Love to Hate You: Ask Vicky...

Chapter Eighteen - Home Truths

Rafe looked impatiently at his watch, counting down the minutes until he could go home to his wife. He would have followed her out the door with her cardboard box, but he recognised that she wanted space from him; the tears, swearing, and look of disgust she wore had made it clear. Then Chris had taken her home (a small part of him quite delighting in the honest-to-God crisis which had arisen in his presence), and the older man had told Rafe, in no uncertain terms, that Mattie did not want him following her.

A normal man would know not to count down the minutes until he could go home to his wife - considering the unpleasant circumstances surrounding her removal from the office building - but would instead, rather relish the remaining minutes of safety before he had to return home. Rafe was not a "normal" man. Despite Mattie's fiery temper and sharp tongue, despite her stubborn ways and ability to hold a grudge, he was not afraid of her. She could not make him quail.

Guilt, he would certainly feel, because - although he was a hard, arrogant, unrelenting man - he was only made of metaphorical stone, and thus, was not truly cold and unfeeling. His wife's tears had stirred his remorse. His guilty conscience was in overdrive, and he knew he wouldn't be able to woo her back into good spirits.

Rafe's measured approach was, therefore, to fashion a bunch of origami flowers, which, because they had now become his go-to apology or romantic gesture, were sure to leave his wife unimpressed, as Chris rightly told him, when he walked in on the crisis waiting to happen (not that it hadn't already happened, but if Rafe thought that some folded coloured paper was going to atone for firing his wife, things were bound to get worse).

'Are you going to give those to Mattie?' Chris asked doubtfully, standing in Rafe's office later that afternoon.

'No,' the stony man said scathingly. 'I'm going to use them as a toilet brush!'

'I don't think they're going to cut the mustard, Raffey,' Chris said solemnly. 'You did fire her. Paper flowers...' He winced a little. 'Well, you know what I mean.'

'No,' Rafe frowned. 'I don't.' To which Chris laughed incredulously.

'You must piss Mattie off on a weekly basis. What do you normally do to say sorry?'

'These, if it's something properly bad,' Rafe told his friend quite seriously. 'And if it's something trivial then I just sort of... look at her and she...' Rafe shrugged. 'Forgives me.'

'Yeah, well,' Chris snorted, 'looking at her isn't going to fix this. She was pissed, and I mean crying-in-silence-pissed. There wasn't any swearing when I got her home. No ranting or raving. It was genuinely unnerving, Raffey.' Rafe frowned because - as an astute man - he knew the lack of demonstrative anger was not a good sign.

'What else can I do?' he shrugged, looking helplessly at his paltry offering of artistically-folded paper.

'Honestly?'

'No; please give me bad advice!' Rafe snapped, but Chris was impervious to his partner's temper.

'I think you might have f*cked this one up beyond repair. That, or, eventually - after a few months - she might forgive you, but she will never, ever forget,' Chris said, in a sombre tone of voice, which caused Rafe's lip to curl.

'Thanks for sugar coating it!' Rafe sneered, before swiping up his bunch of origami flowers and moving to crush them in his fist. He stopped himself in mid-career. Mattie will like these, Rafe told himself. Even if she doesn't forgive me, she will like them. He set them gently upon his desk. 'I'm going to go home,' he sighed, before his face twisted into a frown. 'Do you think I should have gone home earlier? You said she wanted to be alone, but does that mean alone or is that women's code for "come home right now"?' Rafe asked his friend, who had been ambivalently married for eighteen years.