Don't Let Him In

by Lisa Jewell

It’s the home of a Gen X man who has made good decisions, made a success of his life, piled his building blocks one on top of the other with precision and care. But also, the home of a man who made one really bad mistake that his wife and his family are going to pay for, over and over again.

Ash googles “Bar Amelie” and finds a glitzy website for it. It’s just off Curzon Street and is sleek and beautiful—brushed brass and pale velvet, three different types of caviar on the bar menu. It’s the antithesis of her dad’s restaurants: sandy-floored, rough-hewn, chalkboards, tongue-and-groove cladding, smoky chowders and chargrilled lobsters.

don’t understand why men don’t realize how little effort is involved in making women happy and how many benefits there are to making women happy.

She didn’t think she needed a man until I turned up in her life with my Reiss overcoat and my suede Chelsea boots

She broke her year of mourning her husband of twenty-eight years to spend the weekend shagging a man who may or may not be taking her to Lille.

The woman’s eyes go to my shoes, my suede desert boots with the contrasting tan elasticated side panels, my long legs, my distinctive, black-framed glasses. She sighs and shows me a still on her phone

desert boots.

his black jacket and scarf,

And I need you to believe me when I tell you that I always, always take this money with an intention, a true, deeply felt intention, of finding a way to repay it. I am a proud man and I have drive and ambition, I have a vision of my future and it involves me making money, owning assets. That vision exists over the next hill, around the next corner, it tantalizes and it glitters and it makes me sick with longing, and it often, I’m afraid, leads me to making rather bad choices.

Zippo

his shirt unbuttoned to the second button down, showing a small puff of white chest hair.

Alistair Grey,

pretended to have died in a water sports accident in the Philippines.

“I need somewhere to stay. Just for a few weeks.”

filthy narcissism and casual cruelty,”

I don’t want to say that she was stupid, but yes, fuck it. She was stupid. Stupid for love. Stupid for the status quo. Stupid for whatever it is that women get from having a man like me in their lives.

But I did feel like I had tapped into something inside me that I didn’t know was there, something vital and energizing, and I would be lying if I said I haven’t relived that last moment of Tara’s sad, pointless life over and over again, and although I do keep coming back to this sense I have of myself as not being a sexual person, I do feel it is related somehow to my latent sexuality.

Chalamet.

Timothée Chalamet’s

pale green polo shirt

(have you tried Kentish sparkling wine,

But also livid with Martha. What more does she want from me?

is a con artist and a fantasist and a liar and a freak.

this was not his

first rodeo.