“Stop, you’re killing me!” I put up my hands. “I surrender. I’m a failure as a human being. Now fix me.”
He took off his glasses and frowned at me for a moment. “Nobody’s calling you a failure,” he said, though it sounded like a telling-off to me. Replacing the glasses, he said, “You’re not unusual, Lara. This is a common syndrome of twenty-first-century life. It can be fixed. I can fix it.”
“Do you really think you can? I’m not beyond hope?”
“Not at all.” Ohmigosh, he was smiling! A little bit. “But you must be prepared for some hard work, honesty and—the most difficult thing of all to achieve—self-discipline.”
Ugh. It sounded like medicine. Couldn’t he have just waved a wand?
“Oh. Okay.”
He made a spreadsheet, which I looked at through trembling eyelashes, because spreadsheets terrified me. Then he made some lists and timetables. Then he made some rules. Then he gave the rules sub-headings and footnotes. Then I begged for mercy by offering him a drink again.
“Do you have green tea?” he asked.
“Oh…I think I might.” I opened my overhead cupboard, in which ancient caddies full of variegated teabags resided. A huge pile of them fell on my head and all over the floor.
He joined me, scrabbling at the lino to get them all up again. Down on his knees, scooping Precambrian tea leaves from the floor, he seemed just a tad more human. He had lovely hands with long, strong fingers, and he smelt nice, kind of fresh and citrusy. He raised an eyebrow at me in a way that was just a little bit sexy as well as stern. You should be ashamed of yourself, you minx! rather than plain, You should be ashamed of yourself. I felt a tiny tug of something in my stomach and my breath went a bit wobbly.
“We really do need to sort you out, don’t we, Lara?” he said.
Ooh, yes, Mister Dexter. Sort me out.
* * * *
So I had a plan. I had a number of plans, in fact—short-term, long-term, repayment, career, fitness, all courtesy of Dexter. He truly was the master planner. This was good, because plans were what I wanted and needed. But I also had something else, something a little less welcome. I had a crush.
Now, with my days better ordered, I didn’t have to spend half the night tearing out my hair, and that left me more time to…think. About Dexter, putting a long, strong hand under my chin and making me look at him, making me admit my faults, making me promise to make amends because if I didn’t…I shivered and my hand disappeared between my thighs. Oh, the things he would do to me if I didn’t…
We met on a
twice-weekly basis for progress reports, and by the second of these meetings, I was barely able to speak to him, breathless with lust every time he turned his steely, bespectacled eyes on me. They were eyes that bored through me, that saw every pathetic excuse for what it is, that accepted nothing less than excellence. I had a hard time separating the fear from the lust, but sometimes I wondered if the two were inextricable and that I couldn’t have one without the other.
“You’ve made a very good start,” he told me at our second meeting, sipping on that elusive green tea.
I’d had to buy some from Whittard’s in the end.
“You’ve a long way to go still, but this shows promise.” He clicked another item off the spreadsheet, stretching his elegant neck in its high-collared black shirt as if it chafed him.
“Are you religious?” I asked him, out of the blue.
He stared. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Just…you remind me of a priest.”
He had nothing to say to this, and I blushed furiously, feeling that I had offended him.
“I mean…you are, in a funny way, aren’t you?” I said in a rush. “You’re my confessor.”
He actually laughed, though it was more a sound of astonishment than humour. He thinks I’m insane. Good move. Smooth.
“I suppose…in a way…that’s true.” Oh, he agreed with me! There was hope. “Yes.” He seemed to be testing the idea out for strength and durability.
I could see the information being processed in his circuits, or whatever substitute for a human brain he had up there.
“A confessor,” he continued. “For the twenty-first century.”
* * * *