‘Oh. No, I didn’t mean to stay late,’ he says vaguely, and starts collecting paper into piles, pushing down the lid of his laptop. ‘You’re not coming, then?’
‘No, I’m staying on,’ I say quickly. ‘Got a bit to get through still.’
‘OK.’ He pulls on his jacket, then stands looking at me, bag slung over his shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
‘Yes!’ I look up, smiling brightly, looking straight into his eyes. ‘I’m fine. Why?’
Steven scratches his chin. ‘I’m not sure. You just seem a little – I don’t know. Nervous. Not yourself.’ The words fall awkwardly from his lips, and his face clouds in embarrassment. We don’t have the sort of boss-to-employee relationship that generally covers personal observations and, when I think about it, I’m not sure that he knows who ‘myself’ really is, not on any deep level.
‘I’m fine,’ I repeat. ‘Just a bit tired and stressed, that’s all.’
‘Right.’ Steven nods, then ducks out of the door, clearly relieved to be escaping this conversation. I sit alone in the office for a minute. My heart is pounding, and I’m suddenly hot, as if I might faint.
I get up and go to the bathroom, swing the door open to stare into the little mirror hanging on the wall. My cheeks are flushed and vivid, my eyes shining darkly. Steven is right. I’m not myself. The woman in the mirror has a power and a presence I haven’t felt for years. I remember Jess last week, stopping to look at me when we met at the station with an expression of almost quizzical surprise. I have to admit, this seems to suit you. Combing my fingers through my hair, I stare at myself. These days, I veer from misery to ecstasy with frightening speed and irregularity. If this is what suits me, I’m not sure what sort of a person that makes me.
The door opens behind me and I swing round to see Carl slipping inside, slamming it shut behind him. He runs his eyes quickly over my buttoned-up white blouse and my short black skirt, the bare legs in high heels. We’re walking fast towards each other and, as we collide, he wraps his arms around me tightly and my whole body relaxes into him. We kiss slowly, deeply. We’re standing in front of the long window, in full view of the offices opposite, but there’s no one around.
‘Do you want to take your jacket off?’ I murmur at last.
He laughs, glancing down. He hasn’t even taken the bag off his shoulder. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Sorry. Hello.’
‘No need to apologize.’ I unbutton the coat for him and slip it off, letting it fall to the floor. ‘Do you want a drink?’
He shakes his head, prowling around the empty desks, looking at the place where he used to sit. ‘It’s weird being back here. You know, I almost bumped into Steven on the way in. Saw him coming down the road and had to duck down a side street until he’d gone. That would have been embarrassing. Oh, errrm, hi. I was just …’
‘… Just passing,’ I finish off, giggling. These near-misses should concern me, but part of me can’t help feeling excited at the thought of discovery. I want to broadcast it – want them to understand it, understand that it’s real.
‘Mmm,’ he says, watching me. ‘You like that idea, don’t you?’ and he’s crossing the room and lifting me up into his arms. I wrap my legs around his waist as he carries me through into the meeting room and lays me down on the desk, his shadow blocking out the light as he bends over me. His hands are sliding up my thighs, stroking my skin. ‘No knickers,’ he murmurs. ‘Naughty girl’, and he’s pinning my arms down and keeping his hand locked hard around them, the other hand fumbling impatiently with his belt now that the waiting is over and he knows we both want the same thing. He’s on me in an instant and the force of it drives me back on to the wood, the rhythm of our movements scraping and thudding against the small of my back – and it’s going to hurt tomorrow but his breath is hot on my lips and I’m seeing stars as I close my eyes and I don’t care at all.
We lie around in the office afterwards for another hour or so, half dressed, lounging on the makeshift bed we’ve created on the floor. The sun has dropped and the light is warm and dim. I’ve switched on the television above the desk, but the sound is turned down to an almost inaudible hum; I can see the images cycling out of the corner of my eye, a blur of shifting light. He’s staring up at the ceiling, his hand threaded through my hair and tugging gently at its strands every so often, and I realize this, too, has become a routine of sorts. We’ve fallen into our own ways of being together, without even trying.
‘Are you sure it’s all right about the 8th?’ he asks at last.
I roll on to my front, throwing my arm across his chest and looking up into his eyes. ‘Definitely.’ We’re going away for the night together – a small hotel called the Silver Birches in an anonymous town that he booked weeks ago as a stop-off en route to his friend’s thirtieth-birthday celebrations the next day. When he first floated the idea that I might join him, I was equally attracted and terrified. Even now, despite Francis’s apparent lack of interest in my movements, I can’t imagine stepping this far out of my life without it being discovered. Whenever I think about it, though – no need to get up and get dressed at the end of the night and go out into the cold, and the intimacy of waking up with him there in reality and not only in my head – excitement beats a pulse through me, and there’s no way I’m going to back out now.
‘Well, good,’ he says. ‘If you’re sure. It’s not that I don’t want you to come. As you no doubt realize. It’s just that I don’t want you to do anything too risky.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ I assure him. ‘I can’t wait.’ These words fall often from my lips, and his. It seems we spend our lives in a permanent state of poised expectancy and, when it lifts, our time together is so temporary that I’ve blinked and it’s gone, driven back to the same old state of anticipation, as if I’d never left.
He sighs, shifting beneath me. ‘And, you know, after that,’ he says, ‘we’re going to have to start scaling this down, you know. Things can’t go on like this for ever, can they?’
‘I know.’ It’s automatic. We have been saying this for a long time, and 8 July has become a marker in the sand – a kind of last hurrah before we start to unpeel the bonds we’ve spent months making. Now, more than ever, it seems senseless. I think about saying so, to suggest the idea that things may not have to be this way, but the time doesn’t seem right and something silences me. ‘I don’t want to,’ I say instead.
‘I know you don’t,’ he says. ‘It’s not going to be easy for me either. But there’s not much choice, is there.’ It isn’t a question. He’s said this kind of thing before, several times. Last time, he went further. I’ll be thirty in a few years, and what have I got to show for it? I’m living in a flat share with no girlfriend and I’m seeing a married woman with a child. When this is over, you’ll have him to focus on, but I’ve got nothing. I’ve got to live my own life. I need to get on with it, without you. And I had recoiled in near-shock and surprise, the hurt written across my face as clearly as if he had shouted it, and he had placed his hand over mine, apologizing silently, but not taking it back.
We lie there in silence for a while longer, and sadness filters through the room like smoke. It’s seeping in more and more when we’re together, this indefinable melancholy that colours every look and touch. We used to spend our time laughing like teenagers, entertaining each other effortlessly. It seems we’ve conducted everything on fast-forward. In five months, we’ve aged ten years, already sensing the shadow of separation.