by PJ Adams
He’d offered her the services of Mo, but that seemed unnecessary and, anyway, she was back in that layers of strangeness place: this was Ray Sandler, offering to hail a cab for her. How freaking cool was that?
“You got far to go tonight?” he asked, and she was reminded of how he’d said that all this making normal conversation stuff was strange territory for him.
“Not bad,” she said. “I’ll be home inside an hour. You?”
They started down the stairs and the babble of conversation was left behind. Now, it was suddenly very intimate, just the two of them.
“I have a place near here,” he said. “That’s why we chose the Roxette. It was a last minute thing and I know the owner and tonight was available. This time last week I had no idea I’d be back on stage again like this.”
At the foot of the stairs, the double doors were closed. Ray reached for one of them, his arm brushing against hers and it was one of those moments. Like when he’d walked off stage and a spark of inspiration had struck, only this time it was a spark of something else.
Passion. Lust. Madness.
Maybe all three.
That brief touch... it was like a fizz of static electricity had jumped between them.
Emily froze, and Ray’s hand hung in mid-air, paused just as he had been reaching for the door.
Had he been that close before, or had the geometry of this space at the foot of the stairs somehow rearranged itself around and between them? His face was only inches from hers, all shadows and washed-out skin tones.
His breath smelt of red wine and made the skin on her cheek stand up in goosebumps, even though it was warm and humid.
“I...” She stopped. She didn’t know what she had been about to say.
He was even closer now, leaning in as that scheming geometry stole the space between them.
Her tongue darted across her lips and then his mouth was against hers, his lips hard but his touch delicate. You kiss like a girl, she had time to think – not that she had ever kissed a girl before – and then a strong hand at the back of her head and one in the small of her back pulled her in tight against him and what had been delicate and tender became hungry and insatiable.
His mouth ground against hers, and his tongue probed, pressing between her lips, between her teeth, until it found her tongue and pressed against it, caressing it.
His body against hers was hard and lean. His leg pressed between her thighs, forcing her skirt to ride up.
Somehow she was back up against the door now, and she started to roll her hips sinuously, meeting the pressing of his thigh against her, matching his rhythm.
That hand at the back of her head shifted, and his fingers closed in her hair so that he could pull her head back, exposing her neck to his hungry mouth. He worked his way along her jaw-line and then down the smooth skin of her neck, the soft pressure of his lips and tongue contrasting deliciously with the hardness of his teeth and the rough scrape of that charcoal stubble.
She thought of Thom. Of the last time they had made love, a perfunctory performance one Saturday morning, a duty fuck if ever there was one. Three weeks ago? Four? The fact that she couldn’t even remember spoke volumes.
Ray shifted position then, and he was driving against her... not his thigh, but a hardness of a different kind.
Oh my God, but this was going to be over in a flash for her! A dry hump with a rock star, with her teen dream... She clung to him, feeling that growing tightness in her belly, her heat against his hardness, and she had to have more, had to have him inside her.
Thom.
Was this an anger thing? A wild, mad lashing out thing?
And with that thought, the delicious tightness started to recede... So tantalizing. So frustrating!
“I...” She couldn’t do this. She had to stop him.
He pulled away, half-turned away from her, backed a couple of steps up the stairs.
“I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t do this shit any more. I don’t want to be that man any more...”
She felt a sudden surge of anger, directed at the man who had once been her dream. He thought he was the one calling a halt to things, but she had already decided! She was already stopping him.
He wasn’t rejecting her.
No.
How awful was that?
In that instant she could see the route his thoughts must have taken. The shock of realizing that this was where he’d reached. That groupies for him now were like this. Like Emily. Overweight, her looks fading. Desperate, middle-aged women.
She’d seen the look on his face as he pulled away from her.
Self-disgust? Revulsion?
It felt like a punch in the belly, a kick when she had already been down, so far down.
She reached behind her, found the door handle and pulled on it.
Backing out into the Roxette’s foyer, that scene would forever be etched on her memory. The has-been rock star, sitting on the stairs, his head in his hands. Looking shocked. Lost.
She turned, strode across the foyer and out into the night to look for a cab.
5
She rode the train home, a half-hour ride that felt like forever.
She shared the carriage with a Chinese family, a mumbling old man and a group of drunken and far too loud young women. She sat with her head against the glass, the city’s lights rushing past, forming neon streaks in her blurred vision.
Layers of strange.
The whole thing: just layers of strange.
She tried not to think about what had happened. She was too close, too emotional. She should turn away now, and deal with it later. But how do you force your head to escape those ever-tightening circles?
Every time she tried not to think about it, she would get a random flashback.
The wine smell of his breath.
That image of a broken man sitting on the stairs, grainy like a still from an old movie.
Ray holding that note at the start of his encore, the half a song he claimed to have written for Emily.
His teeth on her neck.
The tightness in her belly when she had been so close to coming.
The look on his face as he pulled away.
She’d stopped him, hadn’t she?
She dashed the wetness away from her cheeks with the back of a hand, and more blurred lights rushed past.
Finally, a few minutes before the train reached her station, Emily pulled herself together. She found a hand mirror in her bag and checked her neck. Her skin was so sensitive: what if it was still raw and inflamed from the scrape of Ray’s stubble? What if his teeth had left marks? She could hardly turn up at her front door with a hickey on her neck!
Her skin was mark-free, thank goodness.
Her eyes, on the other hand, were red, with big panda shadows beneath them. Could she pass that off as mere tiredness after a long day, or would Thom take one look at her and know she’d been...
She’d been what, though?
Here she was, on a late train heading for home doing the whole adulterer’s checklist thing. Looking for evidence, fixing her face, thinking through her answers for any questions that might come.
She’d never cheated on Thom. She’d never betrayed his trust.
But this evening?
This evening she’d gone to a show and had a drink afterwards. Things had nearly got carried away, but she’d stopped that from happening.
She had nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to hide.
And of course, Thom would see it exactly that way, too, if he ever found out.
She powdered her face, trying to hide the redness, then did what she could to fix her eyes.
The night air at the station was just what she needed, a cold blast to cool her cheeks and sharpen her senses.
She found her car and drove the two miles to her village, a sprawling estate of commuter boxes built in the 1970s.
She pulled up in the drive, braced herself and went inside.
The lights were on but Thom wasn’t there. For a moment she wondered if he had finally left, and if he had, how she would feel about that. Then she looked around and saw the debris of an evening by the TV: a couple of empty Buds, a used cup and plate, a newspaper dismantled into its constituent sections and abandoned, Thom’s shoes left where he’d kicked them off.
She turned the lights out, suddenly too tired to care, and went upstairs.
Minutes later, washed and stripped, she climbed into bed next to Thom, his back to her.
“Hey there,” she said. He shifted, but said nothing. “G’night, Thom.”
6
The day started off like any other, despite the mad rushing of thoughts and fears in Emily’s head. Breakfast was all uncomfortable silences, and for once she was glad that neither of them felt inclined to break that familiar pattern. Thom didn’t ask how her evening out with Marcia had been and she didn’t tell him. He couldn’t probe the gaps in her story if he didn’t even care enough to ask, now, could he?
Still, there was more than the usual sense of relief when she was out of the door and heading to the station to play sardines with all the regulars on the 7.38.
She was at her desk before nine, her in-box open and ready to be cleared and then, finally, she caught herself, allowed herself to breathe.
Had she really been so close to actually cheating on Thom last night?
God¸ but she’d make a terrible adulteress, if this was how she got when nothing had even happened!
The perspective of a new day made a big difference. Now she could look back and understand how she’d been swept up in the moment. She could see how so many things had come together... The chance happenings that had led up to her being there alone; the atmosphere that made it so easy for her and a couple of hundred other women of her age to be swept up in a rush of nostalgia and want to be free, for at least an evening.
She could see how Ray had exploited it all, too. All the moves he’d put on her. It must have been like riding a bicycle for him, or tying shoelaces: moves you never forget. Moves you just slip back into, even if you pull yourself up partway through when you realize you don’t actually fancy whichever groupie has landed up in your lap.
That part of it really hurt, still.
The rejection. The look on his face.
She knew she’d lost some of what she’d had maybe five years and fifty pounds ago, but she had never seen herself as someone quite so unattractive.
Sure, he’d been able to take his pick over the years, but still.
“Emily?”
“What? Oh, sorry, yes. Just give me a moment.” Meeting... what meeting was it? She was late for a meeting...
§
“So there’s this guy,” said Marcia.
Emily had missed a call from Marcia earlier. Now, she had just called back as she slipped away for a mid-morning coffee at the Costa across the road. Thinking time, she always said, and everyone in the office was fine with that. She’d learned early on in this job that she could do pretty much whatever she wanted as long as she delivered.
“Was that why you were a no-show last night?” she asked, sitting back in a deep, leather sofa, her phone pressed to the side of her face. That made a lot of sense: Marcia and Her Men should have been a TV series by now.
“Will you stop leaping to conclusions, okay?”
“Sorry. I’ll shut up. Do go on.”
“So there’s this guy,” Marcia started again. “Calls me this morning, and asks am I the Marcia who’s a friend of Lucy at the Roxette? I say that depends, and he goes on to say, So is that the Marcia who also has a friend called Emily, ’cos he’d like to track down that particular friend of Marcia.”
‘Friend of Marcia’ – that’s what Ray’s minder, Mo, had jokingly called her last night.
She almost hung up right there and then.
She didn’t know where this thing was going, but she really couldn’t let it go there. She couldn’t have Ray Sandler playing mind-games with her like this.
“So this guy, he asks if I’d mind giving him your number. Well I stomped down hard on that one. And then he asks if he can leave a message instead? So is there something you want to confide in Aunty Marcia? Did Emily get lucky last night?”
Where to begin? How much to say?
“I... Did he leave a message?”
“He did,” said Marcia. “Said an associate of his wanted to say something. Wanted to apologize. Thought perhaps you might let him buy you coffee while he did that. Left a contact number. You okay, Emily? Did anything happen last night?”
“I’m fine, Marcia. Really I am. Things just took a bit of an unexpected turn, that’s all. Nothing happened. Just a bit different, that’s all. A bit weird.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You really okay?”
“I am.”
§
Marcia texted the number through, and Emily sat staring at it for several long minutes.
All she had to do was tap that number with her thumb to make the call.
What was she getting into?
Were things really over with Thom? Even if they weren’t – if there was a scrap of hope left – did she even want to chase that hope and work at things to see if they could squeeze out another year, five more, or at the outside ten?
She shook her head, mad at herself, and very conscious that she must look like a madwoman, sitting there in Costa, mumbling and shaking her head.
She was getting it all wrong. She was throwing too much into the equation.
This wasn’t about Thom, or their marriage. Not really. Even if all that was completely over, it still came down to a question of what to do about Ray Sandler.
She didn’t even know where to begin. Her feelings about him were so mixed up with that whole teen crush thing. Was this just a desperate, and rather pathetic, attempt to escape into that fantasy?
She couldn’t work out what to do.
She didn’t know what he might want. He’d made his feelings pretty clear last night, after all. He was probably only chasing her to make sure she didn’t say anything to the press, or spill her heart out on a blog.
She was guessing wildly now.
She was going on too little information. She should be sensible and call, find out what he wanted and decide from there how to handle it.
She stared at that number, a finger tap away from making the call. And then she finished her coffee, stood, and went back to the office.
§
All day she managed not to make that call, but eventually the nagging curiosity became too much to ignore. She should at least find out what he wanted, she told herself. Far better to act on full information than avoid things out of fear.
Shortly before six she managed to secure a seat at the Costa across the road, and with a strong sense of déjà vu she found herself staring at Marcia’s text again, that phone number highlighted ready to just tap and call.
She pressed a fingertip to the number, and raised the phone to her ear.
It answered on the third ring with a deep, “Yah? What’s up?”
Not Ray, but Mo.
“Mo?” she said. “It’s Emily. You know, friend of Marcia, who’s a friend of Lucy from the Roxette. I believe you’ve been trying to track me down? You’ll have to be quick, I’m afraid. I don’t have much time.”
“Hey,” he said, and she could hear that big smile in his voice. It really was hard to sustain any kind of hostility against someone like Mo. “Thank you so much for calling. Listen, can I be direct with you? Ray asked me to call you, asked me to be sensitive and all that, but I figure we should just cut to the chase, no?”
A little taken aback at the flurry of words, Emily said, “Well... whatever, yes, go ahead.”
“Cool. Cool. Listen, Ray can be a total screw-up at times, you know? I don’t know what happened between the two of you last night, but I hope you don’t judge him too harshly. He can be the sweetest guy as well as a scr
ew-up, you know? Anyway, thing is, Ray wants to apologize. He really means that. I can tell when it’s just bull, you know?”
“Um, okay,” said Emily. “Is that it? Was that the apology?”
“No no no! He thought maybe coffee somewhere. Neutral territory and all that. Listen, I know the guy has a reputation, but he’s really trying to get his shit together this time. I’ve never seen him like this. It’d mean a lot if you’d at least give him a chance to tell you sorry. What do you say?”
What could she say? For a successful, articulate woman, she really did seem to be struggling for words these days. So, with a terrible sense of getting herself deeper into things that could never be undone, she said that, yes, she would meet him, she would give him a chance.
7
It could never be just coffee, of course. Meet with Ray Sandler in a Starbucks or a Costa? Sure, he’d been off the scene for a few years, but still, he was Ray ‘Angry Cans’ Sandler. People with his kind of profile don’t just hang out in any old city-center coffee shop.
“There’s a place,” Mo had said. “Up here near the Roxette. Everyone knows him there. He doesn’t get too much attention.”
Mo came to get her. He pulled up in a black BMW right outside the Costa where Emily was waiting. Steadfastly ignoring the traffic stacking up behind him, he waited while she came out.
“Hey,” he said, as he held the door for her. “I really appreciate this. Ray really appreciates this. I know it’s out of your way and you probably have far better things to be doing.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “No really, it is.”
§
After a twenty-minute crawl through heavy traffic, they pulled up outside a corner building where two rows of Victorian terraced houses joined. On the wall there was a name-board which read, simply, ‘Caffè’. Other than that board, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from the neighboring houses, other than a glass-covered menu by the door.
This was a leafy part of the city, only a couple of streets away from the Roxette, but where that had been all pawnbrokers and discount shops, these terraces were gentrified inner-city chic at its peak.
Emily paused at the entrance, using the menu as a prop to her hesitation. So many different kinds of coffee bean on the menu!
