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She would look back and wonder if, in fact, her subconscious had a thirst for knowledge, because the appeal of the drink and the potential bollocking in no way balanced out.
No matter how many times he made it clear Roisin’s revelations weren’t welcome, she lived in hope of him as a confidant.
When Roisin and Joe broke up, twenty years later, Roisin could only think that it was perfectly summarized by the paradox of Queenie Mook. It was slow, but fast at the end.
If there was one thing that both her childhood and her career had taught Roisin Walters, it was that lying to kids might not be noble, but generally got the job done.
The mocking in her lessons would bounce off her like small stones on a toughened windshield, ripping along at motorway speed.
Joe slung an arm around Roisin and absently kissed her on the head, without making eye contact or focusing on her in any way. Gina and Meredith got blasts of warmth; Roisin was furniture.
And when it’s that impossible for anyone else to understand, isn’t it a clue that maybe you’re doing the wrong thing?
Roisin simply didn’t know if Joe Now was also Joe Then. If one became the other, overwrote him like an old videocassette. Or if the former version was still there, available to return to her, if she was patient. Until she’d figured it out, she couldn’t make a move.
“Absolutely!” Joe said, addressing the table. “I don’t expect anyone to get up to see me off.” Anyone? Roisin thought. What am I, the dog we don’t have’s mother?
Maybe Roisin should let herself off the hook regarding Joe losing interest in her—maybe he was always going to do that with any partner who couldn’t remodel herself into Joe’s adoring foil. He used to like a challenge.
Her soon-to-become boyfriend, Joe, perched on the sofa arm, raising an eyebrow over the rim of a pint that he was holding up to obscure his face. He was shyer then. Roisin remembered the fascination between them at the time and felt a pang of loss.
Much as she loved Dev’s idealism, Roisin felt sure that these two portraits would be less of a sequence, and more like bookends.
Roisin realized she was still the rebellious twelve-year-old witnessing Queenie Mook’s phantasms.
She felt as if Joe kept trapping her inside riddles. He might be great at dialogue, but a hyper-empath, he was not.
The whole show, Roisin thought, was meant to be so cerebral, erotic, and knowing, and came off to her like horny Ferris Bueller.
It was for the best that other people were here to give Joe the praise he sought. Roisin couldn’t have managed a word of it.
she’d been pushing this reckoning away for too long. Hoping that in exile, banished from serious possibility, the idea would change or die. That it would sort itself out. In a twisted way, Joe had done her a favor. He’d demonstrated a level of disregard she couldn’t ignore.
What’s even more worrying is that I don’t think you’ve even asked yourself why you did it. It doesn’t interest you.” God, that was it. In a nutshell. Joe hadn’t wondered, in light of his girlfriend’s distress, Why did I think this was okay?
If you’d told me, I’d object, and you’d have to take it out. So you went ahead and chanced it, thinking, if you got away with it, cool. If it went wrong and I kicked off, it was a price worth paying to keep it in the script. Even when you knew I’d watch it here, with our friends around us, it didn’t change the stakes enough for you to come clean before you put me through that. Because why gift me an opportunity to be a nuisance?
This said more about Joe than he realized. Image was everything, and he’d not damaged hers. That the fact that only she could perceive the treacherous plagiarism meant it as good as didn’t matter. Because, once again, she didn’t.
She grabbed Roisin in a tight hug. As Roisin absorbed the meaning of their exchange, she tried not to burst into tears on her shoulder then and there. She hadn’t realized how broken she was, until someone acknowledged it.
“I think . . . be clear in your own mind what you want. Or Joe will be clear in his mind what you want.” “Thanks, but I’ve reached a level of cynicism where nothing’s going to work on me.” Roisin indicated at a junction and pulled out. “Which is just as well, ’cos nothing’s what he’s giving me.”
Single. Joe being single. Their not belonging to each other anymore. Roisin was being confronted with the simple reality of what she’d decided. She didn’t know how to feel about this huge shift in gears with Joe: the largesse, the humility, the dangling of carrots. After the unrepentant attitude and acid thrown around outside Benbarrow Hall, it was almost dizzying.
“You talk about you and Joe in terms of what he wants and what he might be doing or thinking or feeling all the time, but say very little about yourself.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing, with Joe. A man has stopped loving me, and all my focus is on why, and what I did wrong. Solving the mystery. Fuck,”
So I had a string of boyfriends and tried to impersonate someone everyone loved, while hating myself.
“When we set out on this walk, I thought we were two fun, laid-back people,” Roisin said, patting Matt on the arm. “In fact, we’re a pair of fuckups. Harrowing.” “Let’s never do any soul-searching again,” Matt said.
She thought about how he didn’t date anyone he might end up liking, because he didn’t like himself. I think he can’t be with Gina because it’d have to mean something, and he can’t risk that.
He gave Roisin a penetrating, sullen look. It should look like pure loathing, yet it was somehow a Rhett Butler stare that she feared could equally precede shouting or trying to kiss her. Like their initial showdown, it was as if Joe was finally interested. A thought came to Roisin: that clear bell voice of her subconscious. Now he can’t have you, he really wants you. A tired love had become a sharp hunger again.
Perhaps Meredith was right: the decision to end was sufficiently momentous that she wanted objective proof that she should.
What was it about Hunter that had changed everything? Apart from the mere fact it involved sex and betrayal? It was because by watching Joe’s on-screen alter ego, she’d become seized by the certainty that there were different versions of him, and she’d been living with only one of them.
Joe had started fetishing unnecessary secrecy.
Why even tell Roisin that they’d spoken about Matt? Because Ryan was always higher in the pecking order. Even as Matt and her daughter saved her fête and saved her face, Lorraine couldn’t resist subtly reasserting that her son was CEO of the company. That his was the five-star standard of care. She rewarded words and took actions for granted.
Both of her offspring were at university, yet Roisin was required—with the emotional equivalent of a gun at her temple—to miss nearly two months of her course to come home and nurse her mother through a mini-breakdown and keep the pub running.
They moved on to circulate, and half an hour later, Roisin glanced over and saw Imogen almost bent double with laughter at something Matt had said. She straightened up, put the back of her hand to her mouth and the other on the small of his back, and Roisin felt a sharp stab of an unexpected, unnamed emotion. She looked at Matt, and he saw her. His eyes traveled down to her dress, and suddenly it felt two sizes tighter and considerably more revealing than it had done before.
Whether Lorraine maintained the momentum Matt had found was yet to be seen, but he’d forever proven it could be done. He’d lifted a sixteen-year-old curse.
In a split second, she became acutely self-conscious. Her arm, chucked around Matt’s middle, demonstrating how easy she was with him, was suddenly heavy as lead. She could sense every inch of her limb making contact with his midriff, feel the heat of his skin through his shirt. What had been so thoughtlessly done was charged with electricity. Was her arm even positioned normally? Roisin couldn’t tell. She was as stiff-jointed as a shop mannequin. Someone else had cranked her elbow hinge and curled her fingers, and she could only maintain the pose. Matt put his hand over hers and moved her arm
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Roisin obsessed about the surreptitious hand-holding, and what it meant, for the rest of the shift. Probably nothing; she was out of practice at courting rituals.
She thought on it. If Matt was intimidating to Joe or anyone else, it was through no intention of his own. Being pretty and smart was simply what he was. Easing their discomfort about this overachievement with ridicule was a price he was expected to pay, like a tollbooth he had to pass. She could see why, sometimes, he lost patience with it.
She rested her head on his chest. After the hand-holding, she wasn’t sure if this was wise, but it felt too good to stop. Such close contact was a strange mixture of fireworks and security. That was it—that’s what Roisin had noticed during the hand-holding. It was completely natural, and yet wildly exotic at the same time. Exhilaratingly new and already familiar. He was a safe place, full of danger. She toyed with her own feelings, imagining how it would feel if they crossed lines. If they . . . belonged to one another.
Matt was looking down at her with an intense seriousness. She’d almost call it “pained.” It was utterly unlike him. She realized they had been catapulted into A Moment Before Another Moment—this couldn’t be played off as horsing
Her feelings for Matthew McKenzie had arrived in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. Slow, but fast at the end.
He gave her that troubled look again. She felt she was seeing a side of him he always kept hidden. It was slightly disorientating.
“The etiquette is to at least vaguely try to deny that’s what you were doing, though!” Matt said, now sounding both amused and offended. Normal Matt had returned. But while his tone of voice was steady, he was flushed too. She had affected him.
Their whole dynamic was based on Roisin being a woman immune to his charms, and she feared that was permanently shot. She cringed so hard it was as if she’d sprain her stomach. She heard a noise and turned to see Matt on the other side of the room again, looking at her. Before she could say anything, he walked toward her, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her like it was the last scene in a movie.
What the hell was I thinking? I hate myself right now.” “Ah, there you go. There’s the regret you ordered,” Matt said in a very flat voice. “That arrived faster than even I predicted. Amazing.”
Coming on to someone and then remembering you couldn’t because your friend liked them was fifth-form stuff.
her dread at seeing him converting immediately into panic that she wouldn’t.
He looked, with bloodshot eyes, as if he’d had a sleepless night, or maybe she was projecting her own. He also looked heartbreakingly good, and she wished she could still be indifferent to that.
I have to assume you really, really wanted to protect him. I wondered why? THEN the answer arrived.
