Thrill Seeker (28 page)

I hoped Den and I could thrash some of this out tonight. He’d sounded contrite in his text but, given how erratic his behaviour had been to date, it was probably wise not to set too much store by that. And if we couldn’t agree on a way forward, well, I would renew my search for a sexually dominant guy who played well with others.

Heavy footsteps in the stairwell snagged my attention. Was that him? If so, good timing, Dr Jackson. It would be useful if we had the roof terrace to ourselves so we could skirt
the need to keep our voices low. The footsteps ascended. My heart beat faster than it ought. I tried to appear casual, not overly keen to greet him. Much as I wanted to gawp at the entrance to the stairwell like an eager puppy awaiting its master’s return, I gazed out across town, playing it cool.

From the corner of my eye I saw a man. A bigger, bulkier man than Den. I turned as he approached, a burly figure in a suit, collar askew, his dark, wavy hair flopping over his forehead. He set his pint down on an empty table and strode towards me, arms held open, a faint, regretful smile on his lips.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Somewhere far away, a firework exploded.

‘Hen,’ he said. ‘My God. It’s been too fucking long.’

There was a hotel, once. He was on call in another town, mid-week, standing in for a sick colleague. The night was likely to be quiet, till the pubs shut at least. Would I join him?

Hell, yes. I’d swipe the little toiletries and enjoy not having to tidy up in the morning. Shortly before midnight, Baxter got called out to the police station. He was needed to give solicitor’s advice to someone who’d been brought in ‘for being a pisshead’, as Baxter put it. In the past, I’d heard him on the phone advising regular clients, the ones constantly getting banged up for the night. ‘Just hush your fucking mouth, Jonesy! “No comment”, remember?’ He’d once described his job as being a ‘friend to the great unwashed’, adding ‘because some fucker’s got to be’.

We were still awake, talking on the bed, naked and post-coital. I was drinking wine but Baxter was sober since, technically, he was working. He needed to shower before heading out so we continued our conversation in the poky hotel bathroom, even though he’d told the station he’d be there in ten. Baxter had a tendency to overpromise.

Still naked, I sat on the lid of the toilet, glass of red in hand,
while next to me, Baxter showered in a corner cubicle with two Perspex walls. Steam fogged the sides, condensation and droplets of water cutting a track through the mists. Behind the screens, Baxter soaped himself, rubbing vigorously under his pits and between his legs. Steam veiled him, suds and water sliding down his powerful, hairy body. His voice billowed out of the top of the unit, rising above the hum of the extractor fan and pattering water.

He was talking animatedly about a film he’d seen some years previously, while expounding a theory romance was dying. ‘People don’t want to know who you are,’ he said. ‘They want to ken what you do for a living. As if that’ll tell you a fucking thing. Where’s the spark, the risk? Where’s the chemistry?’ As he spoke, he periodically rubbed the fog from the side of the shower cubicle so he could see me, making brief, eager eye contact while he babbled away. ‘And relationships? Love? Gone too quick. Reduced to the need for a mortgage, a family, a fortnight in the sun. Your freedom’s fucked, people, fucked. You fold into each other till you can hardly tell yourself from herself and the magic’s dead as stone.’ His fingers rubbed at the misted Perspex. Baxter’s face emerged, peering through the frame of a dripping cloud, hair plastered to his head. Back to the soap, talking in the shower as if he were singing with no one to hear him. ‘Then you start to hate, and you don’t know if what you hate is something in her, in yourself, or in the monster the two of you have fashioned. Anyway, in this film I saw …’

I couldn’t follow him. His words seemed to be more a stringing together of half-formed thoughts than a coherent argument. I remember I was watching rather than listening. I found the sight of him amusing. He looked as if he were trapped in a glass cage, waving at me from afar.

Later, after we split, I revisited that moment so many times. In my mind, the scene became a metaphor of the distance between us, a barrier I hadn’t noticed.

He
was
trapped, or so he thought. And, as the poem goes, not waving but drowning.

When Baxter walked across Sonny’s rooftop terrace, his breath condensing in the dark, I was undone, demolished by his tender smile and craggy, shambolic beauty.

He’d lost a little weight but other than that, everything about him was shockingly familiar. Too familiar. He must be a replicant or a dead man reanimated because this couldn’t be him. Baxter Logan was a memory, not an actual living person. I couldn’t believe he was real. Not here, now, on a roof terrace in November. Yet he was so solid, so immediately vital. His face hadn’t changed a jot, ruggedly handsome in a desk-job kind of way, nose a little pudgy, brown eyes gleaming under dark, shaggy brows. He moved with the same hefty grace he’d always done; a robust mass of a man, comfortable in his own skin.

Our past flooded my present. As he strode towards me, I was half-expecting him to whip off his tie, shuck off his jacket and tell me his dick was hurting to get inside me.

He neared my table, slowing and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. He tried to smile fully but his pain was evident. ‘So we’re no doing hugs, then?’ he said. ‘OK, I can go with that.’

I stood, wanting to bar him from my space and prevent him from joining me at my table. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I glanced anxiously past his shoulder to the stairwell, praying Den wouldn’t turn up yet.

Baxter frowned, opening his mouth but saying nothing.
Behind him, the icy white glow of fairy lanterns bled into the night.

‘You have to leave,’ I hissed. ‘Or I do. This is seriously not a good time.’ I stooped to grab my bag.

Baxter stepped forward and snatched my wrists. He pinned my arms against the air, trapping me with a light clasp, an old, familiar move of ours. I smelled his skin, a catch on the night I wouldn’t have noticed unless I’d recognised it. Him. The oils of his skin blended with a hint of faded aftershave; memories of a place where over and over I’d yielded. My bag slid to the crook of my elbow, swinging clumsily between us.

He gazed down with something akin to angry disbelief, a reflection of how I must have been looking at him.

‘But you agreed.’ His grip squeezed harder on my wrists.

I stared at him. I agreed? How so? The blood left my head as the penny dropped. The text. The unknown number. My assumption the message had come from Den. I’d even added the name to my contacts list. I felt queasy, all my expectations going haywire. I recalled his sign off text: ‘
Love you xx’

As if Den would send anything like that. As if. Jeez, I was an idiot.

‘You were expecting someone else, weren’t you?’ The fingers around my wrists loosened a fraction.

I nodded, lightheaded.

‘Someone who loves you.’ Baxter’s voice rose to a crack.

The patio light clicked off, darkening our surroundings and causing an instant chill. Our breath misted in the space between us, mingling like spectral kisses.

I swallowed hard, trying to read those brown eyes, now glimmering with hard tears. ‘No,’ I said, quiet but firm. ‘There’s no love.’

We became self-conscious in the same moment, glancing
sheepishly at our stance. Baxter released his hold on my wrists as I withdrew. He dusted his cheek, raked back his hair, his movements fast and brittle. I hooked my bag onto my shoulder and rubbed my wrists as if to erase his fingerprints. We stood inches apart, saying nothing. I reached back and tugged the cord on the patio heater.

At length, in a hoarse voice, Baxter said, ‘I’ve missed you. Missed you so badly, heh –’ He couldn’t manage the final word, ‘hen’. He glanced aside, pressing his lips together as if fighting back tears.

I shrugged, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder. ‘Missed you too.’ I attempted breeziness but managed only to sound petulant and defensive.

‘Can we talk?’ he asked. ‘Will you stay?’ He reached out to brush my fingertips.

I shrugged again, not knowing what to do.

‘I know I acted like a cunt,’ Baxter went on, ‘and you don’t owe me a thing. And I’m not here to ask anything of you. But I’d like us to talk. If you’ll give me that.’

I said nothing, mulling over his request, still wildly confused. I wasn’t prepared for this. I was psyched up for a different conversation with a very different person.

Baxter stayed silent, awaiting my answer. I drew a deep breath, about to speak. But Baxter’s rotten at waiting and he cut in, saying, ‘I still want to fuck the lights out of you, you know?’

I laughed, despite myself.

Baxter stepped close and seized my upper arms. ‘And you ken why?’ he said. His eyes were wild, his frown pitching his thick brows together. He gave my body a tiny shake. ‘Because I know I never will. I know I can’t.’ He spoke through clenched teeth, saliva slicking his lips, and oh God, the smell of him,
the smell of him where I used to kiss his neck, the smell of skin and a worn, laundered collar, so familiar I almost felt the rasp of stubble on my lips, tasted the peat-rich Scotch on his breath. His face was close, blocking out everything, his expression angry, his hair awry. ‘You have a light, Nats,’ he said. ‘You don’t see it but you have a light. Soon as I met you, I saw it. Something in you. Something bright and burning.’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not me.’ I made a feeble effort to step back. ‘If you saw something, it’s only because you lit it.’

His hold tightened on my arms, fingers pinching through the fur of my jacket.

‘Every day since we split,’ he began. ‘My – ’ His voice splintered and he drew a long composing breath. I heard the air shiver as he inhaled. He tried again, enunciating his words. ‘My every waking moment … has been haunted by the terrible and beautiful things I want to do to you.’

He looked at me, searching. He was so close. I could see the individual lashes on his lids, the blood vessels in his eyes. I thought I’d never see that again, never see individual pieces of him, having instead just a fading memory of his face and a few fossilising photographs.

‘I want to wreak havoc on your body,’ he whispered. ‘I want you to let me, Nats. Oh God, I want you to let me.’

Now it was my turn to press my lips together. I blinked rapidly, shaking my head. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to tell him he shouldn’t have confessed to such thoughts. But I couldn’t say the words.

We gazed at each other, on the brink of knowing a new thing, of being changed one way or the other. I wondered about the dividing line between safety and danger, between happiness and pain. Was there a line or did one thing merge
into another? Here, now, the risks were enormous and the stakes were my heart. What to do?

Impossible lines; invisible until you’ve crossed them. Impossible decisions.

I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. My body sagged. Then, impossibly, my wine glass was on its side, rolling towards the table edge. Rioja poured like spilled blood through the wooden slats of the table, splashing onto stone. Glass shattered. And I was flat on my back, blinking at a star-spangled sky, at hair and skin as Baxter pinned me to the table, his hand surging between my thighs, his lips hot and wet as he tried his darkest to kiss my lights out.

During our relationship, Baxter’s Blackberry was practically an extension of his body. He couldn’t take a bath without placing the device on the side. He rarely clocked off, maintaining he needed to keep on top of emails or he’d face a deluge on returning to work. I used to joke I was a Blackberry widow. Sometimes, I openly wished we had more quality time together. I didn’t complain too much though since he claimed to wish for the same.

And he did important work. He wasn’t slogging his guts out to earn shedloads of money. If status and wealth were his motivations, I’d have been less sympathetic. But I cut him some slack because he had a strong moral code. He believed in the right of those without money to have access to legal representation so everyone, whoever they were, was innocent until proven guilty.

Baxter was one of the good guys. He had principles. And he’d exploited those principles to mask his deceit, forcing me to re-evaluate who he was. He used to make out he was permanently busy, the unpredictable pressures of work
limiting his free time. But, as I discovered, it wasn’t simply the job making demands on him; it was the responsibility of having a hidden wife. Or hidden to me, at least. My very own Mr Rochester. Except Mrs Logan, as far as I knew, wasn’t barking mad, although being wed to Baxter, you could understand if she were hopping mad.

Debra Logan. Baxter had not only betrayed her and me but himself and what he claimed to represent.

I’d stumbled upon his secret when he’d left mine one morning without his Nokia, the piece of technology that ranked a close second to his work Blackberry. I wasn’t aware of his phone until it blared with a text message. I was in bed, still dozing. In my sleep-addled state, I understood Baxter had left his phone behind and the message was to inform me of that. Don’t ask why but that made sense at the time. So I’d lazily picked up the phone and checked the screen. The message was from Debra.

Debra, the ex-wife who’d returned to Scotland; the woman he didn’t like to talk about much. Odd for her to be texting so early in the day. He’d told me they had little to do with each other now, just occasional practicalities.

I opened the text, too perplexed to consider the rightness of doing so. The message said,
‘The boiler is broken and u r never here.’

Was she visiting? He’d never said. Maybe she was in town for a few days, seeing friends and staying at her old home. He hadn’t mentioned it because her visit wasn’t significant. She was sleeping in the spare room. Or, no, she was in Scotland and she meant her life was domestically difficult now they’d separated. She didn’t expect him to be there; it was just a strangely phrased wish he were around to help.