‘This place has hardly changed in twenty years,’ Dom said wistfully.
Felicity looked around at the fluffy pollen blanketing the deserted car park. She knew her husband suffered from hay fever. ‘You must have spent most of your time sneezing.’
‘Yep. Back then, I couldn’t afford the good antihistamines. But now …’ Dom took a deep breath through his nose. ‘Ta-da!’
‘Bravo,’ Felicity said drily.
Dom was always talking about the things he owned. When they first met, Felicity had assumed he was bragging: I came from nothing, now I have everything, look how great I am. She’d actually found it attractive, the way he wasn’t embarrassed by his wealth. It helped that he was attractive in every other way, too. Thick brown hair, deep blue eyes. A head taller than her and square-jawed, with a heavy brow and broad shoulders. Today he was wearing a buttoned Hugo Boss shirt, but he still looked a bit like a sexy caveman.
She understood him better now. Bragging was designed to impress other people, and Dom didn’t care what other people thought—he was just expressing gratitude. He was that rare kind of man who appreciated what he had, instead of always wishing for something better.
Felicity wrapped her coat more tightly around her body. ‘Why are we meeting here?’
‘Old times’ sake.’
‘We look pretty shady, adults hanging around a high school. We might get in trouble with the cops.’
He leered at her. ‘You could pass for a high school student.’
She tried to look affronted. ‘Well then, you’d be in even bigger trouble, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’m sure you could get me off.’
She laughed. ‘Oi! No funny business. That’s my job.’
Dom winked. ‘Just providing extra material, sweetheart.’
She often made fun of him during her set. ‘I’ve discovered a life hack,’ she’d whisper into the mic, then pause, luring the audience in. ‘It turns out, being a wife is way easier than being a hooker.’ A single awkward chuckle from the darkness beyond the stage. ‘For starters, you only have the one client. It’s very easy to remember his name. I get it right, like, eight times out of ten.’ Laughter, from more people, a little more comfortable now. ‘And his fetishes,’ she’d continue. ‘No more wondering, Is this the guy who likes being spanked, or is it the guy who’s into feet? Now I know straight away: it’s both! It’s always both. “You want me to kick you in the arse, honey? Just like last night, and the night before? Okey-dokey, you’re the client—I mean, husband!”’
Like all the best bits, this had a sprinkle of truth but was completely deniable. She’d never been a sex worker, but in high school she’d charged a boy twenty bucks to touch her boob. She had accidentally said ‘James’ when she meant ‘Dom’, but only once. And Dom was indifferent to spanking, but he did love her feet; she got a lot of massages.
While she mimed a mixture of kicking and mock-sexy dancing on the stage, Dom would be in the crowd, laughing uproariously alongside all the uncomfortable-looking friends for whom he’d bought tickets. That was the other thing she loved about him: he didn’t mind being the butt of a joke.
Now, in the car park, she got out her journal and scribbled a note. Butt of a joke. She was sure she could work that into the spank-fetish routine.
‘If the cops handcuffed us,’ Dom was saying, ‘could you use your old circus skills to get us out?’
‘I was a clown,’ she reminded him.
‘Yeah, but …’ He trailed off. This car park was adjacent to the high school campus, close enough that the buildings were visible through the fence. Dom was frowning at some kids lounging under an awning, hypnotised by their phones. ‘What are primary school students doing here?’
‘Oh, sweetie.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Those are high school students.’
‘What?’ He squinted. ‘No way. Those children are ten at the most.’
‘They look ten to you, because you’re an old, old, old …’
He swiped at her, and she leaped out of reach.
‘… old, old, old man,’ she finished, laughing.
He chuckled. ‘Okay, give me a break.’
She wrapped her arms around his waist, tilted her chin and kissed him on his stubbly cheek. ‘Never.’
A dented hatchback turned into the car park. Isla and Oscar were here. Felicity felt her good mood slip away, like the sun disappearing behind a cloud.
There were two types of sexiness, in her experience—the type that needed you, and the type that didn’t. Dom had the second type. He was a rugged, independent man who loved Felicity but nevertheless gave the impression he’d be just fine without her. They’d first met two years ago, after she’d quit the circus and found a job as a sales assistant at a Wagga Wagga car dealership. Dom asked her out just after buying a Jaguar from her. ‘Maybe you could take me for a test drive sometime,’ he said, spinning the key on one finger. It was the sort of line that Felicity usually rolled her eyes at, but he made it work. His smile seemed to suggest that if she turned him down, it would be her loss.
They’d really clicked, and Dom proposed after only four months of dating. His family hadn’t liked her much, particularly his grumpy old father, but that seemed to work in Felicity’s favour—Dom became her defender, her champion. It was them against the world. They got married at a vineyard in the Hunter Valley, honeymooned in the Maldives, and came home to Dom’s beautiful house in Warrigal. After a senior partner at his company had a stroke, Dom got promoted, and suddenly they had even more money. Felicity quit her job to focus on comedy. Dom showered her with gifts on Valentine’s Day, her birthday, their anniversary, Christmas, and sometimes for no reason at all. She had never been so happy.
Soon Dom got bored with the Jaguar and went out to buy a Tesla. Felicity waited outside the dealership, while he went in to sign the paperwork. When she glanced up from her phone, she saw him talking to the pretty young woman behind the counter. The woman was laughing. Felicity wondered if it was just the Jaguar Dom was getting tired of.
That night, at the party, she told him she was going out the back to check on Oscar. She made sure to take a suspiciously long time. She talked loudly, hoping to lure Dom out. She wanted him to see them together, to realise what he had, and what he might lose.
Oscar was so pathetic that it was almost a turn-on. He had the other kind of sexiness, the kind that was desperate, hungry. Manipulating him was unexpectedly thrilling. Some well-chosen words, some seemingly innocent body language, and then, bam! This total stranger was in love with her. Kissing her. Betraying his wife with her. Why couldn’t she seduce her own husband as easily as someone else’s?
Dom hadn’t come out into the backyard. Felicity had left Oscar there. She’d expected him to forget about the kiss once he’d sobered up; instead, he’d become obsessed. He liked every single one of her posts on social media. He texted her in the middle of the night. She deleted the messages and blocked his number, but the more she retreated, the more desperate he became. She seemed to be the fulcrum on which his whole world was balanced. He sent emails. Turned up at her shows. Once he even came to the house with a bunch of flowers, in the middle of the day when Dom was at work. Felicity had pretended not to be home and Oscar had gone away, but not before her nosy neighbour spotted him.
Oscar wasn’t sexy anymore. He was like a drowning man who would grab hold of anyone who got too close and take them down with him.
She hadn’t told Dom about the kiss, because she didn’t want to admit she’d been trying to make him jealous. She couldn’t allow herself to seem needy. But the longer she waited, the more impossible it became. If he found out now, he would surely wonder if she’d led Oscar on, not just that night but in the months since. What’s more, Dom might start looking more closely at her background. He might figure out why she’d left Warrigal to join the circus, all those years ago.
She remembered how fast things fell apart with James, the boy she’d dated in her late teens. She couldn’t let the same thing happen with Dom. But it would be hard to keep him if he thought she had cheated. He was rich, handsome and childless: he could find a new wife in a heartbeat.
Felicity had been lost before she’d found Dom. Nothing she did felt meaningful. She’d told outrageous lies out of boredom. She had friends and boyfriends but only pretended to like them, and never thought of them when they weren’t around. At school, she used to think that if the Rapture happened and her friends vanished, she would shrug it off. She wondered if she was even capable of love.
Now she knew she was—and she refused to give it up.
Isla got out of the car first. ‘Hi, guys!’ she called. As usual, she wore clothes that concealed her body from head to toe: a baseball cap, a high-neck long-sleeve top that covered not only her wrists but also the heels of her palms, and loose pants that hung over closed-toe shoes. Perhaps she was sensitive to the sun, despite her dark skin.
She hugged Felicity, squeezing tight enough to make her ribs creak. Isla had represented Warrigal High School in the state athletics championship, along with Dom, Cole and Clementine. None of them seemed to know their own strength.
‘I like your hair,’ Isla said.
Felicity touched the back of her head. ‘Thanks.’ She’d cut her red locks to shoulder-length and straightened them in preparation for this weekend.
Isla hugged Dom next, but not as tightly or for as long. Her affection looked forced, although Dom didn’t seem to notice. There had always been something off about that relationship. When Felicity queried it, Dom had said he dated Isla ‘very, very briefly’ in high school. Felicity had asked others, who’d confirmed this, but no one would explain the undercurrent of tension, the one Dom didn’t seem to notice. She went through his old social media posts, but he hadn’t joined Facebook until 2011, so there was nothing from high school. All Isla’s profiles were set to private; after Felicity’s friend requests were accepted, she found that the woman hadn’t posted anything prior to 2009—or had deleted her old posts. Even now, she seemed camera-shy: all her photos were of Noah, not herself.
Oscar came over. He always looked a bit drawn, with dark hollows under his grey eyes, a permanent slouch in his lean body, curly ginger hair often stuck to his forehead. Now his hair was neater, but in his tattered, stained green coat, he still looked like he should be holding a cardboard sign that said THE END IS NIGH.
‘Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie,’ Dom said cheerfully, extending a hand.
Oscar shook it stiffly, then opened his arms to hug Felicity. She couldn’t avoid it without arousing suspicion, so she forced a smile and spread her arms.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he whispered, his face buried in her hair.
She slipped out of his grip, skin crawling, and patted the envelope in her pocket. Two more days, she thought. Then he’ll be out of my life forever.