On the deck, Cole glanced at Dom’s phone for the third time. It was 8.51 p.m. There was a timer in the centre of the screen: big, clear numbers ticking down, surrounded by a purple circle. This was the longest five minutes of his life.
All three men had dressed in suits and ties, so their wives wouldn’t be able to tell them apart by their clothes. Other than their hands and heads, everything was covered, whereas the women were supposed to be bare. Cole reflected on the strangeness of female desire—women seemed attracted to men who revealed less of themselves, not more.
But maybe it depended on the man, and what he was hiding.
Cole had brought his suit because Oscar told him to, and Dom had presumably done so because he never went anywhere without one. Clementine had seen Cole pack the outfit but hadn’t questioned it. He wondered if the other wives had been suspicious.
The silence stretched out. Cole had always envied women’s ability to talk openly to each other. Sometimes he would sit in a cafe and listen with wonder as old ladies nearby spoke of very personal things with no apparent embarrassment. With other men, he rarely mustered the courage to say anything, and whatever they said to him always sounded defensive, boastful or threatening.
Maybe men didn’t bond with one another because they weren’t oppressed. Or maybe women made just as many boasts and threats, but at a frequency he couldn’t hear. Or perhaps it wasn’t about gender at all, just about him: his own private defect.
Oscar interrupted his thoughts. ‘You nervous?’
Cole forced a smile. ‘Oh, you know. Little bit.’ Which meant, very. And he knew the anxiety might make it hard to perform—which made him more anxious. He was in a death spiral. But he could never admit that, not in front of other blokes.
They seemed to sense it anyway.
‘Relax.’ Dom patted him on the back. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Being told to relax always had the opposite effect on Cole. He felt like he was on the deck of a ship, and everyone else was pretending not to see the iceberg.
He flashed back to a high school athletics carnival. His class had been lined up from shortest to tallest, so he and Dom were side by side. As they waited for the long jump, Cole was touching his toes, stretching his quads, rolling his shoulders back in the sunshine. Dom was reassuring him, encouraging him, as though they were team-mates rather than competitors.
But the pep talk didn’t help—in fact, it stopped Cole from mentally preparing, getting into the zone. He jumped a measly four metres, while Dom managed almost five and a half.
Now Cole wondered if Dom’s ‘encouragement’ had been deliberate sabotage.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, hoping Dom would stop talking.
Dom didn’t. ‘I like to reframe my nervousness as excitement. Whenever I’m about to make a presentation to a prospective client—’
‘No offence, mate,’ Oscar interrupted, ‘but I think this situation is a bit different.’
Dom didn’t seem offended. ‘Is it? Either way, you’re trying to please someone, to make a human connection with them …’
‘But this time you can’t use PowerPoint slides,’ Oscar pointed out. ‘You can’t even talk.’
Dom’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You think I got to where I am using PowerPoint?’
Cole glanced at the phone again: two minutes and forty-five seconds left on the clock.
‘If you screw up a presentation,’ he said, ‘the client walks away and you never see them again. But you can try again with someone else tomorrow. Right?’
Dom ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘I don’t have meetings with prospective clients every day, but—’
‘That’s why this is different,’ Cole said. ‘It’s a one-off, no do-overs. And the “clients” are our wives. They won’t walk away.’
‘Unless it goes really badly,’ Oscar said, unhelpfully.
‘Cole straightened his spine. ‘Whatever happens, we have to live with the consequences.’
‘You sound like you want to back out,’ Dom said.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Oscar said.
There was so much more Cole wanted to say. He wanted to ask Oscar what Isla’s turn-ons were. He wanted to beg them both to be gentle with Clementine. She was fragile. At the same time, he wanted to warn them about what she might ask them to do. But he followed the unwritten rules of male conversation. He said, ‘I’m fine,’ then lapsed into silence.
A minute later, Dom’s phone chimed like a glockenspiel.
Oscar took a last swig of his drink, then left it on the edge of the hot tub. ‘See you on the other side,’ he said.