David looked rather panicked. “I could. There’s no reason why not. Are you having another drink, Ava? Elijah? I think I’d like another beer.”
I walked back to the small office space she’d recently moved into, a place that gave her a little meeting room so there was somewhere she, and her employees, would feel comfortable in meeting new clients.
She’d planned the place before the Jon incident; one of her complaints about him had been that he’d always wanted to meet somewhere quiet or in a bar or for a meal and she didn’t have an alternative, having generally worked from her home, gone to her clients’ homes or used a spare conference room at Callaghan Green occasionally.
We talked as we went, about David and Andrea, about Max’s latest secretary who had walked out yesterday because he refused to take her out for a drink and about the magazine feature Vanessa was organising on the firm, this time focusing on partners other than the Callaghan siblings.
“You’ll be famous,” she said, teasing, as we got to her office. “You’ll get fan mail and ladies underwear sent through the post.”
“I hope not,” I said, following her up the stairs to the first floor where she was situated. “I just want to get my job done in peace. I’ll leave the fan mail to Seph.”
“Is he still getting it?”
“At least a couple of items a week get sent. And there’s the stuff on social media,” I said. Seph had featured in an article last year when Vanessa was rebranding the firm. He was unfortunately very photogenic and knew, somehow, to work the camera. To say he’d milked the attention he’d got would be an understatement.
Ava shook her head. “My brother: the stud. So, what do you think?” She gestured around the main room which had a desk for her to work at with a large screened iMac. There were floating shelves positioned on patterned wallpaper on one wall and at the back of the room were two two-seater leather sofas facing each other, with a refurbished wooden coffee table in between them.
“It’s really good,” I said. “How do you find it?”
“Better,” she said. “You know I still go to visit clients – I have to go into their homes to do my job, but any follow up visits can be done here, you know, if they want to change their mind about fabrics or patterns. I’m having a sign designed for outside too.”
“Your hair’s grown,” I said, the words slipping out of my mouth.
Ava smiled and nodded, grabbing her hair and pulling it over one shoulder. I remembered how it felt wrapped around my fist as I fucked her and then spread across my chest as we slept.
“Hair does that.”
The air in the room felt thick and heavy, as if a storm was about to break out.
“How was your champagne?”
“It was good. And I knew I’d be okay. You were there.”
I nodded. “And it’s unlikely to happen again. And you have systems in place.”
“Yes. I texted Claire to let her know I was having a drink. I said you were there. Her response was what you’d expect.”
“What was that?”
“That you don’t need to drug me to get me in your bed so why was I bothering to tell her,” she said, deadpan, no smile.
I said nothing, just taking a step closer, watching what she was telling me with her body, how her breath changed and how her eyes widened.
“I missed you,” she said. “And I keep missing you more.”
I stopped when I was just over a foot away from her, desperate to take her in my arms and feel her heat on mine.
“I don’t want temporary,” she said. “I don’t think it was temporary before.”
“I don’t want temporary either,” I said. Our voices were low, as if the walls were listening and we wanted to keep these words to us like precious coins that we could only spend once. “I don’t need to rush things either.”
It was the right thing to say, for once. Her shoulders relaxed and the breath she exhaled was long and deep.
“Good. I’m going to need to take things – I don’t know how. This is unfamiliar territory for me.” This time she stepped towards me.
“Let’s just do what we’ve been doing all along and see how it goes. We can do things as quickly or as slowly as you want.”
“What about what you want?” she said, her fingers now resting softly on my stomach, near the buttons of my shirt.
