It was too noisy to talk properly at the yacht club and so, after we’d welcomed in the New Year with the flashiest firework display I’d ever seen we ended up sharing a taxi back to his apartment with Mike. Or it could have been Mark. Whichever one it was, he had an eastern European girl draped all over him wearing the shortest skirt and skimpiest top I’d ever seen and a very hard expression on her face. Alex had said she was his girlfriend but she didn’t look very friendly. She looked like she could be Katya’s or Natalia’s cousin.
The taxi ride took forever – Sheikh Zayed Road seemed to have doubled in length while I’d been at the yacht club – but eventually we got to Bur Dubai, where Mike, or Mark got out first at a rather downmarket-looking hotel and quickly disappeared inside with the girl, who I was starting to suspect might not actually be his girlfriend.
We drove round a couple more streets before pulling up outside a huge building called Golden Sands. Alex paid the driver and I clambered out, not having to worry about the stupid topknot, which I’d yanked out in the powder room at the club. It looked like a nice building and I peered up at it, wondering which balcony was his. A smile flickered across my lips as all my bluster about shoving him off one of those sprang into my mind. As if! They still had the death penalty here for that sort of thing.
A security guard greeted Alex with a smile and briefly glanced at me as we walked through the lobby area towards a pair of lifts. We got out on the first floor and Alex led me along the corridor.
As he stopped at what must have been his front door I caught myself smiling again. This time it was at the memory of him carrying me over the threshold, at my insistence, after our honeymoon and banging my head on the door frame.
Alex put his key in the lock and ushered me into the apartment. The door opened on to the lounge – from what I could see by the light that had been left on through a door to the left. He walked me through the door and past a dark kitchen. The light was coming from the bedroom, where the unmade bed and mess of clothes strewn about took me back to the first time I ever went back to Alex’s place in Camden. His room back then had had the look of a student pad tenanted by someone doing a PhD in medium budget designer squalor. The only difference here was that the designer shirts looked high end.
‘Na katsoume sto balkoni – let’s sit on the balcony.’ Alex indicated the sliding glass door on the other side of the bed. ‘I’ll bring some wine,’ he added, leaving me to go and get it.
I’d rather have had a coffee, I’d already sunk far more wine and fizz than I was used to tonight. It occurred to me though that the options would be limited – sandy Greek coffee you could stand a spoon in, or syrupy frappe with sickly condensed milk. In my absence there wouldn’t be any decaf, or even any fresh milk in Alex’s kitchen. So more wine it was.
I fiddled with the window catch and went out onto the balcony. It was long and narrow – just room for a small bistro table with a chair on either side which you would have to squeeze past to walk further along. I supposed it ran the whole length of the apartment. Instead of the road, it overlooked a quad with a swimming pool in the middle and what looked like a nice garden around it. I looked forward to seeing it in a couple of hours when the sun came up. If I was still here then.
‘Katse – sit,’ Alex invited me, as he put a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses on the table. Of course, he preferred red wine so he wouldn’t have any white in, but that was fine. He poured the wine. ‘Stin yia mas! – Cheers! Here’s to us.’ He clinked his glass against mine and downed about half of it in one mouthful. I took a sip of mine. It tasted dry on my tongue – I wouldn’t be able to drink much on top of all the Prosecco I’d had at the yacht club, or I’d be fit for nothing in the morning. Putting his glass down on the table he rested his hand close to mine and ran his fingertip along my wrist. Goose pimples shot up my arm – it must have gotten cooler than I realised.
‘How long have you had this place?’ I asked him, thinking my brain should be sending my arm a message to move and wondering why it wasn’t.
‘Since the beginning of December. I was stuck in a hotel apartment before that. It was pretty grim – you’d have hated it.’ He turned those big, puppy dog eyes on me and stroked my wrist again. ‘You really would have.’
Possibly, but I wouldn’t have hated this place, I thought, but didn’t say. There went the goose pimples again – I should have brought my pashmina out. ‘Big pool.’ I breathed, nodding down towards it. ‘Do you get time to use it much?’
‘Yeah,’ his fingers started tracing their way up the inside of my arm. ’Most Friday and Saturday mornings I’ll go do a few laps before it gets too warm. Some evenings when I get home too, if I haven’t gone for a drink with the boys after work.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got in to a nice routine.’ I took what was meant to be another sip but turned in to a gulp of my wine just for something to do with my hands. He moved closer. He looked like he was about to kiss me. That so wasn’t what I’d come here for. And yet …
His free hand found my thigh and started stroking it. Half my brain was thinking Mm … yes please. The other half was trying to protest but couldn’t quite remember why and my body was siding with the first half. Then his lips met mine, my brain shut down completely and my body took over.