by PJ Adams
I sat, blushing again, God damn it! How did he do that to me?
Those predator eyes, watching me, a slight smile on his face.
He’d shaved for this evening, and as I returned his look I wasn’t quite sure whether I preferred him well turned out like this or just a little rough, a little dangerous. Prompted by that thought, my head suddenly filled with flashbacks to that evening when he’d tied my wrists to the sofa with my torn blouse and had me, quite brutally.
That did nothing for the blushing.
I looked down at the menu, and concentrated on the music playing in the background, Madeleine Peyroux’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”.
He reached across the table and touched the back of my hand, gently, briefly, and a bolt of desire stabbed through me from that touch. I’d never known anyone who could have such an effect on me. Ask me there and then and I’d happily have skipped dinner.
“Mersea oysters,” he said. “The native oysters have just come into season. These ones will have been in the River Blackwater only a few hours ago. You like oysters?”
I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice. God, I felt like a schoolgirl before him!
“Let’s have the oysters, then. And a Pinot Noir? Not an obvious combination, but believe me, they have one from New Zealand’s Awatere Valley here that’s perfect. The vineyard owner made me try it with oysters he insisted it would change my life. He wasn’t far wrong.”
This was smooth Will, the one who showed me his Rembrandts and van Goghs, who whisked me to the Alps and dressed me in designer dresses and shoes. The one who took all that for granted. Doesn’t everyone know vineyard owners on the other side of the world?
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can relax. You don’t need to perform, okay?”
For a moment he looked like he was going to deny it, then a tension seemed to ease out of him and he gave me a boyish grin. “You do strange things to me,” he said. “You make me tongue-tied. You occupy my thoughts whenever we’re apart. You make me want to show off, be extravagant. I... I don’t really do relationships. They never seem to work out. But you... you do things to me, Trudy Parsons. Strange things.”
“Good things?”
He just nodded.
“You do things to me, too,” I said. “Like rip my clothes off and tie me up to my own furniture and make me feel like I’ve never felt before. Like... like occupy my thoughts, too. Strange things, indeed.”
Just then I became aware of the presence of someone standing at my shoulder. The waiter. How much had he heard, and did I even care?
“We’ll have the Mersea oysters,” Will said, “and a bottle of The Crossings Pinot Noir, please.” Then, to me: “You were saying...?”
When the waiter had retreated, I said, “Tying me up. That’s what I was saying.” I liked the way his eyes widened just a little when I said those words. They did that at other times, too, like when he was buried deep inside me, barely moving, savoring every sensation. “After you’d ripped my blouse off. Tying my arms above my head so that I was helpless. You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”
“You’d rather I hadn’t?” One eyebrow cocked, and still that smile.
I shook my head. “I liked it,” I told him. I wondered then if I should tell him that I’d done that kind of thing before, too. A neck-tie around Charlie’s wrists; the handcuffs Charlie had surprised me with one day, how he’d kept me locked to the bed frame for nearly an hour one time, drawing everything out deliciously...
Now, as if reading my mind, Will reached for his neck-tie and loosened it a little, undoing his top button. He smiled. He knew what he was doing. Were we really talking bondage on our first normal date?
I looked down again, then away.
The oysters and wine came, and Will was right. The light fruitiness of the Pinot Noir went perfectly with the saltiness of the oysters, bringing out their meatiness and highlighting the metal tang of their aftertaste. I watched as he raised each oyster to his mouth, tipped and swallowed, and all the time, his eyes never left mine.
I stretched one leg, curling my foot around his calf, and his eyes widened again.
I leaned towards him, touched the back of his hand, just as he had touched mine, and said, “We should be naked.” Then I took another oyster and downed it.
Those eyes. Those dark, intense eyes. In those eyes I was naked already, I knew.
“In your head,” I said. “Tell me what’s in your head.”
“You,” he said. “Just you. Everything that is you.”
I’d expected him to be more graphic. To tell me his fantasies, what he wanted to be doing with me right then. But those few words... They did so much more than that.
I ordered quail breasts, remembering that he had ordered them for me in Austria. There were probably less subtle ways to tell him I was his, but I liked the symmetry of me choosing what he had chosen. He ordered steak, and I wondered whether there was meaning there too: red meat, man food, the alpha male asserting himself. Or maybe he just fancied steak.
We talked a little about day to day things: my work at Ellison and Coles, the food and wine – I’d gone on to a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc with my quail; he’d stuck with his favorite Pinot Noir – we’d talked of Ethan and Eleanor, and the fact that they had returned from their honeymoon in the Maldives that afternoon.
There was history between Will and Ethan, and Charlie, my ex. The Cabal, and Sally Fielding.
I remembered a conversation with Julie, then. We were talking about how she researched her books and I remembered her saying, “Research? Always go to the source, Trude. Always go to the source. Everything else is just hearsay. Chinese whispers.”
So I asked him.
“Are you going to tell me what happened back then? You, Ethan, Charlie. Sally Fielding. That whole Cabal thing?”
He shrugged and all of a sudden he was transformed again, to the slightly flustered Englishman persona, that Hugh Grant thing he sometimes did. “Oh, you know,” he said, knowing damned well that I didn’t.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Young men, the college high life, all a bit of fun, a bit of a lark...” I hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh, but that’s just how it came out. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been bottling it up – the curiosity, the resentment at how he would just brush the subject away with a few dismissive strokes.
“I... well, yes,” he said. “It was a long time ago. Look, do you really want all the gory details about my sordid past? It was nothing. Just a bit of fun that got out of hand.”
“A bit of fun that ended up with rehab, blackmail, and a woman dead.”
He put his hand on mine, and the contact was perfect. I didn’t want to be confronting him, but I didn’t like feeling that I was being kept in the dark, either. That touch reminded me of what we had between us.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to...” His hand tightened on mine, cutting off my apologies.
“It’s fine, Trudy,” he said. “I know there’s... well, there’s a lot of shit in my life and I have this stupid protective thing where I just want to shelter people from it. It kicks in automatically. I’m not deliberately keeping you in the dark.”
I decided then not to press, and almost immediately I wondered if that was exactly what he had intended. Damn, but this man generated so many mixed reactions in me! So many good ones, but also this paranoid suspicion, this feeling that I was being gamed, played like a fish on a line.
But then, after a pause, he went on, and I felt bad for ever doubting him.
“There’s not a lot to say,” he said. “Me, Ethan and Charlie, we were really close for a time. We used to party together. We had fun. There were girls. Girls like Sally. Sometimes the girls would move around between us: one week with me, the next with Charlie or Ethan. It was fun and we were young.”
It was strange hearing him talk of my ex and my brother like this. A side of their earlier lives I’d never known about.
“Please don’t judge me for
sowing a few wild oats.”
His hand was still on mine, and so I turned mine and squeezed back. “Why would I judge?” I asked.
“Well... One of our parties got a bit out of hand. We got a bit carried away, you know? All four of us. The Press got wind, my family found out and they did what they could to snuff out the story before it became a scandal. That’s it, Trudy: just college kids getting stupid.”
A party... I knew what wasn’t being said. They’d moved from passing girls around to sharing them... an orgy... a gang-bang.
“But...” I said. “But... Ethan?”
I pulled a face and Will did a double-take and then laughed, just a little.
“I know, right,” he said. “Your brother has sex.”
I pulled my hand away and rapped him lightly on the wrist. I didn’t need that kind of image, that kind of knowledge. Ethan was still the big kid who went all goofy for Dunkin’ Donuts.
I couldn’t quite leave it there, though. I had to ask.
“Sally,” I said. “You said she’d been found dead. The word you used was ‘killed’...”
Serious again, he nodded. “She always had problems. Desperate for attention, desperate for contact. I can see that now. Back then she was just a rather attractive young woman who was throwing herself at us, you know? A few weeks ago she called me. I don’t know how she got my number, but she always did have her ways. Said she was in a clinic and she needed money. Sally always needed money, but now she had big bills to pay if she was to get the help she needed. Said she had turned to me first as an old friend, but she could always turn to Eleanor. And I knew that ‘turning to Eleanor’ meant telling her whatever it took to get money from the family – Sally was no friend of Eleanor’s.”
“Blackmail.”
“Desperation,” Will said. “The action of a vulnerable woman who was struggling to cling on.”
“You’re doing that protective thing again,” I chided him, and he smiled, which was a heart-achingly beautiful sight on a face that was looking so anguished.
“I spoke to Interpol today. An agent I know–”
That thing of his again: the tantalizing hints, the man who just happens to have contacts at the international police agency...
“–I’ve given statements and everything already, of course. They might want to talk to you, too, I’m afraid. Filling in all the gaps, and all that.”
“Me?” But of course: I was there in Austria. But did that mean that Will was under any kind of suspicion? Was I... was I his alibi...?
“Just to confirm a few details,” he said. “No big deal. Dessert?”
§
So how do your first dates go?
This, my first date with Will – I couldn’t count that fairytale meal in Austria as a date; it had been something else entirely – and we started off with talk of bondage, we got hot and steamy over oysters, we talked of dark secrets from the past, of murder... I ended up understanding him no better than before, the evening only confirming that I didn’t really know him at all. I even had the nagging suspicion that somehow I was getting wrapped up in an international murder plot as some kind of cover story. I was being used, being gamed all over again.
This, our first real date, and we ended with pleasantries, an awkward, stilted exchange outside the bistro while we waited for a cab, and then he went off in his chauffeur-driven car and I climbed into my cab, gave my address to the driver, and somehow felt a weight lifting.
All the way up Tottenham Court Road and onto Euston Road, my head was spinning, and trying to catch a thought was like chasing butterflies. Past King’s Cross, and my head started to settle. I was so confused by that man! The evening had been such a mix of things.
The attraction was like nothing I’d ever known. It was as if there were rubber bands stretched taut between us, always pulling us together. Just a look, a touch, a half-smile, and my heart would race and there would be a heat deep in the pit of my belly. I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted a man before.
And those moments when I managed to scrape beneath the surface and glimpse the real Will. Each of them, a moment to treasure, when you see it in his eyes and smile, when you’ve connected.
I wanted that. I wanted that Will.
But Willem Bentinck-Stanley was a man of many aspects. The flustered upper-class thing, the arrogance of a man who has always had whatever he wanted, the evasiveness that I guessed went with the kind of jet-setting James Bond lifestyle he led. The manipulation... He was a man who didn’t trust people and that seemed to translate to it being okay to use and abuse them.
Was I just a challenge, a game to him? Or might I be something more?
By the time my cab had pulled up outside my Islington apartment, my head was little clearer.
Was this how I should feel after a first date?
I didn’t know. All I knew for certain was that nothing could ever be simple with Will Bentinck-Stanley.
23.
“Hey, bro’, how’s things?”
“Hey, sis’! It’s good. Everything’s good. You get our postcard? So what’s up, then?”
“You busy today?” It was a Sunday, the sky a beautiful September blue. Perfect for a day out, a drive, perfect to just get the Hell away from London and blow away some of the cobwebs. “I didn’t get to see much of you at the wedding. Thought maybe we could catch up. What d’you say, E?”
“Sounds like a damned fine idea to me, little sis’.” Since when had his accent started to fade, and Englishness creep in? We really had let things lapse over the last few years. Time to make that up.
“Cool. That’s great. Be with you in a couple of hours?”
“Hour and a half tops in that little car of yours, sis’. I’ll put the kettle on.”
§
It felt like ages since I’d been out in my Mini, with its Stars and Stripes roof. In fact, the last time had probably been Ethan’s wedding up in Norfolk: that awful, traffic-choked journey up there and then the mad midnight rush home, getting away from Will and his arrogant claims to his friends that he could have me any time he wanted. So much had happened in the last couple of weeks, and as I drove my head was rushing with all those confused thoughts about that infuriatingly enigmatic man.
Traffic was light, and in under an hour and a half – yes, big bro’ was right – I was edging the car into a tiny parking space just outside the city center. Ethan had an antiques shop just off Bridge Street, so I grabbed my bag and a box of donuts from the passenger seat and headed into town.
I paused by the river and took a deep breath, allowing myself to soak up the atmosphere: the tourists, the mad rush of students on bicycles, the guys trying to persuade me to take a ride on the river in a punt. It was a completely different world.
Good call, Trude. Good call.
A few minutes later I was ringing on my brother’s doorbell. He kept the shop open on Sundays through the summer, but today it was closed – perhaps because it was September now, or maybe because he was only just back from honeymoon and still in vacation mode.
I stepped back to look up at the windows above the shop where Ethan had his apartment, and then when I looked down again the door was swinging open and he was standing there, six foot something of lean, muscular man in long shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, with a buzz cut, and a stupid, goofy grin all over his face.
“Hey, sis’,” he said, his arms spread wide, and I stepped into his hug. Instantly, it was that thing again, something about the shape of him and the scent of him that took me right back to those times when I would fall into my pop’s embrace and he’d pick me up off my feet and swing me around.
“Hey there, E,” I said, taken aback by the sudden rush of emotion. I pulled away and thrust the box of donuts into his hands. “It’s not Dunkin’ Donuts–” that was a Pop thing, too: bringing Dunkin’ Donuts home just to see the grins on our faces “–but will you accept Krispy Kremes as almost as good as...?”
That grin again, what I’d always called his D
unkin’ Donuts grin.
“So,” he said, “what’s up?”
I fell into his arms once again, and it felt so damned good.
§
I’d only met Eleanor for the first time at the wedding, and then she had pretty much blanked me. At the time I put it down to big day nerves, to never having met me and maybe not even being sure who I was at first.
She was a real beauty, tall and raven-haired with wide, dark eyes and – even after a honeymoon in the Maldives – delicate pale features. Ethan referred to her as his English rose, and it was easy to see why. When he led me upstairs she was standing at a window. She turned and gave me a big smile. “You must be Trudy,” she said, and rushed across to give me a warm embrace.
Such a contrast to the wedding! Had she really not worked out who I was that day?
It was when she stepped back and fixed me with those dark eyes that I had a sudden flash of recognition. The family resemblance to her brother, Will. I wondered then if she, like him, was a person of many aspects. Was this the real her, and the cold, suspicious Eleanor of her wedding day a product of nerves? Could she switch at will, or was it more subtle than that?
God damn it, Trudy, get a grip! So damned suspicious and paranoid these days...
“Eleanor,” I said. “Did you guys have a good time? Are you going to tell me all about it? Are there pictures? Come on, I’ve been here how long, and you still haven’t shown me pictures?”
We laughed, and then Eleanor went off to make tea, and I remembered that odd moment at the wedding when she made her vows, including the promise to obey.
The three of us drank tea from delicate – and very old, I suspected – china, and made small talk for a while. Then Ethan flicked through their honeymoon photos on his iPad. Lots of palm trees, blue skies, and white sand. Halfway through, I put a hand on my brother’s arm, then leaned in and hugged him, briefly. He looked happy. Both in the photos, and now, as we went through them. Not Dunkin’ Donuts instant gratification happy: happy happy. I liked that.