‘Come here. Allow me.’
‘Oh, emmm, thanks.’
I go over to where he’s sitting up against the pillows and sit down gingerly on the edge of the bed, with my back to him. Next thing, I feel his warm hands lightly lifting my hair off the back of my neck as he zips the dress all the way up. For just a millisecond longer than necessary, his hands linger on my bare shoulders and now there’s a tingling thrill shooting down my arms, bringing my whole body out in goose pimples.
Hadn’t counted on this … Hadn’t even considered the deep, swell that starts inside my chest then slowly starts to spread over my whole body, until my fingers tingle, and each and every one of my nerve endings feels like it’s physically starting to ache.
Christ, I think randomly, have I really been withering for the want of a human touch this badly? And for this long?
His giant hands linger on the nape of my neck, then gently start to play with a loose strand of my hair as my stomach contracts with longing … Whatever else happens, I don’t want him to stop …
Okay, I’m starting to feel dizzy now, loose and watery and find my head slowly turning round to face him as he cups my face in his huge hand, massaging it with his long, slow fingers.
‘This alright?’ he whispers so softly, I can barely hear him.
The rational part of my mind says, stop this lunacy right now, get up while I still can, say something smart and get back downstairs to the party proper. Because the thing is, I
like
being Jake’s friend. Surely the superior and permanent position of friends is a pretty good place to be. Isn’t it? Not to mention the bombshell I’ll be landing on him tomorrow … So why am I in danger of blowing everything right now by turning back to him, mumbling ‘Mmmmm,’ softly under my breath, wanting nothing more now than for him to hold me, to lie down beside him, to feel his lips on mine … He must be able to hear my heart hammering, I think, he must …
‘You’re amazing, you know that?’ he murmurs into my hair, and now I can feel his tongue lightly grazing off my ear. Oh God, he smells so delicious too, musky and gorgeous. And suddenly it’s like a furnace in here and even just looking at him is making me break out in a clammy sweat.
‘Most incredible person I think I’ve ever met.’
Another flush from me and now he’s smiling down at me.
‘I love watching you blush. It’s so against your nature and you’re so pretty when you do.’
I inch back a tiny bit, to look him full in the face.
‘Jake …’
‘Mmmmm …’ he says, pulling me back towards him, his grip like iron now.
‘What are we doing here? Are we both sure about this?’
‘Never been surer of anything in my life.’
‘But what about your woman? The Girl from Ipanema, sorry, I mean, what’s her name, Monique?’
‘Nothing.’ He just smiles that wry crooked smile I love and looks at me the way he always does whenever he thinks I’m acting like a complete mental case. ‘No story whatsoever. We’re friends, that’s all. Went to a movie together once and that was it. I already told you that.’
‘Yeah, but, I just wondered …’
‘Come on love,’ he smiles, lazily tracing a line of light kisses along the path of my collarbone, ‘the only reason I even mentioned her was because you seemed so edgy with me when we were out to dinner last week. I honestly thought you were about to tell me you were married or in a long-term relationship or something. So I just thought it might put your mind at rest a bit, take some pressure off you if I told you about Monique, that’s all. If you’ll remember though, I did make it clear to you we were only going out as friends …’
Now. This is it. The perfect moment.
‘Jake … there was something I wanted to tell you that night, but I never got a chance …’
‘Shhh, can’t you see I’m trying to kiss you here?’
With that, he grabs me by the waist and pulls me towards him so that now we’re face to face, inches from each other and all I can do is forget what I was about to say and look deep into his beautiful, wide blue eyes, just wishing he’d lean down and kiss me properly … And when he eventually does, it’s an endless kiss, strong and deep and so, so sexy and I can’t help myself from moaning softly as he strokes down the whole length of my body … it’s hot and getting hotter and I don’t want him to stop, don’t want this moment to be over, want nothing more then to commit this to memory, so I can relive it later …
It takes every gram of strength I have to pull away, but somehow I manage to.
‘No, please Jake, not until I’ve talked to you …’
‘What’s up love?’
Next thing, the bedroom phone rings.
And now I’m startled, almost shocked back to sobriety.
‘Let it ring and tell me what’s bothering you,’ he says thickly, arms clamped tight around me.
But I can’t, in case it’s Helen or Lily or some problem at home. I detangle myself, slide away from him towards the bedside table and pick it up.
‘Hello?’
‘Eloise, where in the name of god are you?’
Ruth O’Connell, sounding even tipsier than I feel right now.
‘Hi Ruth, you OK?’
‘Come on, the party’s started and you’re late! We’re all down here waiting for you, so hurry up! And get that gorgeous slab of a man of yours down here too! Steve from accounts is making serious moves on me again and I need to talk boys with you!’
I smile, hang up, then turn back to Jake.
‘Party’s started,’ I tell him. ‘Time for us to go.’
Can’t tell him now. But for the first time all week, I think maybe, just maybe, everything will be fine when I do.
‘Party hasn’t even begun to start,’ he grins broadly. ‘You just wait till I get you back up here later on. Now that’ll be the real party.’
Five minutes later and arm in arm together we both trip down the massive stone staircase into the large, looming and slightly terrifying library, where aperitifs are being served before dinner. Jake holds open the door for me, winks at me, then brushes his hand lightly up and down my bare back as I waft past him. And it’s thrilling and sexy all at once and as I smile coyly up at him all I can think is – later.
Just wait until later. That’s all we have to do. In a few hours, all this work malarkey will be done and dusted and then it’ll just me and him …
alone.
And I’ll come clean to him and with luck we’ll just pick up exactly where we left off on that gorgeous, conveniently oversized big double bed …
Jesus, I’m acting and feeling like a teenager, I think, totally assaulted by a mixture of relief and happiness as a dizziness comes over me just at the memory of him touching me. Nor does Jake show any signs of regretting what just happened either. Every chance he gets, he’s brushing up against me, slipping an arm round my shoulders, making it clear to one and all that we’re together. Which they all automatically assumed anyway, but still.
And each time he lightly grazes my bare back, it sends a thrill through me that I have neither felt nor experienced in such a mortifyingly long time – I’m guessing sometime during the Clinton administration. And it’s all just so sexy and so beyond fabulous; like that feeling you get when you hear the opening bars of
Avalon
, only better.
Anyway, Jake heads to the crowded bar to get us some drinks while I slip into a quiet corner to call home and say nightie-night to Lily. I mwah-mwah her over and over again while she giggles, sing her two verses of
The Bing Bong Song
from Peppa Pig at her insistence and faithfully promise her I’ll be home in time to make popcorn and watch a movie of her choice with her on TV, tomorrow evening. Then have to resist the urge to physically kiss the phone as she happily waddles off and Helen takes over.
‘So, can you talk?’ she asks me excitedly, dying to know all. ‘How’s it all going?’
‘So, so well,’ I hiss. ‘LOADS to tell you, but just relax. I really think that somehow it’s all going to work out, that he won’t mind a bit when I tell him. Look, I can’t talk now, but for once in my life I really, honestly feel that everything will be just fine …’
With that, I spot Jake on his way back with drinks.
‘Gotta go, talk later!’ I tell her, hanging up.
Later, later, later. And all Jake and I have to do is wait till later.
To be continued …
Anyway, the pre-dinner drinks party is packed to the gills, with everyone deep in chat and of course knocking back the freebie champagne and cocktails to beat the band. The vast majority from the
Post
, I can’t help noticing, all executing perfect one hundred and eighty-degree head turns, so as to check that there’s never anyone close by more important that they should be rubbernecking with instead.
But not me, not this weekend. Not on your life. Tonight to me is about having the one thing I rarely allow myself … fun. And possibly sex into the bargain, but I won’t count my chickens. Everything is going so incredibly well so far, why shouldn’t my glorious good fortune hold out? I think, more than a bit smugly, floating around with a beam on my face like someone who just won the Lotto, but doesn’t like to gloat. But even besides Jake, aside from what just happened, tonight is a well-earned celebration with people I wish I’d got to know before and who I’d really like to get to know a whole lot better.
For feck’s sake, I think, we do shop talk 24/7 in the office, can’t we all just allow ourselves one night off to let our collective hair down? Christ knows, we’ve earned it.
Next thing I feel a warm hand slip through mine as Jake leans down to whisper reassuringly in my ear.
‘Once more into the breach, dear friend.’
‘Let me guess, your O.U. English course?’
‘Henry the Fifth, the man himself.’
Photos are being taken all round us on camera phones as I beam back up at him, feeling light, lighter than air. He leans down and lightly kisses me just as our picture is taken. I feel the flash in my face, startling me, then I pull back and we both suddenly burst out laughing.
And it’s hard to believe it, but this is actually the last time that anything is ever normal between us again.
True to form, it’s Seth Coleman who gets the ball rolling. Probably the only person here who’s relatively sober, with the lardy-looking head of hair so slicked back tonight, that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Wolverine from X-Men. A galaxy-class schmoozer, the minute his gimlet eye spots us, he oils his way over to Jake then surreptitiously steers him away from me, out of earshot.
It’s beautifully done: they’re just far enough away that even while straining, I’m still only able to pick up annoying snippets of their conversation. All of which are enough to make my blood chill as a long shadow suddenly stretches itself across this near-perfect day. Because he’s grilling Jake, sounding him out, doing a real number on him, almost worthy of a five-and-dime, gumshoe private investigator, circa nineteen-forty-five, by way of Raymond Chandler.
Even worse, I’m stuck with Lady Hume, who’s already far more than three sheets to the wind. I can tell by the way she keeps pressing me to call her Shania, but then she only ever abandons the social pecking order when she’s totally pissed as a fart. For once, she’s abandoned her mobile phone and it’s hard to say which is worse; trying to sustain a half-arsed conversation with her while she’s rudely tweeting away in front of you, or else having to have a full-blown conversation with her, now that she’s phoneless and Twitterless.
She’s wearing a dress a good twenty years too young for her, exposing far more flesh than even a gap year student with a perfect body ever should, with her too-blonde hair and too-fake nails that I’m certain she must have spent an absolute packet on. But then Shania’s one of those women the Celtic Tiger years really suited, but now that we’re all broke, she just comes over as being grossly OTT and faintly embarrassing. There’s always one at these things, that one person that you just dread ending up with and sure enough, it’s my bad luck to have been collared by her.
‘No one here likes me,’ she slurs, standing way too uncomfortably close to me and breathing boozy fumes that nearly make me cough. Christ alive, has this one been on the booze for the whole afternoon?
‘Even,’ she says, starting to sway dangerously now, ‘I might say …
especially
him.’ She practically spits this out and when I politely follow her eye line, I realise she’s referring to none other than her husband, Sir Gavin.
‘I’m pretty certain he’s having an affair, you know. And she’s only bloody thirty. Some bitch journalist. Thinks I know nothing about it, but …’ then her voice drops down to an exaggerated stage whisper, ‘I make a point of checking his mobile phone bills every month AND his credit card statements … How about that?’
I nod as sympathetically as I can, all the while casting around for someone, anyone, to come and rescue me. But before I can even make eye contact with Jake, she nudges me sharply and sloshes a good half of the margarita she’s been milling into all over the carpet. Jesus.
A second later, she’s leaning in closer, grabbing onto the straps of my dress and locking her lolling head with mine.
‘Wanna know what the useless fecker bought for her on Valentine’s Day?’ she asks me, and somehow it sounds like a threat.
I want to say no, not particularly, but find I can’t. I shoot another worried glance over at Jake, but Seth’s still monopolising him and he’s too far away to dig me out of this.
‘Diamond earrings,’ Shania goes on, her posh affectation of an accent now almost completely evaporated. ‘And you know what the bastard got me? A Magimix blender. A sodding Magimix buggery blender! Bitch he’s shagging gets diamonds, I get kitchen appliances.’ Then even more scarily, she starts laughing like a nutter.
‘You take my advice Eloise, you stay away from all men. Even Mr Rock of a Hunk you’ve got on your arm tonight. Use him, then dump him and move on. Do you hear me?’
I nod placatingly and make the right noises, while Shania slurs a word that might or might not be ‘miserable’. I’m straining to catch snippets of whatever Seth’s probing Jake about. And the little I can hear is enough to bring on an out-and-out panic attack.
‘So what school did you go to?’ Seth is grilling him. ‘And where exactly are you originally from? I’m finding that accent of yours particularly hard to place, and I’m normally good with accents. And who are your parents and family, might I know any of them? Do you have brothers and sisters? And what do they all do? And what did you work at before you got a teaching job? And where exactly did you go to study? Which college? And how did you support yourself before then? And where?’