The Gentleman Has Left the Building Read Free Page B

confident gets a man laid, Rhys. It’s that,
or you might as well start browsing for fat forty-somethings on the
internet.”
    She had to go
there, didn’t she? To my secret pit of despair…the place my mother
still thinks I’ll end up. Brilliant.
    “Or there’s
Mimi from the office,” she went on.
    “I already told
you, she’s not my type. She's got a really weird-shaped head."
    "Oh, she so
hasn't. Stop making excuses."
    "Look.” I drew
a sad face with my fork in the swathes of bacon fat. “Let’s make a
deal, yeah? We’re supposed to be in this together.”
    She arched an
eyebrow. “What kind of deal?”
    “You stop being
a damsel in dick-stress with Nathan--just fucking go for it
already--and I’ll try to approach Nicole again.”
    Harper cocked
her head and a blond fringe obscured slate eyes. She was thinking.
This could not end well. “All right,” she said finally. “You’re
on.”
     
    ****
     
    The internet
has nothing new to say on seducing women. I knew this because I
Googled for it at least three times a week.
    I don’t
remember being such a neurotic man-bitch before all of this
happened. I had moderate success with girls (fourteen notches on
the bedpost in twenty nine years isn’t bad, is it…?) so I can’t
have been that unfortunate where looks were concerned. I wasn't
fat, or too short. No lisp. No halitosis. My ears were nicely close
to my skull. The only debt I had was my car and my job was just
forty percent gay (which is pretty good for London). I could talk
about normal things; I didn’t pick my nose in public; I could cook,
for fuck’s sake. Why did the idea of asking Nicole out terrify me?
Harper was right--what did I have to lose?
    Dignity, I
suppose. The scraps of it I’d clawed back in the months since Kate
left. There was the fear that I was just getting used to being
single--being really okay with it--and if I gave that up, even just
for a few dates, it might take even longer to get it back
again.
    I sat back on
my bed and replayed the moment Nicole bent over in front of me in
the park; the way her arse made a perfect heart shape above the
taper of her thighs. Thought about how she might buck against me.
My palms began to sweat with it and my cock was slippery in my
hands. The idea of controlling her like that…I had no words. Just
inappropriate noises.
    I should go
after what I want, shouldn’t I? I could emerge from this hangover
as a proper alpha bastard. I always kinda suspected it was
somewhere inside me. But even if it wasn’t, I could emulate someone
like Nathan if it meant that I got from A to B. Or inside Nicole.
Hell, outside her, on top of her, underneath…any of those would do.
Delete as appropriate.
    Delete…me?

 
    Part Two
     
    Harper and I
hatched our dastardly plan on the train the next morning.
    I’m pretty sure
that most super villains have lairs for this sort of thing. We had
a cramped, sour-smelling corner of a tube carriage, and while there
were no cats to stroke, there was a Spanish guy with an alarming
amount of hair falling out of his shirt collar wedged into my left
side.
    I knew three
things about Nicole; two of them through pure chance (a sign?) and
one because of Aidan. She went running on Saturday mornings in our
park, she got coffee in the local Starbucks a few hours later, and
she was almost definitely posh. I could use these, said Harper. In
fact I should, because they were all I had. The problem I faced
would be doing so without looking like a first class lemon.
    We’d just
dodged a gaggle of Japanese tourists and were headed towards the
giant glass foyer of our building when we spotted them.
    Kate and Rory.
My ex and Harper's ex.
    “She’s dyed her
hair again,” said Harper, subdued.
    “She used to
tell me she was a natural blonde, remember?” We huddled in next to
a phone box; we never walked past Kate and Rory if we could help
it. It was bad enough that we had to work with them several times a
week.
    “I still