He didn’t have to check which way she went when she left the pub; he knew. Of course he did. She was heading home, just as he was. He jogged lightly until he caught up with her. She turned her head to look at him, but kept moving.
‘Are you stalking me, Nick?’
Nick. He could hear the extra ‘k’ when she said it. He didn’t know how, but he could.
‘No, I’m not stalking you. I just happen to be walking this way as well, and as long as we’re walking the same route, we may as well walk together. While I’m a big fan of girl power, or whatever everyone calls it these days, you’re still safer if you’re not on your own.’
He waited for the rant. Erica had given him one every time he’d tried to do something like this for her, accusing him of treating her like a weak, second-class citizen, but Claire didn’t say anything but, ‘Well, I’m sure I’d be fine on my own, but that’s very chivalrous of you.’ They carried on walking.
‘Doris came from that era, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘When men could hold a door open for a woman and still keep their heads on their shoulders.’
‘She did,’ Claire said, glancing across at him as they walked. ‘But she wasn’t old-fashioned at all. In her life and in her films, she was a front-runner for women’s liberation. She was the wage earner in her family, and she often played intelligent, successful career women, not delicate flowers. Either that or tomboys who could shoot or fix a car or throw a baseball better than the men she was with. You’ve got to love her for that.’
‘You have,’ he said, smiling, even though Claire was looking deadly serious.
She sighed and her pace slowed a little. ‘It was after watching On Moonlight Bay with my gran that I realised it didn’t matter if I was a bit of a tomboy, that I could still be that one day and then dress up in frills and bows the next, and still be all girl.’
He looked at how steady her stride was in her stilettos, the easy sway of her hips in her fitted skirt, and shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine you as a tomboy.’
She stopped giving him the cool treatment and grinned at him. ‘Well, I was. I used to like to dig for worms and make mud pies with the boys that lived next door. At least I did until …’ She trailed off, the smile disappearing as quickly as it had arrived.
‘Until what?’
She shrugged his question off. ‘Let’s just say my father preferred I didn’t mix with them, that I was a little more ladylike. Besides, they were older than me and it got to the stage they didn’t want a little shadow with pigtails following them around.’
He let out a low chuckle. ‘Well, if you ever want to wear pigtails and follow me around, I promise I won’t complain one bit.’
That earned him a sharp look. Damn. He’d forgotten about the make-believe woman of his dreams. Better back-pedal, change the conversation to something else. Doris, perhaps. He seemed to pretty safe with that subject, mostly because then Claire was doing the talking and he wasn’t opening his big fat mouth.
‘So was Doris a tomboy too?’
Claire’s expression softened, but he noticed the way she changed her direction a little so they weren’t walking so close together. She paused as they crossed the road and headed down a side street. ‘You’re going this way as well?’
He nodded. ‘Take this route home every time I go to The Glass Bottom Boat.’
She frowned at his vague answer, but kept walking. ‘Yes, Doris was a bit of a tomboy. Like most women, there was more than one side to her. She liked dressing up in lovely clothes in her films, but she often didn’t once she got home, preferring to relax and just be natural. She didn’t really do the whole “Hollywood” thing, going to parties and premieres all the time.’
‘Really? Wasn’t she a really big star?’
Claire looked up at him, just briefly, then down at her feet as she walked. ‘She was. Number one female star in Hollywood for quite a few years during the fifties and sixties, but those things didn’t really matter to her. They were just numbers, she said, and once you’d got to number one, there was only one direction you could go.’
He nodded. ‘Wise words.’
Claire sighed. ‘This is my road,’ she said, as they turned another corner.
Dominic looked up and saw with surprise that it was. The walk home had been far too short. ‘Okay,’ he replied slowly, trying to work out what he was going to do when they got to the garden gate. Another thing he hadn’t thought through. If he walked on, it was another lie, but if he didn’t …
Claire didn’t seem to notice the battle he was having with himself. She just kept on walking. ‘All she really wanted was a home, a normal life, a happy family,’ she said wistfully.
There was sadness in her voice that Dominic told himself he should pay heed to.
‘I hope her life turned out the way she wanted it to in the end,’ she added. ‘Sometimes when you’re young you make decisions and you don’t realise how they’re going to come back and bite you on the butt. Especially when it comes to love.’ She looked at him suddenly, flushed with embarrassment under the street light. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘didn’t mean to say that. You don’t need to hear me wittering on about life and love, the universe and … Doris.’
‘Claire?’ He reached out and touched her arm.
She jumped away as if she’d been stung. ‘What?’ she said, more than a bit crossly.
‘Which house is yours?’ he asked softly, even though he knew. They were there. Home. But Claire hadn’t noticed and was just about to walk past the gate.
‘Oh,’ she said, and stopped dead. ‘This one.’ Then she laughed. ‘That crept up on me!’ She turned to look further down the road. ‘Which way are you?’
He swallowed. ‘Not too far away,’ he replied, making sure he didn’t look in any particular direction.
‘What a coincidence.’
He nodded.
‘Anyway …’ she said and glanced towards their shared front door. ‘I’d better get inside. Thanks for walking me back. It was very gentlemanly of you.’
Dominic felt something warm flare in his chest. Even though he knew he wasn’t being gentlemanly at all, he hadn’t realised how nice it was to hear someone say those words, to at least think it wasn’t beyond possibility that he could be like that. ‘No problem,’ he said, aiming for ‘casual’ but landing on ‘slightly gruff’.
She looked at him and he could see her chest rise and fall, just once, in the glow from the street light across the road. Her voice was low and quiet when she spoke. ‘Goodnight, Nick.’
The words hung in the air between them, slowing time, but then she turned and started to walk up the path.
‘Claire!’ he found himself calling out after her.
She looked round, her eyes wide.
He’d told himself he’d just say goodnight, but he heard himself saying, ‘I think I can make a stab at those questions of yours now.’
She walked the few steps back down the path towards him. ‘You can?’
He nodded.
‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Good.’
‘In answer to question one: I think she likes the outdoors, but she probably isn’t yearning to bungee jump on holiday.’
He stopped and thought for a moment. ‘Although I could be wrong – she’s constantly surprising me.’
Even though it was dark and the yellow light from the street lamp across the road fell across Claire’s features, she looked a little pale. He decided to carry on while the words were still filling his head.
‘I think she enjoys the occasional evening out and has a great time doing so, but she’s not a party animal who’s at a club every night. Sometimes she just likes her own company and a good book.’
She nodded. ‘Good. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to know. It rules out extreme sports and isolated destinations where there’s no nightlife at all, or hedonistic hotspots where there’s nothing but.’
Ah. That made sense. He was starting to see where she’d been going with those questions now.
‘I’m answering them in the wrong order, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘That was question two.’
She shook her head lightly. ‘It doesn’t matter. Carry on, if you like.’
He took another lungful of oxygen. He didn’t know where this stuff was coming from but he was going to ride the wave while it lasted. ‘I’d say she likes a bit of pampering – like most women – but a spa isn’t her thing. She’d much rather be somewhere relaxed and natural, so a summer day in the countryside might be just up her street.’
‘Noted,’ Claire said, looking very serious, concentrating as if she was committing everything he said to memory.
‘And as for fashion …’ He laughed and shrugged, and even Claire cracked a smile. ‘I wouldn’t know a designer label if it came up and bit me on the nose, not unless it was of the outdoor gear kind of variety – and I don’t think she owns a set of mountain climbing clothes – but she always looks nice, as if she’s taken care about her appearance, but that doesn’t mean she’s snobby about brands and such like either. I think she’s somewhere in the middle. I think she probably owns a few nice things, but she chose them because she liked them, because they suited her. She’s got her own style, and she doesn’t wear something just because someone else tells her it’s fashion.’
Claire frowned.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Wasn’t that enough detail?’
She sighed. ‘No. It was plenty of detail. I was just hoping your answer would help me decide between luxury hotel versus something boutique and quirky. From your answer, it sounds as if she’s not very easy to pigeonhole that way.’
He looked very hard at her. ‘More on the boutique side, I think. Not too quirky, but not too glitzy, either.’
Her brows pinched and she thought hard. ‘Nick? You keep saying “I think” when you talk about her. Don’t you know?’
Ah. He’d inadvertently given himself away a little bit. Those were the sort of things a man in love should know about the woman in his life. His mind quickly flitted to Erica.
Night on the town. Spa. Luxury hotel all the way.
He smiled to himself. There. He wasn’t as hopeless as she’d thought he was. That hadn’t been hard at all, even after all these years.
But that didn’t help him with Claire, did it? He thought for a moment. ‘The old saying’s true, I think. You can’t judge a book by its cover.’
Her eyebrows rose in lieu of a verbal question.
‘For example,’ he continued, ‘I would have never picked you for a Doris fan in a million years, but since you talked about her on the walk home, it actually makes perfect sense.’
‘It does? How?’
Dominic shrugged. That bit he wasn’t so clear about. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘It just does. Anyway … What I’m saying is that people aren’t always what they seem, even when you’ve known them for years.’
She let out a snort of dry laughter. ‘Ain’t that right.’
‘You sound like you have personal experience.’
Claire nodded, her expression rueful. ‘Yep and I have one ex-husband under my belt to prove it.’ She watched his reaction, must have read the surprise on his face. ‘You’re shocked. Why?’
Again, he didn’t know. It seemed he’d got those questions done just in time, because now his flash of insight about Claire seemed to be over. Every time he thought he’d got to know her, she revealed another layer, a new surprise.
He looked at Claire and saw open and warm, loyal and funny. Who wouldn’t want to stay married to her? He’d have bet money on the fact that once she had a ring on her finger, the marriage would have stuck.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. She seemed so together, not like the friends of his who’d gone through divorce at all.
But then he looked at her eyes and had the funniest sensation, as if he was looking in a mirror. There was pain there. Well hidden, but there. And disenchantment. Wariness. Suddenly he understood the strange push-me, pull-me effect she had on people, that drawing them close while keeping them at arm’s length thing.
She was looking up at him, her eyes wide, saying nothing. It would be so easy to step in and kiss her. He could feel his weight shifting to the balls of his feet to do just that, but he rocked back and stepped away. Now was not the right time, not when she thought he was a decent guy who had a girlfriend. He didn’t want to be another disappointing man to add to her list.
‘Goodnight, Claire,’ he said again.
She nodded. ‘Goodnight.’
This time she walked up the path and he didn’t stop her, didn’t call out. She didn’t look back as she slid her key into the lock and opened their shared front door. It closed behind her and he stood there in the darkness, doing nothing but watching where he’d seen the last flash of her dress before she’d disappeared.
Which was stupid, really, as he realised that unless he wanted to be walking the streets of Islington for another hour or two until it was safe to creep into the house after her, that he only had a very small window of opportunity to get to his flat door undetected.
He didn’t know how, but he knew she’d look out the window once she got upstairs to see if he was still standing there. And he really shouldn’t be – for a whole host of reasons.
He’d have to time his race to his flat just right. Too early and she’d still be on the stairs. Too late and she’d see him coming up the path. He had about fifteen seconds at most – the time it took for her to close her front door and walk to the large bay window at the front of the house. And he could probably make it, if he went right about … now.
He dashed for the front door and hid under the small porch while slowly and silently turning his key in the lock. Somehow he knew she’d just entered her flat. Possibly, because since she’d left him he’d been imagining her walking up the stairs, counting each one, in the back of his mind.
As carefully as he could, he pushed the front door open, closed it just as quietly and in a combination of tiptoed creep and sprint made it to his flat door in under two seconds. He fumbled his keys in his hands and his heart began to pound. Suddenly, his fingers seemed like big fat sausages, incapable of doing anything dextrous, but then he found his door key. Moments later, he was inside his flat, breathing heavily, his back against the door.
He shook his head. This was getting stupid. Really stupid. Was all this sneaking around really necessary?
He took a moment to consider that question. Probably not, although he’d convinced himself it was.
They’d got past the surface layer now, past those first impressions.
It was time. Time to tell her. Time to put his neck on the line and see if she could forgive him for being her oafish neighbour and welcome him as the man she was attracted to. She tried to guard it well, but he could tell she was.
He let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair, relaxing even further against the door. The only problem now was how to tell her. Do it wrong and he’d probably lose any chance with her forever, and he really didn’t want that. This was about more than proving a point now. When it all boiled down to it, he just really wanted to see her again.
He chuckled as he pushed himself upright and loped into his living room. This was why he liked to move around. When he stayed put somehow he always managed to get himself into a whole heap of trouble. Now he had to work out how to tell Claire the whole story without confirming every bad thing she’d ever thought about him.
He dropped onto the sofa and picked up the remote. Seriously. His life was starting to sound like one of Doris Day’s rom coms.