The Nature of Cruelty by L. H. Cosway Page B

fingers, and taps in the numbers. I take it back and let the receipt print out. Robert pulls his wallet from his pocket, lifting out a fifty-pound note. He moves even closer now, and before I know it, he’s slipping it inside the pocket of my skirt.
    “That’s way too much,” I say, as he takes his time pulling his fingers back out. They scorch my skin through the material.
    “No, it’s not,” he answers, but before I have the chance to return it to him, he’s walking away from me and ducking out the door of the restaurant. Not in all my days waitressing have I ever gotten a tip that big. Oh, how I long to know what Robert is playing at.
    The remainder of my shift flies by. I get the Tube back to the house and lie down on the couch in the living room to watch some TV.
    I’m eating a chicken salad for dinner at around five-thirty when the front door opens and shuts. Knowing that Sasha doesn’t get home from work until at least seven, I presume it’s Robert. I momentarily regret being in an old T-shirt and yoga pants, but then I scold my subconscious for perpetually wanting to impress him. My subconscious is a shallow bitch.
    I have my feet up on the couch, my salad bowl in my lap, and “Come Dine with Me” playing on Channel 4. I hear Robert’s keys jingling just before he steps into the room and takes his time surveying me.
    “Well, you’ve certainly made yourself at home,” he says jovially, throwing his suit jacket down onto an armchair and undoing the second button on his shirt.
    However, instead of sitting down on said armchair, he pushes my feet out of the way and sits on the couch with me.
    “Sasha does that, too. I never understood it,” he remarks, eyeing my salad.
    “What?” I ask, munching on some lettuce leaves.
    “Watches food shows while she’s eating.”
    I grin. “Yep. That’s one of our favourite things to do. It’s no fun watching food on TV if you’re sitting there, starving.”
    “Well, when you put it like that, it kind of makes sense,” he replies, leaning in to steal a crouton out of my bowl and pop it in his mouth.
    “Hey! Go make your own dinner,” I protest, shifting the bowl out of his reach.
    He chuckles. “So how did you like your first day?”
    “It was good. Other than this one customer being particularly difficult and then randomly giving me a fifty-pound tip out of nowhere,” I say, eyeing him curiously.
    That gets a smirk out of him. “How very strange. Why don’t you just return it if it makes you feel uncomfortable?”
    “No chance. I’m keeping it as compensation for all the years I had to suffer you calling me names as a teenager.”
    “Lana…” he starts, but trails off, his eyes on my feet. “I told you I was sorry for being a dickhead back then.”
    “You’re still a bit of a dickhead,” I interject.
    “Oh, yeah, and how did you come to that conclusion?” He shifts closer, and I move my feet before they touch his thigh.
    “Well, leaving out what you did yesterday in the back garden, you also recently cheated on your girlfriend with a married woman. If that’s not dickhead behaviour, then I don’t know what is.”
    “Ah, but you don’t know the whole story there, Lana. Kara had been cheating on me for months with Gary, so why shouldn’t I have given her a taste of her own medicine?”
    I let out a small gasp. “She had? But I thought she’d only just met him.”
    He shakes his head and folds his arms. “Nope. She still thinks I don’t know. A friend of a friend told me what she’d been up to. Since there had been so much infidelity in our relationship already, I wasn’t too pushed about confronting her.”
    “Why were you even together if you couldn’t be faithful to one another?”
    Shrugging, Robert answers, “The sex was pretty good.”
    Finished with my salad, I place the bowl down on the coffee table. “I don’t think I could ever be with someone if they cheated on me. Even if it was the best sex in the whole wide