The One Before The One. Katy Regan

      I read a passage aloud. The drunker we got, the more seriously we were taking it. Or perhaps it was because discussing the book meant we didn’t have to acknowledge the strangling sexual tension in the room. I could feel Toby’s eyes burn my eyelids as I read. I looked up from the book and he was still holding my gaze. I read on, my heart thumping. Then there was a line where the narrator says how he never found a way to be ‘pleasurably idle’ with his wife; how she was always so busy, wanted too much out of life.

      ‘I know that feeling,’ said Toby. His gaze was intense, penetrating. Gone was the usual, puppy-dog Toby; he was serious. ‘Feeling neglected, unimportant.’

      The room had gone deathly quiet and I pulled a face. No doubt wholly unattractive, but nerves do that to me.

      Then Toby said: ‘You know what, Caroline (he never called me Caroline, only Steeley)? I think you may be one of the few women who does understand me.’

      I downed a glass of red in one. Then Toby sat down next to me, moved his face millimetres from mine and kissed me, but I’d not had time to swallow the wine so a dribble ended up in his mouth.

      ‘Sorry!’ Another bit escaped down my chin, so I now resembled an incompetent vampire.

      ‘Don’t apologize,’ he said. ‘Red wine and Caroline Steele. Two of my favourite things.’

      Things went from nought to sixty in about ten minutes. We abandoned the books and my top and started on the vodka (the beginning of the end). The next thing I know, I’m lying on the lounge floor smoking Lucky Strikes whilst Toby showers my belly with kisses (the end of the end) and he’s telling me he thinks I’m ‘enigmatic’ and I’m telling him I find it hard not to touch him at work, that I think he looks like James Dean. At which point, I imagine, I ceased to be enigmatic.

      And then he says, giving me the most gorgeous, stubbly kiss, ‘Well, if I’m going to live fast and die young I’d better get the snogs in now …’ And a small explosion took place in my groin.

      Then we ended up in my bed.

      ‘We need condoms!’ I said as he pulled my tights off. ‘We need condoms and we need fags!’ That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up, with just my bra on, a Lucky Strike – you live, or you die, the in-joke of the evening – lodged between my cleavage.

      In this case, I died. Of utter embarrassment. Talk about out of character. Toby, on the other hand, thought it was hysterical.

      ‘And I thought you were stuck up,’ he said, laughing and laughing in the office kitchen the next day, as I stood, face in hands.

      ‘This can never, ever happen again,’ I hissed. ‘You are bloody well married and I … I want to be single.’

      He raised his James Dean eyebrows at me. My cheeks burned furiously.

      ‘Not that I was suggesting …’

      ‘Oh, Steeley,’ he said, with his sexy little lisp, taking my hand. ‘Take a chill pill. It’ll be our little secret.’ Then he sighed. ‘But yes, you’re right, we can’t do this again’. He grimaced in a way that told me he didn’t mean this at all. ‘You are, however, sexy as hell. Remember that.’

      I did. Oh, I did.

      I shuffled into work later after a horrifying, near-vomit experience on the tube where I heaved, but nothing came out, so that people on my carriage just parted, like a wave as I made a sound like a dying walrus. I was green and the heel of one shoe was missing. Last seen, rolling down the escalator of Marble Arch station.

      As the day wore on and the alcohol wore off, the reality of what I’d done hit me. I’d slept with a married man. In the space of five months, I had dumped my fiancé, dumped a string of men and slept with someone else’s husband.

      And it had all started off so well, too! For the first four years of working together, I was the only person out of twenty-two graduates on the Skidmore-Colt-Davis graduate trainee scheme who hadn’t had so much as a party kiss with Mr Delaney. This was my first grown-up, ‘proper’ job, after all, and I was in the thick of a ten year, very grown-up relationship with Martin Squire. So whilst all my new colleagues were out drinking till 3 a.m. and jumping into one another’s beds, I was batch-cooking risotto.

      ‘Two birds with one stone, Caro!’ Martin would proudly announce, like batch-cooking actually elevated him to a higher spiritual plain. ‘This will do us for tea and five days of lunches!’

      It has come to light since – I know because he’s told me – that Toby was somewhat fascinated by me. He was the unmistakable heartthrob of the grad scheme. His unique blend of raw sexiness and little-boy-lost look had all the girls wanting to soothe his hangovers, then roger him senseless and bear his children, me included.

      And yet I never stayed behind to get drunk, always went home to the boyfriend. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have the same filthy thoughts as everyone else, I was just a pro at self-control. On the few occasions that Martin and Toby met at work drinks, I would squirm, then feel terrible for squirming. They would talk about music – nobody is less sporty than Martin and it seems to be sport or music with men. I would be trying to concentrate on whatever conversation I was having whilst overhearing Martin going, ‘David Gray, Toby, he’s your man!’ whilst Toby raised his eyebrow at me over Martin’s shoulder and tried not to laugh.

      Then, in 2004, four years after Toby and I met on the first day of the grad scheme, he was head-hunted and we didn’t see each other for another four years. But then, one day in the October of 2008, I heard a familiar voice in the office: loud, slightly husky, with an adorable lisp. My stomach turned upside down.

      So now we’re here, with me snogging a married man in the living room of the house I used to share with my fiancé. Like I said, it was all going so well …

      Perhaps, I reasoned, that now I was going to hell anyway, I may as well get the best seat there, because despite my resolve, come a fortnight later, when Toby kissed me outside the tube station, cocked his eyebrow and said, ‘Back to yours?’ I dissolved.

      Well, that was it. I had lost face, dignity, any enigmatic qualities I might have ever possessed. I was damned if he thought he was just going to continue to get me drunk, then have his wicked way with me any time he wanted. I was damned if I was going to get involved. If we were going to play this game, then there were going to be some rules. The book club rules. My house, every other Wednesday. Out by 9.30 p.m.

      So, in an effort to show Toby Delaney that I am not the sort of girl he can just get slaughtered then shag, I have become the sort of girl who makes a fortnightly appointment to sleep with someone’s husband. Which suits me fine, of course. Sex with someone who is already taken. I couldn’t get involved if I wanted to.

      We’re dozing in bed now. Beside me I can see the red digits of my clock winking, menacingly: 8.16 p.m. Forty-four minutes until he has to go.

      ‘Would sex vixen of SW11 care for a glass of wine?’ asks Toby.

      I roll on top of him and sigh. ‘Is it that time already?’

      ‘’Fraid so, treacle.’ He smacks my bottom. ‘Wine time, home time … Worst luck.’

      I kiss his nose and get out of bed. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say, turning towards the window so he can’t see my smile.

      We get dressed and go down to the kitchen. Post-coital, ice-cold Sauvignon Blanc being one of the book club rituals.

      ‘Do you know what I love about you most, Steeley?’ says Toby, pouring me a glass.

      ‘No, go on, what do you love most about me?’

      ‘You’re like a bloke.’

      ‘Oh.’

      ‘Oh, baby!’ he says, seeing my face fall. This time his schoolboy snort is a little irritating. ‘I don’t mean in the way you look – you’re foxy as all hell, you know I think that – I just mean