The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ threat.
‘Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,’ she’d guffawed, ‘The secret life of the neighbourhood tom.’
Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.
Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the legal undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.
Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.
The risky choice of companion aside, The Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.
A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?
Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.
She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasise dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star-shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses, usually? Hah, the vanity.)
Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practised hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.
His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe moulds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirt sleeves. And Eve … hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-coloured heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag (was that a Birkin? Oh to have rich uncles).
Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fitted in, amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs and brash confidence.
Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.
As Laurie waited in the four-person deep rabble at the bar, she pondered The Jamie Carter Phenomenon.
Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the fag break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting round social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.
At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was ‘without any baggage’, which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.
Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.
How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.
The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man, he never got blamed for ladykilling, or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.
2
‘Hello?’ said a male voice at her elbow.
‘Hi,’ Laurie said, starting as the subject of her reverie appeared, as if she’d summoned him. She felt a stab of irrational guilt, having been thinking about Jamie, spying on him.
‘You out for the night?’ Jamie said. He disguised it well, but Laurie could see he was apprehensive. They’d never spoken at work, knew each other by sight only. He had no measure of her and no goodwill to exploit.
They were both lawyers: she could work backwards through his thought process in approaching her. He’d seen her, therefore there was a fair chance she’d seen him, with Eve. Better to brazen it out and act like he was doing nothing wrong than leave Laurie unattended with a tale to tell.
‘Yeah. Tagging along with my mate’s firm. You?’
‘Just a couple after work.’
Heh heh oh really. She toyed with asking ‘who with?’ but was a shade too drunk to judge whether it’d clang as obvious.
‘What’re you having? In case I get served first,’ he said.
Bribery now, was it.
‘Old Fashioned.’
‘That’s it? You’re queuing for one drink? Where are you sitting?’
Laurie pointed into the dining area.
‘There’s table service through there, you know?’
‘I wanted the change of scenery,’ Laurie said. ‘Where are you sitting?’
Yes, she could play mind games too. Knight to your Rook!
‘Same,’ Jamie said. ‘Last time, the waitress took too long. Mind you, this is carnage.’
Hmmm. He’d spotted her, panicked and made an excuse to follow her out here.
Laurie noticed when he spoke that his incisor teeth were tilted slightly inward, like an uncommitted vampire. She suspected this was the true secret of his incredible appeal, the deliberate flaw in the Navajo rug. Otherwise he was a little too wholesomely, straightforwardly good looking. Somehow, the teeth made you think carnal thoughts.
They suspended conversation to stake elbow space on the bar and catch the barman’s eye. Laurie got served first and volunteered to buy Jamie’s, but he wouldn’t let her.
She was less convinced this was chivalry than unwillingness for her to discover his order of a lager and a Prosecco with a raspberry bobbing in it, which made it clear he was on a date. She heard him tell the barman anyway. Her cocktail took long enough to make that they returned to their seats at the same time, having traded awkwardly shouted staccato remarks about how it was heaving in here. As they neared Laurie’s destination he stopped and leaned in to speak to her, over the Motown decibels.