Run To You

And then just when she’s sure she’s safe …

Just when she breathes a sigh of relief …

That’s when he drags her, screaming, from her hiding place. That’s when he does whatever Russian mobsters do – teeth-pulling and eye-puncturing and lots of shouting about treasure that I have no knowledge of. Any second, I think. Any second.

Only the second never comes. It just goes on and on until it’s practically a whole minute, torturing me endlessly with its refusal to end. If this moment goes on much longer I swear I’m going to burst out and make a run for it, and the only thing that stops me is my need to check first. I just have to look.

And then I lean forward, trembling, and peer through the gap between the doors. I see who he really is, in a rush of breathless bravery.

It’s the man from downstairs.

The man in the suit, with the inescapable face.

Apparently he had such an impact on me I can recognise him in parts and in pieces. I see a sliver of black and know that it’s his big, burly right arm. And that flash of gunmetal grey … that’s the hint of stubble on his great granite face.

Though I think I try to pretend otherwise, at first. I turn him into a jigsaw, and rearrange each tiny bit I can see into something else – that’s a leg, not an arm, and it’s far too small to be his. That flash of dark hair I can see? It’s not dark enough to equal the black pelt I saw a little while ago. It’s not him, I think, it’s not him, and even if it was I wouldn’t care.

Only he chooses that moment to speak, and after he has I have to face the fact that I do care, after all. I care a lot. I want to slump against something, but of course I can’t. If I do, he’ll hear me. He’ll know I’m here, and worse – he’ll see the effect his silken voice is having on my usually reasonable behaviour.

My breath actually catches in my throat, when he speaks words into his phone. And I can’t blame what he might be saying, either, because I don’t know what it is. It could be ‘I’m going to kill her,’ thus justifying my bizarre shivering reaction to the sound of him. But it could just as easily be dry-cleaning instructions for his assistant.

Because he says it in another language.

He speaks in a different language with a voice that’s already like sand shifting over metal, and my insides just flip out. He’s inadvertently flicked some weird switch inside me, and there’s no turning it back once it’s there. Apparently, I really like hearing someone speak in Hungarian or Polish or Russian or whatever it is he’s speaking, while trapped in a closet. I’m a secret subscriber to Trapped In A Polish Closet magazine.

I’m practically the President of the TIAPC.

Though I don’t exactly know how that happened. I’ve never noticed a predilection for accents before, in my back catalogue of sexual encounters. The only thing I can come up with is that time Steven Tate pretended to be a caveman, but ended up sounding like a Brummie taxi driver.

Needless to say, it wasn’t sexy.

But this … this is sexy. Suddenly I know exactly what sexy is, which is in itself a revelation. I wasn’t previously aware that the word really existed, or could be applied to things that happen in life. It had seemed like some abstract concept that other people probably only pretend to understand, the way women pretend about orgasms.

No one is actually sexy. Nobody really has an orgasm.

Only now I can see I was very wrong about the first one, and am getting scared about the second. Because the longer I watch him – like some furtive pervert, unable to help themselves – the more I understand what sexy is. And the more I understand what sexy is, the stranger I feel. A heavy pulse starts to beat between my legs.

And when he passes too close to the closet and I catch a whisper of his cologne …

Suddenly I can feel that pulse beating all over my body. It’s running down my arms to the very ends of my fingertips, before doubling back to blast me in the face. My teeth are rattling because of it – this drumming inside me that has never previously existed. This drumming that shouldn’t exist now.

It’s embarrassing, really. What sort of person gets so excited over something so trifling? A silly person. A weak-minded person, who’s so unused to the finer things she falls to pieces when she sees them.

I don’t like being her. So I close my eyes and count to ten. I think of all the ways I can make myself reasonable again. He isn’t here for me, I tell myself, and he could never be. The kind of woman he’s here for will be like the one downstairs at reception, beautiful and elegant. And she’ll have called to organise this meeting by doing something effortless and classy, like ringing a special number on an antique phone.

She wouldn’t hide in a closet, wrestling with her suddenly emerging libido. Her heart wouldn’t beat hard to see someone like that, and hear him say a string of alien words. Tar-zu, he says, and something else that sounds like ‘camera’, and then another thing that reminds me of that castle I thought I was in again.

Only this time it’s real, and on top of a mountain in Transylvania. If I look again he’ll be wearing a cape, and have a pronounced widow’s peak.

Though when I really peer through the gap he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He’s still this perfect picture of a businessman, all smooth clean lines and big angles, inside his second-skin suit. He’s still so handsome I want to open the door, just so I can see more of him.

But I stop myself in time. I hold back just as he picks up that red silk and lets it trail through his fingers. He’s still on the phone, talking in this uninterested way, probably about stocks that need transferring into bonds, but he’s playing with something so sensuously as he does it. And he is playing with it too.

I can’t pretend he’s doing something more manly, like mining the material for coal. He lets it slide over the back of his hand, and just when it’s about to drift back down onto the bed, he catches it. He’s so deft, I think, before I can kick myself for mooning over him again.

God, mooning. Like a teenager.

Seriously, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I’m still watching with bated breath for his every little move. He finally finishes his call and snaps his tiny phone shut, and I jerk like he fired a bullet into the ceiling. And then he strides across the room, quite abruptly, and I almost do the thing I prided myself on avoiding.

I almost stumble into the shoe rack behind me and give myself away. In fact, I’m certain I have given myself away, just by jerking back. I fully expect the doors to swing wide at any moment. I’m sure that’s what he was intending to do anyway.

But when I dare to look again, the room is empty. He wasn’t going for the closet, I realise. He was going for the exit. He came to meet his lovely Lucy, and, once he realised she wasn’t here, he made a call to the complaints department of the Assignations Bureau, before taking his leave.

Or at least that’s how it goes in my head. In reality, I have no idea if there’s such a thing as the Assignations Bureau. For all I know, this could be some kind of sex-trafficking drugs ring. Lucy could have been moonlighting as a high-class call girl. I was almost in an episode of that TV show with Billie Piper.

If I hadn’t hidden in a closet.

But I did, and that’s how it is, and so now I have to fumble out into an empty room. And though I know, rationally, that this should be a relief, it somehow isn’t. I’m not pleased that I avoided him. I’m boiling hot and absolutely furious with myself for being the same person I always am: frightened, foolish, clumsy.

I didn’t even speak to him. I couldn’t even ask him about Lucy. I let myself be intimidated by his brilliance and lamped by my own weird arousal, and now I’ll never know. I’ve missed my chance, because God knows I’m never coming back here. Never, never, never. Wild horses couldn’t drag me.

However, I suspect his business card might.

He’s left it on the desk by the window, propped up against a bottle of champagne he didn’t drink. It’s probably worth more than every drop of lemonade I’ve ever consumed, but he’s just abandoned it here. He’s used it as a backdrop for that little innocuous rectangle – the one that probably doesn’t mean anything at all.

He’s left it for the girl that didn’t come. That red writing coiled across its surface will say, ‘Lucy, lovely Lucy, why didn’t you meet me?’ Or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I try to leave without reading it.

And then somehow I find myself crossing the carpet, to get a closer look. I see the word ‘girl’ and the word ‘wardrobe’, and I know what’s coming, though I try to deny it for another moment. I was so sure he didn’t know I was there. I was so sure I got away with it. He gave no sign, you see. There was no indication he’d guessed – I thought I was safe.

Now I know I’m not.

‘To the girl in the wardrobe’, the card says, on its blank white back. Then on the front: his name, and his number, and one simple instruction:

‘Call me.’

Chapter Two (#ulink_be35aa5b-29ff-5772-adf2-5a3ac19c910d)

When I get to my desk I do everything the same as always. I put my coffee on my little Garfield coaster and turn on my computer. I check my emails and send out various messages, then call down to Finance to make sure they’ve got my updated details. It’s just another ordinary day, I think to myself, though I can already tell it’s sliding into something else. I’m concentrating too hard on work tasks for it to qualify as normal. Usually I hardly care; now I can tell I’m caring too much.

Once I’m done with the typical morning tasks I straighten my desk, as though it really needs straightening. Everything needs to be at right angles, and there are far too many paperclips lurking behind sheets of paper. The sheets of paper themselves shouldn’t be here, so I file them away in a filing system I don’t yet have.

But I soon will.

I spend a good hour creating one – with tiny tabs and little plastic inserts and everything. Michaela snorts at me over the divide of our two cubicles, wanting to know why I’m suddenly so busy … but of course I can’t tell her. I can’t tell anyone about this, because my usual go-to confessor has flown the coop and I’m still no closer to finding out why.

I don’t want to be any closer to finding out why. I’ve already dialled his number twice and hung up, and I really can’t risk any more. The night before last was frightening enough, and maybe explanation enough, and I’d far rather be normal and busy and a customer services operative again. The phone rings and I answer it like I always do: ‘Alissa Layton speaking, how may I help you?’

And I expect the person on the other end to be boring and possibly stupid, the way they always are. ‘My payment went out at the wrong time, I don’t understand these forms, I don’t like what I’ve signed up to, do you sell milk?’ I even have my sigh pre-planned, soft and low and aimed at something other than the phone receiver. Just beyond our dividing wall Michaela rolls her eyes and makes a winding finger around the edges of her own phone conversation, like every other day in this mundane place.