Run to You
Charlotte Stein

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

More from Mischief

About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Sometimes I’m sure Lucy hasn’t really gone on holiday. Something else has happened to her, something terrible, like the little scene at the start of a gritty crime drama. The police are going to find her tomorrow, floating in the Thames. In fact, I can almost see it when I close my eyes: that pretty under-slip of hers drifting around her pale, still body, like transparent water weeds. Her red hair so bright against those murky depths.

She isn’t somewhere exotic, living the life of Riley. She wouldn’t leave with only a note for a goodbye. And yet, when I search for some other answer, there’s nothing to be found. Her apartment is as clean and featureless as ever: an open book. There’s no clue stuck on her refrigerator, in the form of a shopping list she suspiciously never went out for. I can’t find clothes she didn’t take, or arrangements she didn’t make.

‘I’m moving to my Mediterranean heaven – rent’s paid for the next three months,’ she said, which should be explanation enough, really. It’s only because I’m left with an absence, and a sense that I meant far less to her than I thought I did. I was just a blip to her, in a life filled with jagged edges and full Technicolor. I am a speck, a stripe of grey.

But that’s OK, because I like it that way. It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. I have a sensible job at a sensible company, and every night I eat sensible meals in my sensible flat, before retiring at a sensible hour. My pleasures are few and simple, but they are pleasures.

And even better: they can never hurt me. I don’t have to flee to some far-off place because I did something very wicked – though I don’t know if this wickedness of Lucy’s is just my imagination. It certainly seems like it might be when I flick through the little date diary she’s left in the upper right-hand drawer of her desk.

‘Dentist at three,’ it says, in that looping, dangerous-looking scrawl of hers. ‘Floor waxing at nine.’ Dull appointments like that almost look disingenuous, dressed in those slashing black ‘T’s and her big, all-consuming ‘S’s. The latter letter seems to devour entire pages, and puts my own handwriting to shame. My words creep across the bottom of pages, narrow and cramped and completely unobtrusive. I can’t bring myself to turn my ‘C’s into great, gaping mouths. And I certainly don’t know how to write in red.

But she does. She has. Every third Friday, there it is – the one appointment that doesn’t seem quite as dull as the rest. ‘Assignation’, it says, in bold, bloody crimson. And then as though to emphasise how incongruous that one word looks and sounds, she’s circled it three times. She’s circled all of them three times – these sibilant, secretive marks of the thing she must have been doing.

She was meeting someone. Someone she didn’t tell me about, someone dark and deadly. Or maybe it’s worse than that: an affair, an embroilment in the underworld … anything. It could be anything, which probably explains why I then pick up the telephone, and call the place she’s listed under every instance of that word.

‘The Harrington’, her diary says, and I immediately picture a great, grand dinosaur of a place. It will be one of those hotels that’s been caught between the wealth it once commanded and the seediness it’s disappearing into, and when a woman answers the phone she does nothing to dispel this impression.

‘How can we be of service?’ she says, in a tone designed to put the casual patron off. It’s both haughty and bored, like a person who’s just stepped out of the nineteenth century. She could kill with a voice like that, but my answer spills out of me anyway. I stretch my neck out, and put it on the chopping block.

‘My name is Lucy Talbert,’ I say. ‘I believe I have a reservation with you for Friday.’

And the woman says, ‘Yes. Yes, Lucy, you do.’

* * *

The place is even more intimidating than I had initially imagined – mainly because that seediness simply isn’t present. There are no holes in the velvet curtains, or cracks in the yellowing plaster. Everything gleams like the inside of a wine glass, and for a moment I stand transfixed in the doorway. I’m afraid to walk on the glossy marble floor, in case my cheap heels crack it.

Or maybe I’ll slip. Yes, slipping seems likely. It’s practically an ice rink in front of me, and I’ve never been known for my poise. Whereas the woman descending the elegantly curved stairs in front of me … well. She has poise in abundance. She’s wearing a skirt so slim and tight I’m surprised she can walk, and her heels are daggers.

But she doesn’t falter on that smooth floor. She doesn’t even seem aware of it. She glides to reception with all the grace of a swan, murmurs something to the equally elegant lady behind the mahogany desk and waltzes on.

It doesn’t surprise me that I hold my breath when she swings past me. If I inhale her perfume I might die of wealth. Her sheer classiness is on the verge of swamping me – or at the very least it’s about to mark me out as the impostor I am.

Suddenly, the difference between me and Lucy is immense. It’s a chasm. She came here, and she came here often. There are a lot of assignations in her little book, and if she attended them all she must have known how to operate in this environment. You couldn’t come here as a misfit, in ill-fitting clothes.

Though somehow that’s what I have done. I shamble up to the reception desk like an old washerwoman, skirt riding up my thighs, jacket gaping open. These heels are crippling me, and they aren’t half the height of that other woman’s. It’s really no wonder the receptionist looks at me with clear disdain, though I suspect that’s her default expression. Her eyes are the cool, clear blue of an arctic ocean, each framed with the kind of artistic sweep of eyeliner that I can never hope to achieve. And her hair …

I’ve never seen such neat, complicated coils. She’s wearing a snake on her head, only the snake is beautiful and blonde and so much better than me. I’m embarrassed to be in my own body, right at this moment.

‘Yes?’ she asks, and for a long second I can’t think what to say. I’ve forgotten how to speak, in a presence as imperious as hers. She isn’t even trying to be imperious, either. It just comes naturally to her, in the middle of casual conversation.

‘I’m Lucy Talbert,’ I say, but this time the lie stings. She’s quite clearly going to know that I’m not telling the truth, because she’s not just some receptionist. A person like her won’t mistake one guest for another, or fail to pay any attention at all.

I bet she knows everyone who’s ever walked through those doors. I bet she knows the random visitor who only stayed once last June, all the way up to the pretty red-headed girl who used to come once a month. And she knows … she absolutely knows that I am not that girl. My hair isn’t red, for a start.

It’s a dull, dense black.

And I’m biting my lip, where I imagine Lucy didn’t. In this, she was definitely different from me. She must have used that flicker of iron I saw in her sometimes – that confidence that I lacked. She was the one who said to some guy in a bar, ‘Buy us a drink.’ I was simply the one who reaped the benefits.

I can’t pass for her.

And the pressure of trying to is too much for me. Before the woman has said another word I turn to leave, defeat like ashes in my mouth. My head is down; my eyes are on the floor. That flame of sudden jolting curiosity will never be extinguished.

Instead, I make an even greater fool of myself.

There’s a man behind me, and of course I stumble into him as I go to leave. Of course I do. He’s a suited wall, grey and heavy and ominous, and the moment I glance at him I rush to back away. It’s bad enough that I’m surrounded by all of this opulence. I don’t want to smear my poverty and inelegance all over it.

But that’s what I do. I skid on the ice rink, and rather than avoiding him I blunder in closer. My heels shove forward; my body arches back. It’s only his quick reflexes that stop me landing on my ass. He shoots out a hand, so quick I hardly see it coming – and I certainly don’t have time to graciously pass it up.

‘No, I’m fine,’ I imagine myself saying, in this imaginary world where I didn’t actually need his help. In the real one, he grabs my elbow and jerks me back up – but that isn’t the humiliating part. No, no. The humiliating part is how indifferently he does it, as though saving girls from embarrassment is on a level with swatting away a fly. There’s no concern to the gesture, or acknowledgement of me as a person.

He sets me right and then simply keeps on moving towards the desk, oblivious.

Whereas I’m left with the opposite feeling. I’m on the other end of the spectrum from oblivious, whatever that’s called. Extreme noticing, perhaps? Severe and chronic attention-paying? At the very least, my eyes are refusing to move away from this man – this guy who’s barely registering my existence.

I can’t blame my eyes, however. He looks as though he’s just stepped out of a Hugo Boss advert, if Hugo Boss adverts usually featured much burlier, intense-looking men. Instead of the flat, moody look of a model trying too hard, he has an aura of focus, of effortless masculinity. His suit has settled on his body like a second skin, and beneath it you can clearly see all the things you usually wouldn’t.

How broad his chest is, how immense his shoulders are. I’m sure I can make out the heavy slab of one shoulder blade, in a way that should mark him out as a wrestler, or a boxer. It should make his suit seem ill-fitting.

But of course it doesn’t. He’s so at ease he could probably wear a coat of armour and seem comfortable and proper. He just looks at the receptionist, and she goes to retrieve whatever it is he came here for – while I remain, gawping.

I can’t help it. His face, oh, Lord, his face. I haven’t even gotten to that part yet. I’m still stuck on his grey woollen suit and his massive hands – the ones he’s currently easing into leather gloves. I’m almost afraid to analyse anything else, in case it proves too much for me.

And I was right on that score. His face is far, far too much.

Of course he’s handsome, in that Hugo Boss way, but he’s also handsome in a way that’s not. As though he maybe models for some obscure Eastern European equivalent of that scent – Hurgo Bsosch, maybe. It’s there in the heavy-lidded look in his eyes, and the softness of his mouth. He doesn’t have a grim slash, of the kind that seems so popular these days.

He has a sensuous mouth, a decadent mouth, a mouth you want to plunge into and swim around in. If his mouth was sculpted out of chocolate, I’d cram it down my throat like a starving person – hell, it’s possible I’d do that anyway, chocolate or not. He’s just so rich-seeming, and not just in the monetary way.

In the solid, fleshy, real-seeming way. In the big, masculine way.

And yet when he speaks, his voice is so gentle. So unassuming. He has a slight accent, just as I suspected, but I’m not close enough to make out what it is. He doesn’t speak loudly enough for me to make out what it is. He just murmurs a few words as the receptionist hands him his long overcoat, and all I’m left with is a hint of musicality.

It seems quite incongruous to hear such an imposing man speaking in such an unimposing manner. Shouldn’t he be more commanding? How on earth does he pay for suits like that, and go to work at the Hungarian branch of Hugo Boss, if he barely speaks above a whisper?

And then I realise what I’m doing, in a rush of humiliation. I’m actually leaning forward, to hear him better. In fact, I’m practically on tiptoe. And I’ve held my breath again, as though breathing is just some irritating habit, getting in the way of my ability to listen.

He doesn’t have to speak in a commanding way, I realise.

He’s already got your complete and undivided attention, just by being.

I watch the way he writes on a little notecard she gives to him – with a jewel-like fountain pen, naturally. I don’t think he needs it to make his script so neat and fluid, however. I think that’s just the way he is: both precise and effortless.

He has precisely and effortlessly brought me to a standstill. I can’t even move when he turns, abruptly, though I know he’s going to see me. He’ll take in my wide eyes and my gaping mouth, and then he’ll sneer, I know it. He’ll be disgusted.

But somehow it’s worse when he doesn’t seem that way at all. The look he gives me is a punch to the gut, mainly because I can finally see those twelve-past-midnight eyes of his but also because of the weight behind his gaze. He considers me gravely, as though I’m somehow as important as the glossy girls he usually sees. I’m as important as his latest business meeting; I rival the world for his attention, in that one moment.

And then something like a smile hovers around his lips, a second before he moves past me and glides back out of the main doors. Strange, really, that so slight a thing leaves a burn mark in my brain. I can’t shake that barely-there smile, long after he’s gone – and I know this because the woman behind the desk has to get my attention.

‘I assume you wanted your room key, Ms Talbert,’ she says.

It isn’t a question. She brooks no refusal. I’m in this for real, now.

The trouble, I suppose, is that I don’t know what this is. ‘Assignation’ implies a meeting of some type, but it has other connotations too. Nerve-wracking, impossible, problematic sorts of connotations that I don’t quite know how to deal with.

So I don’t. I put them out of my mind as I climb the winding staircase, still marvelling at the air of utter luxury. I’m almost afraid to trail my hand over the banister, in case I get my sticky, plebeian fingerprints all over it. And at the top is a hall lined with doors, each one glossier than the next. The wood is so dense and dark I’m certain it must have a smell, but when I lean in close there’s nothing.

There’s just the odour of sheer, intense class – more class than Lucy could have possibly afforded. She earned the same as me, which puts this place out of reach. But then I think over that confidence she had, again, and my mind goes back and forth on the matter.

True, she didn’t have the money for a place like this.

But she had the chutzpah.

And that thought pushes a sudden pang of loss through me. She’ll probably never tell me some shocking story again. She’ll never persuade me to do daring things. If I want anything above a simple life of simple pleasures again, I’ll have to persuade myself.

Which seems unlikely, until I get to the door on my room key: One-One-One. And then despite my pounding heart, and that impulse in me to always turn back at the point of no return, I’m somehow putting the key in the lock. I’m compelled to, by the look of the thing. It isn’t one of those modern card-type affairs with a light that turns green when you’re allowed in. It’s a proper brass key with an ornate and shadowy hole to slide it into, and, when I turn it, it creates such a solid sound.

Just to make everything that little bit more final. I’ve come to a hotel with a name that isn’t mine for an assignation I didn’t arrange, and now I’m in a room I didn’t pay for. A room that hasn’t been paid for, if I know Lucy. She was probably going to meet someone here and then finagle them into footing the bill, but of course I don’t know how to do that.

I’m not even sure how to stand in a room like this. The luxury downstairs was bad enough, but in such a closed space it’s almost oppressive. I feel as though I’m being mugged by expensive furniture and artwork, and there’s nothing I can do to get away. The three-foot-deep carpet has me mired, like quicksand.

And then I see what awaits me on the bed, and the effect gets worse. I’m smothered in shock and anxiety, to the point where I can’t breathe, for a long moment – though I do understand how silly that is. I’m sure this is all perfectly normal and ordinary to someone who isn’t as dull as me.

People are probably using handcuffs on each other all the time, in all the places I’m not. It’s not even a big deal to have kinky sex any more. It’s old news, it’s beyond boring, it’s passé. Those glittering gunmetal loops on the bed are simply a sign of how out of date I am.

As is the leather strap next to it, and the puddle of red silk like spilt blood, and the thin silver cane that makes me think of the kind of school I never went to. This is the dusty place of my Enid Blyton imagination, filled with answers you can’t give to questions that don’t make sense and professors in tweed with icy eyes.

Professors who might be very angry to find me trespassing where I don’t belong. I’ve somehow slipped into Bluebeard’s cupboard without knowing it, and now I’m dancing amidst the dead girls. I’m seeing things I shouldn’t and feeling things I’m not prepared for, and it’s at this moment of supreme confusion that the door handle starts to turn.

I hear it before I see it. I hear old metal grind against old metal, and then I move without thinking. I don’t even stop to consider how insane this is. I simply step backwards into the double-door closet behind me, and pull the doors closed with every bit of grace I didn’t think I possessed. I’m almost proud of myself for the sound they make: soft as a sigh. And for the stillness I sink into, the second I’m cocooned in sultry darkness. Usually I trip, I stumble, I knock something over. I’ve never been known for my stealth.

But I feel stealthy here. I’ve erased myself from the room, as though this is actually the reverse of that Bluebeard tale. I took myself out of the equation, before he could do it for me. I guessed and found my sanctuary behind some secret door, somewhere to hide while he does whatever he’s going to do outside it.

Oh, God, I know he’s going to do something. All the hairs on my arms have stood up, before I’m even aware it’s a him. And then once I’ve heard his heavy footsteps – somehow thudding, despite the plush carpet – and understood that it definitely is a man, the sensation gets worse. The prickling, bristling, squirming sensation, as though I’ve done something to be ashamed of, despite knowing I haven’t.

I’ve only pretended to be Lucy, I think at the heavy presence outside the doors. Please don’t be a Russian mobster, hell-bent on killing me.

Because that idea, though ridiculous, has a ring of truth about it. This is the moment in the movie when the heroine hopes she’s safe. She holds her breath, waiting and waiting for the drift of shadows through the gap between the doors. Hearing the creak of leather shoes, the thud of heavy footfalls …

And then just when she’s sure she’s safe …

Just when she breathes a sigh of relief …

That’s when he drags her, screaming, from her hiding place. That’s when he does whatever Russian mobsters do – teeth-pulling and eye-puncturing and lots of shouting about treasure that I have no knowledge of. Any second, I think. Any second.

Only the second never comes. It just goes on and on until it’s practically a whole minute, torturing me endlessly with its refusal to end. If this moment goes on much longer I swear I’m going to burst out and make a run for it, and the only thing that stops me is my need to check first. I just have to look.

And then I lean forward, trembling, and peer through the gap between the doors. I see who he really is, in a rush of breathless bravery.

It’s the man from downstairs.

The man in the suit, with the inescapable face.

Apparently he had such an impact on me I can recognise him in parts and in pieces. I see a sliver of black and know that it’s his big, burly right arm. And that flash of gunmetal grey … that’s the hint of stubble on his great granite face.

Though I think I try to pretend otherwise, at first. I turn him into a jigsaw, and rearrange each tiny bit I can see into something else – that’s a leg, not an arm, and it’s far too small to be his. That flash of dark hair I can see? It’s not dark enough to equal the black pelt I saw a little while ago. It’s not him, I think, it’s not him, and even if it was I wouldn’t care.

Only he chooses that moment to speak, and after he has I have to face the fact that I do care, after all. I care a lot. I want to slump against something, but of course I can’t. If I do, he’ll hear me. He’ll know I’m here, and worse – he’ll see the effect his silken voice is having on my usually reasonable behaviour.

My breath actually catches in my throat, when he speaks words into his phone. And I can’t blame what he might be saying, either, because I don’t know what it is. It could be ‘I’m going to kill her,’ thus justifying my bizarre shivering reaction to the sound of him. But it could just as easily be dry-cleaning instructions for his assistant.

Because he says it in another language.

He speaks in a different language with a voice that’s already like sand shifting over metal, and my insides just flip out. He’s inadvertently flicked some weird switch inside me, and there’s no turning it back once it’s there. Apparently, I really like hearing someone speak in Hungarian or Polish or Russian or whatever it is he’s speaking, while trapped in a closet. I’m a secret subscriber to Trapped In A Polish Closet magazine.

I’m practically the President of the TIAPC.

Though I don’t exactly know how that happened. I’ve never noticed a predilection for accents before, in my back catalogue of sexual encounters. The only thing I can come up with is that time Steven Tate pretended to be a caveman, but ended up sounding like a Brummie taxi driver.

Needless to say, it wasn’t sexy.

But this … this is sexy. Suddenly I know exactly what sexy is, which is in itself a revelation. I wasn’t previously aware that the word really existed, or could be applied to things that happen in life. It had seemed like some abstract concept that other people probably only pretend to understand, the way women pretend about orgasms.

No one is actually sexy. Nobody really has an orgasm.

Only now I can see I was very wrong about the first one, and am getting scared about the second. Because the longer I watch him – like some furtive pervert, unable to help themselves – the more I understand what sexy is. And the more I understand what sexy is, the stranger I feel. A heavy pulse starts to beat between my legs.

And when he passes too close to the closet and I catch a whisper of his cologne …

Suddenly I can feel that pulse beating all over my body. It’s running down my arms to the very ends of my fingertips, before doubling back to blast me in the face. My teeth are rattling because of it – this drumming inside me that has never previously existed. This drumming that shouldn’t exist now.

It’s embarrassing, really. What sort of person gets so excited over something so trifling? A silly person. A weak-minded person, who’s so unused to the finer things she falls to pieces when she sees them.

I don’t like being her. So I close my eyes and count to ten. I think of all the ways I can make myself reasonable again. He isn’t here for me, I tell myself, and he could never be. The kind of woman he’s here for will be like the one downstairs at reception, beautiful and elegant. And she’ll have called to organise this meeting by doing something effortless and classy, like ringing a special number on an antique phone.

She wouldn’t hide in a closet, wrestling with her suddenly emerging libido. Her heart wouldn’t beat hard to see someone like that, and hear him say a string of alien words. Tar-zu, he says, and something else that sounds like ‘camera’, and then another thing that reminds me of that castle I thought I was in again.

Only this time it’s real, and on top of a mountain in Transylvania. If I look again he’ll be wearing a cape, and have a pronounced widow’s peak.

Though when I really peer through the gap he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He’s still this perfect picture of a businessman, all smooth clean lines and big angles, inside his second-skin suit. He’s still so handsome I want to open the door, just so I can see more of him.

But I stop myself in time. I hold back just as he picks up that red silk and lets it trail through his fingers. He’s still on the phone, talking in this uninterested way, probably about stocks that need transferring into bonds, but he’s playing with something so sensuously as he does it. And he is playing with it too.

I can’t pretend he’s doing something more manly, like mining the material for coal. He lets it slide over the back of his hand, and just when it’s about to drift back down onto the bed, he catches it. He’s so deft, I think, before I can kick myself for mooning over him again.

God, mooning. Like a teenager.

Seriously, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I’m still watching with bated breath for his every little move. He finally finishes his call and snaps his tiny phone shut, and I jerk like he fired a bullet into the ceiling. And then he strides across the room, quite abruptly, and I almost do the thing I prided myself on avoiding.

I almost stumble into the shoe rack behind me and give myself away. In fact, I’m certain I have given myself away, just by jerking back. I fully expect the doors to swing wide at any moment. I’m sure that’s what he was intending to do anyway.

But when I dare to look again, the room is empty. He wasn’t going for the closet, I realise. He was going for the exit. He came to meet his lovely Lucy, and, once he realised she wasn’t here, he made a call to the complaints department of the Assignations Bureau, before taking his leave.

Or at least that’s how it goes in my head. In reality, I have no idea if there’s such a thing as the Assignations Bureau. For all I know, this could be some kind of sex-trafficking drugs ring. Lucy could have been moonlighting as a high-class call girl. I was almost in an episode of that TV show with Billie Piper.

If I hadn’t hidden in a closet.

But I did, and that’s how it is, and so now I have to fumble out into an empty room. And though I know, rationally, that this should be a relief, it somehow isn’t. I’m not pleased that I avoided him. I’m boiling hot and absolutely furious with myself for being the same person I always am: frightened, foolish, clumsy.

I didn’t even speak to him. I couldn’t even ask him about Lucy. I let myself be intimidated by his brilliance and lamped by my own weird arousal, and now I’ll never know. I’ve missed my chance, because God knows I’m never coming back here. Never, never, never. Wild horses couldn’t drag me.

However, I suspect his business card might.

He’s left it on the desk by the window, propped up against a bottle of champagne he didn’t drink. It’s probably worth more than every drop of lemonade I’ve ever consumed, but he’s just abandoned it here. He’s used it as a backdrop for that little innocuous rectangle – the one that probably doesn’t mean anything at all.

He’s left it for the girl that didn’t come. That red writing coiled across its surface will say, ‘Lucy, lovely Lucy, why didn’t you meet me?’ Or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I try to leave without reading it.

And then somehow I find myself crossing the carpet, to get a closer look. I see the word ‘girl’ and the word ‘wardrobe’, and I know what’s coming, though I try to deny it for another moment. I was so sure he didn’t know I was there. I was so sure I got away with it. He gave no sign, you see. There was no indication he’d guessed – I thought I was safe.

Now I know I’m not.

‘To the girl in the wardrobe’, the card says, on its blank white back. Then on the front: his name, and his number, and one simple instruction:

‘Call me.’

Chapter Two

When I get to my desk I do everything the same as always. I put my coffee on my little Garfield coaster and turn on my computer. I check my emails and send out various messages, then call down to Finance to make sure they’ve got my updated details. It’s just another ordinary day, I think to myself, though I can already tell it’s sliding into something else. I’m concentrating too hard on work tasks for it to qualify as normal. Usually I hardly care; now I can tell I’m caring too much.

Once I’m done with the typical morning tasks I straighten my desk, as though it really needs straightening. Everything needs to be at right angles, and there are far too many paperclips lurking behind sheets of paper. The sheets of paper themselves shouldn’t be here, so I file them away in a filing system I don’t yet have.

But I soon will.

I spend a good hour creating one – with tiny tabs and little plastic inserts and everything. Michaela snorts at me over the divide of our two cubicles, wanting to know why I’m suddenly so busy … but of course I can’t tell her. I can’t tell anyone about this, because my usual go-to confessor has flown the coop and I’m still no closer to finding out why.

I don’t want to be any closer to finding out why. I’ve already dialled his number twice and hung up, and I really can’t risk any more. The night before last was frightening enough, and maybe explanation enough, and I’d far rather be normal and busy and a customer services operative again. The phone rings and I answer it like I always do: ‘Alissa Layton speaking, how may I help you?’

And I expect the person on the other end to be boring and possibly stupid, the way they always are. ‘My payment went out at the wrong time, I don’t understand these forms, I don’t like what I’ve signed up to, do you sell milk?’ I even have my sigh pre-planned, soft and low and aimed at something other than the phone receiver. Just beyond our dividing wall Michaela rolls her eyes and makes a winding finger around the edges of her own phone conversation, like every other day in this mundane place.

So I suppose it’s more of a jolt to hear that voice, in the middle of all of this. Back there at The Harrington he belonged, but even then it was a shock. Now it’s almost impossible … like hearing a lion roar in a library. You turn around expecting dusty books and there it is, sleek and predatory and ready to devour you whole.

‘Hello, Alissa,’ he says, and I think he might devour me whole. In fact, I know he will. He’s barely said a word and I’m already speechless and frozen, unable to process his presence in my silly basic office. How did he know where I was? Why does he care where I am? He wrote those words – ‘Call me’ – but I didn’t think they were serious.

‘I’m very disappointed in you.’

Or that I was capable of provoking an emotion like disappointment. I’ve never been important enough for anyone to be disappointed in me. No one has ever expected me to make something big of myself; I’ve never done anything so awful that it let anybody down.

This is entirely new territory, and so disturbing because of that fact. It’s like I’ve stepped into another dimension, while drunk. The world slants sideways and my stomach goes with it … if this carries on for much longer I’m going to lose my lunch. I’m sweating already, and my skin is prickling, and worst of all: I don’t know how to answer him.

I don’t know.

I don’t belong in your world, I think at him, but phones don’t pick up thoughts. He has to make do with my stupid silence, and my shaky breathing.

‘Calling then hanging up? That’s hardly polite. Why would you do such a thing?’

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him, while the image of my own fear and panic rises inside me. It’s like seeing a bird caught inside a bottle.

‘Perhaps you were busy, and couldn’t complete the call,’ he says, in this purring persuasive tone – almost as though he’s daring me to say yes. Make it easy on yourself, he seems to be suggesting, but weirdly I can’t quite do it.

I can’t say, ‘Yes, go away, I’m busy’ now.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Or maybe you had an appointment you had to attend.’

‘That could be the case.’

‘You have such an important life,’ he says, and I know for sure then. He’s teasing me, in the most subtle and strange way I’ve ever been teased in my life. I can almost hear a lick of laughter in the back of his voice, but it’s not unpleasant. It’s not even infuriating.

It’s something else, instead.

‘I really do.’

‘So many matters to attend to.’

‘Absolutely.’

He makes a little hmm-ing noise in the back of his throat, like some friendly psychiatrist. I can almost see him nodding with understanding, though of course it’s obvious the understanding is fake. It’s obvious even before he knifes me with his next words, hard and fast and right under my ribs.

‘Nothing at all to do with being afraid and intimidated.’

I fall silent again then – mainly because I have to. It’s impossible to talk when your throat has sealed itself up, and your body is frozen in one weird position. I’m almost bent double over my desk and my hand has made a fist in my best suit jacket, as though my body just had to prove him right. Naturally I’m afraid and intimidated.

I’m a completely ridiculous person talking to this scion of business. He probably eats people like me for breakfast. I’m probably not even good enough for his breakfast. I’m the water he swills around his mouth after brushing his teeth with his gold toothbrush, before spitting me into the sink.

‘Are you still there, Alissa?’

I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could tell him where to go, but there are so many reasons why I won’t. There’s Lucy and what happened with her, and that place and its mysterious allure. And then of course there’s the real reason:

Him.

‘Possibly.’

‘This makes me think of you as something ephemeral, that I might blow away with a whisper. Is that so?’

‘I’d probably phrase it a different way, but generally yes.’

‘Really? How would you phrase it? Tell me, enlighten me, let me hear your voice.’

That’s too much pressure. He has to know that’s too much, right? Just the idea of enlightening him is making my armpits prickle.

‘I wouldn’t use the word ephemeral.’

‘I see. And there is a reason for this?’

‘Yes. It’s too … pretty. It needs to be more basic.’

‘Ah, then perhaps insubstantial would do.’

‘That’s better.’

‘Or invisible.’

‘I could deal with invisible.’

‘Of course you can. Of course. Because that is how you feel, is it not? You feel so perfectly invisible, like no one could ever notice a single thing about you. And, in fact, you’ve grown so used to this state of affairs that you’ve started to fall in love with it. You like being in the background, hidden from view … lingering around the edges at parties … keeping out of conversations in case someone finds you as insufferably dull as you’ve always suspected you are. You can’t even talk to me because what if I don’t care either? Surely my life must be so expensive and jaded that anything you say will sound like the simperings of a child.’

He pauses just long enough for me to say something here – a denial, perhaps, or an accusation. But truthfully, I think he knows I’ll only answer with this hollow, horrified silence. I think he was hoping for it, so he can just go ahead and fill it up with this:

‘And yet I feel I have to ask: if this is all the case, and you are so little and so weak … why is it that I could feel your presence through five inches of wood? Can you tell me, invisible Alissa? Why are you – in silence – stronger and stranger than any woman I’ve actually met?’

* * *

I don’t know why I hung up on him so abruptly. When I look back on it now it seems like something a person would do if the phone suddenly bit them, and they really needed to get away. I can even picture it in my head: the receiver clattering back down onto the cradle, my hand jerking back.

He probably thought I was insane.

But that’s OK, because I think he’s insane. I think he’s so insane I can’t stop thinking about him. What did he mean by invisible, exactly? And more importantly: how did he know that I was? Surely the point of being invisible is that no one can see you. He must have X-ray vision, I think, but doing so doesn’t help me.

It only makes things worse, because who wouldn’t be intrigued by a man with superhero eyes? If I call again I might find out he has other skills, like the ability to fly in through a window and save me from this stultifying existence.

And for a while I come close to calling him. I get as far as the last digit, but before I can hear the purring ring in my ear I slam the phone back down again. I’m not a weak person, tricked by strange mind games and just waiting for some Superman to come rescue me. I know that he never will, for a start.

But oh, my foolish heart.

How my foolish heart fails me when my phone suddenly goes, ten seconds later. It actually seems to jerk in my chest, before slowly dissolving through my insides. I flick my gaze to that previously innocuous piece of machinery, angry at it for changing. Angry at the ring that now seems as sharp as a knife and dark as midnight.

It makes me think of horror movies, when you know the killer’s calling. The startled heroine, that lonely drilling tinkle, the wide-eyed stare in the phone’s direction … it’s all there. I actually catch myself with my mouth open. I have to compose myself and close it, before I pick up the receiver. And it’s a close call, even then.

I almost go get myself a drink of water.

But I’m glad I decide otherwise.

‘Hello, Alissa,’ he says, and for one mad second I know how Lois Lane feels. I threw up the signal and he came calling, right on cue. ‘Are you ready to finish our conversation now?’

I’m amazed he even remembers our conversation, in-between million-pound meetings and making himself so slick and flawless. The suit alone must take a thousand years to put on, with all of its buttons and extra bits and the always imminent threat of ruining something so expensive. I bet he has to lever it on with tweezers. I bet geishas roll it onto his body using their breasts.

And yet here he is, just waiting to finish something so pale and slight.

It makes me think it wasn’t pale and slight at all. Somehow I’ve stumbled into a Very Serious Discussion about important things, and now I have to finish it. How do I finish it? What were we even saying?

‘Describe your face to me.’

I definitely don’t think we were discussing that.

‘Why? Don’t you know what it looks like?’ I ask, confused. He saw me in the lobby, didn’t he? Though when I think back … how would he have known I was the same person, hiding in the wardrobe? He couldn’t have, not for sure.

And I don’t feel like explaining. Everything might end, if I do.

‘How would I?’ he says, and I can almost hear his shrug through the phone. Just one big shoulder, as lazy and casual as a basking lion.

‘Well, you know where I work. You must have found things out about me.’

‘So you think I’m some obsessive stalker. From invisible to so sure of yourself in under a day. Very impressive.’

‘No, I don’t think … that’s not what I meant,’ I say, but I flounder over what I did actually mean. In the end I have to settle for the truth, even though doing so makes me picture that lion, suddenly baring all of its teeth. ‘It’s just that … well … you seem like a stalker. And also a mind-reader.’

‘You think I found out where you work because of mind-reading?’

He sounds so amused I almost take the words back. But in the end I think it’s better that I stand my ground. If he is a maniac, he’ll know I have him pegged now. He’ll picture me with my thumb on speed dial to the police, and never put me in a box beneath his stairs.

I’m not fooled by you, I think at him – though my actual words sound weak.

‘Possibly.’

‘Ah, possibly again. Not sure, can’t decide, don’t want to commit.’

‘Why would I want to commit something to someone I barely know? You haven’t even told me your name,’ I say. He doesn’t have to know that I’ve invented hundreds for him, in my head. Stanislav, Arvikov, Amritza, my mind murmurs, even though I’m sure none of those are actually words. ‘And I have no idea how you know mine.’

He laughs, low and dark. I swear the sound rattles my bones.

‘You keep calling me, remember?’ he says, and I want to smack my hand over my face to see my own silliness spelled out like that. Of course, of course, I keep calling him and hanging up. I really am sending out a signal. ‘If you hadn’t, I would have surely bothered you no longer. But seeing your work number in neon was too tempting, so I simply called you back and listened to your delightful answering machine message. How does it go again? “You have reached Alissa Layton, please leave a message after the beep.”’

I’ll admit it. I love the way he says the word ‘beep’. It’s almost a click, instead. It snaps out of him, oddly abrupt and oh, so interesting.

‘That does sound like me.’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘It’s straightforward.’ I hesitate, wanting to hold off on the final verdict. It’s just too damning. I want to claw my way out of the outfit it puts me into, and run newly bared down the nearest street. ‘And dull.’

‘So now we have dull to add to your collection. What were your other terms for yourself? Invisible, and insubstantial?’

‘I might have said something along those lines.’

‘So you don’t think there is anything beneath all of this? Nothing of interest?’

‘Certainly nothing as interesting as the life you lead.’

‘And what makes you think my life is so interesting?’

I see the entrance hall of The Harrington behind my eyes, glossy and glorious. The coil of the receptionist’s hair, the three neat items laid out on the bed like bowls of porridge in the Three Bears’ house.

Which one is just right?

‘You do those things at that hotel.’

It doesn’t come out the way I want it to. It comes out fumbled and childish, with a hint of judgement I didn’t realise I felt. I mean, just because I don’t understand sex doesn’t mean other people can’t, and in a second I’m sure he’ll tell me as much. ‘Shouldn’t people explore if they wish?’ he’ll say, though when this doesn’t happen I’m not grateful. His amusement is back, and it’s just as prickling as it was before.

‘Is that what you think happens there? “Doing things”?’

‘You know what I mean.’

How can he? I don’t even know what I mean.

‘I really don’t. Speak plainly.’

‘I thought I was,’ I say, because I’m a fucking liar. That laughing lilt to his voice just makes me want to lie and lie and lie – but that’s all right.

He tells the truth for me.

‘No, you were speaking in a vague way because you’re afraid to say the actual words.’

How does he do it? Years of reading people over the boardroom table, I suspect, though there are other options. Perhaps he operates in some shady, cut-throat world I can’t even fathom, where everything dances on a knife edge.

Or maybe I’m just really easy to read. I’m a neglected book that’s been left somewhere damp, swollen to twice its size and suddenly filled with enormous words. Most of them probably ask for help. Some might mention loneliness.

All of them must be hidden, immediately.

‘Maybe that’s just because you’re a stranger.’

‘My name is Janos Kovacs,’ he says, casually. He doesn’t know that I cradle those two names to my chest like rare and ready-to-fly birds. ‘There, now we are no longer strangers.’

Indeed we are not. He is Janos, pronounced with a curdled call for silence at the end. He is Hungarian, as I had guessed, and suddenly so large in my head I fear I’ll never get him out. I have to tear away the rest of him with claws I don’t have.

I’m not this fierce, I think.

I’m not this able to resist.

And yet I am.

‘I don’t think that’s enough.’

‘How about if I tell you I work in finance?’

‘Lots of people work in finance.’

‘I have a penthouse that overlooks the city.’

‘Doesn’t everyone, these days?’

I marvel at the boredom in my own voice. My palms are sweating so much I have to keep switching the receiver from one hand to the other, but somehow I keep up this charade. When it’s just our voices, I can do it.

‘My favourite opera is Madame Butterfly.’

‘You could be any anonymous millionaire suit.’

‘So if I was poor you might say what you mean?’

‘I might.’

‘Then I am penniless.’

The words themselves are not unusual. But, I confess, the sudden conviction in his voice gives me pause. There’s something steely about it, as though he’s carving each word into a tree with a knife.

It makes me shiver, but I pretend it doesn’t.

‘You can’t change the dynamics just by saying.’

‘Of course I can. That’s how the game is played.’

‘And is that what The Harrington is about? Playing games?’

‘If you say the real words I might tell you yes or no.’

Whatever this game is, he’s extremely good at it. I didn’t agree to dancing, and yet somehow I’m doing it anyway. I’m doing it right here in the middle of the work day, with Michaela to one side of me yakking away into her own phone and my boss over there by the water cooler.

He gives me a slight nod, like he thinks I’m fielding an important call – and I suppose that is how I must look. I’m hunched over, near-whispering, one fist clenched over my keyboard. The other clinging to the phone for dear life.

‘All right. All right,’ I hiss at him. ‘People meet there to have illicit liaisons.’

‘I’m not sure that’s quite real enough. It sounds like something from a tabloid newspaper, about the swinging the neighbours have been doing.’

‘People meet there to have sex, then.’

‘Sex is better, but I think you can do more.’

I glance across at my boss. He’s no longer looking, but that doesn’t matter. This conversation is definitely giving off a vibe, now, that people should be able to feel across long distances and without glancing at me. I can feel it pulsing at my core like some nuclear reactor, so it must be spreading outwards.

Soon everyone will be irradiated.

At the very least, they’ll know. Alissa is having an oddly sexual conversation with a complete stranger, and doesn’t want to stop. Look at her there, shamelessly not stopping.

‘They meet to touch, and kiss, and lick,’ I say, and though my voice shakes I’m proud of myself. It feels like he shot a tennis ball at me with a cannon, and somehow I miraculously managed to smack it back.

‘And is that all?’

I close my eyes and take a breath, hovering on the brink of not obeying. He’s just toying with me, pushing me, daring me to go too far. I shouldn’t care. I should put the phone down. But I suppose the trouble is:

I want to go too far. I’m tired of living in the land of not far enough.

‘They meet to screw in every kind of position, all over each other and upside down and inside out. And when they’re done with all the things I can imagine, they start on the things I can’t. Threesomes and foursomes and things with toys … things with handcuffs and canes and red silk sliding all over their bodies …’

By the time I’m done my face is flaming, and I’m trembling all over. I barely even remember what I’ve said – it just came out in such a tumble, one word racing after the other, all of them so eager to emerge. I didn’t realise how eager I was to emerge.

But I think he does.

‘What a wonderful way with words you have when you really try.’

‘It’s nothing to do with trying. It’s just you and how goddamn persuasive you are.’

‘If I’m so persuasive then why are we talking about what you want to talk about?’

I frown at nothing and no one, the inside walls of my cubicles suddenly gone. Instead they’re replaced by his indomitable face, and its every infuriating line and curve.

‘No, we’re not.’

‘Of course we are. You wanted to know about The Harrington, and now I have told you – even though it is the most closed of all secrets.’

‘But this is … this is what we started out at. We started talking about it and then you wanted me to talk dirty.’

‘Oh, darling. If I wanted you to talk dirty there are a hundred other ways I would have gone about it. No no no, when we began talking I wanted to know what your face looked like, and you led me down an entirely different path. I must admit I am enjoying the view here, but even so – it’s your view, not mine.’

Oh, God, he’s right. How is he so right all the time? It would be impossibly frustrating, if he wasn’t so calm about it. So inoffensive. He doesn’t force his point of view on you. He just leads you down a certain path inside the labyrinth, and suddenly you’re lost.

‘It wasn’t … I didn’t do it on purpose, though.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Of course not. Why would I?’

‘Because you don’t want to talk about your face.’

This labyrinth is dark, and deep. I don’t know where I am any more.

‘Maybe I’m hideous,’ I say, so faintly I hardly have to worry if anyone can hear. Only he can, down a million miles of phone wires to his lair that lies beyond the goblin city.

‘I think it’s more likely that you think you’re hideous.’

‘No, I really am. I’m sure you think you’re talking to some gorgeous babe whose presence pushes through wood, but in reality I’m monstrous. I’m six foot tall and three hundred and fifty pounds, with no ears and one eye,’ I say, and I know why I do it. It’s so I can be the minotaur instead of the girl. I’m marching around his maze, hungry for his blood.

But he doesn’t care either way.

‘Are you just trying to turn me on now?’

‘A man like you isn’t turned on by no ears and one eye.’

‘Perhaps not – but I am turned on by the sound of your voice, and the way you watched me, and by your resistance. I’ve never known anyone long for something so much and yet be so afraid to take it when it’s offered.’

I’m the girl again, just like that. I’m running around the insides of myself, blind and fumbling – only I think I was wrong about him having a lair at the centre. I think I can see him atop one of the walls with a rope, and he just threw it down to me.

I won’t take it though. I don’t know him well enough to take it. This could be a trap, and once I’m up there he robs me of my self-esteem and makes a run for it.

‘You don’t know what I long for.’

‘How can you imagine so when you make it this clear? You long for something different, and lovely, and exciting,’ he says, as my eyes drift closed. ‘You long to be outside your own skin, for just a little while.’

I’ve never ached before over something someone’s said. I’m not used to the sensation, so sweet and hollow inside myself. It makes me swallow too thickly and keep my eyes closed in case someone sees I’m having feelings, and most of all it forces me to deny, deny, deny.

‘That’s all wrong.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why are you still on the phone?’

‘I’m putting it down.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘We’ll never speak again.’

‘No, never.’

Is it my imagination, or does he sound strangely sad when he says that last lonely ‘never’? It must be the former, and yet I can still hear the word echoing in my head a long time after he’s said it. I let the silence spin out, just so I can feel it for a little while longer.

Before I have to say: ‘I’m really not pretty, you know.’

‘Tell me all the ways in which you think you’re not.’

‘My face is too square.’

‘So you have a strong jaw that I should angle up to the light, before I leave a trail of kisses over its perfect slant.’

‘And my upper lip is hardly there, while my lower one …’

‘Is so full and soft and sulky, as I lean in to steal a kiss.’

‘You wouldn’t want to. My skin is almost see-through and my hair is as thin as paper. I can never do anything with it.’

‘Except lie back and let me wrap my hand around those soft strands. Is it dark?’

‘It’s almost black.’

‘And your eyes?’

‘A muddy brown. A boring, dull, nothing brown,’ I say, though that’s not strictly true. It’s just that I don’t want him to recognise me as the girl from the lobby, not yet. Not while he’s so content to imagine me into someone else.

‘But you would look up at me with them, wouldn’t you?’

I know what he means. He means that I would look up at him as I took his cock in my mouth. He means it because I make him, in my head. I push him back on the bed, and lick along the length of him, wetly, greedily, oh, God.

‘I would.’

‘And what would those eyes of yours say?’

‘More, now, yes, please.’

I don’t know if I mean more of his words, or of the sex he doesn’t know we’re having in my head, or just everything, everything would be fine. He’s nothing like I thought and everything that I want, and if that means I have to take a leap of faith and grab the rope, I will.

‘Oh, so greedy. Are you greedy, little Alissa?’

‘You know I am.’

‘Then tell me what you want,’ he says, and the fantasy suddenly bleeds into reality. I blurt out words before I’m even sure he’s ready for them – words like ‘I want you to fuck my face.’

But he doesn’t let me down. Of course he doesn’t. I’m halfway up that rain-slicked granite-grey wall, and he’s still hauling me.

‘Yes,’ he says, only he stretches that one beautiful word out to twice the size. He packs it full of delicious satisfaction, and ends it on this: ‘You want me to fill your hot, sweet mouth, over and over, as deep as you can take it and as rough … and then just as you’re sure you’ve reached your limit … just as you think it’s too much with my fist in your hair and my cock so swollen and eager …’

He leaves the last word hanging, like the hand I imagine reaching down to me. I’m almost at the top, now. I’m almost able to look out over the labyrinth if I can just take this one last little step …

‘You come all over my tongue. All over my face. Oh, God, yes, come all over me,’ I tell him, sure for a second that I’ve gone too far.

And then I hear that amused lilt in his lovely voice.

‘Do you see now how lovely you are?’

Chapter Three

The problem is that I now know what the phone is. It isn’t a device through which I can make deals or contact friends I don’t have or order a Chinese takeaway. It’s a hotline to him. It’s a way of revealing I’m ready. All I have to do is dial and he’ll have my home number, too. And I suspect he’ll call it.

Even though I’m not the sort who suspects anything, of anyone. I usually get it wrong in some spectacular fashion. I imagine someone’s watching me and it turns out they’d just noticed my skirt tucked into my knickers. I believe I’m loved and discover it’s just a mild affection. This is the usual way of things, and for a while it makes me pace the living room like a trapped animal.

I put it off and put it off, by turns angry at myself and almost pleased. I don’t care who he is or what he does, I think to myself. And then I call quite suddenly, when I least expect it, and thirty seconds later he calls me back.

The moment he does, a half-made circle in my head clicks closed. I guessed, and was proved right. For once, I was proved right. I wasn’t punished for imagining something amazing, only for reality to fall so very short.

He’s right there, on the other end of the phone.

‘Hello, Alissa,’ he says.

It’s practically his catchphrase.

‘Hello, Janos,’ I say.

His name sounds like something sacred and unspoken, in my mouth. My clumsy English accent stumbles over the J that should be a Y and the missing H at the end. It’s a travesty, really, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

‘You remembered,’ he says, as though I could ever forget now.

It’s burned onto my brain. I say it in my sleep.

‘Of course I did.’

‘I get an “of course”? Well. I do feel privileged.’

‘You shouldn’t.’

‘No?’

‘I’m hardly anyone important.’

‘And you believe that is how I weigh things? By importance? Perhaps I would like you better for being the undiscovered queen of a small country.’

‘It would make more sense.’

‘Then I shall make you one. You can be queen of my island.’

‘What island?’

‘The island that all men are, naturally.’

He sounds like he’s laughing, again, but I’m starting to think that’s his default state. Or at least it’s his default state with me. I make his voice go all rich and rolling like that, with a faint curl upwards on the end of every sentence.

‘That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I’d probably have to wave a gloved hand from inside an expensive car. Accompany you to functions I’m not prepared for. Wear outfits I look terrible in, with hats I can’t afford.’

‘That isn’t the sort of island I had in mind.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Then what? What sort of island are you?’ I ask, but I’m picturing it in my head before he’s even said. I see tangled jungles lit by a thousand lurking eyes … great jagged rocks turned black and nightmarish by a storm that’s always raging.

And me, swept up on the beach.

‘One where it’s always night.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And the ocean rages.’

‘My little boat hardly stands a chance.’

‘No, probably not. But you needn’t worry.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am waiting for you on the shore.’

‘In your suit?’

‘No, I’m never in my suit, on the island inside me.’

For some reason it makes my breath catch in my throat, when he says it like that: ‘island inside me’. I have to sit down on the edge of my bed, because my legs don’t want to hold me up any more. I’m almost in the same state I was before, at the office.

Flushed, famished, eager to get lost again.

‘Then what?’

‘Barely anything. A savage animal stripped to the waist.’

‘I think you’re just telling me things you think I want to hear, now.’

It’s not the first time I’ve wanted to say it. It’s just the first time I’ve been brave enough to – and not just because of how intimidating he is. I wanted to hold onto the illusion a little longer. I wanted him to be real, to honestly find me interesting, to wonder what lies beneath my cloak of invisibility.

But now it’s OK if he doesn’t.

Because I’m pretty sure he does.

‘I’m disappointed in you, Alissa. Do you really think I’d be so dishonest?’

‘I think you’d do a lot of dishonest things to get what you want.’

‘It’s true. I have. I do. And yet not with you.’

‘Why not with me?’

‘Because you are already sure everything is a lie. My only defence is the absolute truth. My only power over you is the truth. And if I keep telling it, eventually you’ll believe.’

My breath is caught again. Actually I think it’s been bound and gagged and sent before the firing squad. And when I finally speak, my voice is shaking slightly.

‘How do you know this stuff? Did Lucy tell you?’

‘Lucy?’ he asks, and my heart sinks before he’s even finished. ‘Who is Lucy?’

‘The woman you were supposed to meet that night.’

He laughs, low and startling.

‘So that’s why you were hiding in the wardrobe. It was not meant to be you.’

‘That’s right, it wasn’t. Which means everything you think about me is wrong.’

‘On the contrary. Everything fits a little better, now. I thought you’d merely changed your mind, but this is much more you. Slipping into the skin of someone else, just as I said.’

Damn him. Damn damn damn him.

‘It’s not like that. I wanted to find out what she’d been doing. That’s all.’

‘Are you sure?’

I close my eyes briefly.

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Ah, that’s good. It’s good to hear your honesty.’

‘Then tell me yours. You said you would. How do you know me?’

He hesitates, then. His silence is almost as overwhelming as his words.

Almost.

‘Do you think you are so very hard to read? Perhaps no one has ever bothered before, and this has led you to believe you are inscrutable. But no, I think not. I think it is more likely that these other people are lazy. You take a lot of studying and so they let you pass them by, even though everything you do says so much. You hide when you don’t want to; you hang up when you want to complete the call. You deny the things you feel the most and admit what matters least. My little study in opposites, are you not? Heart on her sleeve, though she would say it was only the pattern of the piece of clothing she was wearing.’

He’s right again in many ways, but this time I only swallow thickly and try to change the subject. I try, even though it’s difficult. My heart is thudding through my body like an oncoming army, shuddering my foundations as it goes.

‘Maybe you should tell me something about yourself now,’ I say, despite knowing what path those words are putting me on. It’s the path that leads to him, not away. And worse: I think I like that this is the case.

I shiver strangely when he answers.

‘And what would you like to know?’

‘Anything.’

‘Will you tell me anything in return?’

‘You mean you don’t know it already?’

He laughs that low laugh. It’s almost a growl, but not a threatening one. More like the sort you’d hear as an animal sleeps, and dreams of defending his home.

‘I don’t.’

‘All right, I will.’

‘Very well, then. Ask me a question,’ he says, and in the silence that follows I pick and discard several options. Some seem too personal, others too flippant. And all of them lead me back to the real issue.

My every word apparently tells him a thousand things about me. A single slip and I’m suddenly wretched and shallow, to go with all the other things he’s uncovered so easily. My habit of doing the opposite of what I want to, my tendency to hide – he had it all.

So I have to be careful here, and completely innocuous.

‘How old are you?’

‘Worried that I am older than you’d like?’

Dammit, question, you were supposed to be innocuous.

‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

‘Really?’

‘Why would I? What would it matter to me if you were?’ I say, and try to laugh lightly somewhere in the middle. I largely fail. And even if I had succeeded I don’t suppose it would matter, because he soon blows all of that nonsense away.

‘It would matter because my intention is to do all of those things you spoke of to you, and far more than that besides. I intend to bring you pleasure and sweetness of the sort I’m sure you have not yet known, and so you can see: how old I am is of some importance. Many women don’t like to be with someone twice their age.’

‘I don’t think the idea would even enter most women’s heads, when it comes to someone like you,’ I say finally, and only because I’m afraid of something else escaping. My body pulsed once, hotly, over several of the things he’s just said, and if I give it too much leeway I know what it will make me do.

There are so many words it wants me to say, always hovering beneath the surface of our conversations. ‘Yes’ is one of them. ‘Please’ is another. Both broke through last time and embarrassed me, but I won’t let them out again.

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, really. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘Am I pretending?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘And why would I do such a thing?’

‘To get me to admit it.’

‘Admit what?’

‘How handsome you are! You want me to admit how handsome you are. You want me to say that you’re gorgeous, that you’re amazing looking, that I was mesmerised by your great granite face and your hooded eyes and your mouth like an imprint of a kiss, and I want to because you said all of those things about me and I can’t stop thinking about any of them even though none of them are real and God, God, you’re the most frustrating person in the world.’ I pause to take a breath. ‘Why do you even need to hear this? Everyone on the planet has probably told you how handsome they find you.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he says, so coolly, so clearly. I could almost believe there was nothing else coming, until it hits me around the head. ‘But it only matters to me that you do.’

I can’t be held responsible for the one word I croak out. I’m still stunned after the blow, and probably sprawled all over the floor of my own mind.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want your pulse to quicken when you think of seeing me.’

‘You do?’

‘I want you to be wet between your legs when you imagine my face.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Are you wet now, Alissa?’

‘Can I plead the fifth?’

‘You can, if you wish. Of course it will mean that I have to be honest while you do not, but if you really must …’

‘All right. All right. I am,’ I say. ‘But it’s not just about your face.’

‘I see. How intriguing. Perhaps you could tell me what it is about, then.’

He knows I won’t refuse, now, but oh, it’s agonising to get the words out. Words he said so easily to me, so freely, and I’m struggling like I’m in a straitjacket.

‘The way you say things.’

‘So it’s the sound of my voice.’

‘Not just the sound, though that’s nice enough,’ I say, then immediately want to make it more than that. He was so generous, I think. Why don’t I know how to be generous with him? Why do I keep thinking that he’s heard it all before, when I can almost hear him waiting on every single thing I say?

He’s waiting now, I can tell, and the longer he does the more the pathways in my mind begin to rearrange themselves. The one marked sex no longer has a beware sign barring the way. And the one marked Janos is a thousand miles wide and as smooth as silk.

I could probably slide down it.

‘It’s more than nice enough. It’s so beautiful I hear it sometimes in my dreams. The first time I heard it in the hotel room it was like I’d known it all my life, and just hadn’t listened before.’

‘Ah, Alissa.’

‘And your words …’

‘Tell me about my words.’

‘They make me crazy.’

‘Which ones, specifically?’

‘All of them. Any of them.’

‘So mostly “and”, and “when”, and “if”.’

It’s another challenge, ten hurdles high. I can clear it, though. I can.

‘No. Mostly “sex” and “pleasure” and the way you just said “wet”.’

‘Like it excites me.’

‘Yes. Exactly, yes.’

‘Like I want you to tell me all about that slippery seam between your legs, and how eager you must be to have someone lick their way over it.’

‘Oh, God, yes.’

‘And how I would, if I were there. I’d kiss your pussy until you forgot every little sliver of that restraint, play with your nipples to make them so pretty and stiff, slide my fingers inside you just as I think you might be doing now. Are you?’

I’m sitting with my legs squeezed so tightly together you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar, one hand a tight fist just above that place he’s talking about. However, my imagination is an entirely different matter. In my imagination I’m sprawled back on the bed, fingers sliding through my absolutely soaking folds, everything so frantic and furtive it’s almost real anyway.

I don’t suppose it matters if I lie a little.

‘Yes.’

Only I think it does matter that I lie a little. I can tell. There’s a silence after I’ve said it, as though he’s considering saying one thing. But in the end, he goes with the other.

‘Good. And then just when you’re at the point of begging … just when you’re ready to tell me your every secret without dissimulation …’

‘Yes, oh, yes.’

‘I’d stop.’

‘No, don’t,’ I say, and am shocked by the urgency and desperation in my own voice. I sound like I’ve lost my mind, or at the very least would be willing to trade it for more. And worse, he definitely knows that this is the case.

‘It has to be so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this way I can make you take another step, without even really trying. You’re ready now, aren’t you? You’re just waiting for the next part, hovering on the edge. So I will leave you here, sweet Alissa, with a promise.’ He pauses, almost unbearably. ‘I’ll carry on, if you come to me.’

I could kill him. I want to kill him. At the very least I want to cry and kick and scream, and have to fight with myself to stop it happening. I’m not a child who’s been denied something. I’m a rational adult, who needs to tell him rational things like:

‘I won’t be what you expect, you know.’

But he defeats me again, as easy as anything.

‘Of course you will. You’re the girl I saw in the lobby, aren’t you?’ he says, and when I answer with a shocked silence he laughs. ‘Oh, my darling. Did you really think I didn’t remember?’

Chapter Four

There are so many reasons why I’m standing in the lobby of The Harrington again. Obvious ones, like the curiosity which now burns through my body unchecked and uncontrolled. Undeniable ones, like the draw of that voice and the deal I made with him.

And then there is the real reason:

He lied.

Or, at the very least, he didn’t say. Either way it doesn’t matter, because the result is the same: I’m here and waiting for him, angry and stupefied but most of all safe, oh, so safe in the knowledge that he knew all along. I won’t be a shock to him. I’ve never been a shock to him. He saw my face and my clothes and my body, and carried on with all of this even so.

In fact, he carried it on to almost insane heights. He said I was lovely, and made me say it too. He told me I was a thousand things, and now all of them must be true. Even his guesses now seem stronger and on surer footing.

He’s not a magician after all.

Though it seems like he might be one, when his hand suddenly smoothes over my back. I don’t hear him cross the skating-rink lobby, or see his shadow out of the corner of my eye. He keeps everything drawn in, so that this one touch will have the strongest possible impact. And oh, it does.

I think my whole world lights up to suddenly feel him. My skin bristles all over, so sharply aware of that one innocuous touch. That one nothing touch. He doesn’t even cup my waist or linger for a while, and somehow I’m feverish over it. I’m flaming hot and hardly able to stand it – though I suspect the reason why.

The very casualness of the gesture is what makes it so very potent. Only intimate acquaintances would touch each other like that, with some unspoken hint of all the years between them. Somehow, I think, we have years between us, even though we’ve never actually and properly met.

This is the first time, and despite those years it feels like it. I’m shaking in the semi-shelter of his arm, afraid to meet his gaze but dying to do it anyway. Will he be as magnetic as I remember? It seems impossible, and yet I know the answer before I look. I don’t have to see those eyes. I can feel them on the side of my face: a slow caress.

And when I finally turn my head he’s even better than I expected.

I do it in increments, starting at his stubble-roughened throat, before moving onto his muscular jaw. There’s something so fist-like about his face, so brutal … until you get to the centre. Until you get to that mouth like melted butter and those eyes, oh, those eyes. Had they seemed so alive before? I would have called them hooded and sultry, I think, but I can’t quite call them that now.

They still are, but it’s different. It’s like he’s searching for something; I can see the restless pacing behind that gaze. I can feel him wandering through my insides, trying to find something I don’t know how to give. I’m sorry, I think at him, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Once he’s done with this looking, his mouth lifts a little at the corner. Just faintly, hardly anything at all.

But I recognise it for what it is.

This is the same smile I heard in his words – only now it comes with confirmation of its warmth, of its affection. I can see it in his eyes. I can feel it in the hand he raises to brush aside an errant strand of my insane hair.

And most of all, I can hear it in his words.

‘Hello, my Alissa,’ he says.

* * *

The room is just as I remember it: opulent, and filled with the kind of awed hush people usually find in museums. It makes me want to be very, very quiet, in case I accidentally breathe and disrespect the drapes. I almost fail at following him inside, for fear my shoes will dirty the quicksand carpet.

And for other reasons, too. Now that he’s not holding me and caressing me and saying the one word that turns my insides upside down – ‘my’, I think, mine, my own – I’m not quite sure how to behave. I feel as though I’m trailing in the wake of an enormous dark ship, and if I draw too much attention to myself I’ll be crushed by its jagged edges.

He could definitely crush me, if he wanted to. He’s much taller than I remember. Perhaps six foot two or three, though his overall size makes it seem like more. He really is built like a boxer or a rugby player, which probably explains why I jump back when he suddenly turns to face me. I just wasn’t expecting him to move. I was quite content following a couple of steps behind, and in one abrupt movement he closes that gap too quickly.

It isn’t a shock that I slam into the door behind me.

But it is a shock to him. He raises one eyebrow, which I suppose is his version of that feeling. It’s measured and a little amused, and it makes the corner of his mouth lift a little.

‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ he asks, though I think he knows I am. He just wants to show me how silly that is, how bemused it makes him. He isn’t going to do anything horrid to me, so why did I almost barge my way back out into the corridor?

Because he’s big? Because he’s a prowling, dangerous predator? He certainly walks like one, all from his hips and with the minimum of excess movement. It’s almost like his upper body remains completely still and ready to lunge, while his legs do all the work. It’s impossible to describe fully and so insanely masculine.

But it doesn’t explain why I wanted to run.

No, what he says next explains why I wanted to run.

‘You do understand that I’m not going to suddenly perform strange perverted acts on your innocent young body, don’t you?’

‘Of course I understand that,’ I snort, but I’m still standing by the door. And he’s still raising that one eyebrow. We both know I’m not fooling anyone. ‘All right, maybe I didn’t completely understand that.’

He turns to the drinks cabinet by the window, that great broad back now to me. It doesn’t make any difference, however. I could no more read his face than I can his shoulder blades. They’re both a blank slate.

‘Then let me be very clear: I didn’t bring you here to do anything you don’t want.’

‘So what did you bring me here for?’

He glances over his shoulder at me, smile now as sharp as a shark’s.

‘To find out what you do want, of course.’

‘Don’t you already know?’

‘I told you. I’m not a mind-reader.’

He has a glass of what looks like Scotch in his hand when he turns, and for a moment I think he’s going to give it to me. Instead he simply sits down by the table in front of the window, free hand working the buttons on his jacket until the whole thing hangs loose. One big leg jutting in my direction, the other tucked back.

It’s neither a relaxed pose nor an aggressive one.

It just is. He’s just himself, utterly contained and totally compelling.

‘I suppose the other women are pretty clear.’

‘The rules of the assignation are pretty clear. We always know beforehand what particular game we might be playing, though we never see each other more than once. Everything relies on an unspoken understanding between participants. But you and I don’t have that understanding.’

‘So what do we do now, then?’

He rolls the liquid around inside the glass, but doesn’t drink.

He speaks instead.

‘We do it the old-fashioned way. I ask, and you tell me.’

‘Can’t you just guess?’

‘I could, but that would make it ever so easy on you.’

‘I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.’

‘Perhaps not.’ He sets the glass down on the table, and I know something’s coming. He’s gearing up to it, if he even needs to do anything like that – which I doubt. He seems to have two settings: bristling silence and sudden action. And I think I’m about to get some sudden action now. ‘Perhaps we could play that way for a little while.’

Oh, God, I should never have asked for guessing. I was wrong, I take it back. Guessing is for people who understand everything about themselves. I do not understand everything about myself. I don’t even understand why I jerk when he stands up, because he doesn’t do it in an aggressive way.

He doesn’t do anything in an aggressive way, really. His voice is soft; his movements are measured and precise. And when he starts circling me, he does it in such a slow, casual manner it’s almost like he’s not doing it at all.

I doubt I’d notice, if I wasn’t so completely tuned into him. My body hums the moment he gets close, and even after he’s stepped behind me I’m aware he’s still there. I’m almost leaning towards him, in fact, as though he’s a magnet and I’m made of metal.

And of course he notices.

‘I could, for example, intuit from the sway of your body that you like it when I draw close, and don’t when I step away. Am I correct?’

He’s so correct it’s painful. I think he’s starting to pull my fillings out.

‘Yes.’

‘And when I do this …’ he begins, but naturally he doesn’t have to finish. The back of his hand against my cheek is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s a sort of bliss I’ve never really known before. ‘I can tell how much you like it by the way you lean into it.’

He could say more and embarrass me, I think, because really I’m not just leaning. I’m almost sliding off my chair. If he were standing beside me now I’d slump into his side, and I’m not even sure I’d care. All that matters at the moment is how hard and high my heart is beating, how prickly my skin seems to be, how warm I am right at my centre.

I want to be my body and nothing else, for once.

And oh, it’s easy to be that way with him. He makes you forget without even really trying. He says one word and every frantic thought I’ve ever had just flies away.

‘Yes, you like that,’ he tells me, and I feel no need to say no. Saying no might make him stop, and, dear God, I don’t want that. His knuckles are just about to graze my jaw, and if I hold my breath I know he’ll do more. He’s right on the verge … right on the cusp … just a little bit more and then he gives it to me.

‘And this?’ he says, as his hand slides under the collar of my shirt.

He doesn’t go right for my breasts, however. Of course he doesn’t. Schoolboys with sweaty hands do things like that, and he’s the absolute opposite. He’s from another world where men are calm and cool, and capable of just letting the tips of their fingers trail over a woman’s collarbone.

I feel him press lightly, briefly, barely there, but just as I’m starting to enjoy it he backs away a bit. He lets those fingertips brush against the material instead of my skin, touching buttons in a suggestive way. He might undo them. He might not.

All I have to do is say.

So I do.

‘Yes, that,’ I tell him, fumbling and bumbling over word choice and finally settling on something that makes no sense. Yes, that, I think, and want to roll my eyes. He’s like the endless coils of a clever snake, and I’m this humiliatingly literal and oh, so basic creature.

Not that he cares. In fact, my stunted attempts at being a real person only seem to spur him on. I stutter out the only words I can and he responds with a sultry ‘and more, I’m sure?’

Before that maddening hand does just that. It gives me more – far more than I expect. Running through my head is the image of him cupping my breast, or maybe unbuttoning my shirt a little bit, before I explode. Instead he touches two fingers to his lips, like he’s blowing me a kiss.

And then he licks them. He licks them.

It’s probably the dirtiest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Dirtier than actual sex I’ve had, dirtier than movies filled with sex. He’s still in his suit, and he looks so elegant and refined, and yet he’s lewdly easing his tongue all over and around his fingers, right in front of me.

Of course it’s then that I realise I’m not going to survive any of this. He hasn’t even done anything, and I’m staring like a maniac. I’m thinking like an unprepared teenager. I can’t even fathom why he’s doing what he’s doing, even though I should absolutely know. Why else would he be making his fingers all nice and wet?

He’s going to touch me, I think, but the thought doesn’t connect with his actions. I watch his hand lower back down to my trembling body, as though everything is suddenly in slow motion. My lips are parted; my eyes are wide. I must look pretty comical, following his fingers as they slide beneath the material of my shirt.

And even more comical, when they slide beneath the material of my bra. I make a little sound and come pretty close to grabbing his wrist, but I swear it’s not because I’m a prude. It’s because I’m far too excited. My nipples are stiff unbearable points, clearly visible through my shirt. I really need more time to compose myself before he does this.

But he gives me none.

He simply eases those slippery fingers over that one tight little tip, rubbing and rubbing before I’m ready. I’m still choking over the first burst of sensation, and he’s making slow, slick circles around one of the most sensitive spots on my body.

Or at least, it’s one of the most sensitive spots now. Great aching tingles surge down from that point of connection, turning most of my lower body to liquid. I’m shuddering all over, and so stuffed with heat I could set fire to the carpet with very little effort – and over such a minor thing. It’s nothing really, I think. It’s nothing.

And yet at the same time it’s everything.

He catches the stiff tip between those fingers, and I cry out. I strain towards his touch, without shame. How can I be ashamed when it feels so good? I think I could actually come like this, all mired in the heat and the tension of his presence, stirring restlessly beneath his cool and perfectly assured touch.

And I so desperately want to test that theory. I’m gagging to test that theory. Go on, go on, I think at him, just a little more. Just pinch it a little harder; just lick like that for me, again. Give me everything you’ve got, go on.

But instead he waits. He waits for the perfect moment, when I’m writhing and reckless and ready for so much more. Then he leans down as though he’s going to kiss me, and whispers in my ear:

‘Now tell me what you want to happen next.’

‘That isn’t fair.’

‘Of course it’s fair. If you want something, you have to ask.’ He walks around me again, only this time it’s more like pacing. It’s more like prowling. ‘I did say that you couldn’t expect me to do all the work. You have to offer me something at least, and really I’m requiring so little. Am I not?’

The answer is yes, obviously. Yes, you’re requiring so little. Words are barely anything when you really boil them down, and I know I could compress them even further. I could mash ‘fuck’ together with ‘me’ and he’d understand.

He would.

So why am I floundering? It’s simple, really.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’d like to touch you.’

There, I think. There.

And just as I do he strikes me down.

‘Liar,’ he says, like a fist rapping against glass.

A little harder and it will break.

A little gentler and everything will stay the same.

‘That’s not a lie.’

‘Of course it is. You don’t want to touch me. You want me to carry on touching you. You want me to peel off your blouse and your bra and get right underneath. And when I’m finished there, you want me to start on other items of clothing.’

He gestures to my skirt, though perhaps gesture is the wrong word. It’s much more like a caress, from the curve of my hip over and down my thigh to my knee. And I suppose it would be, if his hand wasn’t around two feet away from any of my actual body parts. It just dances through the air over certain places, and I shudder as though he really touched me.

I’m fighting a losing battle.

‘You’re wrong. I hate being naked.’

‘You hate being naked because you think you’re unappealing. But secretly you long to be confident … to have a man’s eyes following your every move as you strip out of your clothes, so sure and certain that he wants you. That he craves you. Isn’t that so?’

‘No.’

This time he stops in front of me, and tick-tocks his finger back and forth.

‘That’s another lie, Alissa.’

‘How can you always tell?’

‘I make my living from being able to tell.’

‘Really? True or false, then: I threw my childhood pet in a lake.’

‘Are you challenging me?’ he asks, laughter in his words. ‘Very well: true.’

‘You honestly believe I’d do something like that?’

‘Whether I believe or not, it’s obvious you aren’t lying.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you wanted to trick me, so told me the most ridiculous thing you could think of in the hopes I’d get it wrong.’ He sits back down in his seat by the table, while I make every effort to close my gaping mouth. ‘Correct?’

He’s so correct it hurts. My pride is still reeling from the blow.

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t know why you did it, however. Are you going to enlighten me now?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘I killed it by accident. It was just a mouse and I was mostly afraid of it and it jumped out of my hands when I tried to hold it too tight.’ He was right about the ridiculous part. This story is so absurd I’m blushing over it, and not just because of the content. There’s also the fact that he’s making me tell it to someone like him. What does he know about petty concerns like this? I wish I wasn’t telling him about petty concerns like this. ‘And then I was scared my parents would find out, so I got rid of the evidence.’

‘That’s a sad little tale.’

‘It’s a stupid, meaningless little tale.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it’s meaningless that you were afraid, and that you tried to hold on tight, and then couldn’t tell the people closest to you,’ he says, and something rises in my throat after he’s done so. It kind of feels like a knot of frustration on the way up, but it comes out in the form of a word.

‘God,’ I snap. ‘Do you really have to be like this? You can’t work me out so easily, you know. No one can work out another person so easily.’

‘I never claimed I could. I only claimed that I can interpret some of the things you say and do, and that I know when you lie. And I believe I’ve proved that much, at least.’

He’s right. He has. But I’m not willing to accept that. I’m not willing to accept any of this. I just want to go back to the touching and the guessing, and that urge is so strong it’s making my teeth ache. Before I answer I have to clench them together, and the words come out all grating and ground up.

‘Not enough for my liking.’

‘No? Then perhaps we should play another little game,’ he says, in a way that suggests it isn’t going to be little, and it isn’t going to be a game. People don’t brace themselves over little games – but that’s what I’m doing. I’ve stiffened my shoulders and tightened my hands into fists, and when he finally speaks I close my eyes. It seems better to close my eyes for something like this: ‘If you tell me a lie about your desires and I catch you, you then have to do whatever it is you tried to conceal from me.’

‘And how would you go about catching me?’ I ask, in some vain attempt at injecting some bravado into this. I already know it’s the wrong thing to say, however. The second I speak that word aloud, my mind starts picturing him chasing me down hallways. In some of the scenarios he has giant metal hands or a big chainmail net, but in all of them I’m exactly the same way. I’m panicking and stumbling and completely unable to escape.

He’ll have no trouble, I think.

And apparently, we’re of one mind on this.

‘I don’t believe it will be so very difficult.’

‘I could lie about lying. I could tell you it isn’t true no matter how hard you pressed me, and then what would happen?’

‘Then the game comes apart.’ He picks at lint that isn’t there, somewhere around his right knee. ‘Though I trust that you won’t let that happen. No matter what you say, I think you like it when I guess.’

He’s right and wrong at the same time. Sometimes he speaks and my insides soar, but I always have an urge to punch him afterwards. I have an urge to punch him now, and it’s really only being eclipsed by the need to play this game until it reaches some probably nightmarish conclusion.

He’ll ask me if I’d like some anal sex, and I’ll lie and say no.

And then I’ll have to do it.

Oh, God, yes, I’ll have to do it.

‘All right. I haven’t the faintest clue how this is going to work, but all right.’

‘Excellent.’

He shrugs around inside his jacket, as though to make himself comfortable. And when he finally is – when he’s completely at ease and the master of his own domain – he speaks in this casual way.

It’s just a shame that the words themselves aren’t casual at all.

‘What are you waiting for, then? Take off your clothes.’

‘What? That’s not the game.’

‘Of course it is. You lied about not wanting to be naked, and I caught you. So now you have to remove every … little … thing.’

For a moment I’m too taken aback to speak. He’s like a wizard. He’s like the designer of terrible traps for foolish people, and somehow I’ve stumbled right into one without even realising it. My leg is caught and I’ve lost my map, and I’ve really got no one to blame but myself. I actually feel stupid for complaining, though I have to do it.

‘But we weren’t playing then.’

‘I don’t remember that being in the rules. You didn’t specify a starting point, as far as I can recall, though you can try to tell me otherwise if you like.’

I bet he’d let me, too. I bet he’d let me talk just to see how deeply I can tangle myself in him and all of his craziness. And the answer is, of course: very deeply indeed. Oh, so deeply I’m never going to get back out again.

‘I don’t want to tell you otherwise.’

‘So then,’ he says, and holds out a hand – like the conductor of a symphony, I think, awaiting a command performance. I can even hear the strings singing in the background, everything rising and rising to the point where I have to do this.

Doesn’t he realise I can’t do this? I’ve never learned; I don’t know how. The instrument is unfamiliar and clumsy and the notes are all wrong. I can’t I can’t I can’t, I think, about a second before he speaks again.

‘Begin,’ he tells me.

And somehow I can play.

Chapter Five

I start out quite simply, slipping out of my shoes and casually tossing my jacket aside. But after a moment I realise this is meant to be more than that. It’s meant to be a striptease, I can see. It was in his words, and that hand gesture he made, and now it’s in his expression. That near-smile is dancing around his lips, though it hasn’t quite reached his eyes.

Oh, no, his eyes are as dark as midnight and twice as intense. They glitter at me like onyx from all the way across the room, and they never waver. They don’t even flick to something else when I reveal the silly thing I’ve done.

I wore tights, instead of stockings. I wore big, clumsy, grey woollen tights, unthinkingly. All I considered was how good they’d look with the only expensive suit I own, and in truth they do. They look great when I’m fully dressed.

They just don’t when I’m not.

Why didn’t I think about not? I knew what I was coming here for. There weren’t any illusions, though I suppose I might have pretended otherwise. I erased our final phone conversation from my mind, and just focused on other things. His voice, the island, this room.

I’m such a fool, I think, but there is nothing for it now. I have to reach under my skirt and wriggle out of these ugly elasticated things, and I have to do it fast. I have to do it without glancing up, in case his gaze makes me lose my nerve.

When I accidentally do, however, the near-smile hasn’t spread. He’s not laughing. If anything he looks even more intense than he did before. He’s leaning forward a little now, with one hand on the arm of the chair, and as I slowly restart this clumsy strip, his eyes follow my hands.

He watches me slide the wool down over my knees, occasionally tilting his head this way or that – as though to get a better look, I think. He wants a better look at something so completely ridiculous.

And I don’t know what to think of that.

I know it makes my breath come in shaky bursts, however. I know it makes me even clumsier. For a long moment I can’t quite get the tights over my ankles, and I wrestle with them briefly before finally giving in.

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