Suddenly, the difference between me and Lucy is immense. It’s a chasm. She came here, and she came here often. There are a lot of assignations in her little book, and if she attended them all she must have known how to operate in this environment. You couldn’t come here as a misfit, in ill-fitting clothes.
Though somehow that’s what I have done. I shamble up to the reception desk like an old washerwoman, skirt riding up my thighs, jacket gaping open. These heels are crippling me, and they aren’t half the height of that other woman’s. It’s really no wonder the receptionist looks at me with clear disdain, though I suspect that’s her default expression. Her eyes are the cool, clear blue of an arctic ocean, each framed with the kind of artistic sweep of eyeliner that I can never hope to achieve. And her hair …
I’ve never seen such neat, complicated coils. She’s wearing a snake on her head, only the snake is beautiful and blonde and so much better than me. I’m embarrassed to be in my own body, right at this moment.
‘Yes?’ she asks, and for a long second I can’t think what to say. I’ve forgotten how to speak, in a presence as imperious as hers. She isn’t even trying to be imperious, either. It just comes naturally to her, in the middle of casual conversation.
‘I’m Lucy Talbert,’ I say, but this time the lie stings. She’s quite clearly going to know that I’m not telling the truth, because she’s not just some receptionist. A person like her won’t mistake one guest for another, or fail to pay any attention at all.
I bet she knows everyone who’s ever walked through those doors. I bet she knows the random visitor who only stayed once last June, all the way up to the pretty red-headed girl who used to come once a month. And she knows … she absolutely knows that I am not that girl. My hair isn’t red, for a start.
It’s a dull, dense black.
And I’m biting my lip, where I imagine Lucy didn’t. In this, she was definitely different from me. She must have used that flicker of iron I saw in her sometimes – that confidence that I lacked. She was the one who said to some guy in a bar, ‘Buy us a drink.’ I was simply the one who reaped the benefits.
I can’t pass for her.
And the pressure of trying to is too much for me. Before the woman has said another word I turn to leave, defeat like ashes in my mouth. My head is down; my eyes are on the floor. That flame of sudden jolting curiosity will never be extinguished.
Instead, I make an even greater fool of myself.
There’s a man behind me, and of course I stumble into him as I go to leave. Of course I do. He’s a suited wall, grey and heavy and ominous, and the moment I glance at him I rush to back away. It’s bad enough that I’m surrounded by all of this opulence. I don’t want to smear my poverty and inelegance all over it.
But that’s what I do. I skid on the ice rink, and rather than avoiding him I blunder in closer. My heels shove forward; my body arches back. It’s only his quick reflexes that stop me landing on my ass. He shoots out a hand, so quick I hardly see it coming – and I certainly don’t have time to graciously pass it up.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I imagine myself saying, in this imaginary world where I didn’t actually need his help. In the real one, he grabs my elbow and jerks me back up – but that isn’t the humiliating part. No, no. The humiliating part is how indifferently he does it, as though saving girls from embarrassment is on a level with swatting away a fly. There’s no concern to the gesture, or acknowledgement of me as a person.
He sets me right and then simply keeps on moving towards the desk, oblivious.
Whereas I’m left with the opposite feeling. I’m on the other end of the spectrum from oblivious, whatever that’s called. Extreme noticing, perhaps? Severe and chronic attention-paying? At the very least, my eyes are refusing to move away from this man – this guy who’s barely registering my existence.
I can’t blame my eyes, however. He looks as though he’s just stepped out of a Hugo Boss advert, if Hugo Boss adverts usually featured much burlier, intense-looking men. Instead of the flat, moody look of a model trying too hard, he has an aura of focus, of effortless masculinity. His suit has settled on his body like a second skin, and beneath it you can clearly see all the things you usually wouldn’t.
How broad his chest is, how immense his shoulders are. I’m sure I can make out the heavy slab of one shoulder blade, in a way that should mark him out as a wrestler, or a boxer. It should make his suit seem ill-fitting.
But of course it doesn’t. He’s so at ease he could probably wear a coat of armour and seem comfortable and proper. He just looks at the receptionist, and she goes to retrieve whatever it is he came here for – while I remain, gawping.
I can’t help it. His face, oh, Lord, his face. I haven’t even gotten to that part yet. I’m still stuck on his grey woollen suit and his massive hands – the ones he’s currently easing into leather gloves. I’m almost afraid to analyse anything else, in case it proves too much for me.
And I was right on that score. His face is far, far too much.
Of course he’s handsome, in that Hugo Boss way, but he’s also handsome in a way that’s not. As though he maybe models for some obscure Eastern European equivalent of that scent – Hurgo Bsosch, maybe. It’s there in the heavy-lidded look in his eyes, and the softness of his mouth. He doesn’t have a grim slash, of the kind that seems so popular these days.
He has a sensuous mouth, a decadent mouth, a mouth you want to plunge into and swim around in. If his mouth was sculpted out of chocolate, I’d cram it down my throat like a starving person – hell, it’s possible I’d do that anyway, chocolate or not. He’s just so rich-seeming, and not just in the monetary way.
In the solid, fleshy, real-seeming way. In the big, masculine way.
And yet when he speaks, his voice is so gentle. So unassuming. He has a slight accent, just as I suspected, but I’m not close enough to make out what it is. He doesn’t speak loudly enough for me to make out what it is. He just murmurs a few words as the receptionist hands him his long overcoat, and all I’m left with is a hint of musicality.
It seems quite incongruous to hear such an imposing man speaking in such an unimposing manner. Shouldn’t he be more commanding? How on earth does he pay for suits like that, and go to work at the Hungarian branch of Hugo Boss, if he barely speaks above a whisper?
And then I realise what I’m doing, in a rush of humiliation. I’m actually leaning forward, to hear him better. In fact, I’m practically on tiptoe. And I’ve held my breath again, as though breathing is just some irritating habit, getting in the way of my ability to listen.
He doesn’t have to speak in a commanding way, I realise.
He’s already got your complete and undivided attention, just by being.
I watch the way he writes on a little notecard she gives to him – with a jewel-like fountain pen, naturally. I don’t think he needs it to make his script so neat and fluid, however. I think that’s just the way he is: both precise and effortless.
He has precisely and effortlessly brought me to a standstill. I can’t even move when he turns, abruptly, though I know he’s going to see me. He’ll take in my wide eyes and my gaping mouth, and then he’ll sneer, I know it. He’ll be disgusted.
But somehow it’s worse when he doesn’t seem that way at all. The look he gives me is a punch to the gut, mainly because I can finally see those twelve-past-midnight eyes of his but also because of the weight behind his gaze. He considers me gravely, as though I’m somehow as important as the glossy girls he usually sees. I’m as important as his latest business meeting; I rival the world for his attention, in that one moment.
And then something like a smile hovers around his lips, a second before he moves past me and glides back out of the main doors. Strange, really, that so slight a thing leaves a burn mark in my brain.