The Things That Make Me Give In (22 page)

But he isn’t anything like her, or like Marcus or Lucinda or Alan or Hayley, so she isn’t able to guess what his secret may be. It isn’t like cheating the expense accounts or having a slight drink problem. There is something distinctly not like other people about him, as though his centre is made out of dark, sordid things. His centre is made out of forbidden fruit, and he’s always looking at people as though he’s wondering if they want to take a bite.

He’s laughing at them, she guesses. He thinks her tweed M&S skirt is ridiculous. His weird shirts with pictures of boobs on them – they make it look as though
he
has boobs! Where in cripes’ name does he
find
these things? – mock the bun she puts her hair in. But then he’s wearing too-tight jeans while everyone else is still mostly in suits – why shouldn’t he laugh? They – herself included – don’t even know how to have a casual weekend away.

She’s sure they’re only playing hide and seek because he’s sitting in the corner, silently mocking their complete lack of coolness.

Not that he’s cool. It’s just that he’s different.

He’s different all over. He isn’t handsome like Alan, slim and arrogantly blond and always looking like someone who attends seminars on how to actualise your inner millionaire. He isn’t handsome like Marcus, square-jawed and square-haired and steely-eyed – though, if he does secretly want to sleep with Marcus, those things are probably the reason why.

And then she squirms inside, and hates him for making her squirm. She doesn’t even know why thoughts of him should have that effect, because unlike every other good-looking man in the office – perhaps every other good-looking man in the entire world – he isn’t handsome in a way a person could explain.

All his features are too big for his face. They’re too big for anyone’s face. His nose is strange and fat and too long all at the same time, and his lips are bigger than a man’s should be, so that he looks both very masculine and uncomfortably feminine. The masculine, she thinks, comes from all the hair. He’s roughly hairy in a way that suggests shaving is never enough. She’s betting he shaves at nine-thirty and is bestubbled by ten.

She doesn’t know why she’s making bets with herself about his shaving habits. Or why she can’t stop looking at his eyebrows, which devour his face. Not in a scruffy way, though,
or a meeting-in-the-middle sort of way. They’re smooth as anything, blacker than pitch. They help him look as though he’s keeping secrets.

They mock her for attributing motivations to them.

She could just kick him. This was supposed to be a nice, normal weekend away – a pass into the land of polite dating and real estate and nannies and beef Wellingtons. Everyone knows that Alan is here and she is here because one and one make nice couples.

But now Gabe is here and staring at her and saying, ‘Where are
you
going to hide?’

And she just feels awkward and displaced. Her cheeks heat when he raises one of those insane eyebrows. His voice curls and curls and winds its way around some place on her – her upper arm, she thinks. Her waist.

It’s a fascinating voice though, so she can’t be blamed for the way it moves from her waist and runs a hand up her spine. Sardonism burrs at the back of his throat but, by the time he’s pushed his words out, they’re gentle, so gentle.

He smiles his small smile at her, but she doesn’t feel comforted. Instead she notes that he’s still wearing the boobie shirt.

She only goes into the barn because, while she’s standing forlornly between the two places, losing at a game she doesn’t even know how to play, it starts to rain. And even though she’s now sure everyone is hiding in the sauna, she chooses the barn.

There’s nothing in the place, however. It’s musty and secretive and abandoned, with stalls that promise probably feral animals rather than hiding friends. She goes to one and stands on tiptoe to look over the rotting door, but her only reward is not being terrified by something or someone.

She imagines Gabe lurking somewhere, ready to spring out at any second. He’s probably up in the hayloft, about to make spooky noises or shout suddenly at her – she even glances up,
expecting just that. But instead she is just alone in a barn that smells like mouldering wood and old hot fur, only shadows and dust motes stirring when she turns.

Scrabble now seems interesting, by comparison, though she can’t say why, or what this rising sense of disappointment is about. Or what it says about her that the disappointment runs away when the sagging barn door opens again and Gabe blunders in, soaking wet.

Immediately her mind goes to a book she read as a girl. She can’t remember the last time she thought about it – it wasn’t a book she was allowed to read, and she spent the rest of her teenage years pretending she hadn’t – but it comes to her vividly now. It makes no sense that it does, but it comes on anyway.

There was a lady of the manor in it, she thinks, and some sort of rough-hewn stable lad. And they had come across one another in a barn, with her all wet from the rain and in some distress. Lots of purple-streaked gasps and declarations and heaving bosoms had followed, she seems to recall, though that doesn’t explain why it is intruding on her thoughts now.

It’s the barn, she thinks. And then with some reluctance: and the rain.

The heroine had been wet from the rain and then the gruff stable lad had said, ‘Here, take my coat.’ But the heroine had been too straitlaced and too proud, too proud by far, and –

And she has always wondered what the book would have been like if the heroine was not proud and straitlaced at all. She supposes it would be a bit like the way Gabe acts now, stripping off his boobie shirt and laughing and then standing there in just a tiny little vest.

She thinks, I should offer him my coat, and then blushes all over at the ridiculous idea. What would he do with her coat? His shoulders are much too big to go inside that little tweed thing. And it’s not as though he’s naked. It’s just that she can now see how hairy he is and how narrow his hips are – snake hips, she thinks absently.

She thinks all of this absently. She is absent from herself, the person who should be in the sauna with Hayley and Marcus and Alan and Lucinda. Of course, everyone would be much more naked then. But somehow that doesn’t seem to be the point.

There’s naked by design, and then there’s naked by accident.

Not that there’s going to be any such accident here, like all her clothes suddenly falling off, or all of his – maybe because lightning struck or the horses attacked them or the plot called for it to happen. The plot of her life isn’t like that. The plot of her life has a lot of focus on Scrabble.

‘It’s raining,’ he says, laughing at himself and other things that she’s sure she doesn’t know about. Somehow he manages to turn the simplest words into mockery.

‘I guessed.’

Scrabble, she thinks. Scrabble.

And then his voice dips and everything is even more upside-down than it was before.

‘I’m gonna get it from you now,’ he says, as though that is the most normal thing in the world to say to someone when trapped in a barn together.

Clearly, the Scrabble thoughts aren’t working. He has even lowered his eyebrows over his suddenly sparking eyes, just to make sure she doesn’t understand whatever odd intentions he has.

‘Get what?’ she asks, and doesn’t feel silly about doing so. He could mean anything. He could have all sorts of mad thoughts rattling around inside that mind of his. He could mean –

‘Your paper,’ he says, as though that was obvious all along. Didn’t she realise that? What on earth could he have meant besides the little bit of paper sticking out of the pocket of her skirt?

She’s pretty sure that he smirks to see her flustered.

‘Are you going to give it up quietly, or are we going to have a fight about it?’

His smirk makes her say, ‘Fight.’ Of course, she doesn’t say it out loud. But she’s sure he gets the picture when he lunges forward to snatch the bit of paper and she kicks him in the shin.

This time he grins with all of his teeth. He does it even as he complains that she doesn’t play fair, and hops around the barn, and tries to get at her from a different angle. She thinks they’re circling each other, though it’s hard to tell when her tweed suit is boiling her alive and closing in on her so treacherously.

She thinks about unbuttoning the coat, but that would mean undressing. As the lady of the manor did. Or as the stable lad did later on, after overcoming all of her obstacles.

I’ll show him an obstacle all right, she thinks, though she is sure she isn’t going to do anything of the kind – until he grabs the bit of paper and suddenly he’s at an advantage. Then it’s war and anything is fair game, so when he laughs and leans back against a post, she does what she has to in order to make sure he will never win.

She lashes him to the post with whatever comes to hand first.

There’s some sort of strap or part of a saddle that does the job very nicely. Of course she doesn’t really intend to tie him, but once the loop of half-rotted leather goes around his wrist, it’s just a matter of pulling it taut and then leaping away.

It doesn’t sink in until he jerks forward and realises he can’t go any further. He looks back at his tied wrist with the plainest shock she’s ever seen on someone’s face, and then back at her with one eyebrow raised high enough to kiss his hairline.

She realises when she sees the wondering look on his face that she – tweedy, cubicle-working, beef Wellington Una – has shocked someone. Someone whom she tied up before he could make her do any shocking things. No more shocking things, she thinks. Cage it. Close it off. Box him in, quick, before he leaks all over the place and something even more mad happens.

There is a brief stifling silence. Giggling is not allowed. He may look as though he’s about to laugh, but she’s sure it’s not permitted. The glittering new eyes he looks at her with hold the laugh back.

‘You play dirty,’ he says. ‘I knew you would.’

‘I win. Give me your bit of paper.’

It’s not half bad, how authoritative her voice comes out. But she’s pretty sure he can hear how breathless she is underneath. She’s betting he can hear her trying to think about Scrabble, too. Scrabble almost never leads to tying someone to a post inside a barn.

‘And if I say no?’

He could get free if he wanted, she’s sure he could. His other hand is free. Why doesn’t he just reach over and unfasten himself? That leather can’t be comfortable around his wrist – she wasn’t gentle. It isn’t difficult to imagine the fat strap sliding against his skin and digging in, little blunt teeth nipping at the soft dip just below where the thumb begins.

He keeps twisting the hand restlessly, and she thinks: don’t do that. That must feel horrible.

‘Then I’ll just . . . come over there and get it.’

He doesn’t say anything to that, but there’s this expression on his face. She thinks – but can’t be
sure,
she can’t be sure at all – that he might be . . . that he could possibly be
leering
at her. Though of course she has no idea what leering looks like. Leering is for people who don’t wear tweed and don’t seem nervous when they’ve accidentally tied someone up.

‘It’s in my pocket,’ he says. He nudges his left hip in her direction, and this time she has no problems admitting that there might be a leer somewhere in that. There’s definitely something in it that makes her heart rate go up. Her insides twist and she hurls all the offended words she can think of at him, in her head.

But none of them makes it to her mouth.

‘Fine. Fine – I’ll just reach in there and get it.’

But she recognises that she’s all bravado and no action. Her M&S-dressed heart is hammering at the thought of what she’s just done – putting her hand in his pocket will just be too much. How is a person supposed to have dinner-party conversation about putting their hand in a leering person’s pocket while he’s tied to a post?

‘Maybe you should tie my other hand, too, before you try.’

That stops her. She snaps her eyes up to his, but they just laser back at her, too bold. The lady of the manor was never this bold, when the stable lad tied her up.

Though of course that’s the wrong way around.
He’s
the guy. And
she’s
the girl. And she finds it incredibly worrying that she has to keep reminding herself of that.

‘No,’ she says, and then, with more of a waver in her already less than firm tone, ‘No.’

He gives her a little faux-sigh and a faux-resigned head shake.

‘Yeah. You’re right. I guess one hand is acceptable but two is a cause for concern. What would Marcus and Hayley and Lucinda and that other guy think, if they knew you tied
both
my hands?’

She doesn’t know what’s making her tremble harder – this bizarre situation or his mockery. He seems to be mocking the idea that she thinks this
is
a bizarre situation, and that only makes it worse. She feels her teeth chattering, and she doesn’t think it’s because the rain is crashing down now and leaking in through the almost open door.

‘They’d think I did what I had to so that I could win.’

‘I guess it’s all about winning, then.’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t think winning’s important.’

He smiles, soft and slow. Cocks a look back at the leather around his wrist pointedly.

‘Winning may be important, but other things can be more fun,’ he says, and then inexplicable irritation gets the better of her and she lurches forward to stuff her hand into his pocket.

Of course, it was a mistake right from the off. For a start, his jeans are far too tight for a person to get their hand properly inside. She isn’t sure how he managed to put the paper there in the first place – pushing her hand in is like trying to cram Play-Doh into a pinhole.

And all the while he leans over her, smiling secretly. He’s just waiting for her to balk, she knows it. He’s waiting for her to be huffy and put out, and tell him he’s a weirdo and not one of them. And then he can snap back and tell her what a conventional little bore she is, what a square, why doesn’t she just go back to the cabin and make beef Wellington.