I instinctively go to cover his hand with mine; a silent but staunch reminder that I am here for him. But just as our skin touches, I recoil, afraid that this crosses the invisible line between doing right by my client and helping a friend in need. I ignore the very real possibility that the simple action traverses even the most forgiving of boundaries.
But he catches my hand as I pull away and holds on to it as he looks at me. “I’m sorry to have dragged you into this mess,” he says, offering the weakest of smiles. “But I couldn’t have done this without you.”
I attempt to make my hand my own again, but he links his fingers through mine; an act so intimate that it feels as if he’s undressing me. I try to convince myself that it’s just a heartfelt gesture of gratitude, but as I survey the pair of us through an onlooker’s gaze, say that of the woman next to us, for example, all I can see are two star-crossed lovers, reveling in the forbidden time they’ve managed to carve out for themselves.
I know that if I walked in on Leon and a woman in a hotel bar in such a compromising position, I’d be forced to accept that they were in an intimate relationship.
The sickening realization makes me yank my hand away and Jacob looks as if he’s been given an electric shock.
“I should get going,” I say, standing up and taking my jacket off the back of the stool.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t,” I say nonchalantly. “But I should be getting home as Leon’s due back anytime now.” I don’t know why I feel the need to lie.
“Please stay and finish your drink,” he says. “I don’t want to be on my own just yet.”
I chastise myself for allowing the moment to cloud my judgment. To forget that here in front of me is a broken man, who has been brave enough to leave his home and his job, because that’s what it took to free himself from his abusive wife. He will always be looking over his shoulder, waiting for her to come and claim what she believes is rightfully hers. It’s my fault for taking his need for reassurance as an inappropriate show of affection—not his. I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t also my fault that we’ve found ourselves sitting at this bar in the first place.
I smile and sit back down. “So you’ll stay here tonight?” I ask.
He nods miserably as he puts his empty glass onto the varnished mahogany of the bar top.
“Another?” asks the ever-attentive barman. I want to say no on Jacob’s behalf, knowing that drowning his sorrows in the bottom of a whiskey bottle is probably the last thing he should be doing. But he’s a grown man who is in the pits of despair right now, not to mention in fear of his life, and the last thing he needs is another woman telling him what he can and can’t do.
Jacob pushes his cut-glass tumbler toward the man in answer and, with his elbows on the bar, runs his hands through his hair and groans.
“It’s going to be all right,” I say, careful to keep a physical distance. “You’ll get through this.”
He laughs sardonically. “Unless my wife kills me first.”
I shiver, as if someone has walked over my grave.
“If you’d asked me as a twenty-one-year-old man whether I was ever going to be in this position—allow myself to be in this position—I would have laughed at you.”
“None of us know what life has got planned for us,” I say. “We’re all going in blind.”
He nods ruefully and his jaw clenches.
I don’t want to ask the question, but I need to know what we’re dealing with here.
“What do you think your wife is really capable of?” I chance.
“If she finds me?”
I nod, steeling myself for the answer I fear is to come.
“She’ll kill me,” he says, without skipping a beat.
“So, don’t you think it’s time you went to the police?” I ask. “Now that she’s threatened you by saying she knows where you live.”
“Do you honestly think they’ll take me seriously?” he asks. It’s a rhetorical question. “I’m six feet tall and two hundred pounds. I don’t look like someone who gets pushed around by their wife.”
“What does that person look like then?” I argue. “Do you honestly think they’ll not know that abused partners come in all shapes and sizes? That it’s men like you who have to exert even more control because you know the physical power you can wield?”
He shakes his head. “They’d laugh at me,” he says. “It’s a run-of-the-mill domestic as far as they’re concerned, and since when have they ever done anything to help victims of domestic abuse?”
“Things have changed,” I say. “They’re much more aware of all the various guises domestic abuse comes in now and they take it pretty seriously.”
“If I was going to get them involved, I would have done it when the kids were younger and I was still there. There’s no point doing it now that I’ve left.”
“But you’re still in danger,” I say. “She’s still hounding you, still threatening you.”
“Can we not talk about her?” he says, sounding exasperated. “For just a second?”
I look at him, wondering what else we’d talk about if not her. It’s always been her; that’s what he pays me for.
But he’s not paying you now, is he? asks the voice in my head.
“What about you?” he asks, making anxious butterflies flutter in my chest. “You know everything about me, there’s no stone unturned, yet I know absolutely nothing about you, aside from that you’re married to Leon. Tell me about you.”
My mouth dries up and my heartbeat quickens as the four words reverberate around my head. Tell me about you.
I remember going to interviews for various secretarial jobs when I left college, and all the time I was able to tell the prospective employer about the things I could do for them; my typing speed of seventy words per minute, the benefit of shorthand in a world that had rendered it obsolete, and my ability to work well within a team. I was able to wax lyrical. But the nail in the coffin would always be the excruciating pause that followed the question, Tell me about yourself.
You would have thought I’d have perfected a polished response over time. Been able to spin a yarn about my idyllic upbringing, living with my parents and little sister out on Long Island. Going to the local high school and excelling in Math and English. Wanting to be a professor of medicine because that’s what my mother had always dreamed of being, and I so wanted to make her proud.
But that’s where my story faltered because I knew what was coming. I’d start to stutter, trip over my well-rehearsed lines, knowing that I was lying by omitting to mention the single biggest event that had shaped my life up until that point.
Maybe if I’d told them that my father was in jail, serving a life sentence, I would have got the job. At least they’d know I was honest, if nothing else. But somehow, I hadn’t quite got used to sharing that particular piece of information.
Nor was I able to tell them why he was inside because then I’d never regain my composure.
So instead I invented a persona that nothing of any consequence had ever happened to, and my default position of claiming to be uninteresting has served me well over the years. Until someone like Jacob comes along.
“There’s not much to tell really,” I offer.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “You’re an American woman in London, for starters—well, as good as.”
“As opposed to an Englishman in New York?” I say smiling, referring to the song that Leon loves to have blaring when he makes us pancakes on a Sunday morning. Though thinking about it now, I can’t remember the last time he did that.
“Exactly,” laughs Jacob, catching on to the reference. “That doesn’t happen by accident, surely.”
I shrug my shoulders, seemingly no better prepared with a story than I was twenty years ago.
“So, what brought you over here?” he pushes, bringing me perilously close to the edge of my comfort zone.
“Leon, mainly,” I say. “I met him in New York seventeen years ago and when he came back to England, I came with him.”
“So you fell in love and left your old life behind?” Jacob probes.
“Something like that,” I say cagily.