A Very Personal Trainer (6 page)

"Okay," I said, sitting down—
wince
—beside him. "I followed you to the office. Is it so bad that I want to know 52

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more about you? You never answer any questions and I...like you. I'm interested in you."

"These relationships can't get personal," he muttered.

"Why not? If you don't fancy me, that's fair enough but..."

"It's not that," he said, rather savagely, then, noting the fear in my eyes, repeated it more gently. "It's not that."

"What is it then? You don't want to be unprofessional?

You're married?"

"No. I don't have to tell you, so I'm not going to. And perhaps it's best you find another life coach. I'm not sure this is working out."

"Dexter!"

"I wish you well," he mumbled, then he got up abruptly and stalked swiftly off down the towpath, leaving me to call after him and stare in dismay, while the teenage boys whistled and catcalled.

I was not leaving it there. I couldn't leave it there.

* * * *

The next day I called the office, but I got an answerphone the first six times, and a flustered-sounding woman the seventh. She told me that Dexter was taking a few day's leave—if I wanted to book him, I had to leave details. There was no point doing that, so I apologised and told her it was personal and, as a last desperate gambit, asked her for his mobile number or email. Of course, she didn't give it.

The apartment fell into dusty disarray, the gym visits went by the board. I reverted to a diet of convenience food and alcohol while my deadlines danced out of sync and merged in 53

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my head. Nothing was real to me but Dexter, and his whereabouts, and his problem with me. I walked the streets all day, just looking for a glimpse of him that never came. I thought and thought and thought back to everything he'd ever said, everything I'd ever seen, in a mammoth effort to comb my brain for clues. On the fourth day, I remembered seeing him with a Sainsburys bag. There wasn't a Sainsburys near here, but there was one, five miles away, out by the new housing estates. Perhaps he shopped there. Perhaps...but my thoughts were barely seconds old before I had moved to the door, grabbed my handbag and made a mental map of how best to get there.

It was one of those super-hyper-mega-markets, this Sainsburys, with all kinds of extraneous services like a dry cleaners and a travel agent. There were many entrances, but only one exit, which was heartening—I supposed the store detectives wouldn't like it any other way.
Listen to me,
thinking like a detective!
I'd obviously been bitten by the private eye bug.

I spent the afternoon moving from the magazine rack to the photo booth to the change machine, occasionally risking the open space by the trolley park when I thought I was about to be challenged by a bemused employee. Streams of shoppers passed me and I managed to amuse myself, at least for the first hour, by studying human nature as seen in the supermarket—bored children, harassed mothers, chattering old ladies, truanting teens swearing at the store detectives for not having ID when they tried to buy beer. After an hour, though, the repetition of it all started to wear me down. What 54

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was I doing here? What would I do if I saw Dexter anyway?

Rush up and gush, "Oh, fancy seeing you here!" I think not.

But suddenly I was forced to put my plans into focus.

There, at the self-checkout, buying a newspaper and a box of green tea bags, was an unmistakable tall figure, all in black, glasses glinting under the unforgiving glare of the strip lights.

My fingers lost their nerves, and the magazine story I'd been pretending to flick through—'I gave birth on a mountainside with a broken pelvis'—blurred before my eyes. Just as well I didn't want to read it. The magazine fell to the floor, and I left it there, scurrying off to the shelter of the photo booth, praying that Dexter had no plans to renew his passport today.

I saw his feet, shiny polished black brogues, pass by and I gave him half a minute before I darted out from behind the curtain and followed his helpfully high-set head through the crowds on the edge of the carpark, out of the pedestrian exit and into the newly built maze of the housing estate.

The place didn't seem very Dexterous, I thought, flitting after him through identikit streets and squares of faux-Georgian houses and flats. I had thought he would live in one of those warehouse conversions in the East End, or maybe a big glassy tower by the river. This all seemed very suburban and drab, despite the cheery terracotta-and-cream exterior paintwork and the sloping roofs over the front doors and the effortful landscaping.

Dexter rounded a corner and let himself into a tall, narrow building that seemed to be split into about six flats. They didn't look very large—I guessed he lived alone. I saw him, through smoked glass, unlocking a ground floor door. The 55

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ground floor was good. I could lurk around the windows, under the cover of the gathering dusk, maybe take a peek inside, though they all seemed to have blinds drawn against them.

I scurried across a patch of young grass and sat down beneath one of the windows that faced into the square. I thought it was a kitchen window, for no better reason than its proximity to a large waste pipe, which could have meant nothing. I waited for a light to illuminate some of the grass, but when it did, it was at the side of the house and I had to creep round. There was a tiny crack between the window frame and the blind—if I was very, very careful, I could just fit my eye in that space and take a look...yes. He wasn't in the room. It looked like a bedroom. I could see fitted wardrobe doors and a small section of neatly tucked dark bed linen. There might have been a paisley pattern on the duvet cover, but it was hard to tell because the bulb wasn't very strong, sixty watt at most, and...

I screamed.

A pair of hands caught me around the waist and I was swivelled round to face the middle button of Dexter's shirt—

black, for a change—before daring to lift my eyes to what I presumed would be a face of fury.

"Lara," he hissed. "What is going on?"

Without waiting for a reply, he dragged me through the open door of the block and then into his flat. Even though I was shaking and scared and fighting a massive urge to kick myself to death, I noticed that his flat was very, very tidy and 56

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clean, shortly before I was flung onto a pale grey leather sofa and encouraged to explain myself.

"I followed you," I managed to say, my voice all flutey and shrill.

"Why?"

"Because I like you...I...can't let you...I miss you."

"It's only been four days."

"You don't want to see me again and I'm..." I looked away, over to a computer desk and a pot plant. "Gutted."

Dexter wouldn't sit down. I wished he would. The way he loomed, stiff-backed and straight-necked, was so very unnerving.

"You'll have to go," he said, though it seemed to take him a long time to formulate the sentence—grounds for hope?

"I don't want to go."

"Look, there are websites that can hook you up with other people who like spanking..."

"I don't want other people. I want you."

"No, you don't."

"Don't tell me what I want!" I bawled, suddenly demented with anger. "I might be rubbish at making lists but I know when I've got the hots for someone!"

He removed his spectacles, as if the force of my crazed shouting had blown them off his face, and stared. If I burst into tears, I thought, would that make things worse?

Probably. Too late now, though.

"Oh God. Emotion," he muttered, but then the sofa tilted me sideways, into him, as he sat down beside me and placed 57

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an awkward arm around my shoulder. "Lara, shhh. Control yourself."

"I don't want to control myself! I want you to control me!"

"Listen!" he ordered, moving my chin in his direction with such strong, sure fingers that my leaky eyes couldn't escape him. "I can't give you a reason, but it's a really bad idea..."

There was a buzz from the intercom and Dexter sighed and went over to answer it. I died a thousand deaths.
I bet it's his
girlfriend! Oh my life! How am I going to endure this?

Instead, over the crackle, I heard a gruff male voice.

"Mr Reilly?"

"Yes, I'm here, I'm fine. It's no problem, you don't have to come in."

"We do have to. Come on. We had reports of a female trying to look into your windows. We have to check it out."

With a mighty sigh, Dexter pushed the button and waited, flat against the wall, staring at me with what might be animosity. Whatever it was, it had certainly set my stomach off into a riot of cramps.

Two police officers entered the room, looking around for Dexter, then, on locating him, looking me up and down.
Oh
my God, I'm a suspect
!

"Is everything all right here?" the older man asked.

"Fine. This is Lara. She's a client. An ex-client, I should say."

"We were told she was looking into your windows."

"It's okay. She just wanted to see if I was in. It's a social call."

"You're sure about that?"

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"You can go. Honestly." Dexter assumed an 'all-lads-together' tone, winking at the officers, and said, "We just had some
business
to sort out...if you catch my drift."

The officers chuckled complicitly. "Fine. Sorry to interrupt.

Good evening."

They left and I waited an age for some kind of explanation for the very odd atmosphere their visit had left. This wasn't an ordinary follow-up of a possible crime report, not by any stretch. Dexter had seemed to know the men, for one thing, and they obviously knew him.

"I...should go," I said eventually, when it seemed that no explanation was on offer. "I don't know what all that was about, and I'm sorry...sorry for everything. Sorry I cared."

My voice cracked and I stumbled blindly towards the door, putting an arm out in front of me in my haste to get away, but Dexter moved to block my exit.

"You've nothing to be sorry about," he said flatly. "Nothing at all."

"You think I'm some kind of stalker."

"You are some kind of stalker," he pointed out, with the hint of a smile. "Thank you for stalking me. I appreciate it."

"Don't laugh at me!"

He put out a hand, cupped my cheek, stroked it with his thumb. I wanted to curl up into a ball and hide inside him, away from whatever outside-world stuff had skewed our chances of happiness together.

"Are you telling me what to do?" he whispered. "You shouldn't do that, you know."

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"Are you going to let me go home?" I demanded, but he swallowed the last word with a sudden swoop of a kiss.

The hackles rose on the back of my neck and my skin crawled with fearful arousal. My legs buckled and he supported me with an arm behind my back, never breaking the kiss even as he swept around, switching our positions so that it was me pinned to the wall. He released my back and grabbed a wrist, lifting it over my head and holding it tightly against the cool plaster while his tongue pushed through my lips and I fell, down and deep, into a place from which there could be no return.

"Do you want this?" he asked, breaking off, keeping my neck tilted back and up, by the force of his forehead against mine.

"I want you."

"I come with strings attached, Lara. And the strings will be attached to you."

"You can tie me up. I want that."

"You think you do."

"I do."

"We'll see, shall we? This way."

He steered me through the flat, behind me, his hands on my shoulders, walking me out of the living room, across a hallway and through the door to his bedroom. It was exactly as I'd imagined it...plain, neat, immaculately clean, almost bare of personal traces, like a diagram of a space rather than its physical equivalent.

"It's so long since I did this," he muttered, almost to himself, putting his fingers up behind my neck and pushing 60

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them into the soft flesh so that I gasped. His touch was so firm, so sure, as if his fingertips had absorbed my predilections by contact with my skin.

"Are you sure?" I sighed. "You seem to be in pretty good practice to me."

A thumb took possession of the hollow at the base of my skull, applying a less gentle pressure.

"Shall we lay down a ground rule, Lara?" he said, into my ear. "You speak when you're spoken to. If you think you can manage that, say 'Yes, Sir.'"

"Yes, Sir," I breathed, hardly able to stand now, leaning back against his chest, transported slap bang into the middle of a fantasy with no memory of how I got there.

"Good." He let his lips linger on my jaw line, then drift down to my neck. "Unbutton your dress, please."

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Chapter Four

* * * *

I was wearing a sand-coloured shirt dress with a plaited leather belt. My hands were clumsy and it took me a while, but I managed to free each button from its slit. Before I had time to start unbuckling the belt, Dexter took hold of the loosened halves of the dress and pulled them aside, over my breasts, then pushed the sleeves down until he was able to pull the garment out of the belt, leaving me in my shoes and underwear with the woven leather cinched uselessly around my waist.

"I think we can use this," he said, unbuckling it, then bringing my wrists around to rest in the small of my back while he wrapped the soft leather around and around, eschewing the buckle and using a rough knot to finally secure them. "Yes," he said approvingly, stepping away from my swaying body and circling it, his chin cradled in a contemplative hand. "That's the effect I wanted. Lara, bound and half naked, ready for use. Are you quite happy there?"