The Playdate

Read Online The Playdate by Louise Millar - Free Book Online Page B

Book: The Playdate by Louise Millar Read Free Book Online
Authors: Louise Millar
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
again for the fourth night.
    Her phone beeped. She took it out. It was a text from Vondra, saying she had received Suzy’s phone message and would ring back at 10 P.M.
    She sighed. So, it was time.
    Vondra had been asking her a lot of questions recently about her relationship with Jez. It had stirred it all up in her head.
    “Was he like this when you married him?” she had probed gently, looking at Suzy over a cup of tea in a workers’ cafe in King’s Cross, her soft eyes full of sympathy.
    “Yes,” Suzy had been forced to admit. All the clues had been there, so obvious, she couldn’t deny it even to herself now. The British diplomat parents who’d moved every few years from Syria to Malawi to Taiwan, leaving Jez in a boarding school from the age of seven. The violent, primal adventures that took place in that school, recounted to her as she lay wrapped in his arms those first months in Colorado. The fires in the school woods in the middle of the night; being hung by his legs, and hanging others, out of dormitory windows. Stuffing people in boxes and lifting them onto shelves for being “a bloody girl.” The ritual of chanting songs before strange team sports she’d never even heard of. It all seemed so eccentrically, exotically English.
    It was when they finally got to England, she’d revealed to Vondra, that she’d realized her mistake. It was the way Jez spoke so politely and guardedly to his parents, who met the attempts at warmth from his new American wife with barely concealed distaste suggesting that she had stolen their son from some Home Counties girl called Arabella or Belinda. And the friends from school and university who communicatedwith Jez in a muttered, posh, secret code laden with cruel in-jokes. Jez, she suddenly saw, was intimate with nobody. How else could he live and contract in Hong Kong for three months, then Denver, then Melbourne? No. There was no excuse. It had all been there on show from the start. She just hadn’t wanted to see it.
    The pressure ball was now expanding so quickly inside her chest that she had to stand up to breathe. Before she could stop herself, she found herself walking straight into the bathroom and opening the cabinet door. The pack of razors that Jez kept high on a shelf, out of Henry’s way, sat innocently in their cardboard packet. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine the sharp cut already on the skin of her inner thigh, and felt the relief of the pressure ball escaping out of the slit.
    “Damn it,” she said.
    A loud bleep burst into the silence of the bathroom. Suzy felt her phone vibrate inside her jeans pocket and pulled it out. The screen read “private.”
    “Hello?” she said quietly.
    “Hi, Suzy? It’s Vondra,” said a cheerful-sounding woman with a soft Jamaican accent.
    “Hey, hon,” Suzy said. She sat down on the toilet. Well, she’d asked for it and now she was going to get it.
    “You ready, my love?” Vondra asked.
    “Mmm,” Suzy replied, placing her other arm between her legs and leaning forward.
    “OK, I’m afraid it’s not looking so good. I waited outside Churchill Road. I was expecting him to turn right toward the A10 to Hertfordshire. He actually turned left into town . . .”
    Suzy sighed quietly.
    “You OK, my love? Now listen, I followed him in. He went allthe way into Soho. He parked in the NCP car park on Wardour Street and walked to Ellroy’s. Do you know it?”
    “No,” said Suzy faintly.
    “It’s a private members’ club on Frith Street. He went there about an hour ago and he hasn’t come out. Now what else do you feel you’d like to ask me?”
    Suzy gathered her courage. “You know what I need to hear, Vondra.”
    “Sasha? You have to remember I only have the photo from your husband’s company website. But as far as I could see—and I’ve been outside for an hour now—she definitely hasn’t gone in. What I can’t swear to you is that she wasn’t in there before I arrived.”
    Suzy took it in.

Similar Books

Falling Into You

Jasinda Wilder

RunningScaredBN

Christy Reece

Locked and Loaded

Alexis Grant

Letters to Penthouse XXXVI

Penthouse International

After the Moon Rises

Karilyn Bentley

Deadly to Love

Mia Hoddell

Lightning

Dean Koontz