Chapter 8 The Lift
The Lift
The lights flashed on and off and then stayed on, with an overbright intensity that caused their eyelids to shutter down against it.
The lift juddered up and down as if someone were shaking it and then it slowly and smoothly began to rise.
Jack got to his feet and held out his hand to assist Tam up from the floor.
She was going to ignore the gesture, but this suit was not conducive to a wide range of movement.
He pulled her up easily and just as she got to her feet, the lift bounced and she found herself thrown into his chest. His right hand was still holding her left, his left had come around her to steady her, and to an outsider, it might appear as if they were about to dance.
‘You all right there, Tam?’ asked Jack. Close up and personal, she could smell his cologne, and though she couldn’t put a name to it, it made the receptors in her brain sigh.
‘If I let you go, you won’t fall to the ground, will you?’
Tam wasn’t so sure about that. He was holding her both firmly and carefully and she really couldn’t remember the last time she had been held in someone’s arms like that. Not even Harris’s.
Sex had never been a driving force in their relationship, even if she would have quite liked it to be.
It usually happened, like an established habit, when she stayed over at his flat, and that was just once a week, on Saturday nights.
Harris presently resided in a minimalist flat whereas Tam lived in a small mews house in a select part of town, which she would be really sorry to let go of.
She’d bought it eight years ago, a place for a budding future executive, except her personality had spilled over the walls in the form of bright bold paint.
Harris said it gave him a migraine to be in, he couldn’t do with all her cheerful clutter and the tasteless colour scheme and she’d never sell it as it was, so over the last couple of years she’d redecorated throughout with sensible neutrals and with it killed much of that essence that spoke of home.
Still, Harris preferred they stay at his more stylish, spacious gaff, so every weekend she went over there.
They didn’t really do that much together through the week as they were both too busy working, and Harris had a lot of studying to do around his banking exams, but they’d have a nice dinner on Saturday nights, then maybe some sex when they went to bed.
He had learned which of her buttons to press and pressed the same buttons every time.
She couldn’t have it all. But as Jack was holding her to him, her body was having traitorous reactions that it should only have for her fiancé, and it perturbed her.
‘Thank you, I’m fine,’ said Tam, stepping away from him, though her whole being still registered the ghost of his hold and she really didn’t know why.
Residue of panic, she reasoned, her senses confused.
She should get a grip. She’d need all the dignity she could muster for what was about to come to her in the boardroom.
Yesterday, she’d tried not to be upset about today, but she had ended up overflowing to Harris as he drove her from her parents’ house after lunch.
He’d comforted her, of course, said that maybe it was a good thing.
Maybe she was ripe for a change. Something a little less intensive, less .
. . demanding. Maybe they realised she was out of her depth.
And she hadn’t said so, but she’d been tempted to ask if she should just give up working altogether and have lots of sets of twins like his mother obviously wanted.
If she had, he might have said that was the sort of immature talk that only proved she wasn’t fit to be at the helm of a leading supermarket, and he would have been right.
So she’d stamped down hard on the rising tears and cried into her pillow later instead.
He was wrong; she wasn’t out of her depth, she had been swimming around like Michael Phelps, an expert, breathing those depths in as if her lungs were made for them.
The lift cleared floor fifteen. In mere minutes now she’d have to sit there wearing her best wind-smile while she was given a load of guff about how valuable she had been to the company and that they all wished her well.
Limp handshakes, limp words with really the same amount of softness behind them as the stiff leather of her shoes.
How could she be expected to sit through that?
As the lift rose, so did a spiral of annoyance within her, making its exit in Jack ‘Pizza’ Cesaroni’s direction.
Seventeen. They had finally landed and Tam felt sick.
‘Do you really need me to be at this meeting? Do I really need to be witness to my own execution in front of that sanctimonious bunch of old farts?’
From the look on his face, she knew she’d shocked him. Good. Maybe it might be enlightening for him to see that people were not pawns to be knocked off the chess table as inconsequential pieces. They all had the potential to be queens.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he asked, as the lift doors began to slide open, slowly, like newborn kittens’ eyes opening for the first time.
‘I really would prefer to be spared the ignominy of being labelled’ – What’s that patronising word he used? Ah yes, that’s right – ‘“exceptional”. So exceptional, in fact, that I’m to be thrown on the rubbish—’
Jack raised his hands and attempted to press her words back at her.
‘Miss Remington, I have absolutely no intention of throwing you on a rubbish heap or letting you go to Freshfield or elsewhere. I’d be a fool if I ever considered you not a part of the plans for YorkMart going forward.
I want more people like you, not less. What on earth made you think otherwise? ’
‘But . . . I . . . you . . . said . . . it . . .’ Tam’s mouth opened and closed like a bewildered koi carp’s.
‘I think you may approve of some of my changes. We are absolutely on the same page. Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .’
The doors had fully opened now, and he held out his hand to gesture she leave the lift first.
She was so gobsmacked, the pain in her crushed feet as she stepped out didn’t even register above the shock.