Amy interrupted Sarah’s thoughts by returning with her clothes. Sarah pulled them on as quickly as she could, knowing that Amy would want her gone fast too, but when she was dressed, she stopped to ask in a whisper, “Are you going to be ok?"
"I think so," Amy whispered back. To Sarah’s eyes she looked worried, understandably. "I mean... he won't be nasty to me if that's what you mean but... I don't know if me and him will be ok."
Sarah wanted nothing more than to reassure Amy, but for myriad obvious reasons knew she mustn’t. All she did was hold out what was intended as a comforting hand. "If you need anything, you can call me, ok?"
Amy took it and gave a brief squeeze before letting go. "Thanks."
Sarah smiled as sympathetically as she could, and then Amy showed her to the door while James stood impassively in the background, watching the two of them. Stood out in the corridor, Sarah turned to say something, say anything, but Amy had turned away and the door shut, leaving Sarah stood outside in silence, alone.
***
Sarah hurried out of Amy’s building but when she got outside, a safe distance away, she turned down a quiet side street, leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the London autumn air.What on earth just happened?
Factually, intellectually, of course she knew. Lunch with Amy had been lunch with a friend… yes, lunch with a friend she’d been sleeping with for a while, admittedly, but it was intended to be platonic, just as it was with any of her female mentees. The deal with all of them was simple: Sarah helped their careers, their professional relationships extended to casual relationships in the bedroom, no strings attached, no emotions, no feelings, and always, always Sarah in charge.
Fuck, Sarah thought,the warning signs were all there. How could I have been so stupid as to ignore them?
Not what James had just walked in on them doing, as intense and passionate and emotionally charged as the sex had been, but before. The night in LA where Amy and Sarah had switched, the conference room in London where Amy had shown what she could really do when she was in charge, and the discovery that for the first time in her life she wanted to be the one giving herself up, surrendering to someone else, rather than the one in charge.
Amy had triggered something deep down in her that she’d not felt for a long time, so long that she hadn’t recognised it, not until it was too late. She’d fallen for Amy, she could see that now, and the lunch had simply been the catalyst for that all to come to the fore… and, she knew, Amy had fallen for her too, despite her boyfriend, despite this woman Luisa that she’d been seeing in LA, despite all of that… she knew viscerally that this went both ways.
Fuck.
She had the deal with her mentees for a reason… put simply, to keep the two parts of her life separate. One part, her husband Hugo and the twins back home in the West Country. The other part, her true self, the expression of her sexuality that she’d been hiding since boarding school and that not even her husband knew of… the her she was deep down inside, the her that she’d suppressed for years because, quite simply, there was no chance she could have got where she had in her career, in her life, as an openly lesbian woman.
Now, she’d risked it all.
And the hardest thing was, she didn’t even know whether she was frustrated or relieved.
Or maybe, in the short term, she was simply confused.
***
A couple of hours later Sarah told herself for the fiftieth time that no, she mustn’t get in touch with Amy to see how she was doing, because it would be an absolutely terrible idea. Nothing would inflame her situation with James more than if a message poppedup on Amy's phone from the very person she'd been caught in bed with that afternoon. Sarah may have been dealing with some strong emotions that day, but she hadn't taken leave of her senses and she knew that whatever she might be going through was nothing compared to what Amy had going on.
Instead she made herself focus on the rest of her weekend which was, at it stood, depressingly empty. Normally she’d be back home with Hugo and the twins, in the converted Georgian rectory in the West Country, leaning into the version of herself she only inhabited at weekends… mother, housewife, sometime gardener. She loved the weekends back home, mainly for the twins but also as a contrast to the rest of her life.
For that very reason, though, she kept her professional life away from it, so on the odd occasion when she had work to do over a weekend she’d stay in her London flat. Usually a sensible decision, but this weekend it had led to that Saturday’s lunch and all that had happened since… Sarah wasn’t entirely sure whether she didn’t wish that she’d gone back home regardless. Life would certainly be simpler if she had.
So… her weekend as it stood consisted of work and a video call with Hugo and the twins once they’d got back from their football training.
That was it, nothing else.
She’d told Amy at lunch that she had something on in the evening but, to be blunt, that had been a white lie when she didn't want to let on that Amy's social life was much more active than her own. Sarah missed those days in her twenties before all of her friends were married and with kids when you could message a few people and guarantee tagging along to a night outsomewhere. Now, of course there were friends she could see at the drop of a hat in an emergency, but the etiquette was to line things up long in advance.
Sarah thought about what to do… because one thing she knew was that she would go insane if she spent the rest of the weekend alone with her thoughts after what had just happened with Amy. She craved control, certainty, something solid and familiar when so much else had suddenly become uncertain and messy. She craved, she realised, one of her mentees, not for the complexity of Amy but for the opposite, the simplicity of another woman who knew exactly what they were and what part they played.
But… the more she thought about it the more problematic it got, because they’d all be busy, twenty-something professionals with social lives and plans for their weekends. Even if they weren’t, it would look desperate for Sarah to summon them at such short notice. Part of her mystique as their mentor and a senior partner at their firm would be burst to realise that the imperious, dominant Sarah was at a loose end for her weekend, and pride meant that she couldn’t bring herself to go down that path.
There was someone else though. Someone who didn’t care about things like that, someone who Sarah hadn’t seen in a little while and who sat outside of her mentoring scheme, separate from all of the hierarchies and the quid pro quo that came with it, someone who saw Sarah sometimes simply because they liked each other.
Camila.
***
Camila was the daughter of a wealthy minor Brazilian aristocrat and client of Sarah's firm who had been desperate for her to build a respectable career for herself rather than going down the path her older brothers had followed of becoming mediocre influencers who got by on their trust funds.
A couple of years before her firm had organised a ski weekend in the Alps for a select group of ultra high net worth individuals, the sort of people with power and influence who could drive significant work their way. To say that the trip had been high end didn’t come close… no expense spared on the hotel, on the skiing, on the entertainment. Three nights for the three partners including Sarah and five clients easily went in to six figures, but it had more than paid off over the two years since in work that had flowed their way.
