hendou

She's not been snooping. She's tidying up the flat while she waits for him to get back from a lunch date with Mark, because he still has the sense of cleanliness of a teenage boy, and the maid won't be in for another couple of days. The bed has to be made, the laundry has to go in the hamper. It's easy stuff, really. At least it looks like he's made an effort this time. The duvet's out on the balcony, and the sheets are a soggy heap in the washing machine that she'd had to heave into the drier all by herself, even though they probably weighed more wet than she does.

After a long moment of consideration, she tucks the bracelet in the bedside table's drawer on Oscar's side of the bed. She's very good at acting surprised. He's always been rather terrible at keeping secrets.

—

“Oscar,” says Lily, “You really have got to stop leaving garbage everywhere.” 

Oscar, eyeballs deep in a protein shake, peers at her blearily. She’s only just arrived today, noon sharp, to find Oscar still in bed when she’d let herself into the flat. Now he’s feeding himself without much enthusiasm, and she’s making up the bed. 

She brandishes the condom wrapper at him. He chokes on his shake.

“Really,” she says, and she’s truly doing her best not to sound like a nag. But really. “I’ve not been here in weeks. You must have stomped over this about a hundred times since then.” She’d found it because she had stomped over it, just the once, and found it sticky and stuck to her bare foot. She hadn’t realized the lubricated kind would stay, well, lubricated so long. 

Oscar mutters something that could be an apology. He’s really quite red in the face, and around the ears. She knows what he looks like when he’s embarrassed. 

This isn’t quite it. 

“Really,” she says again, and she lets her arm fall, because for some reason she’s expecting Oscar to lunge over the table and snatch the wrapper out of her hand. “I’m not your mum.”

Oscar nods slowly. He’s doing his very best to keep his eyes on her face, but they keep darting back to her hand. She goes to the bin. Might as well put him out of his misery. She notes, in the way someone might note body language at a poker game, the brand on the packet. 

She startles, dropping the wrapper into the bin. Oscar’s come up behind her and slipped both arms around her waist, and he’s hauling her back, and kissing her neck. 

“I missed you,” he says. His voice is still thick with sleep. She lets him grope at her chest through her shirt and then, when she thinks about how much she missed him, too, lets him turn her around and lift her up onto the counter. 

—

Lily isn’t stupid. She’d immediately clocked that the condom wrapper was a completely different brand and size than the ones Oscar uses with her. 

She’s known Oscar for a long, long time. She knows when he’s lying. When he’s really embarrassed or when he’s keeping secrets. For months, now, he’s been all of those things. For months, now, she’s known he’s been unfaithful.

She finds it in herself to forgive him before she even brings it up in conversation. It makes sense; he’s always in one country or another, and while they are together about eighty percent of the time he is a man. She’s not friends with the other girls—the WAGs, which she refuses to call herself—but she knows them well enough to have heard the stories. Almost everyone she’s spoken to has had the same experience. 

Drivers are cheaters, Rebecca had told her, once, sloppily drunk but not unkind. It’s just the way they are.

—

Lily decides early on that she’s not going to talk to Oscar about it. Not yet. She’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but she also knows he’ll try very, very hard to lie to her face if she confronts him. He really is a terrible liar. She’d rather not shatter what she’d thought was the solid bedrock of their relationship by misstepping. 

She does, however, go out of her way to talk to Lando. 

He’s always been lovely to her. She hadn’t expected it, if she’s being honest—she’d anticipated some sort of venom from him, being that she’s partner to his closest competitor. But he’s always been at minimum cordial. Most of the time he’s an outright delight. 

When she runs into him in a cafe in Monaco, he beams at her and pays for her cappuccino. He’s nothing like Oscar, Lily thinks. The opposite in most every way—where Oscar’s pale and curved, broad in the shoulders, Lando’s all dark tan and slender, shapely limbs. He’s easy to smile. He’s very easy to like.

“I have a strange question,” she says, as they sit outside the cafe and sip coffee like old friends. Lando’s bracelet glitters in the sunlight as he sets down his cup.

“Sure,” he says.

Lily presses her lips together. “Is—can I ask how long? You and Oscar, I mean.”

Silence. Silence like a wall, like slick, cold marble. She’d anticipated Lando not having much of a poker face, but it stays frozen in a cooler parody of the easy smile he’d started with. She thinks he’s probably a better liar than Oscar. From what she’s heard, he’s had a lot more experience with this sort of thing. 

“Beginning of the season,” he says, and she really hadn’t expected him to answer at all, much less be honest.

“Hm,” she says. More to herself than anything; she’s surprised that she believes him.

“Sorry,” says Lando. He doesn’t sound all that sorry, really. He plucks at his bracelet; shoots it a rather dirty look when he probably thinks she isn't watching. 

“It’s alright,” says Lily. “Thank you for being honest.”

—

Her options are thus: 

Confront Oscar; risk the relationship they’ve spent the better part of a decade building, go back home to live with her parents while she finishes school. Sleep with Lando; not for revenge, exactly, just to see what’s out there, and more importantly what she’s up against. She thinks he’d probably do it, even though he’s also got quite a lovely partner. Maybe Lily could reach out to Magui. They could make a little club about it. Maybe she could sleep with Magui, too, but she doesn’t think her heart would be in it.

Or she can drop it. Just drop the whole thing. Pretend that she doesn’t know her boyfriend has been not only having sex with someone else but having sex with another man, pretend that he’s not a truly awful liar. Pretend he’s not being objectively quite awful all around.

She’ll have to mull it over.

—

“I know, by the way,” Lily says, unabrasively. She’s just let Oscar make love to her without a condom, which is the easiest way to butter him up for anything. 

Oscar says, “Hmmm?” He’s basically half-asleep, the way he always is after they have sex. Lily’s lived with the secret for too long to be bothered by it when she wonders if he’s fallen asleep in Lando’s arms before. 

“About Lando,” she says. 

The brick wall of silence doesn’t bother her. She sits up and starts to work the tangles out of her hair. Oscar doesn’t move, or speak, but she feels him watching her. She’d like a shower, sooner rather than later, to at least avoid staining the sheets. 

“I don’t mind,” she adds, because she doesn’t anymore. “I understand.” 

Part of her wants him to apologize. The part of her that loves a good romance film wants him to sit up and take both her hands in his, promise to end it with Lando, that it didn’t mean anything, to tell her he loves her and commit himself to her. Part of her wants this very, very badly. 

The other part of her knows what she’s going to get.

Oscar does sit up. He sits up and he watches her and she feels his hand twitch abortively to touch her. 

“I’m, um, sorry,” Oscar says.

Lily pats his bare shoulder; the nearest thing she can reach. She’d like to shrug but she thinks he’s probably feeling rather vulnerable right now. “It’s alright,” she says, climbing out from under the sheets. She really is a mess. “I’m going to go clean up.”