Abruptly, his grip around my waist became tight as a vice.
‘Err… maybe not right now. You’re surely tired from being up the entire night. How about tomorrow, if you still feel like jumping off the roof then?’
I pouted. ‘But I want to do it now! It'll be fun!’
‘Personally, I’m not quite sure about that. Would you sleep on it? Please?’
There was that word again… that word that Mr Ambrose never used.
‘All right.’ Sighing contentedly, I wrapped my arms and also my huge fiery wings around him. The little piggies in the corner had started to dance tango. ‘I’ll do anything for you.’
‘Ehem… I am gratified to hear it. Now… how about sitting down?’
‘If you want…’
He led me to the middle of the room, to where the visitor chair stood in front of the desk. As I moved closer to the desk, the light of the lamp fell on me, and Mr Ambrose’s eyes widened.
‘Wait just a minute,’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t sit down just yet. Your coat…’
But he had already let go of me, and my legs somehow were unable to support my own weight. I was about to fall into the chair when his hands shot out and held me back.
‘Are you insane?’ He hissed. ‘I said wait! Look at yourself! You can’t sit down like this! Take your tailcoat off, first. It is spattered with blood and street dirt. Have you got any idea how much it costs to clean the upholstery on a chair like this?’
I blinked up at him, confused. ‘Not really, no.’
‘Too much for me to be willing to pay it.’
‘That doesn't say much,’ I pointed out.
‘My point, Mr Linton, is that if you try to sit down on that chair again, I will bring you back outside into the hallway and dump you on the floor, just like you asked me to earlier.’
So he felt more concern for the upholstery of his office chair than for me. It was nice to see he hadn’t changed that much.
I realized that in stopping me from sitting down, Mr Ambrose had grabbed onto me a lot more generously than before. He had both arms around me now and was pressing me to his chest with the fervour of a man determined to avoid a large bill from the cleaner's.
He must have been really anxious to avoid that bill, because instead of letting go of me when my legs had steadied a bit, he pulled me even tighter against him. Though my vision was slightly blurred, I could see the hard lines of his face perfectly well. His jaw was taut, which only accentuated the noble harshness of his features. His eyes were boring down into mine, full of dark intensity.
‘Do not sit down.’ His voice was actually hoarse. Dear me, cleaning the upholstery of a chair had to be more expensive than I thought if he could get this worked up about it. He didn’t let go.
‘But… then what am I supposed to do?’ My voice wasn’t too steady either. And… I didn’t want me to sit down any more than he did. I didn’t want him to let go. Odd. I didn’t have to fear a big bill from the cleaner's, did I?
He cleared his throat. ‘You can take off your tailcoat. Then you can sit down… Mr Linton.’
The ‘Mister’ came over his lips with no slight hesitation. Was that because he was still calculating the cleaner’s bill? Or did it have something to do with the way we were pressed together, so closely it had to be evident that ‘Mister’ was not the correct address for the person he was holding in his arms?
I, for my part, felt enough so I would never have called him ‘Miss Ambrose’. The hard muscles of his chest, his arms, his abdomen… they all pressed into my softness in a way that made it all too clear what he was.
A man.
A really manly man with a lot of mannishness in his manliness.
As if of their own volition, my arms snaked up behind and around him. My head found a comfortable spot on his chest and came to rest there. All of a sudden, I didn’t care about any cleaner’s bill. I certainly didn’t care to sit down. To sit down, I would have had to let go.
‘Hmm… take it off,’ I mumbled. Beneath my ear that lay on his chest, I could hear his heart. I wondered why it was beating so fast. ‘Take my tailcoat off… Good idea. Only… I’m not sure I can stand on my own. I feel so tired…’
Gently, hesitantly, he reached up to unwind my arms from behind his back.
‘I’ll help you. Don’t worry.’
He stepped back from me, and somewhere inside me I felt a tug of disappointment. Disappointment? Why? What did I care whether he was close to me?
But then he started unbuttoning my tailcoat, and the disappointment vanished. It was replaced by a surge of heat up from my toes to the tips of my ears. What was the matter with me? It had to be the drink. Or terror of the the cleaner’s bill.
Gently, his fingers travelled up my belly, popping buttons as they went. His fingers were unlike any other fingers that had ever touched me there: smooth and yet firm, light and yet insistent. I realized suddenly that they weren’t just unlike any other fingers that had touched me there before - apart from my sisters’ and my own, they were the only fingers that had ever touched me there. They made me wish for more buttons on my coat, for something to prolong the feel of this. The feel of him.
Then, the tailcoat slid off my shoulders and landed on the floor with a soft, velvety noise. I stood before Mr Ambrose in nothing but trousers and a thin linen shirt. Drowsily, I looked down at the shirt.
‘Oh,’ I mumbled, and pointed to the left side of the shirt, where a few specks of blood stained the white material. ‘The blood must have seeped through the coat. Do you want to take the shirt off, too?’
From somewhere, I heard a strangled groan. When I looked up, Mr Ambrose was standing before me, his face as composed as ever, but his jaw seemed to be a bit tighter than usual.
‘I don't think,’ he said, ‘that will be necessary, thank you.’
‘But it’s got blood on it!’ I protested. ‘I should take it off! The upholstery on your chair-’
‘…will be perfectly fine, Mr Linton! Now sit down!’
For once, I did as he said. My legs didn’t feel all too steady, and even Alexander the Great, who had sneaked in behind us unnoticed, was sitting down in a corner of the room. Surely, if a world-famous conqueror was sitting down, that meant that I could, too.
Mr Ambrose bent to retrieve my tailcoat from the floor. Straightening, he said: ‘I will give your clothes to the night porter. He will have them washed and dried soon enough.’
I squinted at him, doubtfully. ‘He’s a porter. Does he know how to wash clothes?’
‘Probably not. But I demand ingenuity and dedication of all my employees.’
Turning, he marched towards the door without another word. Was it just my imagination, or did he walk just a little faster than usual, almost as if he were running? At the door, he hesitated. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. Then he fled, slamming the door behind him.
Suppressing a yawn, I nodded to Alexander in the corner. ‘I think he really doesn't like you,’ I told him.
The Macedonian conqueror shrugged and started cleaning his fingernails.
Looking for Truffles and Butterflies
Mr Ambrose’s porter apparently was no instant-cleaning wizard. I soon grew tired of waiting for my tailcoat’s return. To tell the truth, I felt tired in general - tired and battered and dirty. What I really needed was not just to get my clothes cleaned, but to get myself cleaned, too. To wash the dirt off my skin, and all the confusions of the night along with it.
Didn’t Mr Ambrose have a powder room? With a shower? I thought I remembered something of the sort from when I had needed to powder my foot. Or had it been my nose?
I got to my feet and waited until that nasty, ill-tempered floor had more or less stopped trying to buck me off. It took some time, but finally it seemed to accept I wasn’t just going to be thrown out of the window.
With all the authority I could muster, I pointed a finger at the floor.