Читать книгу: «Dirty Secrets»

Chapter One

This can’t be the right place. I pull out my phone, check the address for the third time, but it seems that it is, no matter how little sense it makes. It’s half past two in the afternoon and I’m standing in a narrow street in Chelsea, looking at a closed door at the rear of a large, red brick building. The door itself is painted glossy black with an ornate brass handle. There’s a doorbell mounted on the wall at my eye level. Above the door is a security camera.

I wonder if it’s working, and drop my gaze away from it.

When Theo gave me his address, I was expecting a flat. Maybe even a house. But this is neither. In fact, I’m not quite sure what it is. Possibly some sort of private members club, although I’ve no idea what kind. It does seem very…Theo, however, and that’s what has me reaching for the small brass bell mounted at the side of the door. I hesitate a moment longer, and then I swallow my fear and press the damn thing. If it rings, I can’t hear it.

No one is coming, I tell myself, tightening my grip on the handle of my pull-along case. I made a mistake. It’s fine. I’ll just go back to the train station and go home. I’ll ring Theo later, make some excuse. It was a stupid idea anyway, taking a sabbatical from work just because I broke up with my boyfriend. I should be in the office now, not here, in the middle of London with a pull-along suitcase and a headache.

I turn away, trying to pretend I’m not disappointed, that I’m not about to cry. I’ve been doing that a lot recently. Crying, that is. I’ve turned into a human fountain.

I lift my foot to take the first step, and the door opens.

‘Jules? Jules, is that you?’

I know that voice. I’d know it anywhere. It hasn’t changed. He still sounds like he smokes twenty a day, even though I know he hates cigarettes.

I force myself to stop, to turn around. ‘Theo.’

He steps forward, hands tucked in the pockets of dark trousers. ‘It’s good to see you, Jules.’

‘You too,’ I say, and we both stand there, taking a moment to look at each other. It’s funny how people can change without really changing at all. It’s been ten years since I last saw him, since we both left for university with promises to keep in touch. And we have kept in touch, sporadically. The odd Christmas card, the odd email, a loose connection on social media.

I don’t know why he was the first person I called when I ended things with my ex. It was three in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to call my parents, and I couldn’t call my friends. I’d flipped through my phonebook and his number had come up, and I’d called it.

‘Hello, Jules,’ he’d said, as if we spoke on the phone every day.

‘I’ve broken up with my boyfriend,’ I told him.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I’m a mess, Theo.’

‘What do you need?’

‘I need to get away,’ I told him. ‘Just for a few weeks.’

‘Come and stay with me,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve got plenty of room.’

And so I’d packed, and I’d got on the first available train, and paid a taxi driver an extortionate amount of money to bring me here. It wasn’t easy. Nothing is easy any more. Sometimes just putting one foot in front of the other feels like climbing a mountain. But I did it.

Theo is just as I remember him. Oh, he’s filled out a little, and he’s clearly shaving more than once a week, but otherwise, he’s exactly the same. The same hazel eyes with the same wicked glint. The same unruly dark hair. The same half smile, a little cautious, a little restrained, as if he doesn’t know whether he’s allowed to smile or not. He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a pair of Raybans hooked in the front. It suits him.

‘You look different,’ he says.

That would be my ex’s doing. The blonde hair, the clothes. He liked me to look a certain way, so I did my best to make sure that I did. I wanted him to be happy. ‘Different good or different bad?’ I ask Theo, lifting a hand to touch the ends of my feathered haircut.

‘I can’t decide,’ he says. ‘You don’t look like you.’

I bite my lip, drop my gaze to the floor. I will not cry. I will not.

‘That bad, huh?’

I nod.

‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’ He moves closer and takes my case. I packed it in a rush, and I have a sudden panic that I’ve forgotten something vital, like money and clothes. I never used to be like this. I used to be so decisive, so sure of myself. I don’t know what the hell happened to me.

He motions me forward, and I walk towards the door. ‘What is this place?’

‘It’s a club,’ he says.

So my suspicions were right. ‘A nightclub?’

‘Not exactly,’ he replies. ‘Although we do open at night.’

‘Do you own it?’

‘Part of it.’

Inside, it’s quiet, and warm. Theo closes the door behind us, and I take a moment to look around me, to drink in the quiet. The lighting is low, the walls painted a soft cream. It smells clean. Definitely not a nightclub, then.

‘Go through,’ he says, nodding further along the corridor.

I walk along it, my heeled boots loud on the polished wood floor. Doors lead off to either side, but all of them are closed so I can’t see where they lead. Stylish black and white photographs decorate the walls. On closer inspection, I can see that they’re arty nudes. I suppose you could even call them erotica. I glance back at Theo, a little confused.

He simply gives me that half smile.

I keep walking. At the end of the corridor, I turn left, and find myself in a large, open space. It could possibly be a nightclub, only Theo said that this place wasn’t a nightclub. Leather sofas line the walls, and in the middle of the room is the most enormous circular bed.

‘OK,’ I say, coming to a halt. ‘This is not a nightclub.’

‘I already told you that,’ he says.

‘Then what is it?’

‘Somewhere women can explore their fantasies.’

‘What do you mean, explore their fantasies?’

‘Exactly that,’ he replies. ‘Somewhere they can come and ask for things they can’t get elsewhere.’

‘I’m not sure I follow,’ I say. My heart is pounding a strange, heavy beat, and I grip the handle of my bag more tightly, trying to ignore the slippery dampness of my palms.

‘Maybe it’s better if I show you,’ Theo says. ‘Come with me.’

I follow him across the space, away from the leather sofas and the great big bed. At the other side of the room is an archway. We walk through it. Theo turns to the left and pulls a bunch of keys from his pocket. He selects one, then unlocks the door. ‘In here.’

It turns out to be a perfectly ordinary office. White walls, desk, chair, keyboard and monitor. There’s a ficus in the corner, a half-full wastepaper basket, a coffee machine. Theo sets my case down by the desk, offers me a coffee. I accept. It seems rude not to.

Then he steers me into the chair, turns me round to face the desk, and switches on one of the screens that sits on top of the desk.

As he turns away and sets the coffee machine going, the screen flickers to life in front of me. At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing.

And then I can’t believe it.

It shows a pretty room with a four-poster bed. There are vases of flowers everywhere, and lace and frills, all very feminine. A woman is sat on the bed, hugging a pillow to her chest, staring intently at the man stood in the corner. He’s naked, blindfolded, and he’s got his hands behind his back.

He’s also got an almighty erection.

I am still staring at that, shocked, when the door of the room opens and another man enters. The woman on the bed shifts her position, leaning forward, clutching the pillow even more tightly. If there was any sound, I’m sure I would be able to hear her whimper.

He closes the door softly behind him. He walks slowly towards the restrained man in the corner, and then he sinks slowly to his knees in front of him.

I slap my hands over my eyes before I see what happens next. ‘What the hell is this?’ I squeak.

‘Well,’ Theo says, ‘the woman, who we’ll call Mrs X, has a particular fantasy involving watching her husband with another man.’

‘Turn it off!’ I tell him. ‘Turn it off or I’m leaving.’

I hear the sound of a cup being set down on the desk. I feel the air move, his aftershave brushing against me as he leans over and turns the screen off. ‘You can look now,’ he says.

I move my fingers slightly. I don’t move my hands until I see the blank screen. I’m breathing too fast, and my heart is racing. I can’t believe what I just saw. I’m shocked, so shocked I’m almost panicking.

And I’m aroused. I don’t want to be. I know that it’s wrong. But it’s happening anyway. I get to my feet, needing to be away from this place. I shouldn’t have come here. It was a mistake.

I turn, and see Theo watching me with those dark eyes. God knows what he must think of me. I sink slowly back into my seat. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For overreacting,’ I tell him, dropping my gaze to the floor. ‘For being such a prude.’

‘You’ve got nothing to apologise for,’ he says. ‘I should probably have found a better way to explain this place to you.’

‘You don’t have to try and make me feel better,’ I reply.

‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I’m just being honest. I wanted to be open with you about this place. I didn’t want to keep it a secret, have it turn into an issue.’

That makes me wary. I’ve had enough honesty to last me a lifetime. My ex was big on it. ‘So…how does this place of yours work?’ I ask, wanting to steer the conversation away from things I don’t want to talk about, to think about. Needing to make it not about myself, and driven by an inexplicable prurient curiosity, which makes me feel slightly disgusted with myself.

‘We’re a members only club. We don’t advertise, and generally people find us through word of mouth. We vet every application very carefully. Ninety per cent don’t make it.’

I smooth the fabric of my trousers. They’re navy blue, wide legged, and starting to fade, but they hide a lot of sins. ‘I see.’

‘Those who do are added to our database. They submit their fantasies, and we match them with people who have similar interests.’

I stare up at him as he doctors his coffee, adds one, two, three sugars. This is the boy who grew up next door to me. The skinny boy who liked maths and dinosaurs and spent his weekends tramping round the abandoned quarry looking for fossils.

The man staring back at me is not that boy. I’m not sure who he is. And for the first time in weeks, I realise that I’ve stopped thinking about myself. ‘And they pay you for this?’

He nods. ‘Yes, they do.’ He takes a sip of his coffee, and I find myself turning to the one he made for me. It’s milky, sweet, the way I drank it when I was eighteen. I take a sip before I remember that I don’t drink it like that any more, and set it back down. ‘Something wrong?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I lie, not wanting to get into a conversation about how I need to watch my weight.

‘So how did you get into…this?’ I gesture around his office.

‘A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go into business with him.’

‘Oh.’ I’m desperate to ask what sort of friend would set up a business like this, but I bite my tongue.

‘The database is my baby,’ he continues. ‘I designed it, I maintain it.’

‘And the rest?’

‘John takes care of that.’

‘John?’

‘My partner,’ he says. ‘You’ll be able to meet him later. I think you’ll like him. Are you hungry?’

I say yes, only because I don’t want to say no and have him argue. I can’t breathe in here. It’s too hot, too claustrophobic, and I can’t stop myself wondering about what I saw on the screen. I keep glancing at it, even though it’s turned off. ‘Are you supposed to watch people?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t that an invasion of their privacy?’

‘That particular couple asked for a recording of the session,’ Theo says. ‘That means they agreed that John or I could check to make sure everything was working properly.’

‘That doesn’t mean you should have showed it to me!’

‘Are you going to tell anyone?’

‘Well no, but…’

‘Jules,’ Theo says gently. ‘It’s OK. Come on. I can see we’ve got a lot to talk about, and I’m hungry.’ He leads me out of his office, locking the door behind us. We move past more closed doors. Each one has a brass nameplate, with a word cut into it in scrolling letters. ‘I suppose you have a red room of pain somewhere,’ I say, only half joking.

‘We offer that, if it’s what a client wants,’ he says.

‘Do you…’ I falter. I can’t ask.

‘Indulge?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sometimes.’

I can’t think of anything else to say after that, so I follow him in silence as he leads me outside. I blink in the light, feeling a strange sense of confusion. I’m not quite sure where I am, but fortunately Theo does. On the other side of the road is an upmarket organic cafe, the kind that sells exquisite coffee and foraged salads. I find a table and let him order for me.

I pick at my bruschetta and goat’s cheese. Theo watches, but doesn’t comment on it. ‘Tell me about your ex,’ he says.

‘There’s not much to tell,’ I say. ‘We were together, and now we’re not.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s a pretty personal question.’

‘You phoned me up in the middle of the night,’ he reminds me. ‘This wasn’t some easy, mutual breakup, Jules.’

I break my food into little pieces. ‘We broke up because of me.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I couldn’t be the girlfriend he needed.’

‘I see. So did he end it, or did you?’

‘This time? I did.’

‘There were other times?’

‘A few.’

‘Sounds exhausting.’

I think about that. ‘It was.’

‘So what do you want, Jules? Do you want to get back together with him?’

‘No.’ I don’t let myself think about that. I won’t. I’ve made my decision, and I’m not going to go back on it. ‘It’s over. Permanently.’

‘You don’t sound entirely sure.’

‘It has to be over,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t go back to that. I won’t.’

‘Then what do you want?’

‘I want to eat,’ I say, staring at the food I only played with. ‘Drink lattes with hazelnut syrup. Wear red.’ I look at him, take a moment to find my courage. I didn’t know what drove me to call him. I didn’t know what I was looking for, until I walked through the door of that club and found it. ‘I don’t know who I am any more, Theo, and I need to find out. And I want to have sex,’ I say. ‘Lots and lots of uncomplicated sex. You said that the club lets women explore their fantasies. I want to explore mine.’