At last, the taxi approached.
‘I’d better get dressed,’ I said, hurrying towards the stairs.
I was fighting my way into my jacket when Keane appeared in the doorway, towering over me, his beaten-up demeanour doing nothing to detract from his natural menace.
‘I thought you might stay and tend to me,’ he said. ‘I could do with some TLC just now.’
‘I can’t stay,’ I said, grabbing my handbag. ‘I can’t stand violence. Please stand aside.’
‘Does this mean you won’t meet me at the solicitor’s office tomorrow?’
‘I…just let me go. Please.’
‘That’s not a no, then?’
‘Please!’
Reluctantly, he let me pass. I hared down the stairs and out to the taxi, stopping only to offer Maria breathless thanks for dinner.
‘Hope you enjoyed the floorshow,’ she replied laconically.
Twenty minutes later, the cab pulled up at the front of Tom’s apartment block. I asked the driver to wait a minute or so, in case Tom wasn’t there, put my finger on his buzzer and kept it there until the intercom crackled.
‘Ella?’ he said. ‘Come up.’
He was in a worse state than Keane. His face was dark with bruising and there was congealed blood in his hair and eyebrows. His T-shirt was torn and he had to limp back to the sofa.
‘I was just about to take a shower,’ he said, but his voice came out thickly, as if he had teeth missing.
‘Did you lose any teeth?’ I asked, aghast, but he shook his head.
‘Just cut my mouth to ribbons, thassall,’ he said.
‘Oh, Tom.’
I wanted to put my arms around him, but I had the feeling it would hurt him.
‘You can get me a drink if you want,’ he said. ‘Just water.’
‘Anything,’ I said, emotional and distraught at the state of him. ‘Anything at all. Just ask me.’
‘Stick with the water for now, eh?’ he said, trying a smile that came out as a grimace of pain.
I returned with a glass of water to find him lying full-length on the sofa, groaning and holding his head.
‘Perhaps you should go to A&E,’ I suggested, handing him the glass. ‘You might need stitches.’
‘Don’t need stitches. Checked.’
‘But maybe a head injury? You must have a headache.’
‘A bit,’ he admitted. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. I’ve had worse.’
‘Well, Keane wasn’t looking too clever either, if it’s any consolation.’
‘Why did you do it?’ Tom’s pained look was down to more than his injuries.
‘Because I hated the idea of you leaving town and Keane getting away with everything. Just because Ed won’t back you up doesn’t mean the story should be killed for good.’
‘Oh, Christ.’ Tom groaned and downed the water. ‘What a mess. Right, I’m going to have a shower. You sit tight and don’t move till I’m out.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’ I said, rising from the sofa in alarm as Tom attempted to move, with a great deal of difficulty.
‘I am,’ he said darkly. ‘Don’t know about you.’
I subsided against the cushions as he shut the bathroom door behind him. Hearing the splash of water on tile, I yearned to be in there with him. I wanted to dab off the crusted blood and rub soothing balm into his aching muscles. And, to tell the truth, I was feeling pretty icky after the night’s activities with Keane. Nothing could possibly be nicer than getting out of the bloody corset.
I took off my jacket and tried to loosen it a bit, but I cricked my neck in the process, gave up and flopped full-length on the sofa with my hand clamped around the offending area. I felt as if I reeked of Keane’s hands on me and tried to douse myself in body spray from my handbag to compensate.
No, this was stupid. I took tentative steps towards the bathroom and knocked on the door.
‘Are you all right in there?’
‘Fine.’
‘Do you…need any help?’
No reply.
‘Tom?’
Still no reply.
I tried the door handle – it was unlocked. I opened it slowly and peered around the door. Tom had his glorious back to me, freckled and lean, its definition more than adequately visible through the steamed-up glass. My eye travelled irresistibly downward, to his peachy bottom and stupidly long legs. There was a shocker of a bruise on one of his calves, but other than that he seemed to have escaped without too many body blows.
‘Er…Tom?’
He tried to turn too quickly, sighed with pain and put a hand to the wall to support himself.
‘Jesus, Ella. What are you doing?’
‘You went quiet. I was worried.’
‘Worried, eh? As you can see, I’m fine.’
He gestured me out of the room, but I didn’t go.
‘I’m not,’ I said, and without warning the full emotional weight of the evening hit me, and I began to cry.
‘Oh, hey, Foxy,’ he said, and his melting from brusque formality to nickname-using concern made the tears flow even faster. ‘Don’t cry. It’s all right.’
I put an arm over my face and sank on to the toilet lid, sobbing like a fool. He was right. Trying to honeytrap Keane had been an insane thing to do, and now I felt as if I had some kind of trauma. Could you get trauma from consensual sexual activity? And had it really been consensual? He had been like a bulldozer, refusing to take no for an answer. I had been given no option but to play along. Worst of all, I had even enjoyed it at the time, once I was over his lap with all the context hidden in the sharp immediacy of pleasurable pain. How could I admit this to Tom? How could I admit it to myself?
‘Get your kit off and get in here with me.’
Tom’s voice was stern, shocking me out of my weeping woe.
I stared up at him, and he nodded.
‘What are you waiting for? You look as if you could do with a clean-up, anyway.’
He wasn’t wrong there. A fleeting glance in the steamy mirror revealed panda-eye makeup and ratty hair. I stood up and began to undress, but again the corset was my nemesis.
Tom opened the shower door so that spray flew across and touched my skin with its warmth.
‘Come over here. Let me.’
He unlaced it deftly, despite his bruised and torn knuckles.
‘This is the one you got at Louise’s place? It’s very nice.’ He paused. ‘I wish you’d bought it for my eyes, not…’
‘Please don’t,’ I croaked.
He finished unlacing and it fell over my breasts, baring them, and hit the floor. I dealt quickly with the rest of my underwear and stepped into his arms, letting my tears mix with the shower water and flow down his chest and over his abdomen.
‘You’re shaking,’ he said softly, stroking my soaked hair. ‘What have you done to yourself? What did he do to you?’
I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I just wanted to stand there, in his arms, sheltered and warm in the steady flow of water, until the shaking stopped.
‘If he’s hurt you,’ Tom said, still in the same gentle tone, ‘I may have to go back there and kill him.’
I made an enormous effort to catch my shuddering breath, and looked up at him.
‘He hurt you,’ I said, reaching up to touch the bridge of his nose, which was cut rather nastily. Another red gash was high up by his hairline. The crusted blood was gone, but he didn’t look a lot better.
‘Nothing’s broken,’ said Tom. ‘It’s all superficial.’ He reached for a bottle of shower gel. ‘I’m going to clean you up.’
His hands were heavenly, gliding over my skin, turning the silken gel to bubbles as he went. He left no inch untended, giving equal weight and importance to every curve and inlet. I fell into the relief of being cared for, unable yet to find it truly erotic, though I wished I could.
‘That’s better,’ he whispered, pulling me close again. There was a difference now – a hard
difference, pressed up against my belly. He slicked back my hair and kissed my forehead, then my nose, then my lips. Water surged around our joined mouths, some of it trickling inside, but we didn’t care. We were back where we belonged and nothing could distract us from that.
Chapter Ten
Once we had kissed for so long the pads of our fingers were wrinkled like raisins, we came back into the world and stepped out of the shower.
Sunk on the sofa, with him in a dressing gown and me in a towel, we held each other in silence until at last he picked up the brandy he’d poured himself and took a sip.
‘So,’ he said.
The tiny, innocuous word was like a doom knell, breaking the enchantment. My chest tightened.
He looked at me. He wanted me to answer the question before he asked it. But what was the question?
‘So,’ I repeated nervously.
‘Did he hurt you?’
I had the feeling he wanted me to say yes. He wanted anything that might have happened to have been non-consensual. But he had no right to want it and I had no right to lie to make things easier for me, so I took a breath and shook my head.
‘Did you…did he…I mean…how far did it go?’
‘Not far,’ I said. ‘We didn’t have sex. I mean…not properly. Not…’
‘I don’t think I want to know,’ he said, then: ‘Would you have done?’
‘I…to be honest, I hadn’t really thought it through.’
He made a sound, half exasperation and half satisfaction and treated the ceiling to his best eye-roll.
‘I know that sounds lame,’ I said. ‘I suppose I was hoping I could just get him really drunk so he’d spill some beans and then fall straight to sleep.’
‘And if he didn’t? How do you know what kind of drunk Keane is? From what I hear, he has pretty formidable tolerance to alcohol. He’d drink you under the table for a start. And under the covers – easily. Christ, when I think…’
He clutched his head.
‘But it’s OK,’ I said, really hoping it was. ‘Nothing like that happened in the end.’
‘Pure luck,’ said Tom angrily. He dashed down some brandy, then said, more quietly, ‘Did you want it to?’
‘No. I don’t like him. I don’t want to be his…I don’t know. Sex slave, or whatever he had in mind. He wanted me to sign a contract, you know. Was going to make an appointment tomorrow with his lawyer.’
‘Fucking hell. Would you have signed it?’
‘Depends what it said. Oh, I don’t know, Tom. I had no idea what was going on with you. For all I knew, I was never going to see you again. Why not take this chance to bring down the man you’d worked so hard to expose? Was it such a terrible thing to do?’
He put down his drink and clasped one hand in mine, tightly, our fingers twining hard so the bones jammed together.
‘It was a stupid, dangerous and mad thing to do,’ he said.
I looked down at my lap, tears pooling in my eyes again.
‘But I kind of admire you for it,’ he said quietly. ‘Perhaps you need to reconsider your commitment to sub-editing.’
I smiled through dazzled eyes.
‘You think?’
‘Yeah. We could be campaigning hacks together. I’m not sure about Fast and Loose this time, though. More like Sick and Twisted.’
‘Is it really so sick and twisted to sacrifice yourself for the one you lo–, ah, want to be with?’
Tom’s lips twitched. He bent, painfully, to kiss my lips.
‘So you lo– want to be with me, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, I lo– want to be with you too. You’ll have to stop throwing yourself in the path of sociopathic perverts though.’
‘That’s fine by me. And you’ll have to stop having sex with all your exes.’
‘Done.’
We lay in bed some hours later, basking in the aftermath of some unusually slow and tender vanilla sex – of necessity, given his physical and my emotional condition, but also beautifully appropriate – listening to November rain beat against the window. It was four o’clock on a Monday morning, and I’d have to be at work in five hours. How could such mundanity still exist in my strange world?
‘So, did he?’ said Tom, yawning.
‘Did who? Did what?’
‘Keane. Spill any beans. I know you didn’t get to the pillow-talk stage, but did you get anything interesting out of him?’
‘Oh. No, not really. I think I could’ve, though. Puffed-up prats like him always want to bang on and on about how they rule the universe. I mean, he pretty much admitted to taking bribes and handing out jobs for the boys, but he didn’t go into detail.’
‘He admitted it?’
‘Yeah. No shame at all.’
‘God, it hurts to think I’m leaving this town in his hands.’
‘Are you really leaving?’
‘I’ll never work in this town again,’ he said in a hard-boiled drawl. ‘What else can I do?’
My sigh was heartfelt.
‘Oh, God!’ I said, suddenly remembering another of Keane’s potentially interesting revelations. ‘There was something he told me – something that really startled me.’
‘Oh?’
‘Ed’s into all this stuff.’
‘Haydon?’
‘Yes, him. The reason he’s so pally with Keane is that he knows all his dirty little sex secrets. Apparently he sees Maria, on a professional basis.’
‘You are fucking kidding me. Haydon likes to get on his knees and lick the shiny boots of leather?’ Tom tried to sit up, but his ribs wouldn’t let him, and he lay back down, his face alight.
‘So I hear.’
‘This is…this is…wow. I mean…’ He steepled his hands and put his fingers to his mouth in rapt contemplation. ‘Wow,’ he said again.
‘Does that change much?’ I asked.
‘Well, potentially. I mean, nothing personal against old Haydon, but his position as editor of the Clarion will be untenable if the parent company hears about this. I can’t believe they haven’t asked the right questions already. I’ve written to them about the cover-up over Keane, but if they take any notice at all, it’ll probably be too late. But if they knew why he was doing it…’
‘There’s no proof,’ I pointed out. ‘Only what Keane said to me.’
‘Maria’s the key to this,’ he said excitedly. ‘If I could get her to talk…’
‘She knows you’re a journalist,’ I said, deflating him.
‘Oh, right. Of course.’ He cut me off before I could speak. ‘And you aren’t going anywhere near any of them again. So don’t even try and persuade me otherwise.’
‘I guess that’s that, then,’ I said, my head falling back on to the pillow. ‘Leave them. Let them get on with it. Fresh woods and pastures new. Not that there are many pastures in London. Are you really going to London?’
‘I’m taking a month to consider my options,’ he said. ‘I’m going to apply for whatever’s going and if nothing comes up I’ll head to the Smoke and freelance there.’
I turned my face away, reading the illuminated numbers on Tom’s alarm clock.
‘We never did find Mia,’ I said.
‘No. But she’s probably that woman you saw with Keane.’
‘Maybe. Weird thing, though – Keane genuinely doesn’t seem to know anything about this Academy place. And he wouldn’t bite at all when I tried to draw him out on the subject of Mia and blogs and stuff. I wonder if he’s killed her or something.’
Tom snorted. ‘He’s a bastard and a wanker, but is he a killer? I’m not so sure.’
‘There’s something very off about him. He didn’t ask me anything about myself while we were together. Didn’t want to know about my life, my work, my family, where I lived – anything. He knew what he needed to know – which was that he could dominate me if he wanted. Nothing else was relevant at all. You’d think a man on a first date with a potential partner would have a few questions to ask, instead of constantly bigging him
self up, wouldn’t you?’
‘So he doesn’t know anything about you?’
‘Nothing worth knowing.’
‘So he couldn’t come after you?’
Genuine concern lit his eyes.
‘I don’t think so. He didn’t even take my phone number.’ I groaned, wanting nothing more than to shut my grainy eyelids and drift into sleep, but I knew I should get home. ‘Tom, can you call me a cab? I’ve got work in a couple of hours and I can’t exactly turn up in what I was wearing earlier.’
He pouted. ‘Aren’t you going to stay with me and make sure I’m not concussed? Head injuries can be dangerous, you know.’
‘I don’t think you’re concussed.’ I kissed him. ‘But I feel as if I am.’
‘Then you should call in sick,’ he said. ‘Go on. Stay here with me.’
Rarely had I faced such temptation. But I couldn’t do it. I had never faked a sick day and I wasn’t about to start.
‘I’ll come over after work, if you like,’ I said, switching on the bedside light and looking around the room for my scattered clothes.
‘Hmph, is that your best offer?’
‘It’s my final offer,’ I said.
He sat up in bed, creaking and moaning with each movement of muscle.
‘I’m giving you fair warning, Foxy,’ he said, watching me struggle into my clothes. ‘As soon as I’m back to full fitness again, you’re in for the whipping of your life. You needn’t think you’ve got away with this one.’
I let the shudder of pleasurable dread subside before turning back to him with my cheeks on fire.
‘No need to rush,’ I said. ‘You need to take it easy.’
‘It’s not a threat, babe, it’s a promise,’ he said. ‘And I always keep my promises.’
‘Another dirty stop-out.’
Jess was standing by my workstation with a carton of coffee, giving Tilda the lowdown on the weekend.
‘Where were you?’ They both turned to face me. Miles, at the neighbouring booth, was clearly listening in.
‘Oh, I had a date,’ I said, pretending fierce interest in my computer. ‘Online. Online dating. You know.’
‘A date?’ exclaimed Tilda. ‘Why wouldn’t you have mentioned that?’ Her eyes narrowed. She was putting two and two together. Shit.
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