Thrill Seeker (24 page)

One chance, one meeting.

Not if I have it my way, Dr Jackson.

When it was time for the delegates to break for coffee, I returned to the foyer, staying at a safe distance in the hope I would see before I was seen. My heart thumped when the double doors of the lecture hall opened and people began
drifting towards a table where jugs and urns were stationed. The delegates were bright, theatrical and lively, a far cry from the desk-bound, monochrome-suited world I was accustomed to in my job.

For a while, I lurked by a corner, watching at an angle while pretending to text so I could keep my head low. People swarmed around the long table, chatting eagerly and reaching apologetically across each other for sugar sachets, milk and so on. Cups and teaspoons clinked, the chatter of conversation rising to the vaulted stone ceiling.

Where was he? I feared I might be drawing attention to myself by loitering and fake-texting. Would it be better to mill among the crowds? Well, even if it was, reaching them by crossing what seemed like an acre of corporate, pale burgundy carpet would leave me too exposed, so no point wondering.

I’d decided to take a few steps back when I spotted him, instantly recognising that smooth, shaved head and those wide shoulders. My heart flared. How strange everything felt. In this focused bustle of people, half of them resembling carnival escapees, he seemed both improbable and hyper-ordinary. With my pulse racing hard, I couldn’t help but gawp, knowing I ran the risk of him turning my way. He wore a black velvet suit jacket over a checked, deep-blue shirt, jeans and those black Converse trainers. Even without my knowledge of his physique, it was easy to see that under his clothes this man was powerfully athletic.

He was talking intently to a short, floppy-haired guy in leggings and silver Doc Martens. He held his cup and saucer with a peculiar delicacy, energy trapped in every tiny movement he made. His narrow eyes and neatly sloping
nose were strikingly familiar. I felt as if I could walk over there, claim him as my own and return him to my life and my dreams where he belonged. And yet in another way, I didn’t feel like that at all. I felt as if needed to hide in the Ladies till the coast was clear then skulk off home, acknowledging the foolish indignity of pursuing him.

Then, oh Hell, heading for the Ladies is precisely what I was doing, face burning, heart pumping, as Den set down his drink and began walking towards me. I span around and fled, barging into the toilets, the door handle thumping against the tiles. Damn, damn, damn! Forgot my need to stay alert there. Had he spotted me? I caught a glimpse of him as the door swung shut behind me. No, the neutral expression on his face suggested I’d got away with it. He appeared to be doing nothing more dramatic than heading for the Gents.

In a tizz, I checked my reflection in the mirror. I looked hectic and alarmed, my cheeks flushed, my eyes too wide, my curls too curly. Easy, Nats. Get a grip. Nobody’s forcing you to do this. I drew a deep breath. If I were going to go through with this, I had to seize my opportunity. A now or never moment. I counted one, two, three then
now
. I left the Ladies, striding confidently across the dark pink football pitch and towards the doors of the lecture theatre. Chin high, I bypassed the coffee drinkers, chanting a silent mantra of ‘independent scholar, independent scholar’.

Even though I’d paid my money and had every right to be there, I feared I was about to get busted. But I made it across the foyer unchallenged, and found myself standing on shaky legs in a large, brightly lit auditorium, gazing up at near-empty rows of tiered plastic seats. A low, false ceiling obscured most of the chamber’s high gothic arches while enormous grey roller blinds hung in front of slim,
pointed windows, the conference suite once again veiling the venue’s history in an apparent bid to be as featureless as a contemporary hotel chain.

Feeling shifty, I took my place halfway up the rows, sitting to the right in the hope I wouldn’t be seen too quickly from the low stage on which stood a long table, four chairs behind it, a glossy white podium and projection screen.

My breath was pumping so fast I might have sprinted to my seat. I inhaled slowly, trying to steel my nerves. I no longer knew how to achieve what I wanted. My plan had always been to play it by ear but that no longer seemed sufficient. I wasn’t sure what I wanted either. I could see I was becoming increasingly foolhardy. ‘Act now, think later’ is fine if you’re in danger but as a motto to live by, it sucks.

Then I remembered what I wanted: to be acknowledged. I wanted to take some control of the situation. I wasn’t going to play meek victim to a guy who thought it was acceptable to embark on a relationship then vanish without a trace.

I kept my head down as delegates returned to the room. When I saw Den, I ducked below the narrow shelf of a row of mini-desks in front of me, pretending to fiddle with the contents of my bag. When I bobbed back up, he was talking to a woman behind the lectern, the two of them setting up a laptop. After a time, a guy joined them, and Den took his seat behind the long table on the dais.

To my horror, he began confidently scanning his audience, smiling slightly as he gazed out. I ducked down again, mentally apologising to my heart for all the shocks I was inflicting upon it. This time I remembered something useful in my bag, a notebook I’d brought as part of my lame disguise. I set the pad on my desk-cum-shelf, pretending to write so I could hunker down and hide.

I only stopped when the first speaker took to the lectern. For the next thirty minutes, I watched a woman draped in plastic jewellery talk about the choreographer as artist. I say ‘watched’ because her words, steeped in academic jargon, were largely impenetrable to me. I watched Den too, slyly peeking around the shoulders of a tall, frizzy-haired woman who’d helpfully sat in front of me, screening me from Den’s view if I stayed slumped in my seat. Realising that of all the people in the audience, I was the one who’d seen him climax, gave me a sense of mild advantage. I was the one who’d turned him on, who’d felt his cock and fingers inside me, who knew his dark, twisted secrets.

After an interminable length of time and much clanking of bangles, the Chair introduced Dr Dennis Jackson as our next speaker, confusing me momentarily when she described him as a researcher at You See. Then I clicked she meant U-SEA, The University of South East Arts. When Den took to the podium I became nervous for him having to speak in this grand, intimidating arena. But he was confident and relaxed, scanning his papers and loading his PowerPoint presentation onto the big screen before clearing his throat and addressing us.

I slithered down to hide behind the bush of hair in front of me. My heart went pitter-patter, the simple familiarity of Den’s clear, commanding voice enough to excite me. Weird to think that this voice, now rising in the hall and using words such as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘methodological’, was the same one I’d heard say, ‘Suck it, whore,’ and ‘I don’t give a single fuck what you want.’ I tried to focus on his paper, hoping for an insight into his character, but while most words were individually intelligible, when assembled into sentences, their overall meaning eluded me. I experienced moments
of comprehension, occasional paragraphs rising like islands from a murky sea of gobbledegook.

The proposal Den appeared to be making was that Noh theatre couldn’t be understood from the perspective of Western traditions. Most fascinating to me, in elucidating this point, he informed us his mother was part Japanese, part Dutch. Such an unexpected, personal snippet was a joy. I listened hard, doing my best to concentrate. I learned only one rehearsal takes place prior to a Noh performance. One chance, one meeting, and in this was transience, a key aspect of Noh, and Zen Buddhism. But why had he said that phrase to me in The Hippodrome? Did he mean something by it? Something I was too ill-informed to appreciate? Or was he just pulling esoteric-sounding phrases from his brainy life to mess with my mind?

I drifted off as he went into tedious detail about a particular Noh character. My ears pricked up again at the phrase ‘roleplay’. From what I could glean, characters in Noh are abstractions of emotions rather than representations of people with biographies. And the actor’s role is an imitation of this inner essence rather than a mimicry of outward mannerisms. And true masters of the art, in nullifying personality, identify so deeply with the abstracted state that they become this. They have gone beyond roleplaying.

I grew so interested in what Den was saying that I relaxed too much. The clever words leaving his mouth made him strange to me. I wondered if his roleplay theories could be related to BDSM. The zonked state he described reminded me of the floatiness of subspace, of self-annihilation through bliss, a condition reached by powerplay but existing far beyond a role.

One day, I thought, I’d like to ask him; I’d like to sit down
and have a drink with this erudite man who commanded audiences from the stage. He seemed a different being to the one who’d kidnapped me and behaved too cruelly. The hard masculinity of his shorn head was less menacing when teamed with a black velvet jacket and brushed cotton shirt. He still looked good, though, seriously sexy.

And then he saw me. No, no, no! Oh, I’d wanted him to spot me eventually, of course I had. I’d wanted to wrong-foot him by turning our power dynamic on its head. Not our sexual power dynamic; I was comfortable with that. But the real imbalance where he had me running around after him; confused, thwarted, desirous, hurt and hopeful.

My half-baked fantasy plan had been to stay unobserved then ask a question at the end of his paper. I’d imagined myself raising a hand, bold as brass, making him sweat, suffer and stutter as he responded, unable to do anything but reply in this formal, crowded space. He’d be in no position to say, ‘I don’t give a single fuck about your question.’ But, in the catching of an eye, my grand plan collapsed.

He faltered, briefly losing his thread before checking his script and regaining composure. All the moisture disappeared from the inside of my mouth. His eyes kept darting back to me as he continued speaking. I sat up straighter, edging sideways and clear of the fuzzy-haired woman. I’d unsettled him. I allowed myself to smile at my minor victory. Den clicked through to another slide on his PowerPoint presentation. From the screen a wild, crimson mask with fanged teeth, furrowed brow and a ferocious scowl glared at the audience.

Den turned from screen to audience. ‘The red Shikami mask,’ he said, projecting his voice across the auditorium, ‘is the demon, a representation of masculine rage’. Deliberately, he focused on me as he spoke, clearly less flustered than
moments ago. Was this his way of covertly communicating his displeasure? My smile broadened, my satisfaction increasing. I’d definitely disturbed him. I’d pissed him off in front of his peers and there was nothing he could do.

My glow of triumph remained throughout his presentation and the content of the third paper passed me by, all my thoughts fixed on Den. I watched him throughout the delivery of the final paper and he didn’t once look in my direction. The session was wrapped up with questions from the audience, one of which went on for so long it was tantamount to filibustering. People fidgeted, whispered, checked their phones and watches.

Finally, we were done. Lunch. We would reconvene at two. I didn’t have a clue what might happen next. My biggest fear was Den might ignore me, as was his wont. I took my time gathering my belongings, pacing myself so I could leave the lecture theatre when he did. The big-haired woman turned around to ask if I could recall the name of the Italian choreographer mentioned at the end of the first paper. I couldn’t but managed to spin out a short conversation enabling me to linger less suspiciously.

Den was taking forever, engaging in conversations as he made his way from the stage. Unable to stall any longer, I collected my bag and jacket, and walked down the shallow steps of the aisle. When Den glanced in my direction, my pulse skipped a beat, anxiety replacing my earlier smugness. He touched a colleague on the elbow, a gesture signifying he was making his excuses to leave. In a daze of uncertainty, I kept on walking towards the exit then out into the foyer where people talked in clusters.

Seconds later, Den was looming up behind me. He grabbed my arm above the elbow, fingers stabbing. My heart
was going like the clappers. I turned to him, afraid of the anger clouding his face. ‘Down here,’ he said. He steered me along an airy, burgundy-carpeted corridor. ‘You insane bitch. What the Hell are you playing at?’ His grip tightened and he gave my arm a furious shake. ‘This is my career. It is not your territory. You have no right.’

I winced in pain from his fingers, trying to wrench myself free, but he only squeezed tighter. In silence, he marched me along the quiet corridor, flung open a door and jostled me into an empty classroom. Grey, plastic desks were arranged in a rectangle framing an empty space and he shoved me towards the back, making me stumble down an aisle between the wall and the tables. Metal chair legs clanged against each other.

Fearing I’d pushed it too far, I stood petrified, clutching my bag and jacket to my chest. Den grabbed the nearest desk, and half-dragged, half-swung it towards the door, blocking us in. He shrugged off his velvet jacket, slung it on to the desk and began rolling up his shirt sleeves as he stalked to the other side of the room. With snappy movements, he tugged on thin chains to bring blinds clattering down over diamond-paned windows.

He turned to me. ‘You have seriously fucked up this time,’ he said.

I gulped, my throat dry as dust. I had a horrible feeling he was right.

Den glared at me, his chest rising and falling.

‘Well?’ he snapped. ‘What is it? What do you want?’

Summoning up the remnants of my bravery, I set down my belongings and met his glare, hands on my hips. ‘Why are you acting like a prick?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch?’

Den gave a harsh laugh. ‘Wow, stalker alert.’ He swiped the heel of his hand across his forehead. ‘Seriously, you travel all this way to ask if we can talk?’ He began moving around the back of the classroom, approaching with an intimidating swagger. ‘I’m not sure whether to be scared or flattered.’