Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
The silver car with tinted windows pulling in to idle on the other side of the street exactly six and a half minutes after his message had to be Simon. But what if it wasn’t?
Posh car company was him all over. But it could be drug dealers.
It could be anyone. What if I got in the back and it was an airport transfer?
I’d end up at Terminal Five, and some poor family would write to the Daily Mail about taxi fraud and their ruined Magaluf all-inclusive.
And I’d have to fork out to get back again.
Looking-not-looking, I squinted at the rear windows, trying to make out who was inside. The suited-up driver stared at a fixed point in the road directly in front of the car.
My phone buzzed.
Simon
Stand there much longer and you’ll get done for soliciting.
What a bellend.
The rear window hummed down and he poked his head out, already laughing.
“How much for a Happy Ending?”
I scowled like a gnarly old tom cat. He didn’t need me confirming I’d give him anything he wanted. “Pretty sure that’s sexual harassment, mate.”
Simon blanked me, like I knew he would. Experience told me the harsh puddle of orange-toned light from the streetlamp cast too many shadows for him to follow my lips across the distance. I restrained myself by dropping into British Sign Language instead of flipping him off.
“Do you have to be a cock about everything?”
His smile split wide in all its breathtaking glory as I signed the dick in question like it had flopped right out into the air between us.
He cleared his throat. “Oh come on, I’m not the one who tossed you out onto the streets barely dressed.”
Nine times out of ten, when we were one-on-one, Simon spoke instead of signed.
His BSL was a bit pants to be honest, so fair enough.
I didn’t mind a bit of back and forth, but this was cruel.
Even when he spoke in a bored, drawled monotone, throwing out polite words like orders instead of requests, Simon’s slightly imprecise vowels kicked my pulse up a gear.
I did not need him talking about me lacking clothing.
“What?” Wrinkling my face up, the half shaped word stilled on my lips as I wagged a finger side to side.
And Simon tilted his head. The weight of his warm-dark gaze stilled on my hip where the tail ends of my shirt flapped free, refusing to line up, like half of it had shrunk in the wash.
“Shit.” I hadn’t even got dressed in the dark.
Stalking across the road, full on flashing him as I fixed it, I fumbled the so-many-more-than-one button I’d missed.
Hopefully he didn’t see me blush. I had nothing he wanted, anyway.
Simon did not cross professional boundaries.
Not with me. Even though I wanted to taste his stubble and suck love-bites down his neck like a rabid teenager with a vampire obsession.
Simon was immaculate, as always. Something expensive and subtle wafted over me as I buckled up in the back seat.
Citrus and wood and all three kings, barely there against the sweet, clean humanness of him.
Shower gel maybe? Lingering dampness in the moss of his dark hair conjured steamed up glass and water droplets beading down the line of his back.
Just one of twelve billion fantasies I was Not Supposed To Have.
“Honestly, Ben, you should have taken your time.”
“You’re not funny,” I muttered. Clearing my throat almost banished the hallucination of the taste of his body.
He sighed, wearily. “You’re going to have to repeat that.”
Right. The light was rubbish in the back of the car, too.
As we sped off, his warm tawny skin streaked with shifting shapes of yellow orange from the streetlights lining the road.
Darker shadows tumbled under the brightness of glancing headlights.
The red of brakes strobed over him through the window, all colour and shade and nothing useful unless you counted his devastating gorgeousness.
He could have read my filthy gutter-mind like a tabloid headline if he paid any real attention at all.
Tugging my seatbelt, I twisted back against the door to better face him.
“He thought,” I started, signing a fraction slower because of the shifting shadows, never mind the too much beer, “we were trying for a remote threesome through a camera phone.” A lot of signs he wasn’t going to have stumbled across in the middle of your average business meeting.
“And then you rejected him and assassinated his communication skills. So, taking my time wasn’t really on the table. ”
Simon’s whole body shook with the strength of his laughter. At least he thought it was funny. I scowled.
“Why have you interrupted my Friday night then?
“Saturday morning, technically.”
I didn’t soften. “What do you need?”
“You, mostly.”
Oh, he’d never mean that the way I wanted him to. Because I was a masochist, I zoned in on his lips as he wet them – again. Rats in cages learned faster than me.
Simon grimaced, scanning my face like he was weighing up how much to let me in on. “There’s… a situation. All the major media outlets were sent this”—he handed over his phone, with a thumbnail of a video filling up the screen—“at midnight.”
And then, with a pointed glance to the driver, Simon pulled a world first and voluntarily switched to signing. “It’ll be all over Social by the morning, if it’s not already.”
RICHARD WHITTAKER SHOCK GAY SEX TAPE!
I groaned. For so, so many reasons.
“Isn’t he getting married to the posh bird he knocked up?” I signed back. Was that supposed to be the Shock bit? Surely we were past the point where Gay was.
Simon’s eyebrow lifted. “You mean,” he said, “the Cambridge-educated peer of the realm, and businesswoman of the year he’s starting a family with?” He must not have had the vocab to sign all that.
“Yeah.” I nodded at the same time as signing. “Her.” He knew exactly who I meant.
Phoebe Huntley-Templeton was the fiancée of the over-privileged ex-rugby-player turned model whose muscled flank currently filled half of Simon’s phone screen.
Apparently. His face must have popped up in it somewhere, but from the wall-to-wall undulating muscle, I couldn’t tell him from Adam. Or James. Or Luke.
“So, what,” I signed, piecing it together. “This is a deepfake?”
He knew that sign. It came up a lot in reputational crisis management.
Simon had been media coaching Whittaker for the past eighteen months, to no notable effect as far as I could tell from the endless meetings I’d interpreted. Richard had a consistent history of brand-damaging behaviour, but this was way, way left of his usual position.
“Why would you say that?” Simon’s frown coloured the tone of his signs with confusion.
“His wife’s pregnant.” My hands stretched space in the air in front of my belly for her expanding stomach.
Simon laughed. Very much at me. “Fiancée.” Simon signed it delicately – perching the invisible diamond on the invisible ring like he didn’t quite know what he was supposed to do with it.
Then he shook his head on an eyeroll. “There’s this word…
I believe it’s b-i-s-e-x-u-a-l?” Only he could maintain sarcasm through finger spelling.
Automatically, I echoed the full sign back at him with a double fingered waggle. “Bisexual. But... Richard Whittaker. He’s all…”
Chiselled loomed in my back brain. It skittered right off and hid when Simon’s eyebrow arched up with so much precision it might as well have been a question mark.
“Manly?” I coughed, freezing midway through shaping out the point of the beard Richard did not have in real life.
Effete and full of unicorn sparkles I was not, and yet could be described as very much into participating in Shock Gay Sex, so why was I looking at Richard and thinking he never would be? Hello double standards, my old friend.
“Manly?” Simon’s eyebrow quivered, his fingers drawing to the same point below his chin.
“Shut up. I didn’t mean that, did I?”
The driver braked hard for a red light, summoning a wave of nausea.
Flashbacks to childhood car sickness flickered to life.
I swallowed hard, determined to keep them down along with my guts.
“So, he’s gay now?” The suggestive joystick of a sign felt odd to use in front of Simon when normally it was all business between us.
“None of your business.” He didn’t need a translation for that sign. “Point is, everyone’s scrambling to fact-check, hustling for exclusives before it hits the morning news.”
When it came to PR, after three years working with Simon, I knew what landed when, mattered. Dots joined whether you wanted them to or not. It was better to be the person pointing towards the relevant ones.
“So you want me in the crisis meeting,” I signed, “in case someone tries to steer it in the wrong direction right under your nose?”
“Glad you haven’t totally pickled your brain tonight.” The glow of his smile edged into the silent mouth-shapes he was making as his hands brushed past his face. Far too contagious. As always.
“Fuck off. It’s the weekend.” Monday, I’d revisit my professionalism. Right after I’d sorted out my invoices. And rediscovered my self-esteem. “I’m doing you a favour here, remember? This is my time off.”
Simon curled his lips in on themselves like he was guarding his teeth.
“I do know that.” He leaned in, holding my eye and squeezed my knee for the longest second in the history of the world. “You’re my very favourite human, Ben.”
What a wanker. My idiot heart spasmed with optimism at the Simon-ism, and his casual use of my sign name – Big Ben – all earnest and upright and formal, like he didn’t understand the utter piss-take of being compared to the iconic London landmark clamped to the side of parliament, when you were five-foot-six-and-a-half and northern.
It didn’t mean anything.
Simon appreciated everyone. He brimmed with equal enthusiasm for the media intern who made him tea, right through to whatever minor royal he was trying to steer away from social suicide that particular week. And I wasn’t going to get sucked in.
I shifted my leg out of reach.
Mirroring me, he slumped into the corner of the back seat between the door and the window, flagging my attention with a low wave.
“L-u-k-e’s a bit of a cock.”
Things I would stick a fork in my eye to get out of taking part in. Number one: discussing the bloke I failed to get off with, with the boss who stalked my fantasies. I set my jaw.
“Thought you couldn’t understand a word he said?” My finger jab in his direction might have been slightly confrontational.
Simon rolled his eyes. “His mouth barely moved.” Not one ounce of guilt existed in his smile. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”
So not an answer.
“You had live captions on, didn’t you?” I shook my head, eyes narrowed in disapproval. Sometimes, he was so full of shit. “What, you can’t do that for this meeting too?”
Simon tilted his head. “Are you asking whether I think your nuanced translations”—it took him a bit to choose his signs, merging them together, colouring them in with the pinch of his lips and the glint in his eye—“can be emulated by voice recognition software that struggles with regional British accents, doesn’t always differentiate between speakers, and has no take on tonality? ”
I huffed a reluctant laugh. He deserved all my grumpiness, but he was bang on.
“No,” I signed. “I know you know they can’t.”
“Good.” His grin split wide, warming my skin like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Glad to know I’m irreplaceable.”
Simon scoffed. “Utterly. Always. Couldn’t survive five minutes without you.”
Bloody hell. He didn’t mean it.
And Simon was speaking again. “You do know hitting on someone else when you’ve got a naked man in your bedroom is incredibly shady behaviour unless everyone is fully on board.”
My turn to laugh. It came out thin and tired. I had to bite my lip to remind myself not to switch to voice to match him. “Have you seen yourself standing next to me lately?”
Batting that away on a weary tongue clack, Simon rolled his eyes like dismissal was all it deserved.
Exoticism, he’d told me once, on a similar eye-roll, in reaction to an entire meeting room of lolling tongues back when I started working with him. Obviously, being half Mauritian Creole and over six foot, I’m an absolute animal in bed.
I still had his sparkling wink embedded in my wet dreams.
Alright to be him, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a short-arse with a thick neck, a gym habit, a badly broken nose and a cleft lip scar.
But he didn’t get it. So how did I tell him he made my mind melt out of my ears?
I’d say something daft, and he’d see me as this objectifying wank-stain, and I’d be telling him no it wasn’t like that.
Not for me. I was different. And I’d end up doing something extinction-worthy like saying I didn’t even notice he was Black.
And he’d fire me on the spot and never speak to me again.
I’d deserve it too.
“Will you watch the film? I need you to know what’s going on when we walk in there, or I might as well not have turned up at all.”
Realistically, I was never going to say no.