‘Well, I—’
‘—I’m Christine Carter,’ she continued bitterly. ‘I was in an episode of Game of Thrones. I played a chicken farmer. I don’t do toothpaste.’
All the same, Cohen took Christine home that night and bedded her eagerly, although between the sheets, just as in life, she was detached and somewhat cold.
Cohen didn’t take her lack of response personally. If anything, she became a mountain to climb, a goal to score. He was determined to win her over, if only to prove that he could.
Besides, he was tired of being single. Tired of coming home to an empty bed at night, and tired leaving an empty apartment in the morning. He was tired of evenings spent alone. Tired of being too often left with his own thoughts, haunted by his own memories, alone in this prison of his own making.
Did he love Christine? It wasn’t a question he liked to ponder; a can of worms he was never quite ready to open. After all, Cohen wasn’t certain he even knew what love was. But Christine was at least a warm body in his bed and someone to come home to at night. A living, breathing person who took an interest in him and his life.
She had to take an interest in him.
He paid a lot of money to make certain she took an interest in him.
Expensive gym memberships, a new car, a hefty clothes allowance and free-range of his Manhattan penthouse. Jewellery, perfumes, exotic holidays. He left Christine in no doubt that he was her bread and butter, and that he kept that bread liberally spread with jam to make certain that she would never leave him. He married her, giving her his grandmother’s prized diamond and sapphire ring, the first of many payments towards the debt he created out of a living, breathing woman.
Naturally, Esther hated her.
‘All I wanted,’ Esther told him tightly, ‘was a nice, friendly Jewish girl. She didn’t have to be pretty. She didn’t have to be clever. Just a nice girl I could take to temple now and again. And what do you bring me? A bony actress with over plucked eyebrows and a resting bitch face so tight you’d think Moses himself had commanded she wear it. She’s so obviously a gold-digger, Cohen.’
Obviously, Cohen agreed. He was under no illusions where Christine was concerned. He knew that just like everything else in his life, his wife was something to be paid for.
And pay he did. He paid then and he still paid now, and he would continue to do so every God damn month for the foreseeable future until some other poor schmuck had the misfortune to marry her.
He was sitting in The Great Greenwich Ice Creamery, waiting for River’s lunch break, when another email came in from Christine’s lawyer. It wasn’t good news but nor was it unexpected, and Cohen read over it with a deep sigh.
Christine wasn’t happy with the current terms of her alimony and wanted to discuss how much money Cohen would be happy to part with in order to correct this matter. In return, she might be willing to part with his grandmother’s diamond ring before Christmas, although obviously she was very fond of it and while legally it was hers, she understood that morally it could be his, though for the right price, obviously ...
Morals. Cohen felt his fist clench, his blood pressure rise. He didn’t think Christine even knew what they were.
He slammed his phone down on the table so hard that the screen shattered in his hand, and once again, he was bleeding in the ice creamery. Blood seeped from his hand, a sticky rivulet snaking down his wrist onto the table and then across the remnants of his phone below. There was a large shard of glass embedded into the fleshy mound of his thumb, and the pain was a burning reminder that everything in his life – his pitiful, lonely life – was messed up and awful.
He sat, breathing heavily, unmoving, when he felt a gentle hand wrap itself around his wrist. Momentarily, he closed his eyes, breathing in the close scent of vanilla and honey, before looking up.
There she was, the reminder that perhaps not everything in his life was messed up and awful. River de Luca, the living embodiment of all he longed for in life.
Happiness, warmth, light and compassion. He stared at her sadly, and she gave his wrist a gentle squeeze.
He’d almost not come to the ice creamery today. He’d woken in the morning, gone to the mirror, and seen in the glass the bitter and hard-hearted man he thought himself to be. He’d gripped the sink and berated himself for being so easily won over by a woman. He’d chewed on his lip and hated himself for being so quickly entranced by a pair of hazel eyes and the flutter of a gingham apron. As he made his morning coffee – black, no sugar – he tried to tell himself that he really was the man the world thought him to be. A man who didn’t have time for a chestnut-haired woman in a small shop in Greenwich. A man who sneered at sweetness and was downright disdainful of ice cream.
He'd made it as far as King’s Cross before he inexplicably found himself changing tube lines and then switched onto the DLR, watching the underground tunnels of London fly by before stepping into the light at Greenwich and rubbing his eyes.
He’d tried not to come and yet here he sat, River by his side.
Her eyes looked brown today, darkened by the baby pink of her gingham apron. They swam with concern as she took in his flushed cheeks, the shattered phone and the bloodied shards of glass in his hands.
Cohen let out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding.
She held a hand up. Stay there, she was silently telling him.
She went to the door and turned the sign to read ‘closed for lunch’. She then went to the counter and pulled out the first aid box, the same one from the first time he was here. She opened it with a sigh, digging out a pair of tweezers and motioning for him to put his injured hand into hers. He did so willingly and the simple act of trust, clean and pure and honest and good, was enough to almost make him weep.
It had been a long time since Cohen had been able to share a burden, no matter how small, with anyone else.
She carefully pulled the shard from his hand before rubbing an antiseptic cream into the wound. As she tended to his fractured skin, he felt himself relax, lulled into submission by her gentle ministrations. He watched her face as she applied a bandage, enthralled by how a small, delicious sliver of her tongue poked out from between her lips as she worked.
When she finished, she looked into his eyes. Her gaze was searching, her expression sad. Cohen briefly glanced at the shattered remnants of his phone and could have died of shame.
‘I wish.’ His voice was slow, drawn deep from a personal well of regret, ‘I wish you could see me at my best, rather than at my worst.’ He paused, examining the bandage on his hand. ‘I wish I could make you understand. And I don’t mean hear, because I wouldn’t change a thing about you. Not even that. But I wish I could talk to you. I wish I could make you see that there is more to me than this.’ He scowled at his broken phone and battered hand. ‘That there is more to me than the stories your mother will have heard.’
She was watching his lips carefully, but her frown let him know that she hadn’t understood. That she’d tended to his pain without knowing where it came from. That she’d seen his anger without knowing that it was drawn from internal pain.
She hadn’t understood, and Cohen took a deep breath that was part disappointment, part resignation.
‘That’s okay.’ He nodded, bringing a hand to River’s face, holding her cheek while brushing his thumb over her brow. ‘Don’t worry. This is enough. You will always be enough.’