bet he’d let me, too. I bet he’d let me talk just to see how deeply I can tangle myself in him and all of his craziness. And the answer is, of course: very deeply indeed. Oh, so deeply I’m never going to get back out again.
‘I don’t want to tell you otherwise.’
‘So then,’ he says, and holds out a hand – like the conductor of a symphony, I think, awaiting a command performance. I can even hear the strings singing in the background, everything rising and rising to the point where I have to do this.
Doesn’t he realise I can’t do this? I’ve never learned; I don’t know how. The instrument is unfamiliar and clumsy and the notes are all wrong. I can’t I can’t I can’t, I think, about a second before he speaks again.
‘Begin,’ he tells me.
And somehow I can play.
I start out quite simply, slipping out of my shoes and casually tossing my jacket aside. But after a moment I realise this is meant to be more than that. It’s meant to be a striptease, I can see. It was in his words, and that hand gesture he made, and now it’s in his expression. That near-smile is dancing around his lips, though it hasn’t quite reached his eyes.
Oh, no, his eyes are as dark as midnight and twice as intense. They glitter at me like onyx from all the way across the room, and they never waver. They don’t even flick to something else when I reveal the silly thing I’ve done.
I wore tights, instead of stockings. I wore big, clumsy, grey woollen tights, unthinkingly. All I considered was how good they’d look with the only expensive suit I own, and in truth they do. They look great when I’m fully dressed.
They just don’t when I’m not.
Why didn’t I think about not? I knew what I was coming here for. There weren’t any illusions, though I suppose I might have pretended otherwise. I erased our final phone conversation from my mind, and just focused on other things. His voice, the island, this room.
I’m such a fool, I think, but there is nothing for it now. I have to reach under my skirt and wriggle out of these ugly elasticated things, and I have to do it fast. I have to do it without glancing up, in case his gaze makes me lose my nerve.
When I accidentally do, however, the near-smile hasn’t spread. He’s not laughing. If anything he looks even more intense than he did before. He’s leaning forward a little now, with one hand on the arm of the chair, and as I slowly restart this clumsy strip, his eyes follow my hands.
He watches me slide the wool down over my knees, occasionally tilting his head this way or that – as though to get a better look, I think. He wants a better look at something so completely ridiculous.
And I don’t know what to think of that.
I know it makes my breath come in shaky bursts, however. I know it makes me even clumsier. For a long moment I can’t quite get the tights over my ankles, and I wrestle with them briefly before finally giving in.
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