She thought about him still. Last night she caught herself searching through her ‘deleted emails’ box to find his name. She searched by surname then first name, tried by subject heading and finally guessed at date – but she couldn’t find anything. Nothing left of him on the system. Nothing but a cancelled agenda item that she didn’t bother to open.
It was from a Thursday in December when she’d last had contact with him. They were supposed to meet up in London for a drink after she’d finished with her meetings. He’d cancelled on her, late. That had made her cross and faintly needy all at the same time. There’d been no contact since then from either side, but this hadn’t stopped her looking for a whiff of him, even if it was just a scrap of email banter. That was good, surely. It’s not like she’d fallen in love with him, for that would have been absurd. Yet here was this feeling, this chink of light left inside.
He’d started it. He’d pursued. He’d made the moves and been so committed to them that even she’d had to finally concede that he might be into her. Blind, she was. She had been side-swiped by his intensity and now missed the attention.
She’d never known anything like it. He was uncompromisingly filthy. He’d be in contact 24/7 and the sms’s alone made her lose any ability to work a normal day. Instead, she’d arrive at the office and have to go straight to the bathroom to complete an sms session that had already been going on since 7am. He couldn’t stop and that had thrilled her. His honesty sometimes embarrassed her. Watersports and amputees – he’d talk about anything. “I’ve never opened up to anyone like I have to you”, he’d said. She’d believed him at the time. Believed that he believed himself at the moment he was saying it. Looking back, she wasn’t so sure. He was capable of darkness and she hadn’t known what to feel about that. He was also 51. And married.
“He compartmentalises his life,” Petra had said at the beginning, as nail-bitingly avid for details as she had been to offer them. “To him, he’s doing nothing wrong because he hasn’t fucked you. Yet. He really thinks he’s soulmates with you. You stand up to him and make him think. He’ll adore the challenge. You are also polar opposites with his wife.”
His wife. What was he playing at and did she know? Petra suspected that she did, that he had mild indiscretions here and there, which didn’t rock the marital loveboat so long as it was out of town and a one-off. “But you’re under his skin, in his brain and that must be driving him crazy. He doesn’t know what to do with you. He calls you at 3am, for Christ’s sake, and wonders ‘if the kettle’s on’!”
She’d become self-protective and backed off. She knew what she was like: any closer and she wouldn’t have been able to stop scratching until she’d drawn blood. So she’d called him on it, on all the sms’s and the emails and the 3am calls, on the hourly contact and declarations of soul-mateyness.
“You’re a player”, she’d told him. “First sign of trouble and you’ll be declaring innocence. ‘Not me guv’, you’ll say. ‘She jumped my bones; there was nothing I could do about it’. Don’t play with me unless you really mean to play with me.” He hadn’t liked that. He’d been brought up short and made to consider his actions.
She hadn’t seen him coming and for this she felt incredibly naïve. She didn’t realise what a rose-tinted spectacle wearer she really was. There had been things she’d less than admired about him, things that had embarrassed her, his flaws attached. It hadn’t changed the fact, though, that she’d wanted to play his games.