Ashley's Deal

Chapter Six

Ashley kept seeing Rose once or twice a week, enough it was becoming a habit. A bad habit. A cause of distractions, and of odd little insecurities, and a disruption to the comfortable life Ashley had for herself. Almost a risk to it, she sometimes thought, if she ended up feeling too much.

She kept asking David if he minded, and he kept saying no. She pushed, she wanted to be absolutely sure, and he said over and over that he didn’t. That she was having her affair, that everyone had one, and that he was glad he knew about it and she was coming back home.

Practicing law made everyone unbearably cynical, but other than that, David seemed sincere.

“I love you,” she said. “A lot.”

“I know.”

“I’ll stop if you want me to.”

“I know that too.”

“How can you not care?” she said. What she’d been thinking for weeks. “How does it not bother you if I’m having sex with someone else?”

“Honestly?” he said. “It’s not sex.”

Ashley looked at him for a while.

“I know,” he said. “But it just isn’t. I don’t care.”

“Do you think about it?” she said.

“Not really.”

“What about the time I spend with her?”

“You have a friend. I’m glad. We’re busy and don’t spend that much time with each other anyway.”

Ashley nodded, and decided she’d done all she could.

She still felt bad about the deal, as if she’d made him go along with it, in the first place, against his will, but now it was happening, he didn’t seem to care. He said once they felt closer, because she was doing this, finally, and getting it out her system, and in an odd way she understood. Being with Rose was almost like a commitment to David. It meant Ashley actually needed their deal, that she was going to stay.

That made no sense to her, except it did.

She also couldn’t decide what she felt for Rose. She liked Rose a lot, and wanted to be her friend, and none of that was necessarily what she had wanted when this started.

*

Rose rang, and asked if Ashley wanted to have lunch. Ashley went.

Rose rang at odd times, and Ashley did her utmost to move things around to see her. As far as Ashley could work out, Rose worked nights for a while, then days for a while, but also got half-days off sometimes to make up for overtime.

Ashley undid two shirt buttons in the lift. She wore a suit to work. She wore a suit and kept her hair up because she wanted to do everything she could to stop people remembering she was sleeping with a senior partner. When she saw Rose she wanted to look sexy, so she took her hair out and undid the top buttons of her shirt. She was getting used to organizing herself in lifts.

She met Rose in a café near her work. She wasn’t thinking, because she was happy. They’d been getting careless, because they didn’t actually need to worry anyway.

She was holding Rose’s hand, just. Two fingertips twisted into Rose’s underneath the table, both their hands on Ashley’s leg.

They were sitting there, and Ashley might have been smiling a bit too much, and they were caught by the worst possible person.