by Dale, Lindy
‘Please, Luke, please,’ she begged. This wasn’t just sex. Flora had never experienced anything like it before.
‘Your wish is my command,’ he grinned.
****
Flora opened her eyes and blinked the new day in. Sex by the moonlight may have been romantic but in the harsh reality of morning it took on a whole new meaning. Her body ached and her head was sore from lack of sleep. She didn’t care. Luke’s voice was ringing inside it.
‘We can never be friends’ he’d said, and it was true, for despite her better judgement, they were now lovers. Flora had broken every moral code she had ever set for herself and she and Luke were lovers. Stretching, she repeated the words to herself, over and over. Lovers. Then she smiled. This was not sensible at all. It was also not the kind of thing she could share with her friends. But hey, who cared.
Rolling over she fingered the spot where Luke had lay beside her through the night. He was gone but there was a note on the pillow.
I was wrong.
The night we met was not the most pleasurable I’ll ever spend with you.
Call me. x
Blushing at the memory, she pushed her face into the feathers, breathing the lingering scent of the soap and aftershave he’d left behind. Last night his sooty head had rest in that very spot. Last night he had called her name in passion. Last night he had kissed her like there would be no tomorrow.
Rolling to her back and grinning stupidly at the ceiling, she considered what she had done. Last night she had invited a man she had never been on a real date with into her bed. She had had wild un-abandoned sex… with her boss. She had broken all the rules and, while decadent, it felt delicious. She might even do it again or perhaps try something else new.
Starting right now.
Reaching for the handset on the bedside table, she picked up the phone; punching in the number Luke had left. Now this is new, she decided, and quite a refreshing change. She was calling a man, making the first move, though technically the first move had been made when she’d invited him home for coffee. Everyone knew that didn’t mean coffee.
‘Hello?’ Luke’s tone was clipped when he answered the phone. He was moody, she decided, from lack of sleep. She wasn’t feeling that chipper herself.
‘Morning,’ Flora bubbled.
Silence.
‘Flora?’
‘No it’s Scarlett Johannsen, you dope. Who else would it be?’ she purred, trying to sound sexy. She was a little bemused at his lack of recognition. The previous night he’d known who she was. Intimately. ‘Do you have lots of women who call you before breakfast?’
She could hear him rubbing his eyes. ‘Uh no. Sorry. I was asleep and I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.’
Flora deflated. This conversation was not living up to expectations but she supposed she could deal with it. It was only 8.30a.m after all. She flopped to her back again and waited for him to say something else; preferably about how brilliant she had been last night and what a great time he’d had.
‘Look, I had fun last night but I’m really fagged, Flora,’ he said, sounding anything but that. Flora stared at the mouthpiece. What had happened to the man who had cried out her name in the early hours of the morning? This wasn’t Luke. This was his evil twin.
‘You left your number on the pillow. I thought you wanted me to call you.’
‘Yeah… I do, just not right now.’
‘Right.’ She pressed her lips together. Tears were stinging at the back of her throat but she held them back. ‘Well, I guess I’ll call back later.’
‘Mmm…. Yeah. Okay.’
The line went dead.
For a moment or two, Flora sat on the edge of bed, fingering the pillowcase. This couldn’t be happening. She hadn’t misread the signals. Luke had wanted more than one night. What the hell was wrong now? Filled with a sudden anger, she punched the pillow wishing it was him. He had used her but if that was how he wanted to play it…. well…. fine. She wouldn’t call back. If he wanted her, he could damn well beg.
Chapter 17
One lunchtime, in the middle of the next week, the girls were in the very back corner of the library, tucked away behind two metre high shelves on the pretext of doing research for the Christmas concert. They were having a private discussion, the type of discussion that they didn’t want Miriam to be privy to. Her sonic hearing picked up the most minute of details when whispered across the staff room table and blew them out of all proportion. If she discovered PJ had shacked up with Dylan she’d be straight to the school board for sure.
Sitting on a library stool, examining a lock of hair for split ends, PJ wasn’t even pretending to assist them in their quest. ‘It’s late night shopping, tonight. Do you want to come to Ikea and help me pick out a new sofa.’
Louise looked at her over the top of a book. Her eyebrows rose. ‘For the love nest?’
‘Mmm,’ PJ replied, tossing the strand over her shoulder and glowering at her friend. She was tired of Louise’s constant digs about her supposed lousy love life. It was obvious that neither her, nor Flora, saw Dylan for the man he really was. His negative demeanour was only a reaction to the way they perceived him.
‘Dylan’s sofa is so scuzzy,’ she continued, refusing to be drawn into yet another discussion of his failings as a potential husband. ‘It has these big brown stains all over it and I daren’t ask what they’re from. It’s easier to go and get a new one.’
Louise’s brow drew together. Even she, who was never one to scrimp when to racking up credit card dollars, looked worried. ‘Didn’t you buy a new bed last week? Where, pray tell, are you getting all the cash? I thought you were all but locked out of your trust fund?’
‘Decent furniture is a necessity, Louise. Roger doesn’t mind big ticket splurges if they’re justified. He would only say no if I wanted to buy shoes or something.’
Flora lifted her head from her book. It was still possible that they could talk PJ out of it. Why should she buy yet another piece of furniture she didn’t need? The furniture graveyard from her relationship with Mike littered her and Louise’s flat as it was. ‘You have a perfectly good leather sofa already. It’s a waste to buy another.’
Now Louise was pouting too. What would she do if PJ took all the furniture with her to the new place? Was she supposed to sit on the floor? Really sometimes Flora had no idea.
‘I hope Dylan’s forking out his share….’ Flora added, watching as PJ slid the book she had begun flicking through back onto the shelf in the wrong place. ‘It was his idea.’
‘What does it matter who buys the bloody furniture as long as we have it?’
‘Nothing, but you’d think he’d want to contribute something, its his home too.’
‘Well, he doesn’t, so can we drop it please?’ PJ snapped. The sharing of funds was still, clearly, a sore point.
Carefully, Flora pulled PJ’s misplaced book off the shelf and replaced it in its correct position. ‘I was just saying…..’
‘No, you weren’t saying, you were criticising.’ PJ turned to face Flora. Her eyes were filled with anger. ‘What is wrong with you? You do nothing but mope around for days and now you’re yelling at me. You never yell.’
‘I’m not yelling and there’s nothing wrong.’ Nothing except the fact that Luke had been giving her the cold shoulder since they’d slept together. Flora had no idea where to turn or what she had done wrong. Her limited experience of men didn’t reach as far as one night stands gone bad and she couldn’t tell her friends the truth. Louise would have an aneurism and PJ would call it hypocrisy, given the things she had said in the past about Dylan being a womaniser and a user.
‘Yeah, right. Take a look at yourself, girl. Your face is so long it needs a semi trailer to carry it around. Don’t stand there and tell us there’s nothing bloody wrong.’
Flora ignored her. With Christmas and the end of year fast approaching, there were so many things other than Luke that she should be concentrating on. Like
the fact that Louise had offered their services in putting together the end of year concert, for starters and, between the three of them, they didn’t seem to have one useable idea. The parent body of St Bernadette’s were a very picky crowd.
Getting back to the task, Flora ran her hand along the books along the opposite shelf, noting a red-spined book ‘101 Great Ideas for Christmas’. It sounded perfect and was so old it couldn’t have anything too out there that the parents could complain about. Fresh in her mind was the ‘highly inappropriate’ dance, organised by Carmel and James for this year’s Easter ceremony. Personally, she had seen nothing wrong with a bunch of six year olds expressing their joy of life in a top ten way; they’d looked so innocent. But the parents had been straight into the Terminator’s office after the performance, with Mrs Barker leading the charge. Flora didn’t want a repeat performance of that. Especially with Edwina in her current maniacal mood.
‘What about this one? she asked, scanning the list of contents. ‘It has a cute Santa play. We could dress the children without main parts as elves and reindeer.’
‘Eww, so last century. And the book stinks.’ Nimbly, PJ plucked the book from Flora’s hands with her thumb and index finger, and slid it back, destined not to be opened for another ten years. ‘What we need is something modern, rocky, that the kids are going to get into.’
‘What we need is for Flora to stop changing the subject and tell us what’s going on.’ Louise remarked. ‘Come on. Out with it. This has got nothing to do with shopping or furniture.’
‘I don’t want to discuss it.’
‘So there is something wrong. I knew it!’
‘Nothing that a good shag wouldn’t fix, I’ll warrant.’
Flora rolled her eyes. PJ’s solution to every problem in the world was based around sex but hot sex wouldn’t solve anything. In fact, hot sex was the very root of the problem.
‘Did I hear someone say they needed a good shagging?’
A blond, curly haired head peeked around the corner of the shelves. It was James, Year Six. ‘You girls know you’re not supposed to have these important conversations without me. Is he anyone we know?’ He stepped from around the shelves and looked them up and down. As if thinking, his hand grazed the skin along his jawline.
‘It’s really none of your business, James,’ PJ said, ‘and why are you here anyway? We’ve told you a thousand times we don’t want to hang around with you. We don’t even want to, bloody well, talk to you.’
‘This is a library; it’s a free country, Peta.’ James looked at her with derision. He was the only person in the world who had the temerity to call PJ by her real name. Flora could never understand how he got away with it. It had to be something to do with the hair and that cute dimple. It wouldn’t be his bank balance.
‘Yes, it is, and it doesn’t need degenerates like you! Now bugger off, weirdo.’
James looked hurt. He wasn’t a degenerate, a little odd maybe but Flora had met weirder people. Anthony, the computer technician, was into Star Wars for heaven’s sake. He’d spent the entirety of his tax return on a Collector’s Edition Darth Vadar doll. And he was a grown man.
‘So, who’s in need?’ James asked again, jokingly this time.
‘Flora. She’s very grumpy,’ Louise confessed.
Flora was appalled. ‘I do not…. I mean … I am not! Ooohh, I don’t know!’
‘Well, if that’s all the problem is, I could free up a couple of things. Shall say 7pm? Your place?’ he said.
Three pairs of quizzical eyebrows raised in his direction. Surely, he was joking because if he wasn’t it was a definite reason to make a complaint about sexual harassment.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Flora felt a shiver run up her spine. Something in the way James was staring at her made her uneasy. He was as serious as she’d ever seen him.
Louise let out a giggle. ‘Well, nothing against you James, but we were thinking more along the lines of the luscious Mr McDermott,’ she corrected, ‘Flora won’t be in it, though. She thinks it’s unprofessional having sex with your boss.’
Flora began to cough. This was the absolute end. And a bit too close for comfort. ‘I don’t need sex, thank you, very much. And if I did I would NOT be asking Luke McDermott.’
James leant his shoulder against the library shelf, a careful smile forming ‘You don’t like him, then? I thought he was the tall, dark, silent type all girls go for.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous James. He’s our boss.’
He shrugged. ‘Guess you don’t want to know that he was reading your file the other day, then?’
Flora frowned. James seemed to know things that other people on staff had no idea about. But how?
‘I went to ask him to sign an invoice for the Maths texts for next year and he was looking at your photo in the file. He did close it very quickly when I walked in,’ he added, giving a knowing wink that sent the shiver charging anew.
‘He was probably checking his notes. He’s helping me with Mrs Barker.’
‘Then why would he hide it when I walked in?’
‘Because it’s none of your business, you moron,’ PJ cackled. ‘Go on, shove off. Don’t you have a class to attend to?’
Flora watched James leave, taking his information and storing it away. OK, so Luke was ignoring her for a reason she didn’t understand but he was thinking about her. He had been studying her photo. She just wasn’t certain if that was a good thing or a bad one.
****
Despite her mood, the afternoon moved along without further cause for worry. Flora’s class were making ladybird clocks as part of the Maths program and so, knee deep in PVA glue and red paint, she had little time to stress about Luke. Her head was bent in concentration for most of it, as she attempted to peel the numbers from Isobel Stewart’s clock.
‘I’m sorry, Miss O,’ Isobel sniffed, collecting a big wad of snot that had been running down between her nose and upper lip. ‘My ladybug was so booteful, I didn’t want to stick the numbers on his back, now it’s yucky.’
Flora handed her a tissue. She abhorred snot. ‘Don’t worry, Izzy,’ she soothed, ‘We can fix it.’ Heavens knew how, but if worst came to worst there was always the spare in the cupboard. Flora always made a spare for such disasters.
Looking up, just in time to see Jayden testing whether his ladybird could truly fly, Flora spotted Luke standing in the doorway, his mouth curving as he perused the quiet hum of activity. Or was he smiling at her? James’s comment had set her thinking. Convinced that he had only wanted her for one night, after his dreadful behaviour towards her the following morning and all this week, she was now undecided all over again. If Luke didn’t care, why had he been looking in her file, at her photo.
‘Hello, Mr McDermott,’ she smiled, standing. ‘Year One, could you say Good Afternoon please?’
Instantly, the children dropped their work and broke into to singsong chant of the greeting.
Luke stepped into the room and walked towards her. ‘What are you making this afternoon, Year One? You look busy.’
‘We made these ladybird clocks but they don’t fly and you can’t tell time on them,’ Jayden piped up as he climbed down from his position on the windowsill and tried to look innocent. The ladybird that wouldn’t fly had landed there. ‘Real ladybugs are way cooler.’
‘Well, these ones are very colourful, they’ll look great up on your wall,’ Luke grinned, as Isobel began to sniff again.
‘Mine wont, it’s stuffed!’
Crossly, the little girl waggled her ruined insect in Luke’s direction and sniffed again, wiping her nose on her sleeve as she did. A trail of green goo spread up her arm.
‘Isobel!’ Flora reprimanded, standing up to face Luke. ‘Sorry about that, she’s over-expressive with her language. Her mother has her seeing a therapist twice a week for it.’
Luke regarded the six year old. ‘It’s amazing what you can buy these days, a bit of good old fashioned attention and some discipline wou
ld go a lot further.’
‘Hmm.’
He took a step closer, out of earshot. ‘Listen, could you pop into my office during your class’s PE time?’ His face was serious and Flora was worried. It was not the sort of face a man would have if he were going to throw you up against the bookcase in his office and have his way with you. It was his usual gruff, yet impassive, school persona.
‘Of course.’
‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘there are a few things we need to discuss,’ and strolling across the room, he grasped Jayden by the hand and removed a pencil he’d inserted from Brooke’s nose at the same time. ‘But we can do that after I’ve had a stern word with Master Davis here.’
Winking at Flora, he left, Jayden in tow. Suddenly, Brooke’s impersonation of Mr Squiggle or the glue congealing on Izzy’s desk mat meant little. Luke was going to confess how wrong he had been to be so terse, that he’d meant the words he wrote. She just knew it.
****
Later, at Luke’s door, Flora fluffed around straightening her skirt and smoothing her already neat hair. For the remainder of the afternoon, she had been having visions of Luke, in a fit of passion, pulling the clips out and letting it tumble around her shoulders as he pushed her against the back of the door and kissed her. It was most disconcerting. She was never one to daydream on the job. And never about sex!
Excited, she entered the room and waited with breath not quite baited but still expectant until Luke looked up from his paperwork. He didn’t smile.
‘Shut the door, Flora,’ he said, motioning her to a chair. Flora held her breath and sat on the edge of the seat. ‘I’ll get straight to it. Mrs Barker has put in a formal complaint.’
Oh dear. That was not part of her daydream.
Flora pushed her glasses up her nose and stared at Luke. Her shoulders slumped. Anxious, her fingers sought the pleats of her skirt. ‘What was the complaint?’ If her career was going to be ruined, she might as well know how.
