"Are you hungry?"
"What?"
"Would you like something to eat?"
"No, I'd like you to answer my question."
"In good time. Besides, you're the analyst, Ruth. You work it out."
He got up and walked to the fridge.
"I don't want to work it out. I want to go home."
Harry paused and regarded her, he looked for all the world like he wanted to say something in response, but whatever it was he kept it to himself and instead opened the fridge door.
"I thought I might make us some pasta."
He reached in and pulled out mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes and spring onions.
"You do like pasta, don't you, Ruth?"
"Harry, have you lost your mind!"
"What? You don't like pasta?"
"Yes, I like pasta, my god, who doesn't not like pasta! You're doing it again. You're behaving like everything's perfectly normal, that I've come round for dinner and a drink. Harry, I'm a prisoner."
He smiled, "hardly a prisoner, Ruth."
"Well, what would you call it then?"
He pondered, "a hostage, perhaps…..a dinner hostage."
"Quick, tell the broadcasters, it could be a whole new take on 'Come Dine with Me,'" she said, vaguely apoplectic.
"What's that?"
"Oh, never mind. Just cook."
Harry turned away a little confused and began to measure some of the aforementioned pasta into a pan.
Ruth tried to focus her wild and angry thoughts into a useful direction. She tried to work out what the hell he was doing…besides making pasta!
"You said you didn't have a knife," she said calmly, as he began chopping the mushrooms.
He looked at it and then her.
"I lied," he said, with a wicked, but slightly endearing grin.
Ruth chastised herself for even beginning to think of him as endearing and instead muttered something incoherent.
"So how long are you planning on keeping me hostage, is it purely dinner hostage, or hostage for the night?"
"Oh," said Harry, "I'd not actually thought it through, to be quite honest. It depends how long it takes."
"How long what takes? Dinner?"
He nodded but she knew he wasn't talking about dinner.
She told herself to focus once more.
Harry moved her chair towards the table a little and placed a glass of white wine in front of her and turned away.
"Thanks," she said sarcastically, "I'm going to really enjoy that."
He turned back and placed a straw in the glass and angled it towards her. "I thought white seemed less unseemly to drink this way than red."
"Of course. I always have my Chablis with a straw."
"It's white burgundy, Ruth."
He turned back to his chopping.
Ruth sighed and leant forward, realising it was actually quite easy to reach the drink and that it still tasted the same, straw or not. She might as well, she thought, after all she wasn't going anywhere.
Again she tried to focus but he was distracting her. Her eyes followed him around the room as he methodically prepared dinner. She had only ever been in his house twice, well, once really, once on the doorstep when she had raised her hand to knock and then fled and the second time to deliver some papers when she never made in past the hallway.
And now here she was, having dinner, watching him cook, drinking wine. It all sounded rather lovely if she excluded the straw and the fact that she was tied to his kitchen chair.
"I'll put some music on," he said.
"Oh, yes why not, dinner as a hostage just wouldn't be the same without some background music."
She smiled but it wasn't a happy smile.
He pressed play and glanced at her.
"Bill Withers," he said, "you can't help but feel happy listening to Bill Withers."
"Yes, Harry I feel very happy tied here, listening to 'Just the Two of Us'!"
"Wait a minute, Ruth I'll go and get a cloth so that I can wipe the dripping sarcasm from the floor. Now if you don't mind, I've got dinner to cook."
And so once more she had little to do but watch him and sip on her straw.
He had prepared most of the vegetables and now he was testing the pasta before throwing the mushroom into the pan.
He paused.
"I used to listen this to when you went to Cyprus," he said wistfully and then resumed what he was doing.
Ruth knew the song. Of course she did.
"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone and she's always gone too long, any time she goes away. Wonder this time where she's gone, wonder if she's gone to stay..." sang Bill. And she listened.
"I thought you just said that you can't help but feel happy listening to Bill Withers?" she said, this time a little more softly.
"I lied," he said, "well, maybe just this track."
"Maybe it wasn't the best thing to listen to at the time."
"No it was the perfect thing, Ruth," and his eyes drifted away to the window and she suddenly had a sense of him, here in this kitchen, playing that song and gazing sadly out of the window thinking the same thoughts as her, as she sat in the sunshine so very far away.