Chapter 3
Sarah
London
“Excuse me, but what's going on?”
They both reacted nearly instantly, Amy lurching away from Sarah mid-climax, Sarah rolling off to the side, but Sarah knew right away that they were busted.
She recognised James from the screensaver on Amy’s phone and, as her mind refocused from what her and Amy had just been doing, she realised that it couldn’t plausibly have been anyone else…
this was Amy and James’s flat after all.
Perhaps unsurprisingly James barely paid any attention to Sarah, his focus entirely on Amy who was now kneeling on the bed, still naked, looking at him with an unfathomable expression.
Amy was out of breath from her interrupted climax and her body still showed the signs, the flushed and sweaty upper chest and neck, the slight shudder that ran through her making her close her eyes momentarily, the slightly wild, unfocused look in her eyes.
Oh my God she looks hot right now, Sarah thought, before stopping that line of thinking in its tracks.
This was a situation that could turn bad, and quickly.
While her instinct was to get out of there as quickly as she could, even more important was making certain that Amy was safe first. She was sure that James was a complete gentleman but the sight of his girlfriend naked, being pleasured by another woman, well…
you never know how people will react to something like that.
"You're not supposed to be here," came out of Amy's mouth, and Sarah could see that Amy regretted her choice of words the moment she said it. Amy was flustered and Sarah knew that Amy needed to keep calm, but there was nothing that Sarah could do to tell her that.
"Clearly," came James' reply. "I think we need to talk."
Sarah suddenly became aware of her own nudity but there was nothing she could do in the short term.
She had no clothes anywhere to hand, they were all spread across the living room wherever Amy had discarded them earlier, other than her boots in the doorway which weren’t much use on their own.
The only cover was on the bed… and climbing under the covers would be just about the most passive-aggressive thing she could do in the circumstances.
So instead she just sat up, using her hands to protect her modesty as best she could, praying that there would be a way to get dressed soon.
James and Amy stared at each other for a few moments longer, something unspoken passing between them, and then James stalked out of the room.
Sarah watched Amy pull on the first clothes that came to hand and start to hurry after James.
“My clothes?” Sarah whispered, as loudly as she dared.
Amy stopped and looked at Sarah in surprise, as if she’d forgotten that Sarah was even there. “Of course, wait here,” she replied eventually. She left the room, closing the bedroom door behind her.
Sarah lay back on the bed, her head spinning.
This was not what she’d expected from what had been intended as lunch with a friend…
not in the slightest. She sighed and forced the self-analysis out of her mind.
Introspection can wait. Right now, check Amy is ok and then get very quickly out of the way.
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 popped up 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 out somewhere.
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.