A Touch of Spice (7 page)

Jackie filed it away along with all the other things she wasn’t brave enough to do. “Say things ended a little awkwardly. Maybe you didn’t say what you should have—”

“Oh, I
always
say what I should,” Clara boasted. “Besides, it’s a one night stand. As long as you didn’t give a performance review at the end and bullet point ways to improve, you’re fine. Just, you know…”

“What?”

“Bite the bullet,” she encouraged. Platitudes about seizing the day might have followed if Clara hadn’t recalled just at that moment that Jackie was already spoken for. “You know what I don’t understand? If you and Marten love each other so much,” she said, sighing a little, “and you’ve been together six years—”

“On and off,” Jackie threw in, for the sake of clarity.

Clara didn’t let that tiny detail upset her argument. “But firmly
on
for the last three, right? Then, well… Why aren’t you married?”

The answer, Jackie already knew, was going to seem very contrived. She attacked a carrot stick with her fork, but the assault did nothing to alleviate her lingering discomfort. “It’s never been something either of us wanted.”

“But
hypothetically speaking
,” Clara insisted, “you’re having one-night stands with men you want to see again?” Her insistence was raising Jackie’s hackles.

“Well, it’s not like I’m the only one…” Jackie bit her lip. Too late, the words were out and Clara’s green eyes had already widened a little behind her frameless glasses.

“Wow, you two don’t screw around. Well. You
do
screw around—”

“Clara…”

“Is this, like, an open relationship? Or are you more like on that show—”

“
Clara
.” This time, the sound of her name on Jackie’s lips was enough of a warning. What could Jackie say? Drop it? She had brought up the topic, she had sought the wisdom of a twenty-something-year-old who was only just opening her eyes to the world. Not that Clara didn’t mean well, of course, but she was still so young and there were times talking to her when Jackie felt irrationally, irrepressibly
old
. Most of what Clara found exciting by way of office gossip Jackie had already come to regard as par for the course. It had been a mistake to choose her as a confessor. “Can we just,” Jackie begged, “pretend I didn’t say anything?”

Her appetite was already gone and she slammed down the plastic lid on what was left of her pasta salad with a defiant click.

Studious attempts to avoid Clara’s gaze were all brought to an end when the younger woman said “Okay” very softly, like she’d finally clued in to the magnitude of what she wasn’t being told. An avid conversationalist, Clara couldn’t be totally devoid of discretion or she wouldn’t have got this job.

“For what it’s worth,” she told Jackie on their way up to the office, “you should still call him. You’ll never know otherwise.”

“Know what?” Jackie heard herself ask, unwillingly re-entering the game.

Clara shrugged. Something knowing and sharp was hovering in her smile, but Jackie couldn’t make sense of it. “You’ll know if it really is just a one-time thing.”

Jackie didn’t get the chance to ask what else it could be because they were already parting ways, each bound for different ends of the office floor. She didn’t have an answer to give herself.

Her still-silent phone seemed to be mocking her when she plucked it from her purse. There were no missed calls, no new text messages.

Poor impulse control had once been the bane of Jackie’s existence—it could stand for courage in a pinch. With that in mind, she brought up the new message screen and drafted a quick hello. Pressing send turned out to be a bit of a struggle. Was she cheating? Was she stalking? Her thumb jerked with a spasm, brushing the touch screen.

When Jackie next looked down at the phone, the message had already been dispatched into the ether of electronic communication. She could no more call it back than she could scratch printer ink off a page.

The nitty-gritty of busy work kept her from darting impatient glances at the clock until the end of the day. Clara swung by her desk to offer a ride home and Jackie, having no reason to say no, agreed. “I wanted to apologise,” she said as they eased their way into traffic in Clara’s tiny Renault. She had been a little short with the PA at lunch and that at least merited contrition. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Jackie added, darting a glance at her driver. “I’m not the kind of girl who—”

“It’s never as simple as it sounds,” Clara shot back, smiling a little tightly.

The reprimand reduced Jackie to silence. She was relieved when they finally pulled up to her building and Clara brought the car to a standstill.

“Did he answer? Your hypothetical one-night stand guy?”

“No.” And how crushing it was to discover she’d been hoping he would.

“I guess that’s that, then.”

Jackie made an acquiescing sound, low in her throat. She hastened her steps to the front door, not for fear of the rain that drenched the streets, but in a last ditch attempt to outrun Clara’s parting words. She was right—Tony clearly didn’t want to have further contact with them. And who could blame him, really? Saturday had been a fluke, an experiment. Jackie had successfully set up something Marten never would’ve organised for himself and now the sane thing was to withdraw, to gather her memories like photographs and put them in a box.

Tony wasn’t their friend. He was a guy in a video online who’d happened to put up with her company for a few would-be rendezvous. That he was good in bed she’d already figured out before he’d even taken off his clothes. It was no doubt in the job description. The rest was just—water under the bridge. No harm, no foul.

There were no text messages on her phone, but when she fired up her laptop, Jackie was surprised to find, among all the spam and useless Facebook updates, a singularly important email waiting in her inbox. She recognised the address as Tony’s. When Marten called to ask what he should pick up for dinner, she was rereading the email for a third time. “You sound strange,” he noted astutely. “Everything okay?”

“What? Yeah.” She was only listening with half an ear. “Totally. Listen, how would you like to go out tonight?”

“I’m a little tired,” Marten temporised.

Jackie didn’t give him a chance to bolster a negative with further evidence. “Tony is asking us out on a date,” she blurted out instead, scrolling down to that part of the email with the odd sensation of butterflies fluttering in her belly.

“He is?” Vocal denials morphed into strange wonderment. Marten hadn’t been expecting this any more than she had.

“Yeah. Tonight.”

“Should we go?”

Jackie hesitated. “If you want.” Her cheeks felt hot, a pleasant tremor coursing through her body to pool in her nether regions. She couldn’t help remembering the worshipful glide of Tony’s tongue between her folds, or the heat in his eyes when he’d looked up at her—or, better yet, the grounding weight of him when he had eased his hard cock into her.
So much for boxing up those memories
.

“Do you want to?” Marten pressed her. “Because if you want—”

“Yes?”

“I think we should go.” His voice was small on the other end of the line, like he wasn’t entirely sure he was giving the right answer. Was that really the case or was Jackie just trying to bolster her own desire to see Tony again by hoping it was shared?

“Marten, if you don’t want to…”

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him,” her boyfriend blurted out, voice hushed although he was probably alone in the car, with no one to overhear his confession.

“Oh, thank God,” Jackie breathed out, relieved, “me too.” Her shoulders sagged against the backrest of the couch. “I didn’t want to say anything.”

“Me neither. Because I think about you, too,” Marten insisted.

“I know.”

“And I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Jackie assured him. “So…yes to dinner tonight?”

They agreed to meet Tony at the restaurant. Jackie was tasked with typing out the reply even though her fingers were shaking and she kept hitting the wrong keys. By the time Marten came home, she was doing up her hair, trying to look more put together than she had practically every other time she’d met Tony.

“Should we change the sheets?” Marten wondered as he changed his shirt and shoes. He was wearing Calvin Klein. Jackie smiled—the shirt had been her gift to him last Christmas and the dark burgundy really contrasted nicely with his skin. As for the sheets—

“Isn’t it a bit presumptuous?”

“Probably,” Marten agreed, looking sheepish.

They changed them as a precaution, just before leaving the apartment. Tony hadn’t complained the last time he’d been here, if he had even noticed the general, methodical state of disarray all across the apartment, but tonight, for reasons passing understanding, they were apparently trying to make a good impression. Jackie fidgeted with her skirt as she slid into the front seat. Marten had joked about crotch-less tights, she worried that could make her look—well, cheap. Because clearly sleeping with Tony the last time had revealed her upstanding moral character.

“You’re nervous,” Marten remarked, reaching between the seats to grasp her hand. “If you’ve changed your mind, we can just text him to say that something came up…”

“We can’t,” Jackie protested.

“It wouldn’t be very polite, but I’m sure he’d understand—”

“No, I mean we really can’t. He wrote in his email that he hasn’t been able to find his phone since Saturday.”

“Oh.”

Jackie sighed. “Yeah.” They couldn’t back out and, what was more, she wasn’t really convinced she meant to. She couldn’t remember a single date that hadn’t involved some nerves or the fear that she’d be found ridiculous. It was only hindsight that made those past attempts seem so much easier than this one.

That Tony greeted them without fanfare, smile brightening when he saw them approach, only made her feel even more foolish for anticipating the worst. He pecked her cheek and pumped Marten’s hand not just as a friend might do, but almost as if he’d actually been looking forward to seeing them again tonight.

“Jackie tells me you lost your phone,” Marten said as they all sat. “That’s got to be a pain.”

Tony chuckled. “Yeah, it is…but I have a pretty good idea as to where I left it.”

“Where’s that?”

“In your apartment,” Tony said, pursing his lips in a vague attempt to conceal a smile. “I think that when I was getting dressed it might have, uh—” He had to cut himself off as the waiter brought them the menus.

The restaurant he’d chosen was the kind of fancy establishment Jackie always felt a little nervous stepping into. It was one thing to take the girl out of the Midwest, but to take the Midwest out of the girl took a lot more effort. She was getting better at hiding her surprise when she was offered a wine list clasped between thick leather covers. Tony said he’d let her choose and Marten took that opportunity to say he wouldn’t be drinking since he was driving, which left Jackie with no one to pass the buck to. In the end she settled on an Argentinian vintage she seemed to remember having tried before. The waiter assured her it would go well with the risotto she’d ordered. Jackie admitted that the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind.

“If you’d like to come back to our place to look for your phone after dinner—” she started telling Tony only to pause when Marten shook his head, grinning. “What?”

“Nothing. Just… You don’t waste any time.”

“Oh…
Oh
! No, wait. I didn’t mean—” Too late—they both laughed at her, tension dissipating right before her very eyes. “I didn’t mean it like
that
,” Jackie complained. She could feel her face growing warm.

“It’s okay,” Tony assured her. “I was going to invite myself anyway.” He helped himself to a glass of water, eyes glinting in the light of the solitary candle on their table. “And you never know how the evening could turn out.” On that, at least, they were all agreed.

Marten’s gaze found Jackie’s, a slight wrinkling at the corners of his eyes telling her he’d picked up on that faint but hopeful sliver of innuendo just as well as she had. More importantly, he actually seemed to be okay with the idea.

Chapter Six

Jackie reached for the small silver tray on which the waiter had deposited their bill.

“What are you doing?” Tony asked.

“Paying?”

“It’s my treat. I asked you out—”

“And you paid for lunch, remember?” Jackie certainly did and with the boundaries of their friendship already in doubt she didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings. She snagged the tray and doled out the cash with a flourish, tip included. “Now we’re free to go. Unless you’ve changed your mind…?”

Tony
was
pouting a little bit, but not enough that he looked genuinely put off his game. Something told her it would take a lot more than a disagreement over who should pay for dinner to ruin his good mood. She was banking on it. “I really do need that phone,” he said, shoulders slumping comically.

“I bet,” Marten echoed, clamping a hand to Tony’s arm as they made their way out of the restaurant. “And we’d hate to be a nuisance.”

The line between flirtation and innuendo was a hard one to toe. Jackie wondered on which side they found themselves, but then she saw Tony tipping ever so slightly into Marten’s side and her misgivings found their answer like arrows piercing a bulls-eye. She took the back seat on the way home, the better to kick off her shoes and stick her feet beneath her for warmth. It didn’t hurt that she had a clear view of Tony and Marten making eyes at each other at every stop light, either. Vague threads from her conversation with Clara came back to haunt her. Why hadn’t she married Marten yet? Was this—watching her boyfriend flirt with another man—not supposed to make her green with envy? Instead she only felt a faint thrill of arousal and her pulse stuttered that much louder against her eardrums when they entered the darkened apartment in a tangle of haphazard limbs and wine-flavoured kisses.