All Work and No Play (20 page)

‘Not exactly. You did act out one of my most amazing fantasies on the very first night.’

‘That was—uncharacteristic.’

‘Was it?’

Being up here seemed to get rid of her embarrassment, her reticence. It was as if by climbing up high, she’d left behind the rest of the world and it was just her and Jonny safely cradled in the tree.

‘I used to take risks,’ she told him. ‘It was one of the reasons I was so attracted to the creative side of advertising. I could come up with wild ideas, hundreds of them, ones that nobody else could think of, and sometimes they would stick.’

‘Has that changed?’

‘Yes. I’m not sure when, exactly. When I started to get promotions, it seemed to be less about coming up with ideas than coming up with the right idea. The one that would sell. Making a success of it. I’ve got people depending on me now, and it’s harder to go out on a limb.’ She realised the aptness of the metaphor she’d chosen, and laughed again.

‘You were always the most exciting person I knew,’ Jonny said. ‘You were exactly what I thought every girl should be like.’

‘Was,’ she said, quietly, glancing away. ‘I’m not like that any more.’

A dark bird alighted on the surface of the lake, spreading ripples. She was too far to see what it was, but she watched it paddle, search, and dive.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ asked Jonny.

‘Of course.’

‘You’ve made one of my fantasies come true lately. I wonder if you would mind helping me with another.’

She looked away from the ripples the bird left on the
empty lake and back at Jonny’s face. He was serious, but there was still a hint of a gentle smile.

No fear up here, safe from falling. ‘All right,’ she said.

‘I remember sitting up in a tree with you that last time, when nobody knew where we were. You were just like this, leaning against the trunk and laughing. I had the biggest crush on you, Jane. And I couldn’t ask you, but all I wanted to do was to kiss you.’ He didn’t move closer, but the intensity in his eyes was enough to make her feel as if he had. ‘Could I kiss you now?’

‘Yes,’ she said, on a thrill of anticipation. Not even thinking, not even remembering that it was what she’d nearly killed herself to avoid the night before, until she’d agreed.

Jonny swung himself around so he was straddling the branch, too, facing her. He boosted himself along the branch, nearer to her, until their knees touched and their shoes nudged against each other. Then he leaned forward, and she leaned forward at the same time, and their lips met.

She’d kissed Jonny enough so that she should know all about it by now. But while this was familiar, it was new. They touched at their knees and their toes and their mouths, where Jonny was soft and so tender that she had to hold onto the tree branch to keep herself from falling off.

A gentle kiss. A slow kiss. An innocent kiss, in this lofty world with only the two of them. A kiss that ended and then started again, as sweetly as before. A kiss that felt like a first kiss. The fantasy first kiss that she was sharing with Jonny, after all these years.

When he parted from her, she saw her own smile reflected on his face. ‘I’m glad we had these days together,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

He didn’t drop her gaze. ‘I have this awful suspicion that if I look at my watch I’m going to see that it’s time for us to head back so you can get your train.’

Even though her head was nicely spinning, she caught the significance of his pronoun choice. ‘You’re not coming back to London?’

‘The shoot is over, and I have a book to write.’

She bit her lip, tasted Jonny, and understood why their kiss, sweet as it had been, had held a trace of sadness. ‘Back to the real world.’ The risk of the next three words was easier to take. ‘I’ll miss you.’

He nodded. ‘There’s always the computer.’

‘Of course.’ She took a last breath of Jonny and this special air, and swung both her legs over the same side of the branch. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and began to climb back down to the real world.

Jane piled her hair up on top of her head and stuck a pencil through it to keep it in place. She glanced at the clock on the wall; it was nearly ten o’clock.

Surely you don’t work every weekend, Jane?

She smiled at the memory of Jonny’s voice this past afternoon. ‘I’m working now because you made me play earlier,’ she said aloud. Not to him, because he wasn’t here. He was up in his comfortable flat in Keswick, no doubt working too. Or maybe he was at the hotel with Naomi. Whatever he was doing, he was incommunicado, because she had her laptop open on her desk, and he hadn’t replied yet to her email telling him she’d made it home safely. His name wasn’t up on the chat program, either.

But she had reminders of him everywhere, even if she couldn’t see him online. Her desk was covered with glossy photographs, mock-ups of the Franco cologne campaign she’d picked up from Pearce Grey on her way from Euston, and every single one of them had him in it.

She picked up one, a black-and-white shot, and ran her finger over the smooth, cold surface.

Jonny’s personality was what made these photographs so captivating—not his body, not his face. It was his pure Jonny-ness.

And none of this was helping her prepare her presentation to Giovanni Franco tomorrow afternoon. Jane exhaled
sharply and stood, stretching. Hours on a train and then hours bent over these mock-ups had started an ache in her shoulders and lower back.

Then again, she was used to bending over work. Her back was probably aching because of the unaccustomed exercise of hauling herself up a big old tree.

Like working late on Sunday evening, the ache was worth it. Though it seemed to be joined to an empty ache in her stomach and chest, an ache that hadn’t been caused by any exercise.

She walked around her flat, rotating her shoulders and rubbing her neck. She could do with a hot bubble bath and a glass of wine, but that would send her straight to sleep, and she had a good couple of hours’ work in front of her still. In the days before Gary had left, she would refocus her mind and refresh her body by lying down on the couch with a bunch of pillows behind her back and watching exactly half an hour of mindless television.

But, of course, Gary had taken both the couch and the television.

‘This is ridiculous,’ she said, and she strode right back to her desk. Pulling her laptop towards her with one hand, she used the other to type in the website of an online furniture shop.

Half an hour later she was entering her credit card details and specifying a delivery date for her new, overstuffed,
soft burgundy velvet sofa and armchair. It didn’t match the decoration in the flat, but she figured it was about time she redecorated, anyway. In a way to suit her taste, not anybody else’s.

It felt so good that she was just starting to navigate to an electronics site to order a television when her laptop chimed to let her know that someone had just come online.

She was hit by a little hiccup of joy when she saw that it was Jonny.

Working?

The message came up from him right away.

Spending money, actually.

As she typed back she didn’t bother to suppress the huge smile that spread across her face.

I wonder if when Licklider came up with the idea of a Galactic Network of computers he ever dreamed that in forty years people would be using the invention to shop and share idle chit-chat with their friends.

Jane laughed aloud.

Jonny, you are such a geek.

Hey, I’m not the one working on a Sunday night.

She picked up the photo of Jonny again and propped it up on her desk.

What are you doing?

I’m wondering something.

What?

It occurred to me that over the past few days, I’ve told you two of my fantasies. But you haven’t told me any of yours.

Jane’s fingers had been poised over her keyboard, waiting to give a snappy answer to whatever teasing question he came up with. She froze in position, her eyes locked to the screen.

What are your fantasies, Jane?

Jane swallowed. She looked from her screen to the photograph of Jonny, so like how he was in real life. But
not really him, no more than the words on the screen were really him. He was three hundred miles away in Keswick.

My fantasies are all about you.

Tell me.

She leaned her head back on her chair, breathing in deeply from her nose and biting her lip. He had been honest with her, and he was so far away that surely this was safe.

I want to make love with you, Jonny.

I want you to. How?

Slowly. I want to see and touch all of you. I want to feel and remember every moment. I want to be naked with you.

She felt herself blushing furiously. But she also felt a furious heat in her body that had nothing to do with embarrassment. It was arousal, and it was freedom.

What else?

Jane closed her eyes and imagined herself with Jonny. The surroundings didn’t matter, as long as it was private,
as long as they could create that little bubble of the two of them. She imagined standing close to him, taking off his glasses, unfastening each item of his clothing in turn and removing it while he did the same to her. Their eyes on each other. She imagined him stroking aside her hair and whispering in her ear, hot words that made her body shiver in real life. ‘What else?’

I want to tell you what I want.

She barely opened her eyes to look at the screen as she typed. She continued:

I want you to ask me and for me to tell you, every step of the way.

She shut her eyes again. Imagined speaking the words out loud. Letting them live in the air around them. Letting him hear her, letting him know her. The thought was so tempting that she shivered again.

A chime from her laptop. She brought herself out of her delicious dream to the incredible thing that was really happening in front of her.

Tell me more.

She pulled her laptop closer, as if it were pulling Jonny to her. But it wasn’t. The laptop was only plastic and
wires, the photographs were only paper. And this was only bytes and bits, an electric conversation in reality as well as in effect.

Do you know what my fantasy really is, though, Jonny? It’s being able to tell you this in person. Face to face, to risk it and see your reactions and live it together.

She hit ‘send’ and she stared at her computer. So many times she had felt as if it was a portal of communication, a line between her and Jonny. Now it felt like a barrier. Another wall she was hiding behind.

There was a knock at her door.

Distracted, aroused, frustrated, she got up and went to her door. She looked through the peephole and there was Jonny, his blue eyes looking steadily at her through his glasses.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
ANE
gasped and took a step back in surprise. Then she opened the door.

Jonny stood in her hallway, tall and beautiful, wearing the same jeans and sweatshirt he’d been wearing during their walk. His laptop was under his arm.

‘It was too empty in my flat without you,’ he said, and his voice was even richer than she’d been imagining it speaking his words on the screen. ‘It was too empty in the whole Lake District without you. So I drove down to London.’

‘You’ve been—’

‘Outside your door, hacked into your wireless internet connection. Yes.’

She couldn’t quite say anything. Seconds ago she’d
been wishing he were right here. And now he was. No need for a computer. All the physical walls down.

‘Do you want me to come in?’ he asked gently.

She nodded, and then realised that, if she was going to do what she really wanted to do, nodding wasn’t a very good start. ‘Yes, I want you to come in,’ she said.

He stepped in and shut the door behind him, putting his laptop down on the table by the door. They stood looking at each other.

‘Tell me what you want to do,’ said Jonny.

She reached forward and took off his glasses. The rims were warm from him. She laid them down on the table beside his computer, and then she put her hands on his chest. His heart was beating hard and fast.

‘I want you to come into the bathroom with me,’ she said. It came out without her having planned it, but the minute she said it she knew why she had.

Because she hadn’t wanted to take that bubble bath with a glass of wine. She’d wanted to take it with Jonny.

She took his hand and led him across the living room, through her bedroom, and into the
en suite
bathroom. ‘I want to take a bath with you,’ she said.

‘I’d like that, too.’

Turning on the taps, testing the water temperature, pouring foam bath into the tub—none of that had seemed sexy to Jane before. Now, with Jonny watching her every
move, close enough so she could hear him breathing, it seemed just about the sexiest thing she’d ever done.

She straightened and turned to Jonny. ‘I want to undress you, and I want you to undress me, too. One piece of clothing at a time. It was fast, last time, and I want it to be slow.’

‘Your wish is my command,’ he said, smiling. ‘Who gets to start?’

‘I do.’ She unzipped his sweatshirt and pushed it off his shoulders and down his arms, moulding her hands to every muscle she encountered as the piece of clothing dropped to the floor. He wore a plain white T-shirt underneath, fitted enough to emphasise his slim build and strong shoulders, loose enough that she had to imagine what was underneath.

‘My turn?’ he asked, and she nodded. He unbuttoned the cardigan she’d put on to work in, and, like her, pushed it slowly from her shoulders and let it fall onto the tiled floor.

‘T-shirt,’ she said, and she took hold of its hem. He lifted his arms to help her pull it over his head. She watched, inch by inch, as she exposed his chest. All that flawless skin, the ribs and muscle, the trail of hair on his stomach and the discs of his nipples.