by Jane Lark
I needed to pull myself together. I needed to go back to my flat and back to work – and get over this. It wasn’t asking too much; it was clear that’s what everyone else thought they’d do.
I made the porridge. It was probably crap, but I sprinkled a little brown sugar on top and poured a little maple syrup on it, then some cold milk. When he came back in he was wearing a light-blue sweater with a white shirt under it, and the grey suit trousers he’d worn at the weekend.
‘If I dress quickly, can I come in to work today? I think I’m being childish hiding like this. I think it would be better for me to get back to something normal.’
He sat down on a stool on the other side of the worktop. ‘You can if you want – of course you can, but do you think you’re up to it, really?’
‘I’ll be up to it, Jack. Stop fussing over me. You’re playing Captain Control and I need to just get on with it.’
‘You’re allowed to feel bad when someone scares the shit out of you, Ivy. And looking after you isn’t controlling you.’
‘Yes. But not forever.’ I was being mean. He hadn’t been controlling, just kind. It was my fault; I’d wanted the comfort of being looked after.
His hand touched my shoulder. ‘You’ll get over it. You’re way too sensible.’
Ouch. I wished he hadn’t used the word sensible. It was too like boring. God, Rick was what I called ‘sensible’; he was the beware-of-this, think-about-that person. I didn’t want to be sensible.
Jack drove us in to work in the car. It was weird. And riding up in the lift with him from the basement was weird. He took my hand and squeezed it. ‘If you feel like you need to go home, tell me.’
‘Okay.’
He kissed me when the lift passed the last floor before ours, then let go of my hand.
When the doors opened he lifted his arm, encouraging me to walk out first, then held the door into the office for me.
Everyone looked. Heat flared in my cheeks. I didn’t look back at Jack. I went to my desk and sat down. Embarrassed. Jack didn’t make a fuss – just went into his office and got on with his work.
‘Hi.’
I looked up at Phil.
‘You okay?’
My hands were actually shaking. It was strange to be outside the cocoon of Jack’s apartment. The whole world was different because some bastard had decided to invade my very small place of safety. I took a breath. ‘Not really. I still feel violated, but I have to try and get back to doing normal things sometime. But I’m grateful to Jack for letting me stay at his place. I haven’t been home yet. I can’t stand the thought of it. I guess I’m going to have to try it tomorrow, though. I can’t stay at his forever.’
Phil shrugged at me as if to say ‘why not?’, and then I thought he probably didn’t even know about Daisy.
‘His daughter comes over every other weekend, so I can’t outstay my welcome. It would put him in a difficult situation.’
Phil’s jaw dropped, pulling his mouth open a little. I wanted to stick my tongue out at him. He was older than Jack, nearer thirty. In fact I think he was thirty this year. So he should know better than to judge people.
‘Do you want to come round here and look at the work I’ve done on your accounts. You can take them back over now.’
When I pulled my chair round to Phil’s desk I glanced into Jack’s office. He was leaning one arm on his desk – his other hand was scribbling away, probably recording some genius idea. I didn’t care what anyone else thought, I was glad I was with Jack. I just had to not be boring and make sure the office knew that this relationship was not about money for me – it was just about him.
At one o’clock, Jack came out of his office. The back of one curled finger brushed my cheek. I glanced up. He had his coat on. ‘Do you want to come out for lunch with me?’
Phil coughed. I ignored him and stood up. ‘Yes, okay.’
Jack walked ahead of me to get my coat, then held it up for me to put on. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders as we walked out of the office, but when we got to the coffee shop I told him, ‘I’m paying.’
He looked at me. ‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know I don’t have to, but I want to, because it’s not right that you pay for everything.’
‘But, remember, I pay your wages. I know what you’re budgeting on.’
‘Cheers.’
‘I could talk to Em about giving you a pay rise?’
‘Wow, that would look good. Like you were asking her if you could pay me for sex. Awesome. Thank you.’
His forehead scrunched up. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘If you give me a pay rise, you’d have to give the same to everyone, so we all earned the same.’
As we moved along in the queue his hand cupped the back of my neck. ‘You are so wonderfully naïve. You don’t seriously think you’re all on the same money, do you?’
‘We’re not… I mean I know people like Phil earn more for managing bigger accounts. But—’
‘Ivy, you’re all on different amounts, dependent on your skills, knowledge and contacts, and you’re on the least. One of the other factors is how bad you were at negotiating when you started, and you were shit – you didn’t try and push us up at all.’
‘I’m on the least!’ I smacked his arm. ‘You asshole.’
He laughed, ‘It’s not my fault you were too timid to push for more. You should always push for more, Ivy.’
Timid. Ouch. That was as bad as ‘sensible’. ‘Okay, I want a pay rise, then; there’s a law against women being paid less than men.’
‘Yeah, exactly, because men push harder. But you couldn’t screw us over with that – on an average we’re about level. It’s you who is paid low – nothing to do with you being a woman.’
I made a face at him and when the woman asked what we wanted I ordered everything that was most expensive and said, ‘He’s paying.’
Jack pulled out his wallet, laughing. But when I picked up the tray and turned to find a table he said, ‘Em and I were going to look at your salary anyway since you took on the Berkeley account successfully; we should have just upped it then. I’ll talk to her.’
But that made me feel bad because I thought Emma would be annoyed, but I couldn’t tell Jack I’d seen the texts.
‘Here.’ He nodded towards a table.
I sat down opposite him. His pale-blue eyes smiled at me. I’d felt crap sitting around his apartment alone all week; I felt better with him.
It was going to be awful when this ended.
Don’t think about it!
When I dropped into the passenger seat of Jack’s car after work, I looked over at him. I’d been debating with myself all afternoon – and in the lift down to the basement. ‘I need to go back to my flat, Jack. Can I go back to yours and get my stuff? Then will you take me there?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have to face it. I can’t keep running from it and I want to get it over with. I need to be me again. If I don’t try, I’m letting whoever broke in win.’ And when things go wrong between us it’ll be even worse if I’m not living my own life. I couldn’t let myself get into the routine of being dependent on Jack like I’d been with Rick.
It took two hours to get back to his, pack, and then come back across London in the early evening.
Jack parked, then got out, and as I got out he fetched my bag out of the boot. He carried it up to the front door. I pressed the code in. Greg had changed it, on the advice of the police, to be safe, but he’d texted me the new number. He’d also had a CCTV camera installed on the insistence of his insurance company. I should feel safe. I was protected now, or as protected as it was possible to be.
I delayed going upstairs by opening my post box. I hadn’t even thought about checking for any post all week. I had eight letters, three of which were postmarked as letters from the police station. I gripped them tightly as I turned to climb the stairs.
I glanced back to check Jack was close. He smiled.<
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‘Thank you for coming with me.’ It was a heartfelt statement.
‘Why wouldn’t I come with you?’
I focused on getting myself to the top of the stairs. My heart thumped and a spasm gripped so tight around my chest it was hard to breathe. I glanced at Jack again. ‘I think I’m having my first ever full-on panic attack.’
‘You’ll be okay.’
I nodded. But I really didn’t feel okay as I turned around the corner to see the stairs leading to my new front door. Bile spun up in my throat and time flashed back to the moment I’d seen the door standing open.
I stopped.
Jack gripped my shoulder. ‘It’s alright.’ I leaned back against him and didn’t move for a moment. He stayed silent and squeezed my shoulder, then after a minute whispered against my ear, ‘Climb when ready, I’ve got you.’
I breathed out and straightened as I answered, staring at the door, ‘Climbing.’
‘Climb on. There’s no one up there, you know.’
I nodded, but I didn’t move.
‘Come on, let’s go and face it.’ He got me walking again. Breathing hard as my heart pounded so much it made me dizzy. He took the keys from my hand and when we got upstairs I saw him notice the change of the style of lock. He opened it.
I stepped into the room. My leather suit, boots and my helmet were still on the floor where I’d left them, but the duvet cover had been taken by the police to be tested for forensic evidence. Everything else looked normal, as if nothing had happened.
Jack put down my bag and then he picked up my leathers. ‘Where do you keep this?’
‘I hang it up over there.’ He did it. Then he picked up my helmet. ‘This.’
‘On the shelf in the wardrobe.’
‘Put the TV on, Ivy. I’m sure the noise will make you feel better.’
I did. EastEnders was on.
He took his coat off and hung it up over my leathers. ‘I’ll make us coffee.’
I laughed. ‘This situation is so fucked up – you’re even going to risk my shitty coffee.’
‘I’ll risk several mugs. I’m staying with you. I’m not leaving you here when you’re scared. We’ll live here over the weekend.’
‘It’s tiny for two people.’
‘It’s fine. We can squash up in the bed – we’ve done it before. It’s cosy. I’ll make us coffee. You put a new cover on the bed.’
I turned around. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t touch it. It made me shiver. I didn’t want to ever be on that bed again.
‘Have you opened your letters?’ He was trying to distract me as he filled the kettle. I’d completely forgotten about the letters I was holding. I opened the ones from the police. One was a copy of my statement, for me to sign and send back. Another was to tell me that they’d seen someone like the person I’d described walking behind me on local CCTV; there was a picture in with the letter. It looked like the guy I kept seeing but the letter said he had appeared to legitimately turn back, he’d dropped something near the gate of one of the houses and turned to pick it up, then walked on and was seen walking on other CCTV footage further along the main road.
The last letter… I read, then held it out to Jack. The paper trembled violently and a tear fell on to it before he took it.
The fingerprints in my room had matched those on the post they’d checked weeks ago. But worse, there’d been semen on top of the bed.
‘I don’t want the bed in the room, Jack.’ I turned into him. ‘I don’t want to go near it.’
His arms came around me, protective and secure. My new fortress. ‘That’s okay. Forget the coffee. We’ll go buy a bed. You were right; you need to be here to get over this. But you don’t have to sleep on that bed.’
He took me to a late-night-opening department store and paid them ridiculous money to deliver the bed we’d chosen within two hours. Then we went to a hardware place and bought a hammer and screwdriver so we could take the old bed to pieces. The new bed arrived at ten-thirty p.m. and when the old bed was carried out of the room I felt as though the presence of a demon went with it. It was packed on to the lorry the new bed had come on and driven away.
Jack put the new bed together, then we put on a new duvet, pillows and sheet, which he’d bought at the store too.
‘Let’s cuddle and find a film to watch,’ Jack suggested when we were done.
The air in my room was full of the smell of new linen and Jack’s aftershave.
We changed for bed. He stripped down to his boxers as he hadn’t brought anything with him, and I changed into pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt. Then we snuggled up under the covers and I slept leaning on his chest with the TV playing. It was then I knew I one-hundred per cent loved him. I’d fallen in love with him. I’d been calling it love for days, but now I knew that if Jack got bored of me and dumped me, my heart was going to shatter into a million tiny little pieces. This was love. This was the sort of love I’d been longing for when I’d left Rick. It was in every cell of my body.
Captain Control ruled my world, and with him in it, it was a beautiful world. I didn’t ever want to lose him.
So what would happen when I did?
Chapter 24
At some point in the night, when Ivy had been asleep for a while, I clicked the TV on to standby.
Captain Control… I heard the words in her voice and I smiled. Yes, maybe. But sometimes Captain Control was the good guy – in a situation like this he wasn’t bad to have around. She hadn’t been her vibrant, smiling self all week. She’d been scared and shaken up. Captain C wasn’t leaving her. I was wrapping her up and holding her so tight she felt safe again. Captain C would look out for her as if I was her guardian angel.
When I woke up Ivy was plastered to my side still and her head gently lifted on my pec muscle as I breathed in.
I looked at the clock on the oven. It was nearly nine.
I remembered looking at the clock last time I was here.
Shit. It weirded me out to think that someone had been in here on her bed, fucking playing with themselves. I understood why she’d needed to change the whole bed. I got why she’d struggled to come back here too.
I brushed her hair off her cheek.
Her dark eyelashes fluttered and lifted.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Nine, not early.’
She nestled closer against me instead of moving to get up, her arm slipping about my middle and hugging me. A rumble of humour rolled through my chest.
I gave her a squeeze of reassurance. I thought the world of her. I’d never felt like this for a woman. My innards had been mush for days and the empathy inside me was burning a hole through my chest. I was so attached she could melt me with a smile. And my lust for her… It hadn’t quelled. I was hard for her a dozen times a day, thinking about stuff with her. But we hadn’t done any of that all week. She’d been in need of hugs not sex.
I took a breath. My body wanted to flip her on to her back and have its wicked way. But this was her first night in here. She was not in the right headspace. I’d take her out of here for the day and then tonight I’d sleep over again if she was happy for me to do it, and then maybe… ‘Shall we get up and I’ll take you out to breakfast, then we could go out for the day somewhere, if you like?’ It would be better for her to do something. ‘We’ll have breakfast in Hyde Park, where Daisy and I go for hot chocolates.’
‘Okay.’ But she didn’t get up. Her fingers slid to the back of my neck and she reached up to kiss me, destroying my plan to be chivalrous as the pressure of her fingertips urged me to roll her back. My hand slid to her waist as I leant over her and kissed her, my erection probably peeping out of the top of my boxers as it brushed against her hip.
Her hand slipped down underneath the covers and freed it. I was painfully hard. ‘Sure you’re up to this today?’
‘Yes.’
Well, if she was sure, I was sure. I lifted to let her s
lip my boxers down over my backside and then helped her strip them off my legs, and then we dealt with her pyjama bottoms. I didn’t try to make this anything fancy, or wild, and yet – like the first time we’d done it in the missionary position at Christmas – it felt so special I was never going to forget it.
I slipped in and out of her slowly while she licked her lips and her sleepy lavender eyes looked at me, and her warm, long legs wrapped around my hips and squeezed me tight. Each time I moved, the muscle in her abdomen clasped at me.
She came after about ten minutes and so did I, but it had been ten minutes of heaven.
I was jumpy today. Fidgeting. I hadn’t been able to concentrate on the advert I was developing because my brain was shot at the minute. It couldn’t settle on thinking about anything work-related.
Ivy gripped my hand to stop me turning the Café Nero drink mat, and tapping it, then turning it again and tapping it.
‘You’re a ball of energy today. What’s up?’
I hadn’t told her I was worried because she was busy trying not to be worried about the stuff going on in her life. She’d spent three nights in her place alone, and she said she felt secure now there was CCTV and a new number on the door and a better lock on her room. But the guy, whoever he was, had sent her a letter, typed not written, just saying, ‘I’m watching you,’ nothing else.
The fucking bastard. I wish I knew who he was. I had a desperate urge to slam him up against a wall and hit him – then watch him dragged off and thrown into jail.
But his letter had meant that the slightest thing was freaking Ivy out. Like, some guy had bumped into her accidentally in the High Street and she’d panicked. That had been a proper anxiety attack. A woman walking past had sat Ivy down and made her relax. I hadn’t been there. I was being pulled in different directions – I wanted to be with her all the time, but I couldn’t be, because there was Daisy too, and work was busy.