It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Seventeen




Ellie nodded. ‘Inappropriate does seem to cover it.’ Now that she knew exactly where she was, she couldn’t step away from the front door because if she did, then she was committing to this crazy scheme. She’d never thought David Gold would do crazy. ‘Is this just for today, while you sort something else out?’

‘Really, when you’ve calmed down—’

‘I’m not uncalm. I’m just … perturbed.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ he said a little sharply. ‘You can’t possibly think that this is some elaborate scheme to get you on your own so I can … what? What could you possibly think my ulterior motive might be for bringing you here?’

When he put it like that, like he was spitting out cherry stones, Ellie felt chastened and ashamed. It was as if he could read her mind; knew about her ridiculous crush on him and the dirtybadwrongporno fantasies that were beginning to blossom.

‘It’s just odd,’ she said woodenly. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. But she’d had barely any sleep in the last two days and she was in David Gold’s apartment with nowhere else to go, and if he kept barking at her, then she would weep. ‘Please don’t talk to me in that tone of voice,’ she managed to add.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t sound it. ‘Surely you understand that you need to be contained.’

‘I’m not an airborne toxic virus,’ Ellie protested, and when he stepped down into his huge living space, she stayed where she was. ‘Mr Gold, when you said you were going to help, I didn’t expect you were going to hold me hostage.’

‘You’re not a hostage,’ he said, sitting down on a huge oatmeal-coloured modular sofa, so he could see the mulish expression on her face. ‘You’re a reluctant house-guest. A guestage, if you will. I think you can call me David now, don’t you?’


Ellie didn’t want to call him David as though they were first-name-term buddies. It was better to keep things on a professional footing. She also didn’t want to stay in his flat where she’d have to remain on her best behaviour. Did he even have a spare room? And what if she bumped into him while she was wearing only a towel or something? Or he was in a towel? It was too unsettling. She’d never be able to relax, she thought as she took one tiny step that led her to the second stair down. ‘This is really going above and beyond for the sake of your client, isn’t it?’

‘It really is,’ he agreed smoothly, without even a hint of censure at said client.

‘Did Billy Kay ask you to do this? Does he know I’m here? At this stage, it would be kind of polite for him to call me up, check that everything’s OK, don’t you think? Or is that entirely your remit? Making sure the bastard daughter is locked away in case she goes rogue again? You totally think I tipped off the tabloids about the hotel, don’t you? Don’t you? Why would I even do that? Why would you think that I’d want yet another picture of myself in yet another state of undress on the front pages? Do I look like any part of this is fun?’

She was nodding her head like a demented children’s toy and her voice was climbing higher and higher to a pitch where she’d be able to shatter every single one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Ellie was also aware that her legs didn’t want to hold her up any longer. But mostly she was painfully aware of David Gold sitting there and looking at her as if she was a living, breathing encapsulation of everything that was wrong with the world.

Ellie sat down heavily on the steps staring at the living room, which was sleek and spotless, the walls a glossy white that didn’t seem like paint, the wooden floorboards so smooth it was impossible to believe they’d started life as trees, and rested her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands.

‘Velvet?’

‘Can’t you even get that right? It’s Ellie!’ It was almost a scream.

He stood up. For a second Ellie imagined that he’d stride over, slap her face and tell her to stop being hysterical. Lola would have, but he was walking away, only to return with a glass of water, which he handed to her, then sat down next to her.

‘Drink that. You’ll feel better.’

She was already gulping it down, her swallows deafening in the sound-proofed silence of his fancy fifteenth-floor flat. Not that Ellie cared any more. It was obvious what he thought of her and it wasn’t anything good and there was no point trying to summon up the energy it would take to change his mind.

‘Now, you need to stop firing an endless round of questions at me,’ he continued, folding up his long bony legs. Tabitha had once told Ellie that she should never take a lover whose thighs were thinner than hers … ‘Some of them are none of your concern. Some of them are extremely insulting to you, me and Billy Kay and some of them I’ll try to answer when you’re feeling calmer.’

Ellie swallowed again, even though she’d finished the glass of water. ‘I’ve already told you that I am calm,’ she said mutinously.

‘No, you’re not,’ he said, and he put his hand on her knee. It was wholly inappropriate touching but his hand was large, his skin cool, when she felt small and like she was burning up from some inner conflagration. His touch was comforting, anchoring, and Ellie needed to snap out of this. She didn’t really know anything about David Gold, but he didn’t smile nearly as much as he had at first, and that steely edge was showing more the longer she spent with him.

She looked around. There was a dining table at the furthest end of the living space and beyond that a kitchen. ‘Have you got a spare room?’

‘Let me show you,’ he offered.

There was an archway through the kitchen, which led to an internal corridor off which was the master bedroom, the door firmly shut, a huge bathroom, a perfectly nice guest room, whose windows opened out on to a balcony that stretched the length of the flat, and a study.

‘I absolutely can’t stay here, even if you think that’s only because I’ve got an urgent appointment with a tabloid hack,’ Ellie said tightly, though after one glimpse of the double bed in the guest room with its fluffy white duvet and mound of pillows, she’d really wanted to hurl herself on it. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t impose.’

‘If I minded the imposition you wouldn’t be here,’ David Gold said. He shut the door of the guest room. The tour ended back where they’d started: on the dais by the front door. ‘Let’s talk about this later. I need to get back to the office now.’

‘I already told you, I’m not staying here. You said you’ve had clients who’ve been in this situation; I bet you didn’t kidnap them. You must know a hotel I can go to where the staff won’t tip anyone off,’ Ellie argued, but her voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way away and she was leaning against the wall because her body wasn’t doing a very good job of holding her upright.

‘Please stop being so melodramatic. I’m asking you to stay here for a few hours so you can regroup, sleep if you want to, get some peace and quiet,’ he said to her, but he was distracted as if his mind was already in his office in Clerkenwell. ‘I don’t see how you could find anything sinister in this arrangement. On the contrary, help yourself to anything in the fridge. Make yourself at home.’ He attempted a welcoming frown. ‘But please eat at the table and use a coaster.’

Then he was gone.

After four days of non-stop weird, Ellie wondered if this was the weirdest thing yet – being trapped in David Gold’s well-appointed Highgate apartment. She didn’t think he liked her. He certainly didn’t trust her, so why had he left her here where she could rifle through his belongings or nick the family silver?

Ellie waited for him to come to his senses, burst through the door and order her off the premises. When he did neither of those things, she decided to unpack everything she’d need for the next eight or so hours. She longed to sleep but peeling off her clothes and sliding between the covers of his spare bed would be a tacit admission that she was happy to stay here, when actually she wasn’t, which was why she would only unpack essential items.

The mysterious cardboard was a food parcel thoughtfully provided by the hotel: sushi, fruit salad, a box of miniature pastries and a bottle of vegetable juice that Ellie hoped tasted better than it smelled. She packed it all away in David Gold’s huge fridge, which contained very little in the way of food: milk, a jar of pickled cucumbers, a carton of eggs with added Omega 3, plus bottles upon bottles of the electrolyte-replacing drinks that she and Tess had become obsessed with when they’d signed up for a five-kilometre sponsored run for Breast Cancer Care.

He didn’t have much food in his cupboards either, apart from energy bars, packets of peanuts (the pallid, non-salty ones from health food shops) and a gigantic tub of protein powder. It was just as well that the hotel had provided lunch, or she’d have starved, Ellie thought balefully as she headed to the bathroom.

Ostensibly she was going to brush her teeth, which she hadn’t had a chance to do yet, but really? One of the life lessons Chester had taught her, along with being able to mix the perfect Martini and not to trust a fat roofer, was that you never really knew someone until you’d had a good root around in their bathroom cabinet. It wasn’t like rummaging through a nightstand or a sock drawer. The bathroom was communal. It was a common area. Any visitor to David Gold’s flat who needed a wee after having an electrolyte-balancing drink would come in here so there was nothing wrong in opening his bathroom cabinet door and doing a quick inventory: Deep Heat, liniment, a tube of Voltarol, a bottle of arnica tablets, an elasticated bandage, some ibuprofen, the usual detritus of plasters, tweezers and miniature toiletries purloined from hotels, a tube of Clinique Age Defense Hydrator, which was manspeak for moisturiser, and a bottle of Tom Ford Grey Vetiver, which Ellie sniffed cautiously. It was citrussy and expensive, and now she remembered when he’d stood close to her at Glastonbury, so that even though their bodies hadn’t been touching, it had still counted as touching, and despite the lack of witnesses, Ellie blushed.


She wandered back into the living room. Something was off about the apartment. Then Ellie realised that, apart from the modular sofa, David Gold didn’t have any stuff. The only thing breaking up the white and beige were three Damien Hirst spot paintings. Probably chosen because they didn’t jar too much against their bland background, though the cheery, multi-coloured polka dots added a playful note that Ellie didn’t necessarily associate with David Gold. Maybe a girlfriend was responsible for them. Maybe that girl he’d been with at Glastonbury – definitely not Melanie from Goldman Sachs, who had no time for polka dots. Or another woman who was a more permanent fixture; some perfect size-six testament to all the qualities that Ellie would never possess.

Certainly a girlfriend couldn’t have thought it was a good idea that the white glossy walls were actually cupboard doors, which slid back (after pushing and pulling had got her nowhere) to reveal a plasma TV and other audio visual accoutrements, CDs, which Ellie decided not to scrutinise because compared to Ari’s collection of vinyl anyone else’s music library was pitiful, books, mostly deathly dull law tomes and Scandi crime thrillers, and that was it.

This apartment belonged to a man who’d turned being urbane into an art form and used it to hide away anything that hinted at a personality. This apartment certainly didn’t belong to the smiley, flirty guy she’d met a month ago but she had to forget about him. He was gone and he wasn’t coming back. The man who was wearing his face was unfathomable like some deep, dark ocean, and Ellie was out of her depth and barely treading water.

The apartment also made Ellie rethink her plans for minimalist living because minimalist living was time-consuming and stressful. You had to tidy up after every minor task, from pouring yourself a glass of water to drying your hands on a towel after you’d washed your hands.

Even pulling out her laptop, iPad and assorted cables made Ellie feel that she was violating David Gold’s hallowed living space. She set up shop on the dining-room table and logged into her work mail folder. It contained a huge bullet-pointed email from Vaughn of all the tasks he wanted her to action while she was off-site – from finalising contracts to working with his New York gallery on bringing the Emerging Scandinavian Artists exhibition to the mean streets of Chelsea. He also wanted her to start sourcing paintings on domestic life between the wars, the more obscure and female the artist the better, as he had a hunch that that might be the next big thing but ‘to be on the safe side, find out if another series of Downton Abbey has been commissioned’. Ellie had thought she was too exhausted to bristle but she could feel her shoulders and her hackles rising.

Amid all the Sturm und Drang, she’d almost forgotten that he’d sacked her yesterday. It was a measure of how her neat, ordered life had descended into chaos that being fired didn’t rate so highly, but now it was something to fixate on, brood over, wipe away the inevitable angry tears.

Vaughn hadn’t even bothered to throw any small crumbs of praise in Ellie’s direction for the success of last night’s opening. She was still fired and he expected her to fit three months’ worth of work into four weeks. The really annoying thing was that she’d tick off every item on his tasksheet and probably end up finding her own replacement, she realised with a despondent, resigned sigh. How she longed to have the private income and the balls to tell Vaughn what he could do with his month’s notice and his gargantuan to-do list.

Of course there were follow-up emails from Piers, who wanted to know where she was so he could courier over contracts, the portable lightbox and case after case of tiny slides. Even Inge had stirred herself to email Ellie as ‘all sorts of interesting things have arrived with your name on them and they won’t fit on a bike. Might have to send a car. Where are you anyway? Still lots of paparazzi outside but would be lovely to see you at El Vino for lunch.’

Going to El Vino for lunch the day after an opening was a work tradition. They’d dose their hangovers with a couple of bottles of Pinot Grigio and perform a postmortem on the launch party. Today they’d be gossiping without her.

Meanwhile, there was nothing Ellie could do on the work front until she’d persuaded David Gold to stop withholding his home address. The thought of ringing him filled her with dread. When she thought about him returning to the flat later on that evening, her heart started thudding so frantically that she had to place her hand flat against her breastbone and practise deep breathing. But while she was in a panicky place, she might just as well go with the feeling and, really, there was no putting it off any longer – she hadn’t checked her non-work email since Friday evening.

There was the very real possibility that she might actually throw up all over David Gold’s dining-room table when she saw that she had emails from a couple of her exes, her so-called lame ducks. Heart pounding all over again, fingers trembling, she read the two emails, expecting the very worst: that they’d sold intimate details of their time together and had had a last-minute pang of conscience, but though Andy (ex-gambler) cracked a very unfunny joke about how Ellie had never put out like that for him, he and Jimmy (former alcoholic) couldn’t have been sweeter or more concerned about how she was holding up.

Ellie felt somewhat vindicated. Tess and Lola were wrong. She wasn’t a bad judge of character if at least two of her exes were rallying around her. She wasn’t some drunken party girl with morals as loose as her knicker elastic either. No, she was just your average, bog-standard twenty-something who’d had her heart broken as she searched for the one man who would never, ever break her heart. She still wasn’t sure that she was going to pass on their contact details to David Gold, but if the tabloids managed to track Andy and Jimmy down, then Ellie was pretty sure (about eighty-seven per cent sure) that they’d never betray her, though she didn’t feel that confident about some of the other blasts from her past.

David Gold rang as she was in the middle of a huge Facebook friend cull. She’d already Fort Knox-ed her privacy settings, though as most of her photo albums were already in the possession of the picture desks of most national newspapers it was too little, way, way too late. Now she was deleting any ‘friends’ she hadn’t worked with or got drunk with in the last year, as well as any friends who felt the need to poke her or send her messages gleefully commiserating about her tabloid ordeal. Some guy that Tess had dated for all of three weeks when they were seventeen had asked if she’d pass a demo tape on to Billy Kay, and her second cousin, who’d gone hardcore Orthodox after visiting Israel in her gap year, wanted Ellie to know ‘that your disgraceful behaviour just fans the flames of anti-Semitic hate’, so Ellie was positively stabby with rage when she answered her phone.

‘Hello!’ she snapped, then realised it wasn’t her God-bothering second cousin, Rivka, but David Gold. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if you followed my advice and had a nap,’ he said obliquely. ‘Apart from that, have you settled in?’

‘I connected to the Wi-Fi without any problems and I’m a big fan of the ice-maker in your fridge,’ she said, because in her experience it was best to start with the positives before you moved on to the more controversial items on the itinerary.


‘Use bottled water in the ice-maker, not tap water.’ He made a tiny noise that despite its minuteness still conveyed much irritation. ‘Actually, leave it. I’ll do it when I get home. What do you want to do about dinner tonight?’

It wasn’t any of his business what Ellie was going to do about dinner that night because she would be out of his flat and out of his hair by then. ‘Well, I already told you that I’m not staying with—’

‘I could order something for tonight or … do you cook?’ he suggested, as though her protests weren’t worth a moment of his attention.

‘Hell, no!’ He’d lured her to his flat under false pretences and now he wanted her to stay there under duress and chop, stir and apply heat to raw ingredients. She could only take so much. ‘I can’t cook. I only warm food up. Under supervision.’

‘I see. I’ll endeavour to make sure that you don’t starve.’

‘That’s not really any of your concern as I’m going as soon as you get in. Though, I suppose if it came to it, I could survive for about a week on your cereal bars,’ she joked, and he breathed in sharply as if he really thought she was going to scarf down all his precious, very dry-looking cereal bars. So much for his urbanity – one threat about the sparse contents of his kitchen cupboards and it was shot to pieces. ‘So what time are you coming home?’

‘About seven thirty,’ he said, which was hours away and … ‘If that’s all, then I should be—’

‘Don’t go!’ Ellie yelped. ‘I need your address! Work have to send me important things today, and Ari and my grandmother like to know where I am at any—’

‘Velvet, we agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone where you were,’ he reminded her in a quiet voice that drip-drip-dripped down her spine. ‘As a controlled experiment to see who, if anyone, was leaking your whereabouts to the press.’

‘I can’t believe you still think I’ve been alerting the media to my every last move,’ Ellie said incredulously. ‘I’m not going to tell everyone where I’ll be, just the Gallery, who are under pain of death to keep schtum, and my mum and grandma, who I’d trust with my life because they’re, you know, my mum and my grandma. And you know how you keep calling me Velvet as a way of cutting me down when you think I’m being a brat? It doesn’t work. All it does is piss me off.’

It was infuriating the way he treated Ellie as if there was something distasteful and unlikeable about her. People, generally, liked Ellie and she worked hard to make them like her, but it was as if he could see right through her. Cut through all the effort and care she took to present herself to the world and saw what was underneath: a woman who was always a little lost, a little confused, straining for what was just beyond her grasp, no matter how much she managed to style it out and fool everyone else.

‘I call you Velvet because it’s your name—’

‘No, it’s really not—’

‘And I’m afraid I can’t give you an address. It’s out of the question. Not yet. You need to give me time to formulate a strategy.’

‘A what? You can’t keep me here and …’

She was talking to dead air. David Gold had hung up on her. Ellie scraped back her chair, not caring that it might leave marks on the pristine wood floor, and skidded over to the front door, which resisted all her efforts to turn its handle.

He’d locked her in! Ellie hurled herself at the door, which was no practical help but she still continued to do it for another five minutes until she gave it up as a bad job. She couldn’t even open the windows, and she imagined that as the afternoon sun became fiercer and brighter, it would bake her slowly from the inside out like a little doggie left in a car by a callous owner.

It would serve David Gold right when he finally came home to find Ellie dead from heat exhaustion, though actually it wouldn’t be very pleasant for Ellie or her loved ones. It also didn’t solve the problem of how she was meant to deal with the urgent items on Vaughn’s bullet-pointed list if she didn’t have a physical address for physical things to be sent to.

Ellie wasted precious time trying to pinpoint her exact location with the aid of Google Maps on her iPad, streetmap.co.uk on her MacBook and the satnav app on her phone, but while her iPad had it narrowed down to the point where two streets converged near Highgate Village, her iPhone was convinced she was in Spalding, Lincolnshire, which was no help at all.

Then light dawned. She might not have an actual physical address but she knew someone who did.

At half past seven, as Ellie was sending the last of her speculative emails to a gallery in Leeds, she heard a key in the lock. She ignored the urge to run to the door to start berating David Gold before he could even set foot over the threshold and stayed where she was.

She even pretended she was engrossed in a very dry press release from the Arts Council as he came through the door. At least she thought it was David Gold, but his face was obscured by a huge bunch of flowers: wild roses, lilacs and lavender, all wrapped in brown paper and tied with a baby-blue ribbon. The strategy he’d been busy formulating obviously involved a major charm offensive, Ellie thought. She was determined to remain immune to it.

‘How dare you give out my office address to all and sundry like it’s your own personal mail box,’ he thundered, so maybe she was wrong about his new strategy. He was also weighed down with several bags and the gallery’s portable lightbox. ‘I had to get a car home.’

That was what was bothering him? Really? ‘Just add it to my bill.’ Ellie could feel her brows knitting together in what she was sure was a murderous scowl. No one had ever made her feel murderous before.

‘That’s not the point,’ he snapped, dumping the flowers down on the table, then slowly relinquishing his grip on the bags. ‘I had my entire day disrupted signing for deliveries that apparently couldn’t be signed for by my assistant. I was even called out of a meeting and I always run home on a Tuesday. This is not acceptable.’

There was nothing Ellie could say because she was speechless. She kept opening her mouth but her brain wasn’t capable of sending words down the pipe so she had to shut it again. By the time she finally managed to wheeze out an indignant, ‘I’m sorry! Your day has been disrupted?’ David Gold was already in the kitchen and tutting furiously by the time Ellie caught up with him.

‘You’ve made a mess,’ he cried and he did almost sound like he was crying as he pointed at the plastic tray that had once contained sushi. Ellie had washed it with hot soapy water and left it to drain on the draining board because she didn’t know what the deal was vis-à-vis rubbish and recycling, and anyway, everyone knew that you didn’t throw out stinky, fish receptacles without rinsing them first. She hadn’t been raised by wolves. ‘You can’t leave things lying around.’

He was already stomping back into the living room and was now pointing at the bags that he’d dropped on the floor. ‘You were the one who left them lying around,’ Ellie reminded him tightly. ‘And I hate to sound competitive but while you were having a bad day, I’m having a bad month. About ninety per cent of my life was in ruins last time I checked. Do you think I’m having any kind of fun?’


When Ellie quantified it like that, it made it seem worse: like the ten per cent that was AOK wasn’t going to be enough to pull her through. She bowed her head, let her hair cover her face, because she could feel the weight of the world bearing heavily down on her and turned away because she didn’t want to be this vulnerable in front of him. The tears surely couldn’t be that far away now.

‘Oh God, I can’t do this,’ he murmured, as if she were pushing him right to the edge and he didn’t have the time or patience for it. As he brushed past her, not even able to hide his distaste as his jacket sleeve caught her arm, Ellie almost felt nostalgic for the smarmy smiles he’d used to give her. Mostly, though, she felt crushed as if another five per cent of her life had suddenly crumbled to ash. ‘It’s expecting too much of me.’

Ellie’s voice returned at around the time she heard the door to the master bedroom slam shut so she had no other option but to stand outside and say heatedly, ‘I don’t want to do this either! I’m not going to speak to the press – as if – but I’m not staying here … Are you even listening to me?’

She wasn’t sure if he was or he wasn’t, but as she tentatively lifted a hand to knock, the door suddenly swung open and she nearly fell headfirst into David Gold’s arms. She struggled away before there might be any touching, and of course she was blushing, but that wasn’t important when David Gold was standing there in a white running vest and navy-blue shorts. Not short shorts, but still Ellie’s eyes felt as if they were popping right out of their sockets. It had certainly taken her mind off the existential crisis that she’d spiralled into. It also explained why he had no form of sustenance in his flat apart from foul-tasting sports drinks and huge tubs of protein powder.

He was thin and probably could do with bulking up, but it was a lean, wiry thin. Like a greyhound with sleek muscles and a quiet strength. Ellie was standing there like a gormless idiot, drinking him in, until he physically shifted her out of his way, his hands on her arms, and for one unbelievable second Ellie was sure her feet left the floor.

‘I’m going out for a run.’

For the second time that day, he walked out on her.