by Kate Johnson
“Setting me up on a date with Clodagh.” A date with Clodagh. Who might also be dating Khan but wasn’t sleeping with him.
“I have no idea what you mean. I just thought you’d like to take a friend to see your favourite band. No?”
A friend. Yes. Yes, she was just a friend. Like he and Olivia were just friends. Only not like he and Olivia, because he had zero wish to sleep with her and every wish to with Clodagh…
“My friend,” he said deliberately, as the flight attendant came round with flutes of champagne. “I’ll take my friend. Who is dating my PPO.”
“Anything you say, darling.”
Davood had insisted on paying for their first date, so Clodagh insisted on returning the favour. The restaurant wasn’t half as fancy, but it was much more in her price range, especially if she just ate a main course and stuck to water. Davood, maybe out of politeness or maybe out of knowledge of her finances—she had no idea how much the PPOs knew but she wouldn’t be surprised if they had her bank account number and sort code—did the same.
Thanks to Jamie, the menu was much more comprehensible. She even knew what mooli was now.
How far you’ve come, Sharday Walsh, said a nasty little voice inside her, and she ignored it and ate some more quinoa.
“Next time we split the bill,” she said as they walked slowly home. She’d recently been allowed to take the walking boot off for short periods of exercise, which hurt like hell but made the weakened muscles of her ankle stronger. Jamie had carefully said nothing about her looking daft as she walked on tip-toes or flexed her calf muscles while she stood at the cooker.
“Next time?” said Davood. A small group of men came out of a pub and meandered drunkenly about, and Davood moved to shield her with his body. An automatic instinct, she supposed, but one that still made her smile.
“Yes. Our next date.”
There was a pause. They passed the group of men and turned past the Corpus Clock on the corner of King’s Parade, with its monstrous grasshopper always gobbling up the passing seconds and minutes.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a next date,” said Davood eventually, and Clodagh paused, leaning on her crutch as she looked up at him.
“You don’t?”
He sighed, shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “Look. I like you—I mean, I really like you, and I really like spending time with you.”
“I like spending time with you,” said Clodagh, because it was true. He’d become a good friend.
“But be honest with me, Clodagh. You don’t see this going anywhere, do you?”
Her gaze skittered away from his face.
“Our mutual friend told me that grasshopper thing,” he gestured to the clock, “is meant to represent the inevitable march of time.”
“The Chronophage,” said Clodagh. “Literally something that eats time.”
He smiled. “You see? You’re smart. You know things, like Latin—”
“It’s Greek. The inscription underneath is Latin.” Dammit, Random Fact Girl was back. Jamie was a bad influence on her.
Davood’s smile grew wider. “What’s it mean?”
Clodagh had asked Jamie, because it was a bit beyond the scope of her Latin primer. “‘The world passeth away, and the lust thereof.’ From the Bible, apparently.”
He nodded, as if thinking about it. “So what it’s saying is, time gets gobbled up and we’re not getting any of it back?”
“I guess.” She shivered, a blast of January wind whistling down Bene’t Street.
“Therefore, we really shouldn’t be wasting any of it. That’s why I asked you out. Seize the moment and all. But it’s not working for you, is it?”
Clodagh didn’t know what to say. If she’d met him under any other circumstances, she’d probably have fallen for him. If she hadn’t met Jamie.
She’d been silent for too long. Davood nodded, and said, “Come on, it’s freezing out here.”
Clodagh nodded and walked alongside him back to the gatehouse, where he paused, took her face in his hands and kissed her softly. And it was a pleasant kiss. A kiss that would surely have stirred another woman.
He moved back, an expression on his face that she couldn’t read.
“I’m sorry?” she said. Try it again, without the question mark.
“Yeah. Tell you what, maybe we’ll try again some time.”
“Maybe,” said Clodagh.
“When you’ve got over your crush,” he said, and she froze guiltily. “I’m very good at reading people,” Davood added softly. “It’s my job.”
“I don’t,” she began, but she couldn’t even convince herself.
He nodded, then sighed. “Just be careful,” he said, and opened the door to let her through.
By the time the Crowded House gig came around Jamie was beside himself with anxiety. What if his grandmother or father or someone came up with something else he had to do? What if he couldn’t get out of it? What if he missed the gig? The surest way to lose something was to want it too much.
“It’ll be fine,” Clodagh said to him that morning as he came back to collect the scarf he’d forgotten. “Stop stressing. I’ll see you later.”
But he was stressing. He really, really wanted to enjoy the concert, and he really wanted Clodagh to, as well. She said she didn’t really know the band but liked the few bits she’d heard. Was she being polite? Was it too staid for her?
He was distracted throughout the day, and only stopped worrying about it when Ruchi scurried in, face worryingly tight, after a meeting with her PhD supervisor.
“Are you okay?” asked Zheng.
“Fine.”
“What’d he say?”
“Oh, nothing. Just that I have to do it all again.” She buried her face in her hands, and the three men in the room looked helplessly at each other.
“Why?” asked Jamie.
“Because he doesn’t trust my data! I ran the program three times, it’s all sound, but he thinks I’ve made it up!”
“Well, show him the logs—”
“I did! There was a flaw in one of them which I made corrections for but he said that was sloppy… He just wants me to do it again.” She looked up, eyes damp and nose pink. “He never makes any of you rewrite your whole reports.”
Hunter and Jamie said nothing. She was right.
“He made me amend mine,” Zheng said, “but I had made a mistake in it.”
Jamie looked down at his keyboard. He’d made mistakes too, but his supervisor had never made him repeat a whole report. Nor Hunter.
“Do you want me to have a word?” Jamie said.
“No. That will make it worse. Like I’ve been telling tales. Like I need a big strong man to stand up for me.” She blew out a sigh. “All right. Looks like I have work to do.”
Jamie felt so bad he offered to take her out for lunch, but she said she was too busy, and he went home that evening feeling angry as well as anxious.
“I mean, I talked to some of the undergrads and apparently it happens all the time,” he said to Clodagh as she cooked pasta. “More of the female students get asked to repeat their experiments, or accused of copying someone, than the boys. They waste hours and hours defending themselves, instead of just getting on with their work. And we ask why there aren’t more women in science,” he snapped.
“Took you that long, did it?”
“You knew about this?”
Clodagh laughed hollowly. “I’m a mixed-race working class woman,” she said. “What do you think? Look, they pick on us because it forces us to waste time defending ourselves, or proving ourselves, or proving them wrong, when they know all along we can do it just as well. And it doesn’t matter whether ‘it’ is a degree, or a job, or… just being a human in this world. The more time we’re forced to waste, the less time we spend threatening the existence of the privileged white man.”
Jamie blinked at her. “Christ, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m
right. Have you heard the one about privileged people feeling discriminated against when all they’re facing is equality?”
Jamie leaned against the kitchen table. “Forget history, you should go into politics.”
“No bloody fear,” she said. “Can you pass me that bacon?”
He did, watching her stir it into the saucepan. He should probably talk to people about this kind of issue. The university, for one. What was the point of being a prince if you couldn’t use your voice for good? He wondered if any of the family was involved in a charity or program to address issues like—
“Food’s ready.” Clodagh glanced at the clock. “Did you want to see the support act?”
Jamie shrugged as he sat down opposite her. “No point. According to Geraint the idea is to get in there at the very last minute before the band comes on stage, to minimise contact with the public in the foyer. Apparently the venue’s security team will notify him.”
“How organised. Do we have to leave the second they go off stage, too?”
He sighed. “I hope not. But probably.”
They loitered in the car around the corner until Geraint got the go-ahead, despite the Corn Exchange barely being a ten minute walk from Lady Mathilda even at Clodagh’s reduced pace. Either Olivia or Geraint had planned it so well that they could access their seats directly from the side entrance of the building, making for an easy exit too.
The band came on just as they took their seats, flanked on all sides by PPOs. Jamie started to worry they wouldn’t share his musical taste, and then thirty seconds into World Where You Live he forgot to care. The band joked with each other and with the audience, an easy rapport that spoke of many repeat performances.
“Who came to see us in London?” Half the audience whooped and waved.
“I think I recognise that guy from last time we were here,” joked Nick the bassist, peering into a crowd he clearly couldn’t see.
“Yeah you do!” someone random shouted back, to general laughter.
Jamie glanced at Clodagh beside him. She was laughing, and once or twice during the better known songs he caught her singing to the choruses.
“Oh my God, I haven’t heard this one in ages!” Jamie cried, as they began English Trees.
When it ended he leaned close and said in her ear, “It’s possibly about the death of their drummer, Paul Hester. He committed suicide while they were on a UK tour. Well, Neil and his brother were. Nick flew out to be with them and joined them at their Albert Hall gig. A friend of mine was there. They said it was electric.”
“They didn’t cancel?”
“No. They said Paul’s favourite thing was to play music for people who loved it, so that’s what they were going to do.”
“That’s really touching.”
More than once, an audience member yelled out an obscure album track, and the band glanced at each other, shrugged, and started playing it. When they brought out the big hits, they played extended versions to let the audience sing along.
At one point, chatting with the audience, Neil said, “Now I hear this place has amazing acoustics, even if you’re not using an amp. Shall we try it out?”
“Is he kidding?” Clodagh said, eyeing the massive sound rig.
“Probably not.” Jamie watched them unplug their guitars with great flourishes.
“Now you’ve got to be really quiet,” Neil said, and the audience rippled with murmurs before going so silent it was eerie. “Good job.”
Then he played an A minor chord and the hairs on the back of Jamie’s neck stood up. The sound was small compared to what came out of the amplified speakers, but the domed hall magnified it and the music filled the air.
“Perfect,” said Neil, and Jamie had to agree because he knew that chord like he knew his own heartbeat. Fall At Your Feet was the song that had made him fall in love with the band, back when he was a kid and modern music was Britpop and trance and grunge and he didn’t think he was cut out for it.
And then he’d heard the perfect fall of notes, the minor keys and the unexpected chord changes, and he knew he’d be in love forever.
He didn’t realise he had tears in his eyes until Clodagh took his hand, and he gripped it tight as the song floated ethereally around him.
“Will you sing it with me?” said Neil, and the audience, soft but in surprisingly good voice, joined in the last chorus. They even hit the harmonies. And Jamie, anonymous among the crowd, sang along with a bunch of people who didn’t even know he was there, a part of a greater thing instead of one focus point in it.
Clodagh leaned against Jamie, her head on his shoulder, probably the only person in the audience not singing. She could feel his voice vibrating through him, a tremor of love and excitement. His eyes shone with worship as he looked up at the stage.
Imagine what it is to be looked at like that by him, she thought, gazing helplessly at his profile, and then the song ended and Jamie turned his head and kissed her.
He’d once tried to explain to her the Crowded House Moment, where a chord changed with such unexpected perfection it took your breath away. This was such a moment.
Clodagh had thought she’d enjoyed kissing before. She thought she’d had chemistry before. But Jamie set her on fire, his lips on hers, one hand cupping the back of her neck, the other clutching hers. Her lips parted and she licked into him and his body yielded against hers and heat followed it. Lightning crackled around them.
I know you. I know you, now, and I always have and I always will.
She breathed him in, the closest thing in the world to herself. There was no one else around.
Then sound washed in around them, thunderous applause, and Clodagh thought muzzily that they should be applauding because that had been one spectacular kiss, and then she realised she was in a crowd of several hundred people and they hadn’t even noticed her kissing Jamie.
She stared up at him, and his face reflected the same shock she felt. Hazel eyes, with a touch of green.
“That was spectacular,” said someone into a microphone, and she could only agree.
Jamie didn’t let go of her until the concert ended, not even to applaud. She was only half listening, too aware of him beside her, her body turned in against his so she could feel the heat radiating from him.
And when the lights went up after the final encore and the PPO nearest the door opened it and they were shepherded out, shielded from everyone else, directly into the car, she didn’t even wait for the door to close before she was kissing him again.
“I am so into you,” Jamie breathed, and she’d have agreed but she was too busy kissing him.
When the car door opened again they sprung guiltily apart, and then Jamie grinned and tugged her after him into the garage, towards the door leading to the garden.
Davood Khan stood there, one hand on the car door. His face was expressionless. Clodagh caught his eye stricken with guilt, and the tiniest hint of wryness touched his face. He nodded.
Then Jamie was tugging her across the frosty grass to the front door, and inside he started kissing her again, and she forgot absolutely everyone and everything else in the world.
She held onto her handbag as he led her upstairs, and when it formed a barrier to his removal of her t-shirt she held up one finger for him to wait.
He froze, eager as a hound. She almost expected his ears to quiver.
“Hah!” She held up the packet of condoms triumphantly, and Jamie grinned at her ear to ear.
His bed was huge and plush and they rolled all over it, tossing items of clothing away and arching against each other, kissing and kissing. Jamie, lean and pale in the moonlight, hair wild where she’d clutched at him when he kissed a trail of fire down her body. The way he held her, as if he couldn’t get enough of touching her, as if he’d never seen something so lovely or desirable. She felt that way when he looked at her, as if she was perfect and wonderful, and she loved him for it.
Her thigh hitched over his hip as he drove into her and
shuddered, lips on her throat, gasping her name. Yes, she whispered, and more, and he gave it to her, until she was tossing and arching and crying out as she broke apart in his arms.
And afterwards he lay beside her, chest heaving, looking shellshocked.
“Jamie?”
He stared up at the wooden panels of the bed canopy. It was probably as old as the house.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
He swallowed, and she watched the movement of his lovely throat. “I think you broke me.”
Alarm swept her. “Shit. What’d I do?” Had she been too enthusiastic? Had she hurt him? He had gone pretty wild there at the end. Maybe he’d strained something—
“My brain doesn’t work. Hang on.” He rubbed his hand over his face, then pulled her against him, breathing in her hair as it brushed his face. “Okay that’s better.”
Clodagh lifted her head to look at him and raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Jamie cuddled her close. “I’ve heard the phrase ‘mind blowing’ before but I’ve never… I mean…”
She smiled as she snuggled in. “It was good for me too.”
“Jesus.” He blew out a long breath. “Is it always going to be like that?”
He wants to make this a recurring thing. Clodagh smiled, and said, “Bloody hope so.”
Jamie kissed her mouth, then lay back, eyes closed, fingers playing with her hair.
She traced a bead of sweat as it trickled down his chest. She followed further, to his hip with its scrolled tattoo. “You’ve kept this quiet.”
“I’m not in the habit of wandering around naked.”
“What’s it say?” The script was looped and curled and she wasn’t in the mood to read upside down.
“Nulli Secundus.” He opened one eye. “Sergeant Travers thought that was funny.”
“Why? I haven’t got that far with my Latin Primer.”
“It’s the motto of the Coldstream. ‘Second to none.’”
Ah. A cruel joke for someone born fourth in line. Because he was a prince, after all, and she’d forgotten that. Oh Christ, I just had sex with a prince.
Clodagh kissed Jamie’s jaw and said, “It’s true as far as I’m concerned.”
