Chapter 4.

When Jess opened her eyes, she felt a surprising calm.

She was cosy under a duvet and her body was relaxed with a pleasant heaviness from deep sleep. There was an emptiness from exhaustion too. After her acute anxiety last night, she’d reached a threshold and was unable to panic anymore.

The worst had happened and she was fine. She’d hit rock bottom and the fallout was settling outside somewhere, but she was still here. She’d freaked out in front of the whole of London, fucked up the interview, so many things she’d feared, and now there was nothing else to go wrong. It was like she’d taken a drug and was light and carefree at last.

She sat up, blinking, and stretched her arms, which ached in that satisfying way on awakening.

Daylight shone through thin blinds across the dormer window that spanned the width of the small flat. Jess could search the entire place without moving from the bed. A small kitchen area and island in the left corner by the window. A sofa, bookshelves and TV forming the three sides of a snug living area on the right. The bed was backed against a wall and faced the flat's front door, and the roof of the attic sloped into shadows at the back.

There was no movement or sign of Anna, then the pitter-patter of water running in a shower became apparent. Another door set back from the front must have led to small bathroom.

Jess could scarper if she wanted. Last night she’d been careless on vodka and desperate. Could she trust her judgement of Anna from a few hours ago? Her gut said she could. But photographs of Jess sleeping on this bed might be all over social media and gossip sites she realised with a reluctant fatigue.

She turned over her phone beside her, the battery icon low and red. There were hundreds of notifications, missed calls, re-postings of her cowering on the train or nursing a coffee. Little else though, and nothing taken in this room, and her heartrate remained quiet as she gazed at the shower door.

Perhaps her bold vodka-self had judged well after all. The woman either had no interest in Jess's celebrity or was unaware. Jess smacked her lips together. Her post bold vodka-self could do with a glass of water and a toothbrush.

She checked for messages on her family filter. There was one message from Mom, “Call as soon as you can”, and another from Nan which consisted solely of emojis and Jess suspected the cat had been pawing at her grandmother’s phone again.

An email pinged on the screen from her manager with the subject line “WTH – underground picture?”

A nugget of panic tightened in her gut, the chill threatening to crystalize up her spine and seize her brain.

“No.” She squeezed her phone, its hard edges pressing into her fingers, until the screen went dead and she held the mobile to her chest as if to suffocate it.

The sound of the shower stopped and Jess sat up straight, expectant.

She waited and fiddled with the duvet over her legs. Anna must have covered her last night after she’d nodded off. The bed linen was a yellow ochre, quite garish for someone like Anna, but the flat too was vibrant – a rich terracotta for the walls with wood cut prints of seascapes in chunky wooden frames then a palette of blues for the kitchen cupboards. Jess would have expected something more muted, perhaps a Victorian room of chalk white paints and modern classic furniture.

And it was orderly. “Bloody hell,” she whispered.

It struck Jess how symmetrical and particularly arranged the flat was. Not just the precision rows of containers on the kitchen surface and the range of Pantone mugs hanging below the wall units. The matrix of small drawers embedded in the island. The dust pan and brush clipped to the end unit. The bust, and literally it was a headless pair of boobs, Jess noted, on the book shelf that ran along the sitting area, aligned with a vase of irises and a curvy Polynesian sculpture.

Jess had a fleeting suspicion about Anna’s sexuality before dismissing it. Did every queer female household have a nude? But, everything had its precise place, nothing was simply cast aside, all apart from the explosion of vegetation that hung in the kitchen corner of the long window. Spider plants. “Impossible to kill,” Jess heard her Nan say in her head. “Couldn’t if you tried.” Funny how she’d been thinking of her family so vividly the last few hours.

“Good morning.”

Jess's heart beat faster at Anna’s voice, not only at her surprise presence but its mellifluous quality that Jess found appealing in more than one way. It calmed and reassured last night and flooded Jess with a sense of ease now, but it also delighted.

Anna stood before Jess, her blonde hair in dark tendrils from the shower. She seemed paler this morning, even though her white skin showed a slight tan against her classic linen shirt. Slender arms were revealed by the rolled up sleeves and the sunglasses tucked tantalisingly into her cleavage drew Jess's attention.

Perhaps it was Anna’s lack of makeup – none at all as far as Jess could make out. She had enviable dark lashes, which accentuated her blue eyes, but no, no makeup at all. There was nothing to mask the deep pink of her full lips, no concealment of the sprinkle of tiny freckles across her nose. She was just a beautiful woman in a white shirt and jeans. A confident woman, thoughts impenetrable beyond her calm expression. An assured woman. A woman patiently waiting for Jess's response, she realised.

“Hi,” Jess said, shy and giggly at the situation.

Anna waited, a twitch curling the corner of her mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” Jess burbled. “I don’t remember getting here very clearly. I mean if I had, if I’d been anything like I usually am, I wouldn’t have stayed for a start, but you know…”

Anna tilted her head to the side.

“I might have…at least…you know… perhaps….” Jess drew breath. “I completely crashed in your bed, didn’t I?”

Anna’s face brightened with amusement and their eyes met. “You needed it.”

A burst of elation sang through Jess as Anna’s eyes shone bright azure with their shared recognition of the situation. It was enough to make Jess lose herself for a moment in those twinkling blues.

“Oh,” she said, coming to. “Did I even pretend to leave you any room?” Her sprawl when she’d woken made this unlikely.

Anna laughed. “No. And I took the sofa.” She gestured towards the living area near the window and a pillow and blanket folded on the end of the couch.

“I really did impose, didn’t I?” Jess said, shoulders sinking.

“Yes you did.” Anna might have agreed, but her voice was full of delight. “I was perfectly comfortable.”

“I’m so grateful. And believe me, my Mom would have a fit if she knew I’d been this rude.”

“Well, if your mother enquires, you can tell her you were a well-behaved guest, after presumptuously taking the only bed.”

Jess groaned inside. It may have made it outside too.

Anna smiled once more, her head tilted to the side, and the warmth of her expression seemed to shine on Jess and make her glow inside. She probably wore a goofy expression of appreciation. It’s not like she didn’t wear everything on the outside, and Anna dipped her gaze perhaps out of politeness.

Anna unhooked her sunglasses from her shirt and for a moment looked as if she intended to put them on, before setting them on a bookcase. She sat next to Jess on the bed, in that measured way she had, not close enough to touch, but intimate and comforting.

Anna’s manner was the perfect tonic for Jess. Her memories from last night were a jumble but her impressions of this woman were the same. Safe, responsible, kind without overbearing. It’s funny how you picked up on cues from a person. There was something about Anna’s assured but careful movements that engendered trust. That and the lack of recognition. The whole world had an ulterior motive when befriending Jess.

She had nothing like the panic when she’d woken in a strange hotel room with a vague memory of paying for it, a woman under her arm and too much alcohol in her veins. The lack of clothes in the morning she remembered though. Knickers, bra, T-shirt all gone, taken as souvenirs and sold on eBay, complete with tag line of “genuine scent included”. She shuddered at the memory and shrank inside. Everything was so public. It felt stripped bare and stretched out for all to see. Not even her worn knickers were beyond scrutiny and were treated as fair game. She’d learned caution from that, hadn’t she?

“How are you feeling?” Anna’s presence beside her, respectful but close, was everything. It soothed away her troubled memories.

“Safe,” Jess said. An odd response, considering. But it was exactly what she felt – relaxed, quiet with tingling through her entire body.

“Have you thought about last night and what you should do?”

“No.”

Which part did Anna mean? There would be significant fallout from the night before. She wasn’t sure how much she’d blurted to Anna.

“About reporting the man who followed you to the police?”

“Oh.” That’s the piece she meant. “I don’t think I have enough detail to give them.”

“You have the online account,” Anna said, “and I’ve been thinking. Zehra has CCTV at the café. You may be able to identify him from that?”

Jess's throat tightened. She didn’t want to think about it. How many people could it have been – there were so many crank accounts trolling her these days. Who knew what was behind any of them? She wanted to hide here, the only place of late where the weight of the world disappeared from her shoulders. She was anonymous in a secret sanctuary with a mature thoughtful woman. An attractive mature woman. Jess rolled her eyes at herself. Is this why she’d placed her trust in Anna, inclined towards older, usually straight, women and thinking with her heart and hormones?

“Think about it?” Anna squeezed her knee. “We should at least ask Zehra to keep last night’s recording.”

Jess nodded. No, there were good reasons to have faith in Anna.

“Thank you,” Jess said. “For the suggestion.”

“I will come with you. I know Zehra well and will explain, but she won’t be in for a little while if she was working last night.”

“Oh.”

“You could wait here and we’ll go down in an hour or two?”

Jess opened her mouth. “Sorry. Am I getting in your way? You must have plans. Do you have time to do that? I can be out in a second.” Although her heart lurched at the thought of tumbling outside exposed into the world. And again at tumbling out without Anna’s company.

Anna hesitated and Jess couldn’t see her expression behind a curtain of hair that had fallen over Anna’s face. She stared, waiting for her answer. Anna stroked the locks of hair behind her ear with slender fingers. “It happens,” she said, her voice a soothing murmur, “that I have time this morning.”

And it was the best answer Jess could have imagined. A couple more hours with this woman with the honeyed voice and aura that made Jess warm inside. The woman with the enigmatic smile and eyes as blue as the sea. The woman with smooth skin and freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and that trailed down her cleavage.

A little demon of conscience tutted inside. “Jess Lambert. You and older women,” accompanied by a shake of the head. That little demon had her Nan’s voice. She blinked and the demon disappeared in a puff of smoke.

“Thank you,” Jess said.

She hoped she didn’t grin too much.