The Wake-Up Call(45)



She raises her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“You turned around when I was . . . I just . . . saw it. Accidentally.”

She smiles slowly and lifts a hand to her back, tracing the spot in the centre of her spine where I saw the tattoo. “And how long were you ‘accidentally’ checking me out in my swimwear? Did you see anything else of interest? Shall I quiz you on freckle locations?”

“It was a very brief moment,” I say, immediately thinking about the perfect little mole on the curve of her hip.

“Mm-hmm. Well. It’s a treble clef.”

I wait.

“For my parents. It was always just the three of us. My dad was estranged from his family, and my mum was an only child, so we didn’t have that big aunts-and-uncles, loads-of-cousins type vibe—it was just us three. Trouble trebled, Dad used to say. Hence . . . treble.” She shrugs. “It’s a stupid play on words. I was twenty-one and thought it was clever.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid. It’s creative.”

She gives me a small smile at that. A different sort of smile from usual.

“I cannot imagine how hard it was for you to lose them.”

“No,” she says simply. “It changed me completely.”

“What were you like before?”

She pauses as if she wasn’t expecting that question. “Quiet, actually,” she says. “I held myself back a lot. Now I go full-out because—like I said—life’s too short for having regrets.”

I hesitate before answering. I’m not sure Izzy does go “full-out.” She’s certainly spontaneous, and she works hard. But her life does not seem to me to be built on taking chances. Just look at the inferior men she dates. The job she’s been in for eight years without promotion. The friends she has all over the world, and how rarely she takes time off to visit them.

“Do you feel like you don’t hold anything back now? That you really go full-out?”

She looks at me shrewdly. After a moment, she snorts. “Lose the trousers, Lucas. Don’t think you can distract me by Mrs. Hedgers–ing me.”

Remarkably, for a moment, I had almost forgotten I am sitting here topless.

“Mrs. . . .”

“Mrs. Hedgers, the career-change coach in Sweet Pea? Has she not got you yet? She did a number on me and Poor Mandy. Told Mandy she’s not assertive enough.”

Izzy is breezy and bright again, as though we never spoke about her parents. I’d like to push and ask her more, but I know I’ll get nowhere.

“In the time I have known Mandy,” I say, “she has never once asserted herself.”

“I know, right?”

“What did Mrs. Hedgers say about you?”

Izzy shifts so her feet are tucked underneath her on the bed. Her socks are gone, lost when she played a bad hand at the start of the game.

“She said I don’t know how to switch off.”

Interesting.

“On Thursday, you’ll try some of the ways I unwind and switch off.”

“Oh, will I, now?”

I raise my eyebrows, lying back against the pillows with my hands behind my head.

“Have you forgotten? Thursday is my day. I’m in charge.”

“Oh, shit, yeah.” Something passes across her face. I wonder if it’s worry.

“I won’t . . . If you want to change your mind about the bet . . .”

“Are you kidding? Please. I’d never have given you that opportunity if I’d won.”

“But it’s different. I’m a man. We are always in charge, so . . .” This doesn’t come out the way I intended—she’s glaring at me. I grope around for the right words, remembering how succinctly Ana put it when she was explaining why it’s different for a woman to approach a man than the other way around. “No, I just mean, it’s not the same because of the way society always puts men in control anyway, so me telling you what to do, it just feels like it could be . . .”

“Oh.” Her face clears. “Yeah. A bit loaded. Well, actually, oddly enough I do trust you to be a gentleman about it. You want to have a safeword or something?” She laughs at my expression. “If I say, Fuck right off, Lucas, then you have to back off. Agreed?”

“It is a good safe phrase,” I say solemnly, and I can tell from her face that she doesn’t know whether I’m joking.

“Trousers,” she says, pointing at my knees.

“Ah. Yes.” I shift to the end of the bed and stand to take them off.

The atmosphere in the room shifts the moment I start unfastening my belt. Izzy is quiet, watching me as I unbutton my jeans, rolling her bottom lip between her finger and thumb. I thought stripping off would make her feel like she was in charge, but she’s not laughing or humiliating me, she’s just watching me, and I shiver under her gaze. It’s been a while since I’ve stripped down for a woman, but they’re normally touching me by this point. The distance between us should make this less intimate, but somehow it’s the opposite.

I lie down on my back again, my head on the pillow. Laid out for her, with the cards and that silly little heap of raisins between us. I hear her breath catch and the sound sends something turning over inside me.

“If I win the next hand, you’ll be naked,” Izzy says.

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