasgow. At the time I was on the streets, attempting to question dealers and a few small-time gang members, away from my own district. Claire had introduced Charlotte to me at university. The two of us had been friends for over a decade, since junior school. Years later, after I married Charlotte, Claire had followed our career path and joined the police force. A year later she became Charlotte’s partner. The job came with certain risks, and as a couple we were well aware of it, but never acknowledged it. My wife didn’t pick and choose her assignments; she was committed to the job, to the people that she worked with.

I only found out that something was wrong when I switched on the radio several hours later, after I got back to the car. The dispatcher said something about an officer down at the shooting in Milton—that was the area Charlotte was working in that afternoon. A minute later, our surname was mentioned and I panicked. I tried calling, but Claire and Charlotte were both unreachable. I abandoned my duties and drove off, thinking about our upcoming anniversary, about how late our dinner was last night, pointless arguments that we were having recently. Despite the overwhelming anxiety, I knew that she was all right. I kept telling myself that I would be laughing about this tomorrow night.

Charlotte knew how to take care of herself, and we were both aware of the risks that we were putting ourselves in daily. I raced through the streets, filled with tension, until I reached the station. I didn’t even get upstairs. One of the officers in the car park told me that something went wrong in Milton, that Claire was in the hospital with Charlotte.

Everything exploded then and I was roaring with unending emotion. My mind was clouded, frantic with shock and unable to focus on a single thought, but somehow I arrived at Glasgow Central half an hour later. Time started moving in slow motion. I argued with the nurses on the front desk for information until they told me where she was being treated, then I raced to the third floor. Claire was sitting in the waiting area with her head down. She was sobbing.

“Where is she, Claire? Charlotte!” I roared, not caring that there were other people there, other patients. I just needed to see my wife. Claire looked at me with her puffy eyes, broken and haunted. She shook her head.

“They just called her death, Tobias. They tried to bring her back for thirty minutes,” she whispered. I tangled my hair, feeling like someone had just ripped me apart, kicking me in my gut until I wasn’t moving anymore. This was a dream, a prank. Just this morning I had wished her good luck. She wasn’t dead—she couldn’t be.

I was beside Claire before she had a chance to blink, shaking her.

“What happened? How come you’re here and she’s somewhere else, away from me?” I yelled at the top of my lungs. Some of the doctors and nurses were trying to pull me away from her, but I was in a rage, ready to kill the woman that had been my wife’s partner for as long as I could remember.

“She told me to stay outside, Tobias. I didn’t want to listen… oh, God. It all happened so quickly…

“Just shut up, Claire. I can’t listen to you. You shouldn’t have let her go in alone,” I shouted, losing control of myself.

Suddenly I was snapping back to the present. “We aren’t getting Ellie involved. I’m going to get something on Lurkin sooner or later.”

I hated when Claire brought up the past, like Charlotte meant nothing to her. We had been through this a lot, over and over. She took a deep breath, pretending that these cruel memories weren’t affecting her anymore.

“We are going to get something on Lurkin,” she corrected me. “You would have to be blind not to see that she was flirting with Lurkin. Think about it—if we get her involved we would have half the work done for us.”

“You expect her to fuck him and then give us all the juicy details?” I asked, remembering our erotic moments together. I had no fucking clue what was wrong with me, but I wanted Ellie for myself. Lurkin paid for sex with whores and Ellie was too pure to be tainted with this bullshit. This was wrong and I knew it. She was the first woman that had actually woken me from my mourning in a dreamlike state. No one had managed that since the shooting.

“She might not look like that kind, but she’s a reporter. I bet she would do anything for a story,” Claire added and then stopped, staring at me with that odd expression on her face, like she just realised something very important. “God, you like her. That’s why you’re pissed with me right now. You actually like this girl.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I snarled.

“I have known you for over ten years, Mack, and you don’t want to work with me and that’s okay. You don’t need to be ashamed. It’s been five years—”

“Shut up, Claire. Shut the fuck up and stay out of my head.”

I stormed out of the apartment before I did something that I’d regret later. The moment Claire let my wife go into that building alone, she betrayed me. We hadn’t got on since I moved away and now we were expected to be with each other almost twenty-four seven, fixing the painful past.

Ellie had pushed the other side of me that night, the one that I had hidden away. I liked being in control in the bedroom, and with her I aimed to please. She melted my usual coldness and my cock responded in ways I had never expected. I doubt I had ever been that hard before. It was like I was back to myself again, calm and controlled, not impulsive and miserable.

Ellie

By Thursday I’d had enough of writing about dancing dogs and stolen racing pigeons. For at least two nights in a row I heard the guy next door moving furniture, banging and talking at weird hours of the night. He was keeping me awake and my tolerance was waning.

I hadn’t seen Mack and Claire since that night in their apartment. The truth of the matter was, I was avoiding them. Even after almost a week, that night with him was still fully alive in my memory. Adrian, on the other hand, wasn’t avoiding me and it seemed he remembered how forward I was with him that night. It looked like he finished work the same time as me, and we chatted a few times. Yesterday on my way to the car he asked me out for a drink, saying that his mate opened up a new bar in town and he wanted to take me. I turned the whole thing into a joke, almost panicking, having Mack in my head growling territorially at me the whole time.

Guilt mixed with lust was a really bad combination, because despite how fucked up this whole thing was, I still wanted him and nobody else. Maybe Dad was right—maybe I was just too selfish and self-centred to care about other people’s feelings.

After another crappy day at work, I changed into my gym clothes and headed downstairs to use the facilities. Adrian was handsome, single, and he most definitely wasn’t married. He ticked all the right boxes and I knew that I should have agreed, but something prevented me. Mack was pissed that I dared to flirt with Adrian. I wasn’t looking for a relationship or love, but I wanted to get back at Mack for the hurt his lies had caused, and Adrian gave me the impression that he was only looking for some fun, nothing more.

I signed my name in the concierge, chatted for a little bit with a ginger lad and then left to get on with my workout. After half an hour on the treadmill, I did some pushups and then changed into my swimming costume.

I didn’t fancy using the pool tonight, so I headed straight to the sauna. But I saw it was a mistake, because Mack was there lying in the steam. Seeing him punched the air out of my lungs quite suddenly.