The Piano Man Project (22 page)

‘Shall I come in, or would you like to do it in the lobby?’ he asked, and Honey belatedly realised she had yet to invite him in.

‘Sorry … sorry. Come through.’

In the lounge, Hal took a seat on the sofa, and Honey prevaricated between the other end of the sofa and the chair. The chair won.

‘Unless you expect me to make you orgasm from three feet away using just the power of thought, you’re going to need to come closer.’

Honey laughed nervously. ‘Ha. Yes. Would you, umm, would you like a drink first?’

‘I already had one, but you go ahead. You sound as if you need it.’

‘Do I?’ she said, knowing full well that she did. ‘I’m fine, really. Totally fine. Cool as a cucumber.’ She moved from the chair to balance on the other end of the sofa. ‘See? I’m right here, being cool and calm.’

After a minute’s awkward silence she jumped up again and shot across to the kitchen. ‘I might just get that drink.’

In the kitchen, she banged her forehead three times against the fridge door, called herself an obscene name, and returned with two big glasses of red.

‘I bought wine,’ she said, putting the glasses down on the table. ‘Shiraz. Australian.’

‘There aren’t nibbles too, are there?’ Hal said, low and dry as a bone.

‘No nibbles.’ She sat down alongside him, not quite touching and wishing she’d put the TV on before he came over because it was so quiet and it looked rude to put it on now, as if he were boring her.

He took a sip of his wine, and she took a gulp of hers.

‘So. How was your day?’ she asked, feeling ridiculous.

He put his glass down slowly. ‘Really?’ he said, incredulous. ‘You want to do this that way? Shall we talk about the weather next?’

‘It’s just conversation, Hal,’ she shot back.

‘I haven’t come here to talk. Let’s go to the bedroom.’

Whoa. ‘Easy, caveman. You’ll be flinging me over your shoulder next,’ she said, and when he said nothing, she stood up and muttered, ‘I’ll bring the wine through.’

Hal made his way to the edge of the bed and sat down on the edge like someone in a bed showroom. Honey watched him, unnerved by his big, dark, brooding presence in her light, Scandinavian-style bedroom.

Placing the glasses down on the bedside table, she eyed Hal nervously.

‘What are you wearing?’ Hal asked.

Honey’s eyes opened wide in surprise. He’d gone from caveman to sex line operator in a flash. How to respond?

‘Oh, erm … well, my dress is black with a zipper all the way down the back, easy access,’ she all but purred, and screwed her eyes tight with embarrassment. ‘And … my underwear is new. I chose it for you. It feels …’

‘Just take everything off and lie on the bed on your back.’

Honey picked up her wine glass and threw the entire contents down her throat, then sat down on the other side of the bed. The last man to say anything like that to her had been her doctor.

‘Hal. I’m going to lie down here with all of my clothes on, and I’d like it if you lay beside me. You’re going too fast for me, okay?’

It was something she hadn’t anticipated that she’d need to say. Previous encounters with Hal had been sexy and slow and had melted her bones, but this just wasn’t working yet.

She lay back on her pillows, and he did the same alongside her.

‘Happy now?’ he said, his face angled towards the ceiling.

‘Not especially,’ she muttered. ‘Is this what it feels like when you’ve been married for years, do you think?’

‘It really would help if you got rid of your clothes,’ Hal said.

When she’d dressed that evening, she’d subconsciously opted for things that were tactile, things she hoped Hal would enjoy peeling off her later.

‘I umm … I brought a blindfold. I wondered if you’d like me to wear it?’ Honey heard her own upward inflection, like an Aussie waitress asking if he’d like an extra shot in his espresso.

‘Not especially. Strip off.’

We’ll, he’d missed the point of that entirely.

‘Do you think you could possibly kiss me first?’

Hal paused. ‘I wasn’t planning on kissing.’

‘What?’

‘This isn’t a date, remember?’

‘Yeah, and I’m not a prostitute either,’ she said. ‘Just bloody kiss me. I am one hundred per cent certain I won’t orgasm without being kissed first.’

Hal sighed, then rolled towards her until his body half covered hers and pressed her down into the mattress. Lowering his head, he kissed her too lightly, lingering for just a couple of agonisingly good seconds.

‘There. Now are you going to strip, or does this dress ruck up enough to get your knickers off?’

‘For God’s sake, Hal!’ Honey huffed. ‘This isn’t what I expected from you!’

‘No? What did you expect, Honey?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, flustered. ‘A bit of romance, maybe? I know it’s not an actual date, but can’t you pretend it is?’

‘You want me to lie to you?’

‘Yes Hal. I want you to lie to me,’ she said, surprising herself. ‘Tell me you’ve been thinking about this all day. Take my dress off and tell me how sexy I feel to you. Tell me I turn you on. You don’t have to mean it, and we won’t mention it again once we’re outside of this bedroom, but right here and right now, lie to me.’

Hal dropped his head and kissed her again, this time hot and open mouthed. Sliding the heat and weight of his body over hers, he held her face in his hands and took the kiss as deep as it could go, and Honey wrapped her arms around his back and dragged his shirt up to get at the warmth of his skin.

‘You know you turn me on, Honeysuckle,’ he breathed, his mouth hot against her ear as she arched into him. His fingers found her zipper and slid it all the way down, and he shifted just enough to slide her dress away from her body.

‘And you feel like a goddamn fucking goddess,’ he said, kissing her again, slower, tracing his fingertips from the dip between her collarbones to her navel.

Was he lying? It didn’t feel like it in the heat of the moment. His body told her that he was telling the truth, hard against her softness.

‘Hal,’ she said, her fingers picking at the buttons on his shirt. He stilled, and then covered her hand with his own.

‘Not me,’ he whispered. ‘Just you.’

Honey opened her eyes. ‘What?’

‘We’re not going to have sex tonight, Honey,’ he said quietly, massaging her hip. ‘This is all about you.’

‘But, I want you to have tonight too,’ she said, realising that she meant it. Tonight had been as much about pleasuring Hal as it had been about being pleasured herself. It had to be a two-way street.

He shook his head, trailing his lips over her jaw. ‘Shh. Relax.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, pent up with longing to take his shirt off.

Smoothing his hand down the length of her body, Hal let his fingers come to rest over the silk of her knickers, and then slid under the material to cup her.

‘Yes, you can,’ he said, his hand warm and still and heavy. ‘It’s just you and me. Open your legs.’

‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Honey said, feeling her body tense even as his fingers started a slow massage. Hal smooched the sensitive skin beneath her ear.

‘Let me touch you the way you want to be touched, Honey,’ he whispered, covering her mouth with his as his fingers began to move. To explore. To stroke. ‘Let me do this for you, baby,’ he said, opening her slickness with his fingers, taking her small gasps into his mouth, breathing encouragements and endearments back into hers.

For a second Honey stopped thinking about sex, or about pleasing him, because the things he was doing to her took away every last thought and replaced them with sensation. This was good. So very, very good, and it made her want all he could give her.

‘Change your mind, Hal,’ she murmured. ‘Take your clothes off and stay with me tonight. I can feel how much you want to.’

He stopped what he was doing.

‘Do you want me to do this for you or not?’ he said, changing down the gears from raw Hal to in-control Hal again.

‘I don’t think I can do it unless you’re naked,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me you don’t want to because, er, hello?’ she skimmed her hand over his swollen crotch.

‘You asked for this,’ he said. ‘You asked me to come here and make you orgasm. We were well on the way for a minute back there, and then this. What is it with you? You get something, you always want more.
Lie to me, Hal.
Tell me you’re turned on, Hal
.’

‘Were you lying?’ she asked, hoping he hadn’t been.

He drew in an exasperated breath and extracted his hand from her knickers. ‘A man tells you you’re beautiful when he has his hand down your pants. Go with it. He probably means it.’

‘So you were lying, or you weren’t? Which is it?’ It suddenly felt important to know, because if he’d been faking it he was world class.

‘Honey. Can you just stop this? I’ll say this one more time, because we seem to have a communication failure. Take off your underwear and spread your legs, and I’ll crawl between them and give you what you want. I’ll lie to you. I’ll make it so good for you that you won’t remember your own name, let alone mine. But you need to be really clear on this. We are not going to fuck. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.’

And with that, any hope of saving the situation left the building. Honey reached for her dressing gown on the bottom of the bed and pulled it tightly around her body.

‘Was it something I said?’ Hal muttered, reaching for his wine and knocking it back.

‘Just go, Hal. I don’t know why I thought it would be any different with you than with other men.’ She stood up. ‘My mistake.’

He threw his hands up in the air. ‘Have it your own way.’

‘I will. With someone else.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said, sauntering down her hallway and opening the front door.

‘I won’t kiss you goodnight,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t let you,’ she shot back.

‘Goodnight, Honeysuckle,’ he said, as he opened his own door. ‘Sweet dreams, baby.’

Honey didn’t have sweet dreams. Instead, she finished the wine and tossed and turned all night in a temper, while across the hallway Hal drank himself into a whisky-induced stupor on the sofa.

Headaches, lazy mornings and bad moods were the order of the weekend on both sides of the lobby, and Honey wasn’t impressed to find herself out of milk for a much-needed coffee.

‘I’m going to the shops,’ she yelled as she closed her door, her cross-body bag slung over her denim jacket, and her hair dragged back. ‘And I don’t care if you need anything, because I’m not your bloody servant!’

‘Try not to bring any random men home with you,’ he shouted back.

‘I will if I bloody well want to,’ she shouted back. ‘I’m sure they’d all be a damn sight more considerate than you are in bed.’

‘We haven’t been to bed, and we’re not going to,’ he said.

‘You’re not wrong there, buster,’ she yelled, opening the door. ‘You had your chance to spend the night with me and you blew it, big time.’

It wasn’t the best time to find herself eyeball to eyeball with the postman. He lifted his eyebrows at her appraisingly, handed her the morning’s mail and walked away down the pavement sounding suspiciously as if he was laughing under his breath. Honey glanced through the letters; bills, pizza menus and junk mail. She threw them all on the table in the hall, including the brown envelope addressed in stark black handwriting to Mr Benedict Hallam. Up to then he hadn’t received so much as one piece of mail, leading Honey to conclude that he’d redirected everything on purpose.

She cursed him loudly a few times for good measure and then slammed out of the house hard enough to rattle the windows.

Monday morning, and there had been no further communication, across the lobby or otherwise, between Honey and Hal. Neither of them had enjoyed their weekends much. Honey just didn’t get the man at all. Why had he agreed to sleep with her and then treated her the way he did on Friday night? Was it just too good an opportunity to yank her chain? Even after two days removed from the situation it was hard to see it as much else.

For his part, Hal brooded in silence, mad at himself for the way he’d made such a monumental botch of the situation. He’d been so concentrated on not letting it cross the line into romance that he’d turned it into borderline assault. Was this it for him now? A lifetime of misread situations and mistakes? He knew exactly where he’d gone wrong – he should never have agreed to it in the first place.

‘Would you come outside and cuff me, dear?’ Mimi asked Honey an hour or so later. It was her turn to be chained to the railings that day, and she was all decked out in her slogan t-shirt and hot pink leggings in readiness. She’d tied a pink polka dot headscarf in a jaunty bow on top of her dark curls, and looked for all the world like the star of an OAP production of
Grease
. Honey grinned at the thought. She’d pay good money to go and watch that on the stage. Mimi would definitely be Frenchy to Lucille’s Sandy, and Billy’s snake hips would make him a shoe-in for one of the T-Birds.

Honey shot a look towards Lucille, stacking glasses over on the far side of the shop. Had she mentioned her visit to Ernie yet, she wondered? The cordial atmosphere suggested not.

‘Of course. You ready now?’ she said, picking up Mimi’s fluffy red cuffs from the counter.

Mimi nodded. ‘Although I’m starving. That chef the agency sent over is awful. He gave us biscuits for breakfast this morning,’ she grumbled. ‘We oldies need our All-Bran or there’s hell to pay.’

Honey grimaced. ‘How did he do over the weekend?’

‘Terrible. I can’t even talk about it,’ Mimi shuddered. ‘Even your cooking was better than his.’

Honey swung between being insulted and proud. She went with proud; there was little point in being insulted by the truth. She followed Mimi out, calling back to Lucille that she’d be five minutes.

Lucille looked up sharply. ‘Honey, dear,’ she called out as Mimi left the shop. Honey turned back, and Lucille zipped her lips together with her thumb and forefinger then shrugged apologetically.

Honey shook her head. ‘This can’t go on, Lucille,’ she hissed, as Lucille walked towards her and shooed her out the door.