Authors: Julie Cohen
One Night Stand (6 page)
So my feelings were hurt, even though I hadn’t known it, and Hugh had ferreted it out. He seemed to know when I needed him to keep on asking.
But I didn’t know the answer to this question. An even more thorough search of my house had revealed no traces of my mystery man - no phone number, no scrawled note, not even hair in the brush in the bathroom. No condom, of course. The bed was cold, and I had no reason to think he’d stuck around after I’d passed out. He’d left nothing behind but lip prints on the glass of some noxious Naxos booze.
‘No, I think I’ve seen the last of him,’ I said.
Zero to Three Months: The Whiff of Reality
5
So this is what it feels like to be in politics, Lucy Sharpe thought. She smoothed her hands down her leather-clad thighs, relishing the warmth, the suppleness of her own body. The intrigue. The complications. The battles.
The power. Oh yes, more than anything, the power.
She stalked a few steps in her pointy-toed high-heeled boots, swaying her hips, thrusting out her breasts. She looked good, and he was watching her. From the expression on his face it was with as much fear as desire.
She wanted both from him. She’d never known it till now.
Lucy rested her weight on one leg, her hand on one hip, a pose she knew made her look even more angular and in control. She let her gaze travel slowly over the figure in the chair before her. The black cords binding his arms and legs made his skin look even paler. There were faint red marks where the ropes chafed against his skin. And yet his muscles stood out in sharp relief. So much strength and so much vulnerability.
Especially between his legs, where his cock poked into the air, helplessly virile.
Lucy licked her lips and she saw him twitch. Slowly she approached him. She spread her legs, one thigh either side of his, and bent to rest her weight on the back of his leather chair. The position put her barely restrained breasts on a level with his face and his hot breath.
‘You’re helpless,’ she told him and she saw a tremor shudder through his body. ‘You’re mine. Mr Shadow Minister for the Environment.’ She pronounced the title precisely, letting him know with every syllable that his political position meant nothing here. The only position that mattered was the one she’d put him in.
‘Let me go,’ he pleaded. She wasn’t sure if he meant it. ‘I’m supposed to be at a summit in Brussels to discuss green issues. If I don’t go, I’ll—’
‘Shut up,’ she snapped. ‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here and you will do exactly as I tell you. Exactly.’
She lowered her hand and tested the velvety length of his erection.
‘Speaking of green issues,’ she said, ‘when was the last time you got checked for diseases?’
I banged my hands on my desk beside my keyboard. ‘Shit!’
Green issue? Diseases? What was going on in my head?
I looked around my office. It was actually the extra front bedroom of my terraced house, furnished and painted entirely in white. White computer, white desk, white chair, white rugs on the white-painted floorboards, a white pull-out sofa bed for the rare occasions when I had guests. It was my blank space. My room where I could come and wipe myself clean of my mind-clutter, sit in front of my computer, and write.
It clearly wasn’t working.
For one thing, Mr Shadow Minister for the Environment was supposed to be blond. He’d been blond in the original draft of the book and there was absolutely no reason that he should change now that I was doing revisions. It would create all sorts of continuity problems because of course I didn’t only describe his head hair.
But irresistibly, as I wrote him, he became shorter, darker, and gained a moustache and goatee.
For another thing, characters in erotic fantasy didn’t worry about prophylactics. The publishers put a warning in the front of the book to tell the readers that in real life they should always use a condom, and then the characters got it on happily for the next three hundred pages or so as if the word ‘Durex’ had never been coined. Nobody got gonorrhoea, herpes, chlamydia or, God forbid, HIV, because those things are not part of anybody’s sexual fantasy (or if they are, I don’t want that person reading my books, thank you).
And now I was completely ruining this fantasy by having my heroine ask one of her sex slaves if he’d had a check-up.
I was supposed to be putting the whiff of reality into this book, but that was too bloody much.
There was only one thing for it. It was Wednesday, and I was through with putting off the inevitable.
I shut down my computer and went downstairs to the phone. I knew Hugh was home, and it was more expensive to ring him than to walk out of my front door and bang on his, but ringing was often safer if I wasn’t sure what he was doing.
He picked up on the second ring. ‘I need you to come somewhere with me,’ I said.
The clinic was located in a separate unit behind the hospital. The entrance was in a sort of courtyard, overlooked by banks of windows and the main hospital walkway. It might have been purposefully designed so that every single person in the Royal Berkshire Hospital was able to see exactly who’d been a naughty boy or girl and needed a swab stuck up inside them to check for nasty germs.
I pulled my scarf tighter around my face. Hugh, on the other hand, was looking around with great curiosity. When we walked into the clinic he was immediately attracted by the bowlful of condoms on the receptionist’s desk.
‘Wow, are these for anybody who wants them?’ he asked, bright-eyed and cheery-faced, as always, and the receptionist smiled at him and nodded.
‘Brilliant,’ he chirped and took a handful to shove inside his coat pocket. He was reaching for some more when I leaned over the desk to speak quietly to the receptionist.
‘Eleanor Connor and Hugh Gibson. We’ve each got appointments at eleven twenty.’
Hugh’s hand closed on my wrist. ‘Hold on. I don’t have an appointment. This was for you.’
‘I figured I might as well make you one, while I was at it.’
‘Excuse us,’ Hugh said to the receptionist, then pulled me out of the building to the very public courtyard. His hand was strong on my wrist as he turned me to face him.
‘I don’t need to be checked for sexually transmitted diseases. I’m careful. Look.’ He waved one of the coloured condoms from the bowl inside at me. ‘See this? I use them. Religiously.’
‘I figured it couldn’t hurt, and that you might as well while you were here.’
His brown eyes sparked, and I realised he was angry.
I’d known him for seven years, lived next door to him for four, and for a lot of the three years before that I’d shared halls of residence with him, and I’d hardly ever seen him angry before. His eyes were wide and there was a flush over his cheekbones.
‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Eleanor. You don’t just make an appointment for someone else at this type of place. You’ve got another reason.’
I had no idea how to deal with Hugh angry. It was like seeing a stranger.
‘Honestly, I—’
‘What is it, El? I don’t assume it’s because you want to sleep with me?’
I stepped back, shocked. ‘No.’
He didn’t let go of my wrist, and his grip got tighter.
‘Are you feeling guilty about having sex with that George? Because if you are, go ahead, but don’t try to make me feel guilty too.’
‘I wasn’t trying—’
‘I’ve never once judged you for anything you’ve done, even when I thought you’ve made some bloody stupid mistakes. And I never asked you to judge me, either.’
I’d been feeling overwhelmed and uneasy, but that pushed me over into anger, too. ‘What bloody stupid mistakes?’
‘Every damn so-called relationship you’ve ever had, now that you’ve asked me. Including this one with George, apparently.’
‘At least I have relationships, instead of picking up a new fuck-buddy every five minutes.’
‘Except for last Saturday night.’
‘Will you stop bringing up Saturday night? How come it’s fine for you to sleep around all you want and when I do the same thing it’s a major topic of discussion?’
The blood was pounding in my ears, because this was not fair, no way.
‘Because I—’ Hugh dropped my wrist and held up both his hands in frustration. ‘Maybe because Saturday night is the reason we’re both here at this clinic arguing.’
He ran his hand through his hair, throwing it into even more disarray than normal. ‘Is it only a guilt thing, or did you not use a condom?’
Shame flooded me, displacing anger. ‘I don’t think we did.’
My emotions must have shown on my face because Hugh stared at me, and the flush on his cheeks abated.
‘Stupid girl,’ he said. It sounded more affectionate than angry, and that did it.
‘I wanted some company,’ I told him, willing the tears not to appear. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
‘No, you haven’t. Of course not.’ He took hold of my shoulder this time and pulled me up against him, my face pressing to the soft cloth of his coat. ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ He gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the top of my head and let me go before I could get any more wobbly. ‘But if I have to have something shoved up my old fella I’m going to make you pay.’
6
Hugh wasn’t always the smooth sex machine he liked to think of himself as now. I remember the day I met him. It was the first day of university.
I’d been there for about two hours; the first hour was taken up by moving my stuff from my mother’s car to the hall of residence where I was sharing a room with some girl I’d never met by the name of Leena. Her name sounded very exciting to me, as if maybe I was going to meet the kind of person there weren’t many of in my small home town of Upper Pepperton, someone creative and exciting and unique. Someone sort of like I’d had in mind when I’d picked my going-to-university outfit, which consisted of black jeans, black top, and lots of plastic jewellery. When I got to my room Leena wasn’t there, though I could see she’d dumped her suitcases on one of the beds already.
My mother, Sheila, wanted to stay and look around, meet Leena, check out every aspect of this life that she’d never experienced herself. I wanted her to get the hell out of there and back to Upper Pepperton as quickly as I could hustle her, so I could start living this exciting new life. In my mind, the biggest attraction of the University of Reading was that it was not within easy driving distance of Upper Pepperton. So I talked fast, unpacked faster, practically pushed my mother out the door and back to her car and then rushed back to the hall of residence to see what was going on.
There was a lot going on. Everybody seemed to know each other, for one thing. Some people smiled at me when I smiled at them, but nobody offered to talk to me as I walked up the hallway towards my room.
That was okay. Leena would turn up sooner or later, and we’d meet each other and we’d click together, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. It was going to be great. I’d been waiting all summer to get out of Upper Pepperton. It had been the most boring summer on record; all my friends and I had tedious jobs and my sister June hadn’t visited once.
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