? ? ? ? ?
We dance. There’s distance between us at first—as there would be, I suppose, if we really were the strangers we’re pretending to be. But the gap closes slowly from song to song, until my hips are bumping hers and her hair paints a trail across my arm each time she tosses her head. The music is bad American pop, but I don’t care. I want to dance with Izzy. I want to give in to the thump-thump of desire that courses through me when I see her. I want to ignore real life for once and just pretend that I’m a guy, at a party, dancing with a beautiful girl.
“You’re good,” she says, raising her voice over the music. “You can dance!”
“So can you.”
“Well, yeah,” she says, as if this should have been obvious. “But I thought the whole thing about Brazilians all being great dancers was a cliché.”
“It is a cliché. We are not all great dancers,” I tell her, thinking of my sister, who often cheerfully proclaims that she’s about as good at keeping time as she is at keeping boyfriends.
“But if any Brazilian was going to be bad at dancing,” Izzy says, “I feel like it would be you.”
I glare at her. She laughs.
“And how do you know I’m Brazilian?”
She pulls a face at the break from character. “I mean, ah, where are you from?” she asks.
“Niterói,” I tell her. The song shifts and I watch her body shift, too, finding the new beat. “It’s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.”
“Brazil! What’s it like there at this time of year?”
“Hot,” I say, holding her gaze. I take a sip of my beer.
That thump-thump of desire gets louder. She’s closer, looking up at me, the glitter on her shoulders sparkling under the light of Shannon’s chandelier.
“How about you? Where are you from?”
“Surrey,” she says, her leg brushing mine as she dances. “Way less exciting. Though I loved growing up there.”
Something passes over her face—a memory of her parents, perhaps.
“And what do you do?” I ask, to bring her back to me.
She stumbles slightly as someone moves past us, and I steady her with a hand on her waist. Somehow it feels right for the hand to stay there, and now we’re not just dancing, we’re dancing together. Her hands come to rest lightly on my shoulders, and her hips twist in time with mine.
“I work at a hotel.”
I try to imagine what I would say next if I didn’t stand beside her at the front desk every morning. It’s getting hard to concentrate. Her body moves with mine, and there’s just the soft fabric of her baby-blue top between my palm and her skin. She’s warm and a little breathless. I can smell her cinnamon scent every time I inhale.
I settle for the question I often get asked. “Are people always checking in under fake names to have affairs?”
She gives me a small, knowing smile. “That or turning up naked under trench coats. Yeah. Nonstop.”
I let out an ah of recognition as the song changes to Anitta’s “Envolver.” Izzy clocks it and lifts her gaze to mine. We’re body to body: her arms aren’t just resting lightly on my shoulders now, they’re wound around my neck, and my hand is at the small of her back, keeping our shifting hips in sync.
“Can you translate this song for me? What’s it actually about?” she asks me.
“Well, it’s in Spanish, so . . .”
“Oh.” She blushes. “Sorry. I thought it was in Portuguese.”
For once, I’m not interested in embarrassing her.
“My Spanish isn’t bad, so I can try . . . But, uh, the song is a little rude.”
“We just danced to ‘212,’?” she says, tilting her head back far enough that her hair tickles my hand on her waist as she looks up at me. “I think I can handle some sexual undertones.”
I take a swig of my beer. “She’s saying something like . . . ‘Tell me what we’re supposed to do when we want each other this much.’ She’s saying, ‘If we go to bed together . . . you won’t last five minutes.’?”
Izzy laughs at that, still dancing. “What else?”
“She’s saying that she won’t let this guy get involved with her. Whatever happens there stays there.”
I think we’re dancing close until Izzy closes those tiny centimetres between us and I realise what close actually feels like. Her stomach pressed to my hips, her breasts against my chest. The contact sends desire snapping through me. I’m hard, and she must be able to tell, but she just keeps dancing.
“What an interesting idea,” she says, looking me right in the eyes.
I feel her phone buzz in the same moment she does. That’s how close my hand is to the back pocket of her jeans. She looks down and pulls away as she tugs the phone out.
“It’s Ollie,” she says, and just like that, we’re back. Standing in the middle of a makeshift dance floor in a stranger’s living room when we ought to be at work. The room seems smaller, the music wincingly loud.
I can’t hear the phone conversation, but I follow her off the dance floor and watch her body language. The way she stiffens and pulls her hair up in a one-handed ponytail, then lets it drop again as she talks.
When she hangs up, she turns and finds me immediately.
“We have to go back,” she says.
“What’s happened?”
“It’s . . .” She tugs her bottom lip between her teeth. “Graham’s wife has arrived at the hotel.”
“Your ring owner?”
“No-o,” Izzy says. “Graham’s other wife.”
Izzy
It seems that Graham has two different-but-similar email addresses for a reason. Because he has two different-but-similar lives.
And when I copied the other address into my email exchange . . . I gave Wife 1 access to a thread about a wedding ring that belonged to Wife 2, creating some understandable drama. Wife 1 turned up in our lobby, screaming and shouting, demanding answers from poor Ollie, who had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Apparently, she is now refusing to leave the premises until she “gets some answers from whoever sent that email.”
“We can get as far as Woking.”
Lucas is pacing back and forth along Shannon’s upstairs corridor, oblivious to the people popping up to use the bathroom and having to dodge past him like he’s the Big Bad Boss in an old Game Boy game. He is staring fixedly at his phone, National Rail app open on the screen. I can’t believe that half an hour ago I was grinding up against this man on the dance floor. The thought is completely surreal.
“Right, great,” I say, chewing my thumbnail.
I’ve really messed up here. Well, Graham did most of the messing up. But I’ve brought this whole bigamy drama into the hotel, and now I’m not even there to sort it out—I’m here, sexy-dancing with Lucas. What am I doing?
“Maybe from Woking there will be a bus,” Lucas says, furiously tapping away at his phone.
I look out of the window over the staircase. The snow is coming fast, caught up in itself, whirling and swooping like one of those Van Gogh paintings of the stars.
“UK roads can’t really do snowstorms,” I tell him, leaning back against the wall as someone emerges from the bathroom and hesitates, then dashes past in the moment before Lucas pivots on his heels to pace back again. “I think the odds of buses running in a couple of hours’ time are pretty low.”
“It is a bit of snow! It is a little bit cold!” Lucas snaps.
“Well, OK, I’m not the bloody transport secretary, am I?” I snap back, nettled.
He’s behaving like all that dancing never happened. Gone is the loose-limbed, half-smiling man who circled his hips against mine half an hour ago; here’s grouchy, uptight Lucas, taking things out on me that aren’t my fault.
“Why did we stay so late?” he says, swiping his thumb down to refresh the outgoing trains again. I watch as the red text blinks, the delays lengthening.
“Because we were having fun. Before you switched back to the usual Lucas, who is incapable of fun and just snaps at me about everything.”
He looks up at me at last, surprised. “I’m not snapping at you.”