Peach burrowed beneath the duvet. The Sugar Shop party’s noisy intermission continued in the other room, and as she lay there in the dark, in the just-right bed of her lover and his wife, she realized she longed to be caught. She lay there, her heart racing, having already raided Ashley’s vanity, having rosied her lips with Apple Plush, Ashley’s purply shade of red that often left her lips looking bruised. Peach had liberally sprayed Ashley’s eau de cologne at her pulse points and buffed out a hangnail with Ashley’s orange stick, officially devolving into the worst-case scenario in the book by Sybil the Guru she’d been reading to get to sleep at night: Fairy Tale Endings: The Twenty Types of Bewitching Women Your Husband Might Be Cheating on You With.
Peach had always known she was no Sleeping Beauty, despite how much she wanted to be the type of mistress who quietly, aloofly, kept the affair confined to her bed. She also knew she was no Snow White, the adulteress who innocently played around, taking many lovers, dwarves or otherwise, while she sought her Prince Charming. But she hadn’t quite pegged herself as Goldilocks, the most undesirable mistress there was. A Goldilocks stole into the lives of others, attempting to usurp and assimilate all at once, leaving evidence of herself all over the place. A Goldilocks wanted all that was best in your life, then when she got it, and when she was discovered, she fled the wreckage.
That can’t be me, can it? Peach wondered as she sat up in the bed, eating chocolates from the box on Ashley’s nightstand. She put a coconut one back into its wrapper half-bitten. Yes, she certainly wanted Ashley to simply wise up, and she did sometimes picture herself as Troy’s wife, but now that Ashley had been tipped off by Plum’s announcement, now that the jig might almost be up, Peach felt wracked with guilt. Ashley was no villain in Peach’s life. She was just another fragile soul, weak in the knees from the threat of love leaving her.
Peach stepped over to Troy’s office, a windowless room that had once been a walk-in closet. She pulled the cord to the light bulb and sat at his desk to snoop, bumping her elbow against the computer’s mouse. The psychedelic spinning of the screen saver blinked away, and Peach was faced with the desktop’s wallpaper, an old snapshot of Troy and Ashley and Peyton and Lee, each and every one of them plumped out with baby fat. They were happily squalid and literary, their clothes in rags, their hair uncombed. Troy was all adorable affectation, the bowl of a pipe periscoping up from the pocket of his flannel shirt. A mustache, ungroomed, sat with pretension above his lip.
Peach opened the top drawer to Troy’s desk, and there, not at all tucked away, was just the kind of evidence a Goldilocks hoped to leave behind—a lurid document, perfect undeniable proof. It was a love letter of sorts, handwritten, full of indiscretion and specificity. And though laid out practically in plain sight, it had yet to cause an ounce of injury.
Peach remembered one of the few times Troy had taken her someplace in public, a late afternoon early in the affair, in the fall, weeks before the Flirt began to stalk, and she and Troy had split a bottle of pinot at Nicola’s, the restaurant just up Jackson Street from Mermaids Singing. The room was warmly candlelit, with a hush of jazz piped in low, and the other couples at the other tables seemed to be having trysts too, all so quiet and slipped into shadows. To not be overheard, Troy and Peach had their conversation on paper, jotting down their romantic filth in the pages of Troy’s steno pad.
And here was that secret conversation, on pages torn from the notebook, at the top of a pile of papers in a top drawer, impossibly undiscovered, fractions of an inch from the surface. Had Troy half wanted Ashley to find the notes, for her to see his handwriting taking such shape, his swirling, womanish penmanship spelling out obscenity? And hadn’t Ashley snooped the tiniest bit, even by accident?
Troy and Ashley would never find each other out, Peach thought. Troy couldn’t bear to utter a discouraging word, and Ashley couldn’t bear to hear it. They would always be the little family in the desktop snapshot, young and hopeful, determined not to be the least bit heartbroken in this life. And Peach knew she would always be nothing more than a poltergeist: a mischievous voice on an intercom and unread words on a page.
Troy tortured Peach with his refusal to stop loving her. He came to her house, ate her porridge, broke her chair, lingered too long in her bed. He’s the Goldilocks, Peach thought.
Feeling queasy from the chocolates on Ashley’s nightstand and the toxically alcoholic sangria, Peach dropped into a minor shock. So lost was she, inhaling the cold air of a room long undusted, that she thought the scream coming from the living room might have escaped from her own soft, weak throat.