by Tess Stimson
I am not entirely comfortable with Sara’s fiercely adversarial attitude, but it appears women know each other better: Mrs. Stockbridge certainly seems to respond to it. Between us, we prevail upon our client to accept the advice for which she is paying us handsomely, and having signed a brace of documents, the lady finally takes her leave. I feel deeply sorry for her. It is most unfortunate that she caught her husband and the babysitter in flagrante on her daughter’s sofa; had she not done so, I am quite sure the young woman would never have induced her foolish middle-aged lover to quit his three square meals a day and neatly ironed shirts for her own undeniable, but fleeting, bedroom charms. No doubt the entire affair would have petered out within a very short while of its own accord. Now, however, the damage is done. Instead of the comfortable retirement which should have been his in less than three years, he will no doubt soon find himself treading upon Legos in the middle of the night once more.
Emma, my secretary, knocks and puts her head around the door. “Mr. Lyon, I have the Wilson Form E; it’s been notarized. Did you want me to send it out to Cowan Finch in the morning?”
“We’re getting a little tight for time on the Wilson hearing.” I glance at my watch. “It’s nearly six now; I’ll drop it off at Cowan’s on my way to the station, earn us a couple of days’ grace. Could you give them a call and let them know to expect it before you leave for the day?”
Emma nods and withdraws. As I gather the Stockbridge files and follow her out of the conference room, Sara falls into step beside me. I don’t say anything, because I cannot think of anything safe to say.
The song she sent me at New Year’s changed everything. It said that Manchester was not an aberration, the result of too much alcohol or the temptation of proximity. It said that I wasn’t imagining the subtext of her invitation to come up for a nightcap. Sara knew precisely what she was doing when she used a song to ask a married man to imagine what would happen if we kissed.
I don’t want this. I love my wife. I love my wife.
I want this. I want to sleep with this woman more than I want to breathe. But I am still not going to do it. I am a Renaissance man, not a brute animal.
I exchange the Stockbridge files for the substantial stack of documents destined for Cowan Finch, shrug on my overcoat, and reach for my briefcase.
“Here, let me take some of those,” Sara says, forming a tray with her forearms.
I hesitate, but I am indeed heavily laden. To refuse would be ostentatiously churlish. With a curt nod, I heft the Wilson deposition into her arms. A breath of Allure washes over me, and something else I cannot readily identify—a sweetness that is Sara’s alone.
We exit the office and walk toward Holborn in tandem. As we cross a narrow side street a short distance from the underground station, Sara’s heel sticks in the gutter. She stops to free it, slipping her foot from the shoe and laughing as she tries to balance without touching her stockinged toes to the wet pavement or dropping the documents. Naturally, I pause beside her. And so we are protected by the two solid office buildings on either side of the street from the full force of the blast that tears through High Holborn a split second later.
Had it not been for Sara’s shoe, we would have been ten feet farther down the main road. Precisely where a thousand lethal shards of plate glass skewer down, any one of which would have been enough to kill us.
It’s quite extraordinary, how your instinct for survival takes over. I throw myself across Sara and propel the two of us into a shop doorway, our ears ringing from the explosion. The blast has sucked up all the air and ripped the oxygen from our lungs. We crouch against the wall, tenting our overcoats above our heads to block out the choking brick dust billowing around us, gasping great gulps of dry air as our eyes stream.
And then our ears pop and we flinch at the abrupt wail of a thousand car and burglar alarms. Within minutes, fire and ambulance sirens fill the air. The injured city itself seems to be groaning. It takes me a moment to realize the muffled sound is the collective moans of the trapped and dying.
Sara and I look at each other. Our faces, hair, and clothes are thick with gray dust. I see no fear in her silvery eyes: just curiosity, relief—and a spark of adrenaline-fueled excitement.
“D’you think it’s over?” she asks calmly.
Her savoir faire in the face of such crisis is startling. I can only imagine Mal’s panic in a similar position; although, of course, it would be for the children rather than herself. But Sara has the emotional self-control of a man; I find it refreshing and dangerously attractive.
We both jump as more glass and debris crash to the ground.
“I think it probably is, unless they’ve booby-trapped it so another one goes off once the rescue services are here,” I say, wondering when we all became so terrorist-aware. “This may just be one of several in the city, like last time—”
Another crescendo of shattered glass, this time just feet away.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” I urge. “Christ knows how unstable the blast has left the buildings.”
Sara stands up, brushing brick dust from her clothes. “My flat’s in Theobald’s Road,” she says, “ten minutes away.”
A close brush with death has a salutary effect. One is forcefully reminded of one’s mortality, the brevity—and fragility—of life.
Carpe diem. Seize the day.
A brief glance down the road confirms that our office building has survived relatively unscathed, apart from a few shattered windows. My first instinct is to run to the scene of the blast, where I will no doubt prove a hindrance rather than a help; but a lone police car is already barricading the through road. And so there is nothing to save me from myself.
My mobile phone has no signal—standard procedure, these days, to shut down the networks during terrorist attacks to prevent further remote-controlled blasts—but I turn it off anyway.
Holding hands, Sara and I run toward High Holborn in an instinctive—if absurd—half-crouch against further onslaught. We jolt to an appalled halt as we reach the main thoroughfare, stunned by the sheer level of destruction. It is as if our capital has metamorphosed into the stricken streets of Baghdad. Upended cars, pulverized buildings, toppled streetlamps; and over it all, a pall of thick, heavy dust and smoke. I’m astonished by the speed of the rescue services, who have cordoned off the entire site; but then they have had a grimly thorough apprenticeship.
We cross Holborn, broken glass crunching beneath our feet, and up Hatton Garden, paying little heed to the eviscerated shopfronts of the diamond district. We barely register the eerie silence in the undamaged backstreets, the dearth of traffic and pedestrians. I am too busy unbuttoning her blouse even as we run, her hands are too frantic against my belt buckle as we skirt cars abandoned in panic in the middle of the road.
We burst through the front door of her apartment building, and I push her down on the grubby communal stairs. Shoving her skirt up to her waist and peeling off her knickers, I thrust my knee between hers and spread her thighs as I yank down my trousers. And then I’m inside her, and my blood is pounding, roaring, thundering as I come.
After a moment, I pull out of her and grip the newel post to haul myself upright, panting as I shove my wilting cock back into my pants.
“Well, that may have been good for you,” Sara says dryly, “but it didn’t do a thing for me.”
She wriggles upright, pulling her skirt down smartly and picking up her knickers. I rub my chin ruefully, a little appalled—and thrilled—by the brutishness of my behavior.
“Sorry. Couldn’t help it.”
“Fuck you couldn’t.”
“Fuck I couldn’t,” I acknowledge. “But don’t worry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“You bet your sweet arse you will,” she says cheerfully.
“Here?”
“Yes—”
“Here?”
“Christ, yes—”
“Like this?” She kneels up between my thighs, strawberry-tipped breas
ts glistening with sweat. “Nick. You have to tell me what you want. How else am I going to know?”
No woman has ever asked me that before.
“I love that thing you did—on my—with your nails,” I mumble finally.
“This?” she purrs.
“That.” I gasp.
Sara talks during sex. Not mindless chatter or Nazi instructions or porn-movie dirty; she talks to me.
Do you like this? What about this? Faster? Slower? Is this better? Does this turn you on? I love it when you do that. Can you put your mouth where your fingers just were? Amazing, that’s amazing. Would you like to try this? Or that? Let’s see if we can. I think we. God, that’s making me wet. If you could just. Maybe we should try. Oh, perfect, perfect.
Nothing bothers her. She giggles when our sweat-slickened bodies fart against each other. She laughs when we get stuck in a particularly gymnastic position and have slowly to unwind from each other limb by limb as if from a game of Twister. A condom is produced from her bedside drawer—“Lucky my period is due in two days, or that fuck on the stairs could have been a frigging disaster”—with insouciant efficiency: “Lemon-and-lime or plain?”
Afterward, she rolls onto her side and lights a cigarette. I stare at her, more shocked by this than by the huge (black) dildo I found while groping for a box of tissues under the bed.
“I didn’t know you smoked!”
“I don’t. Only after sex.” She flips the box open. “Ah. Just one left. Seems a shame to keep a whole packet for just one cigarette.”
“It does?”
She reaches for my cock again. “Yes, Nick. It does.”
It is only as daylight streams through Sara’s begrimed bedroom window that I allow myself to think of Mal. My wife. The woman I have just betrayed in the most unforgivable of ways; four times, to be precise. Though obviously this is nothing to be proud of.
An excoriating wave of shame swamps me. Christ Almighty, what have I done?
I get out of bed, careful not to disturb Sara, grope in my jacket pocket, and switch on my mobile phone. I listen to the fourteen messages on my voice mail—all but one of them from my wife—feeling increasingly sickened as I register Mal’s mounting panic. Jesus, I shouldn’t have turned off my phone. What must she have gone through last night?
Glancing once more at the bed, I move quietly into the sitting room—extraordinary how the girl manages to be simultaneously minimalist and messy—and call home.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Mal? It’s me.”
Silence. I wonder if my phone battery has just died and check the display. “Mal, are you there? Dammit, these lines—”
“I’m here,” she whispers, sounding half asleep.
“You saw the news, obviously,” I say, trying to sound normal. What is normal, when you’ve just broken every promise you ever made? “I’m fine, bit shaken up, as you’d expect, but we were lucky, office lost a few windows but the main damage was the other end of Holborn. It’s not as bad as it looks on television, but Christ, it’s bad enough.”
“But are you sure you’re all right? Where were you when it happened? What did you do? Where have you been, I tried to call you but—”
I feel a surge of guilt-stewed impatience. Does she have to make such a drama out of it?
And then appalled remorse: She’s been up all night sick with worry. Whereas I—
“I’m fine. Look, I’m sorry you were worried but—hang on.”
Sara has stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar. I don’t particularly want her to know I’m phoning my wife—no need to rub salt into the wound—but more importantly, I don’t want Mal to hear another woman’s ablutions. I move into the tiny hallway and shut the door. “Mal, it’s been a hell of a night,” I mutter, cupping the phone. “I know you must have been going frantic, but it was out of my hands. I’ll do my best to get home as soon as I can, but you can imagine what it’s like trying to move anywhere at the moment. I don’t even know if the trains are running yet.”
“Waterloo’s open again, I heard on the news. Where are you now?”
Panic flares, and I force myself to damp it down. She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s a perfectly normal question. “Oh. Yes. At the office, obviously. Spent the night here.” I’m aghast at how swiftly, how easily, the lie comes. “Look, Mal, let me go now, OK? I’ll be home when I can. How are the girls?”
“The girls are fine. They’re with Kit—”
Bloody would be. “Of course.”
“Nicholas, please. He was worried sick about you—we all were.”
“Sorry. Yes.”
“I love you,” she says, and I can tell she’s crying. “I do love you, Nicholas.”
I have never felt such a contemptible heel in my life. How can I sleep with another woman and still love my wife? How can I tell my wife I love her with another woman’s juices still sticky on my skin?
I spin as Sara opens the hall door: gloriously, magnificently naked.
“You, too,” I say quickly into the phone, and click it shut.
Sara doesn’t ask to whom I was speaking, and I don’t proffer an explanation. I feel my cock stir yet again as I follow her back into the bedroom, searching for the words to tell her I’m about to leave her high and dry. It was undeniably the most physically satisfying night of my life; but it was also, without doubt, unrepeatable. I know better than most where this road will lead if we pursue it further. The pain, the grief, to all involved. Better to end it now. She’s a woman; she’s bound to have started to read things into this. Get feelings for me. I need to let her down gently, before she gets hurt.
I pick up my trousers from the sitting room floor and am clumsily struggling into them when Sara comes back out of the bedroom, knotting the belt of a scarlet coffee-stained kimono.
“Look, Nick,” she says, pulling at her earlobe, “last night was great—wonderful—but it was just a one-off, right? I mean, I think you’re cool, but to be honest, I’m just not that into the whole office-romance thing.”
I stand there, one leg in my trousers. What was wrong with last night? Wasn’t the sex good? I thought the sex was good. Unbelievable, in fact. So why—
“It’s not you,” she says, perching on the arm of the white sofa. “I had a great time, really. But you’ve got to admit, the whole bomb thing—well, it kind of suspended the normal rules for a bit, didn’t it? We made the most of it, and I’m cool with that. But we have to work together and I don’t want last night to get in the way, so I thought I should just be, you know, up-front about it now.”
I should feel relieved. She’s let me off the hook.
“You’re OK with that?” I ask.
“Oh, fine. Really. Don’t worry about me.”
She doesn’t sound at all regretful. “Good. Good. That’s—good.”
“Our little secret,” she says.
“Absolutely.”
“So.” She stands up. “I’m going to make myself some coffee, and then go back to bed, I think. No work today, obviously. Want a cup?”
“No, I’ll—uh, I’d better get back to—I’ve got to—the train. But thank you.”
“OK. Make sure you really slam the front door downstairs when you leave; it tends to stick and you think you’ve shut it but you haven’t. We’ve already had to get police to evict bums twice this year.”
“Will do. Right.” I match her businesslike tone. “I’ll get Emma to e-mail everyone to let them know when the office is up and running again. The sooner the better, really. Tomorrow if possible, even if we can’t get the windows fixed for a day or two.”
She reaches for the remote control. “Thanks, Nick. I can work on the Yeates file from home in the meantime; I’ve got all the paperwork here from last weekend. By the way,” she adds, eyes on the screen as a correspondent reports live from the clean-up operation in Trafalgar Square, “love the hair. Knocks ten years off you. I told you it’d look better long.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, Nicholas! You look dreadful!”
“Thank you,” I say tightly. “I feel so much better now.”
Mal throws her arms around me, burying her face in my shoulder, and I stiffen in horror. I should have showered at Sara’s. Washed away the warm, honeyed scent of her skin, toffee in the sun; I can still feel the dry stickiness of her cum on me—I have never slept with a woman who ejaculated before; it was the most erotic sensation I’ve ever experienced. Surely Mal can tell, surely—
With a sob of relief, my wife releases me and I follow her into the warm fug of the kitchen. Every available surface is covered with pans and crocks of freshly cooked food, still warm from the Aga: gingerbread loaf, blue cheese polenta, chèvre and garlic timbales, apricot-glazed foie gras, peach and champagne cobbler, olive bread, grilled quail. Enough to feed an epicurean army. Mal’s usual answer to emotional crisis. I just hope it freezes.
She whips a milk pan of crème en glace from the heat. “Darling, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you look dreadful, it’s just you’re so crumpled and disheveled—I can smell the bomb on you, so terrible, it’s like Guy Fawkes night only of course much, much worse. All this dust in your hair—goodness, it’s getting long, isn’t it, your hair, I must make you another appointment at—”
“Malinche,” I interrupt. “I’ve just survived a terrorist explosion, I’ve barely slept in forty-eight hours”—this much is true—“it’s taken me the entire day to get back home, and you’re worried about grime on my jacket and the length of my hair?”
She looks stricken.
“Nicholas, I’ve just been so terribly worried about you, you can’t imagine—and I know you’ve had such an awful time—”
“Better than many,” I say soberly.
“Yes. Of course. Oh, Nicholas.”
“Anyway,” I say quickly, before she goes off again, “I like my hair like this. Knocks ten years off me. Where are the girls?”
“Metheny’s in bed, she couldn’t wait up any longer, but Sophie and Evie are in the dining room, doing their homework. Can I get you a cup of—”
