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Reed feels Stella’s gaze burning all over her, dogging her heels like a blazing hot shadow as she retreats from the lifts, walks through the lobby, and escapes out the door. The night air does nothing to cool the flush of embarrassment in her cheeks or the pulsing ache between her thighs.
Halfway to the car park, key in hand, she slows to a stop. A seductive, tempting voice purrs in her ear that it’s not too late to turn back. The voice has velvety-rough timbre of Stella Gibson’s.
Reed opens the driver’s side door and replays the scene in her mind. She had welcomed the weight of Stella’s arm draped around her shoulder, seen the hungry look in her eye. Felt the press of Stella’s lips against hers as she swooped down like a hawk diving for its prey. Her body still hums, alight with that indescribable magical moment when she kissed Stella back. The air had shimmered between them, electric, a chain reaction about to cascade.
And then, disaster.
Reed pounds the steering wheel in frustration. I was brought up in Croydon. What the fuck was that?
Not disaster. Salvation.
Reed turns the key in the ignition and heads for home.
*****
Reed returns to a darkened, quiet house. The girls are in bed; it’s a school night. More importantly, Tim is in bed. She doesn’t think she could face him right now.
She creeps up the stairs and looks in on Maya and Ani sleeping soundly in their shared bedroom. Maya’s feet are dangling out of the covers and Ani clutches her favorite pink elephant tightly. What she did—or didn’t do—she did for them. A mother sacrifices, that’s what mothers do. They don’t jump into bed with brilliant blonde police superintendents, no matter how sexually magnetic. Reed breathes deeply and for a moment she feels content, righteous even.
She opens the door to the bedroom she shares with her husband and undresses silently in the dark, trying hard not to think that it could have been Stella’s soft hands at this very moment slipping under her shirt to unhook her bra. It’s one of her favorite ones, dark magenta trimmed with lace, and it shames her a little to know that yes she did wear it on purpose, half-hoping that Stella might actually see it.
Reed throws on baggy cotton shorts and a soft worn t-shirt and then she’s got nothing left to do but climb into bed beside Tim, who is gently snoring away. She lies on her side and he reaches out, half-asleep, to spoon her. She used to love it, the warm reliable weight of him. Tonight she just feels trapped.
Reed bears it as long as she can before unrolling herself from his arms and slipping out the door. She’ll sleep in the guest room and tell a guilty lie in the morning about how she’d had to stay up late finishing paperwork.
Before drifting off to sleep, Reed unashamedly rubs circles around her clit, brushes her thumb against her hardened nipples. She imagines Stella kissing her softly before fucking her hard. Stella’s kiss is seared across her lips like a brand; her blonde hair runs through her fingers, spun gold. Reed comes alone, gasping Stella’s name aloud to an empty room.
*****
The next morning there is the usual organized chaos as the family prepares for school and work. Unlike most mornings, everything Tim does sets Reed’s teeth on edge, from the way he spends most of breakfast thumbing through rugby scores on his iphone to once again leaving a half-empty bowl of cereal in the sink instead rinsing it and placing it in the dishwasher.
There are many things Tim does that Reed knows are charming. He has applauded enthusiastically at every single one of Maya’s ballet recitals. Tim will indulgently play ponies and Barbies with the girls for hours, and if he is disappointed to not have had sons, he has never let it show. He will often, without being asked, drop off a coffee and a sandwich at the morgue when she is working late.
But Stella looks at her with an intensity that makes her body feel like it is going to at any moment catch fire. And Reed can’t remember the last time Tim looked at her with a fraction of that level of passion, if indeed he ever did.
He is a good man, she tells herself, a good father. He is good enough, it is all good enough, and no good will come of wanting more.
Reed repeats the words over and over again on her way to work, her own personal incantation to keep whatever temptation Stella Gibson brings at bay.
*****
Her idiotic words from last night circle round in her head like vultures, pecking at what’s left of her sanity and self-confidence. I was brought up in Croydon. Reed has a hard time not taking it out on the corpse, a middle-aged man dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. She slices and dices and mercilessly separates flesh from bone, a carrion-eater herself.
When the vultures in her mind are done picking over her performance, they turn to Tim’s instead.
It’s not like he’d never hurt her, never betrayed her. Four years ago he had gone away to a tech conference in Berlin and had cheated on her with a woman he worked with: Angela from Accounts. Tim had come back from the trip and within a week confessed the whole thing to her. He had sobbed; he had begged her forgiveness. He promised he would never do it again. He offered to go to counseling.
Reed had turned down the counseling and accepted his apology. Two small children at home, two challenging careers, they had both felt neglected. They resolved to do better, to get past it. And for a year or two they did—regular date nights, weekends away when Tim’s parents could watch the girls, lingerie to spice up things in bed.
In time that had faded, too.
Reed has never seen a picture of Angela from Accounts, who so brazenly seduced her mild-mannered husband, but she realizes now her mental image has always borne a striking resemblance to Stella Gibson.
*****
At work, Stella is friendly, professional, maddeningly casual. As if their kiss and near-miss at the Merchant had never happened. Whatever electricity had been in their interactions has been discharged and grounded; Stella has relegated her to the asexual safety of the friendzone.
She should be happy to be there, she knows she should. But still she finds herself asking Stella to get a late dinner (sushi) and Stella, after two full seconds of hesitation, agrees.
They are halfway through the miso soup and waiting for the main course when Reed decides to broach the subject. Stella has been regaling her, too brightly, of her exploits as a young DC, fighting crime and chauvinism. It is her valiant attempt to keep the specter of Paul Spector at arm’s length, heartbreaking in its transparency.
“Stella,” Reed begins, after taking a sip of warm sake, “I’m sorry about last night. I feel like I owe you an explanation.”
Stella eyes her with her most level gaze. “You don’t owe me anything,” she says through nearly closed lips.
“I don’t know what I meant.” Croydon echoes through her head, pounding like a hammer. “I should have explained better. It’s not that I didn’t want to…on some level…I’ve never before of course.” Reed blushes helplessly at her obvious word-vomit. “What I mean to say is that I’m married.”
“Okay,” Stella says flatly, sparsely.
Reed doesn’t hide her mild annoyance. “Okay?”
Stella finishes her whiskey and calls to the waiter for another. “You told me you had children. I didn’t want to make assumptions,” she says, by way of explanation. It has the nagging effect of lobbing the ball back into her court.
“Would it have mattered?” It hadn’t mattered to her with James Olson. It hadn’t mattered to Angela from Accounts. Stella had purposely given herself plausible deniability.
Stella’s icewater gaze goes fuzzy, starts to melt, and Reed knows she is seeing the dead body of Olson, hail of bullets in his back. Her steely focus returns and she answers, “Not much.”
Reed finds herself being again once awed and appalled by Stella, so unapologetic about all of this. At that moment, the waiter arrives with their meal. The momentary distraction of pouring soy sauce and pairing ginger and wasabi with bite-sized sushi allows her to calm down.
She turns the conversation in a different direction. “Do you have someone back in London? A partner?”
“No,” Stella says easily, popping a sliver of tuna sashimi into her mouth. “I have friends. A few from university, work colleagues from the Met.”
“With benefits, I imagine.”
“Some of them,” Stella answers, a hint of swagger brightening her voice. It makes Reed shiver. “Some are just friends.”
“Have you ever been in a serious relationship? Long term, I mean.” Reed shakes her head, apologetic. “I’m sorry, I know I’m prying again.”
“You are." Stella wags a chopstick mock-reproachfully, but continues; "It was a long time ago. Lasted for nearly three years.”
“What happened with him?”
“Her,” Stella corrects. “Emily. She wanted us to move in together; I couldn’t imagine sharing that much of my life with someone. She was nearing forty and wanted children, probably would have wanted marriage if marriage had been a legal option at the time—and I did not. Emily was right to want the things she wanted and I was right to want what I wanted.” Stella pauses to take another sip of her whiskey. There’s no bitterness in her tone, no regret. “She’s very happy now. She and her partner have two adopted children—I get cards at Christmas.”
“Oh,” is all Reed can say, heart sinking like a stone.
“I was thirty-eight and I was trying to make myself fit the mold of all the things you are supposed to want at thirty-eight and it just wasn’t me. And from then on, I never really gave fuck all about fitting that mold ever again,” Stella tells her, perfectly matter-of-fact. Case closed.
Reed’s beginning to understand the weird contradictory psychology of Stella Gibson, who seems to run both hot and cold, full of honeyed compassion one minute, and calculated indifference the next. “Perhaps you keep chasing after married people because you know we’re unlikely to chase you back.”
A hawk-eyed look. A single shrewd word: “Perhaps.”
Reed feels herself building momentum, propelled forward by her own frustration and hurt. “You sweep down on us, shake our foundations, and then blow on back to London, unconcerned about the damage you leave in your wake.”
Stella’s eyes snap up, burning blue flames. “You make me sound like some indiscriminate force of nature. Hurricane Stella—is that how you see me? Well, let me tell you, I never shook anyone who didn’t want to be shaken. And if there are cracks in your marriage, I am willing to wager they were there long before you ever met me.” There is a poison in her words that makes Reed flinch, out of proportion to what she has said. She’s touched a nerve. Stella opens her bag and takes out her wallet, tossing a few notes on the table. “I need to go.”
“Stella, wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.” Reed grasps for her hand, and Stella stills, warm beneath her touch. “Tim and I…we’re having problems...I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Stella replies in a tone that says I don’t care. She withdraws her hand.
“I thought things were fine, but you came along and suddenly up is down, left is right. I’m questioning everything.” How cliché it all sounds to say it out loud.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Stella says carefully.
“And you won’t promise to catch me if I fall.” Reed can feel the sting of tears in her eyes.
Stella gives a slow nod. “Someone I’d had an affair with years back remarked to me recently that he would have left his wife and children for me. I told him that would have been a mistake.”
“Would it be a mistake for me?”
“I can’t answer that.” Stella reaches out to brush aside the tears on her cheek. Her words are cold, but her touch is warm, and Reed doesn’t know which to trust.
*****
Stella left her alone in the restaurant that night, retreating not like a hurricane, but a quiet storm rolling gently out to sea. As the Spector investigation winds toward its end, Reed can feel her there just off the coast, a fog that lingers, clouding everything she sees.
Stella had left it all in her hands. Left Reed to decide if she is the type of woman who would cheat on her husband for one sweet night in another woman’s bed. Left her to see Tim’s Angela from Accounts and raise him one Stella the Superintendent; an eye for an eye, an affair for an affair.
And if she’s not the type to cheat, or to punish, is she the type to walk away altogether?
Reed doesn’t know what she wants, only that she wants.
*****
The look in Stella’s eyes—shipwrecked, lost at sea—as she waits outside Paul Spector’s hospital room makes Reed’s decision for her.
There’s still blood on Stella’s shirt and traces of it stain her hair a pinkish gold. Reed heard how Stella rushed to save Spector’s life. She’s heard, too, how DS Anderson had arrived with her this morning wearing clothes from the night before, a certain spring in his step.
Reed doesn’t really know what to make of either piece of information. Instead she says, “Let me take you back to your hotel.”
Stella looks at her quizzically, a silent question in her eyes.
“I don’t want you to be alone, Stella. And I want to be the one with you tonight,” she tells her softly.
Reed is amazed when Stella pulls her in for a hug, trembling, even more amazed when Stella lets her lead her down the hall toward the exit.
In front of Reed’s car, Stella awakes from her daze, glint returning to her eyes, and asks, “What about Croydon? And Tim?’
Reed presses her lips against Stella’s, holds them there, searing her intentions. “So what?”
*****
To describe the night she spent in Stella’s bed as passionate would be an understatement.
Stella has her pressed up against the wood door, fingers teasing the damp crotch of her underwear within a minute of crossing the threshold. Reed comes twice before Stella even takes off her clothes; once riding her hand, quick, hard, and immediate, Stella’s hot breath against her neck. The second time, she is spread out naked on Stella’s opulent bed as Stella kisses and sucks and nips, savoring every meeting of mouth against skin, drinking her in like wine. Her orgasm builds slowly, white hot pleasure coiling deep inside of her until she’s thrashing against the sheets and the world tumbles down around her.
Reed reaches for Stella, toys with the buttons on her blouse. “I want you, too.” Stella smiles indulgently, bringing Reed’s hands to cup her full breasts. And soon it’s skin gliding against skin, softness on top of softness. Reed had no idea what sex with another woman would feel like, but she never imagined it feeling so decadent, so obscenely good, like rich Belgian chocolate. Stella lets her explore with hands and tongue, encouraging her with little gasps of Fuck and Yes and Harder.
Stella’s touch is like magic and under her dusky gaze Reed is transformed—she is a beautiful, wanton creature of the night, an insatiable vixen whose appetites are more omnivorous than she ever knew.
The proverbial clock strikes midnight and Reed slips away while Stella sleeps deeply in a way that reminds her of her girls. She knows this is the moment when she must change back to faithful wife, self-sacrificing mother. But she feels Stella’s touch on her skin, indelible, a bright tattoo. Reed doesn’t know if she wants to change back, or even if she can.
She can't leave Tim for Stella, but maybe she can leave him for herself.