Chapter 6 #2
‘You won this! That’s amazing!’ Charlotte’s exclamations are joined by a lot of wows and no ways from the others.
We agree that we’re incredibly lucky and this is an amazing trip, and I can’t quite remember why we didn’t just tell everyone in the first place how we came to be here together but not together.
Maybe because initially things felt pretty awkward between us, and now we’ve got accustomed to being around each other.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re all seated in the steak house, yet again according to a seating plan designed by Maxim. Flavia and I have been placed next to each other again, but we have different opposite neighbours. This time we’re facing Charlotte and her husband, Kris.
‘It’s so great that the two of you are happy to share a room,’ Charlotte gushes over olive and bruschetta nibbles. ‘Imagine if you weren’t. This is the stuff that movies are made of.’
‘Charlotte’s a great matchmaker,’ Kris observes fondly.
I glance sideways at Flavia and see that she’s laughing. Clearly she has no romantic thoughts whatsoever about me, or she’d presumably be feeling a little self-conscious. And clearly I should not have any about her either. I don’t, actually.
‘Has anyone been on a safari before?’ Flavia asks.
I say, ‘Nice but very obvious deflection,’ into her ear as the others all answer her question, and she grins at me.
I smile back, unable to take my eyes off her face.
I love that smile. It’s beautiful, it’s kind of innocent but cheeky, it’s a smile you’d never tire of seeing.
And I have now lost all powers of speech because I’m drowning looking into her soft brown eyes.
Yeah, no, other people do have good smiles and nice eyes. I’ve gone a little mad. I shouldn’t be feeling like this when I look at her.
I make a big effort to snap out of the spell I feel I’ve fallen under, and switch my attention back to Kris, who’s talking about a trip he made to Kenya last year.
There’s no more mention of our room-sharing and actually it’s a very pleasant dinner with interesting people.
At home, I have a very busy life full of work, friends and family.
I rarely nowadays meet and get to know over an extended period a disparate group of people brought together only by having signed up to the same New Year’s holiday, and I’d forgotten how nice (and also at times odd and enlightening) such interactions can be.
For example, during that one meal alone we all get to hear about the two years Kris spent as a professional tennis player, with a top-ever ranking of three hundred and two in the world, which is on the one hand truly amazing but on the other apparently incredibly soul-destroying and means a very difficult life on tour.
We also hear about life as a florist, the inspiration behind someone doing a doctorate on the life of Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone), and conceiving triplets via IVF.
(The triplets are now twenty-seven years old.)
At the beginning of the trip, I really didn’t have any desire whatsoever to get to know any more new people.
It’s hard to believe that we’ve only been here for one day: I’ve completely changed my mind and am actively enjoying myself far more than I expected.
And in many ways that’s due to Flavia having drawn me into the group when I was basically doing my best to remain aloof.
Like our pre-dinner run. I hadn’t been planning to volunteer to join the others, but it was really nice.
‘Wow,’ I say to her as we leave the restaurant after hearing about the highs and lows of bringing up the triplets, ‘I have to be honest, that was a lot more interesting than most of the work dinners I go to. And while I love my friends, they don’t surprise me that often.’
‘Same,’ Flavia agrees. ‘I wasn’t really expecting this. I love this group.’
When we arrive back at the hotel, someone suggests that we round the evening off in the bar, and – over a variety of nightcap choices from whisky through hot chocolate to a frothy yellow advocaat of the kind I vaguely remember my grandmother drinking on Christmas Day when I was little – we begin taking it in turns to ask everyone in the group questions.
‘What’s your fantasy job?’ begins Flavia.
Answers include thriller writer, monkey-house worker, tightrope walker, midwife (from Charlotte who’s about to retrain, having been a paralegal for a long time). When it gets to me, I’m stumped.
‘Going to have to pass,’ I say.
‘Nah-ah.’ Flavia shakes her head. ‘Literally everyone else has come up with something. Is your actual job your fantasy? Is that why you can’t think of anything else?’
I humour her. ‘I do like my job. But obviously it isn’t my fantasy job.’
‘Why obviously?’
‘I’m a lawyer and I work far too hard. That’s no-one’s fantasy, surely.’
‘Okay, so what is your fantasy?’ she asks, like a pre-school teacher being very, very patient with a four-year-old.
‘I think I might be too busy to have one.’ My mind is a genuine blank.
‘That is not good,’ Flavia scolds. She waits for a few seconds longer and then shakes her head. ‘Fine. We’ll move on.’
I feel like I’d better come up with a good answer and tell her later.
I do a lot better on the next question: ‘Where would you like to travel next?’ Luckily I happen to have recently booked a holiday to Iceland, so that’s an easy answer. No-one else says anything particularly remarkable either.
‘These questions are too easy,’ Mike says. ‘I have a better one. How many people have you killed?’
We all produce polite chuckles at his weak joke. Obviously no-one has killed anyone.
Except… ‘Seventeen,’ says Alex, who has been very reserved all day so far.
I walked a little with him earlier, and he was quiet even one on one.
He’s around my age, I’d say, and, in the politest way possible, I’d have to describe him as – on initial meeting at least – just unremarkable in every way.
One of those rare people you’d really struggle to describe physically, for example.
Along with everyone else, I politely chuckle at his mild quip, and I hope he doesn’t feel that we’re patronising him because he’s usually so quiet.
‘I was a sniper in the Serbian army,’ Alex elaborates.
He really, really does not look as though he’s joking.
‘What’s the kill you’re most proud of?’ Mike asks, and Flavia chokes a little next to me.
‘Can’t tell you or I’d have to kill you too,’ Alex says. ‘But let’s leave it at I was very good.’
He does sound deadly serious, and everyone falls silent, just staring at him.
Flavia breaks the silence by saying, ‘That sounds like a very hard job. It makes herding teenagers as a schoolteacher sound easy, ha-ha.’
Everyone else joins in with some awkward ha-has and we move on to another question (what you’d choose for your last ever dinner, which does make some people side-eye Alex a bit, possibly wondering if he would be the cause of their imminent death) and then Flavia asks what everyone’s first car was, an entirely comfortable question, and once we’ve all exclaimed politely over Mike’s story about being given a brown Rolls-Royce by his uncle on his seventeenth birthday, I murmur that it’s late, and others join in, and finally we’re off to bed.
Mike, Flavia and I obviously take the lift up to our floor and then walk along the corridor together, still talking about Mike’s Rolls-Royce.
‘I could wax lyrical about the interior for hours,’ Mike says. That’s definitely true: he’s already been going for at least fifteen minutes. It’s actually very endearing; I’m becoming very fond of him. ‘But I shouldn’t keep you two lovebirds.’
‘Ha-ha,’ says Flavia.
‘Not lovebirds,’ I say.
‘Yeah, right,’ Mike says, suddenly seeming a lot less endearing. ‘Anyway, goodnight. See you at breakfast. Sleep well.’ He does a huge pantomime wink and Flavia and I both wince.
Flavia says, ‘Goodnight, Mike,’ and puts her key card into its slot in our door.
And a few seconds later, the two of us are on the other side of the closed door, inside our suite together.
And suddenly, I don’t know why – maybe Mike’s words had something to do with it, or maybe it’s just that being honest I do still find Flavia very attractive and I’ve just spent a whole evening in her company, albeit in a large group – but standing next to her just inside the room, I find that I’ve lost my ability to speak.
All I can do is think about the curve of her mouth, the way her hair brushes against her neck and how much I would like to brush my finger, my lips there…
She catches me looking at her (gazing, if I’m honest) and responds with a slow smile.
I take a step towards her, because I can’t help myself, but halt when she says, ‘What is your dream job? You must have one? Is it really embarrassing?’
I nearly laugh out loud at my own presumptuousness. Just because she wanted to kiss me, sleep with me, once, a long time ago, doesn’t mean that there’s any reason that she’ll want to ever again. Which is of course a very good thing.
‘Dream job,’ I say, to drag my mind firmly away from her glorious… everything.
Also: why am I finding her glorious? We have absolutely nothing in common.
Physical attraction and having a few amicable conversations are not enough reason to kiss someone when they’re vulnerable, you know them, and having a broken relationship with them would cause tension between your two families, who live almost next door to each other and have been close for decades, and you know that you don’t do relationships, so any kissing, or anything else, would just be a short-term fling.
Which she might be up for, but she also might not, and it’s a tricky thing to discuss in advance of doing anything.
What were we talking about? Dream job.
‘Erm… no, still no inspiration,’ I say.
‘Okay, no, that’s ridiculous.’ Flavia moves over to the uncurtained windows. ‘Wow, the view’s amazing at night too. Look at the city lights sparkling and all the buildings lit up, and the massive shadows of the mountains and the moonlight over the sea.’
I join her. ‘It is indeed stunning.’
She turns to me. ‘Racing driver? Olympian? Stripper?’
‘As my dream job? What? No? Firstly, I am not six. Adults don’t dream of being racing drivers or Olympians, because that ship has sailed. Secondly, stripper? Whose dream job is that?’
‘That isn’t true. That ship is still with us. There are plenty of Olympic disciplines that we could still take up at our age and win golds in at future games. Archery. Curling. Sailing. Bottom person in the two-man luge. And what’s wrong with being a stripper?’
‘Clearly you’re a secret Olympian wannabe,’ I say. ‘Have you done a lot of research into the two-person luge thing? And obviously there’s nothing wrong with being a stripper if you aren’t being exploited and you want to do it, but how many people do want to do it?’
‘Isn’t everyone an Olympian wannabe? And, yes, as it happens, I might have researched the luge thing because they’ve just introduced the women’s two-person luge.
And surely some people with amazing bodies who are also exhibitionists would enjoy being strippers?
’ As she speaks, her eyes travel up and down my body.
When they return to my face, she gives a small gasp and bites her lip, as though she’s been caught out doing something very, very naughty.
I smile, ridiculously pleased. If I’m going to be lusting after her, it feels only right that the compliment should be returned.
On the stripper front: I really wouldn’t mind stripping very slowly for her right now.
However.
She’s lost her father and separated from her husband in the past year and is, one would imagine, quite vulnerable emotionally at this point, and I do wreck all my relationships, plus I really don’t want to make things awkward between our families, so – even if she would like to – it’s a moot point. I’m definitely not going there.
So I say, my voice sounding only slightly odd, ‘I’m going to have to think further about my dream job.
Two-person luge. Stripping. On it.’ I love that she can keep two simultaneous conversation threads going.
I feel like she could have kept talking about both the luge and stripping for hours if my lust hadn’t got in the way.
‘I’ll let you know my conclusion over breakfast. Would you like to use the bathroom first? ’
‘No, you go,’ she says, equally huskily, I can’t help being pleased to note.
Of course. She isn’t going to want to come out of the bathroom in her nightclothes and then lie in bed while I wait here.
I brush my teeth and wash my face quickly and then – much as parading across the room dressed only in the trunks I’m going to sleep in would round off our stripping conversation nicely – I apply extreme maturity and common sense, emerge from the bathroom fully clothed, say a quick goodnight from the opposite of the room, and then go to my own room to get changed.