Happy (Good) Friday everyone. No points for guessing what this one covers.
Have a great weekend and a lovely Easter/Ramadan/Whateverelseyouliketocelebrate .
Mel
She'd kissed him back.
Will had no clear memories of how he got home afterwards. He vaguely remembered coming to, so to speak, on the North side of Tower Bridge. Something about having to drive over the river perhaps made him think something other than the fact that
she'd kissed him back.
Oh but she had, she'd kissed him back, and it hadn't been the worst first kiss in the world at all, nuh-uh, not by a very long way. It had been good, better than good, it had been amazing. And not just for him either, judging by how hard she'd hung on to the back of his neck.
OK, so, objectively, he'd not stuck to the plan, not at all. Epic fail on that front - issues with the kissing dial as well, as it turned out. More of an on/off switch, again, but never mind. What else could he have done, when
she'd kissed him back?
He couldn't have been expected to expect that, right? Let alone plan around it. So considering the element of surprise he'd been very good. He'd stopped. He'd pulled back and left her alone and OK, he'd not stopped and pulled back until he'd felt her hand press into his chest, by which time both his hands had long been lost inside her hair and one was probably about to make its way to her chest, which would not have been cricket but in the end it hadn't, he had just about managed to keep both his hands inside that mad amazing hair or hers so yes, all things considered, he could have done worse.
Besides: mission accomplished, he had kissed her, right? OK, so, he'd kissed her a lot more than intended but the point was that he'd done it. She'd finally got the message loud and clear. And he liked her initial response to it. A lot. It formed in his delighted opinion the most excellent basis for further negotiations, because
she'd kissed him back,
and no one could ever take that away from him. He now had a brand-new happiest place on earth, and it was no longer the hotel's terrace, it was the underneath of some stairwell in Archway, because that was where
she'd kissed him back.
x
With this refrain still in his head Will entered his flat and collapsed face down onto his bed, waking up some hours later with the same smile still on his face. The winter daylight was already fading. Where had the day gone? Did it matter? Of course not, because
she'd kissed him back.
He rifled through the pockets of his coat for his phone and found her text. "Here, obviously," and grinned liked a moron, but an extremely happy one, and started typing
"Elisabeth," and then erased that and went through permutations of "dear" and "dearest" Elisabeth, both with and without the addition of the first person possessive pronoun. Then he decided to go back to the original and then stared at her name on his screen and tried to think of what to write after the comma.
"When can we do this again?"
"Please?"
"How did we not do this earlier?"
No, he knew the answer to that last one: some idiot by the name of Tom, why bring him up now? Let the bastard rot in a hell all of his own making.
Next came to Will variations on the theme of how insanely happy he felt, but they all looked corny spelt out, from heaven being a place in Archway, to theirs being the best first kiss ever in the history of first kisses, to the fact that his smile was going to need to be surgically removed from his face by tomorrow morning.
Will set his mobile phone down and went to listen to the message Dean had left on his landline. Dean opened with compliments on Georgie's recital, then enquired how Will's off-site had gone, by which Dean didn't mean: had they finally come up with a way to meet the challenges of building a single high-performance investment culture across six offices on three continents?
While plug-wiring in marigolds.
The trouble with friends who know you too well is that, even when you refuse point blank to talk to them about something, or someone, they go and make assumptions. Correct assumptions, too. But conversely, Will knew Dean well enough to know that if he told him that
she'd kissed him back,
he'd only get a chiding for moving too fast too soon. Will was well aware he'd moved too soon and too fast, but the timing had not been left up to him, and in terms of speed, well...
…she'd kissed him back,
hadn't she?
Still, and this was what made writing this text to her tricky, for a trader and a process-optimising quant, they had a serious case of their ducks being all out of line. Not that Will had ever been much of a player on the courting scene, but his understanding was that you flirted then dated then kissed then snogged, and he and Elisabeth had definitely skipped some important steps this morning.
But hey, what was done was done. And very pleasantly done too, it seemed, for both parties involved, since
she'd kissed him back.
Besides, it wasn't like they couldn't ever catch up and realign the water-fowls if they so desired. He'd see her tomorrow morning and OK, he'd not pictured having to pull her into 3.11 to ask her out on a date, but if that's what he had to do, now that
she'd kissed him back,
then he would. Better ask her out in 3.11 than not at all, and obviously he should have thought of trying to ask her out before eating her face up, but he'd explain and apologise and it would be fine in the end, since
she'd kissed him back.
Right?
Right.
Will should probably have thought of how to try and finish that text to her. Maybe he should even have called her, but what if she was busy sleeping last night off? Certainly he should have got on with his neglected weekend chores, but instead he went back to bed and fell asleep again, with the memory of Elisabeth's hand on his chest, and slept the sleep of the just until Georgie called on her way back from her latest concert.
She too was greedy for news of "the off-site", but even half-asleep Will knew better than to give her any. He did, however, in the process of picking up his sister's call, send Elisabeth a text consisting of her name, and a comma.
x
He realised this the next morning when, having watched Elisabeth's coffee get cold and wondered why she should be late today, of all Mondays, he finally thought to check his phone.
Crap.
Well hopefully she'd find it cute rather than plain stupid, which it was, but more to the point: where was she?
She walked in twenty interminable minutes later, looking like death, if death ever came round with wet hair and late-penalty coffees for everyone.
Swimming? She'd been swimming?
Today?
Why?
She never looked at him while she popped his coffee onto his desk, though Will thought he might have seen a hint of a blush on her cheek as she hurried on across to do the same with Andy's. What was going on here? Elisabeth hadn't gone swimming before work in ages. Not since the dark days of… wait!
Was Estonia arsehole back on the scene?
No, no, calm down, that was absurd. When could the bastard have snuck back onto the scene? There simply hadn't been time for him to do that much damage, not since yesterday about 11 o'clock.
What then? What?
What?
A portfolio manager at Will's left elbow, was what, together with a complete pig of an index rebalance list that was going to take at least a couple of days to work through, because these idiots hadn't thought to anticipate the fact that everyone else on the market would be selling those stocks leaving the FTSE250 today. Hence for the next few hours Will was too busy on tradePad to think further on what might explain Elisabeth's state of… he wasn't even sure what to call it: mute, but agitated.
Though they were all busy Neil, being Neil, took a minute to ask whether she was alright, but she either didn't hear him, or preferred not to answer, and no one else on the desk was brave or idle enough to press the matter further.
The next chance Will had to think on it was at noon during the weekly Operational Risk meeting, which nowadays was a complete waste of everyone's time. On the equity side anyway: the bond and FX guys still had plenty of the kind of cock-ups that tradePad had eliminated for Will's team. So having reported that he had nothing to report, Will sat around and tried to put a more exact word on Elisabeth's state of evident under-slept agitation.
Most certainly it didn't look like the light headed bliss he'd been high on since
she'd kissed him back.
But had she, really? Looking at her avoid looking at him all morning, it was getting increasingly hard to believe. And the imprint of her hand on his chest, which had kept him warm snug and smug all night, had gradually vanished as, whenever he got a chance to look away from his screens, he'd seen her fidget and scrunch things up and mess around with the up and down arrows on her keyboard while staring at her code.
And tuck her hair back, of course.
Her hair…
The meeting was dismissed and Will walked back, determined to ignore index-rebalancing for however long it took to straighten things out with her in 3.11. The view of her from across the atrium was the same he'd left half an hour ago: all hair tucking and nervous key tapping in between long weary palm-to-cheek screen stares. But then her face turned to look at him and the word he'd been looking for all morning came to him like a slap in the face:
Panic, Elisabeth had got herself into one of her quant panics.
Just like that time she might have got sacked, but hadn't.
Thank goodness for that.
Anyway, this was maybe more like the time she'd overbought Xstrata, because what was there to worry about? She'd kissed him back, right, hadn't she?
Shit.
The imprint of her hand on Will's chest came back to him with a vengeance, except this time her hand was pushing him away, hard.
So hard, it stopped Will not ten paces away from his desk. He turned around.
Crap.
Fuck.
Sweet Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking bike: what had he done?
He hadn't quite finished crossing the atrium back when he stopped swearing at himself for long enough to think: poor thing. What had Elisabeth done to deserve this? A bit of mindless flirting of a Saturday night, all of his own devising too, and before she knew it the poor woman was having her face devoured on her own door step and OK, yes, perhaps she had kissed him back, at first, without thinking, but then she'd done her best to shove him away and instead of getting the message he'd gone and sent her some creepy half-a-text in the middle of the night…
Fucking caveman, seriously.
What the hell now? He couldn't leave her like this.
Except that he had to, for now, because Neil was calling his mobile about a run-in he was having with Credit Suisse, and of course by the time Will turned around and got to his desk Elisabeth had scarpered through the back stairs and vanished.
So Will sat down and gave some broker more aggro than the poor guy probably deserved, but far less than Will felt like dishing out, considering that index bloody rebalancing also precluded him from going for a run. He duly transacted all afternoon, bargaining harder than he needed to, and thinking how lucky the guys were on the other side of tradePad's FIX messages, that they no longer had to put up with him live over the phone. He also avoided looking Elisabeth's way, knowing full well what he'd see there, and that it was his own, bloody, stupid fault that she felt that way.
x
After ten breathless miles in a diagonal downpour that evening Will was both drenched and exhausted but still not a lot calmer, or indeed wiser. All he'd concluded on his round of the Thames' bridges was that index rebalancing or not, he wasn't doing one other trade tomorrow, until he'd sorted this out with her. Poor thing was probably having another awful night, swimming and panicking about how to carry on working next to the guy who'd gone and assaulted her on her very own doorstep.
And enjoyed it too, the fucking caveman.
It was a long time since Will had screwed up on that sort of scale. His first year at Goldman's if memory served, not that a five-digit trading error was anywhere near as bad as this. Still, had this been anybody else's cock up, surely Will would have advised them to follow the same steps his first head-trader had taught him.
Step one was to own up and let the other side vent. Call you every name under the sun if they wanted to – saved you having to add the same epithets to your own, subsequent apology. Not that Will could picture Elisabeth doing much in the way of swearing at him, not in English anyway, but she could mutter at him all she liked, give him daggers or even fling her morning macchiato back into his face if that made her feel better.
Assuming her legendary hand-eye coordination was up to the task, which it probably wasn't.
Step two was to agree with whatever had been said, obviously, except that of course the two of them had never been very good at agreeing on stuff. But Will promised himself he'd do his best - his not very good best – not to argue with her. Not to say things like "but you looked at my neck" or "but you kissed me back", because they were irrelevant. The only point of relevance was that he was sorry and wouldn't do it again.
And then, with a trading cock-up, step three would be to go through the post-mortem and try to work out what had gone wrong, and to agree how to not cock-up again, or at least not to cock up again in the exact same way. Now that wasn't a conversation he could picture her contributing much to, and fair enough. After all, it wasn't her cock up in the first place.
Apart from the kissing him back bit. Jesus, why couldn't he let that go?
Because it had been so damn good, was why. Because he couldn't remember ever feeling half as deliriously happy as he'd been after kissing her.
Moron.
OK, so what did he have to say for himself? What would he tell a hypothetical weekly Operational Risk Management meeting had gone wrong? Or a not-so-hypothetical Talent Management dress-down, if Elisabeth decided to call one on him? That his hand had led his mouth where it shouldn't have gone? That he'd probably have been alright if his fingers hadn't ended up all inside her hair and that next time he'd tie his hands behind his back before he made a move on someone he was absolutely besotted with, so he didn't overstay his welcome?
x
Though he hardly slept a wink that night, Will failed to get one bit closer to an intelligent conclusion by the time Elisabeth made her own bleary-eyed way to the desk the next morning. On the plus side she was early too, on the down side… too many to list:
'Morning, Elisabeth. Mind if we have these in 3.11 today?' he asked when she was done faffing with her coat. As if he'd been calling a tradePad meeting, so as not to spook her even more than she already was.
'Right, uh... now?'
'Yes, now,' he said, still in his best impression of an emotionless person, which according to her was a good one.
'Right,' she said. She looked anything but.
'Go on then,' he said, and grabbed both their coffees and their notepads. Elisabeth looked barely capable of carrying herself the twenty paces to 3.11.
'Right,' he heard again, from behind him as he led the way.
'You might need this,' he said, handing over her notepad after he'd closed the door behind her. Outside of a computer or a coffee, a notepad was in Will's experience this quant's best friend.
'Thanks,' she said, opened said notepad, and seemed to regain half a smidge of composure:
'So what's up then?' she asked.
Really? Oh, come on:
'Elisabeth, you know very well what's up.'
'I do?' she asked, trying but failing to keep her hand steady as it flicked the pages of her notepad. Kudos to her for trying to bluff her way out, shame only she still sucked at it, so bad that Will found it hard not to smile.
'I see,' he said, 'OK, let's spell this out for you then: how long do you reckon we can keep avoiding each other?'
'I wasn't avoid...' she started, but gave up. It seemed her bluffing resources were at an end and she was reverting to full panic mode instead.
Cute.
Except that this wasn't about a piddling amount of Xstrata. This was her having one of her quant panics over accidentally kissing him back, Will remembered, and that was nothing to smile about:
'Like hell you weren't avoiding me, Elisabeth, come on,' he said, trying to look straight at her, but she wouldn't let him. She lowered her eyes to her notepad again and this time he too looked down, and waited.
He waited for her to lay into him, but she didn't. She didn't throw her coffee in his face or mutter under her breath either. When he looked at her again she was staring wide-eyed at her notepad and breathing too fast, because what Will had failed to take into account while trying to prepare for this all of last night, was that Elisabeth wasn't some pissed-off entitled arsehole broker. She wasn't any kind of broker, or trader for that matter: she was far too nice, let alone smart, to be either. She was the nicest person he knew, and his best friend was Dean Fitzwilliam.
She was also the most talented woman he knew, and his sister had just soloed the Wigmore hall. She certainly was the most attractive, to him anyway, by miles, and the best kiss of his life. Shame only that kiss should also be their last, making it impossible to regret it entirely, though it did pain him to see Elisabeth do so now. What he'd promised himself would be an unequivocal apology therefore came out as:
'Look, I'm not going to apologise for Sunday. Frankly I'd wanted to do that for a long time and I'm glad I've had a go. Clearly you didn't like it and that's a shame because I certainly did, but at least now I can stop kicking myself for being too much of a wuss to take a punt.'
Understandably she had nothing to say to that. Just because it was the God-honest truth didn't mean he should have said it out loud. Look at her, she was mortified, the whole point of this was to make her feel better, not worse:
'You OK, Elisabeth? Look, I'm hoping that if you were going to report me to Talent Management for harassment, you'd have done it already by now, right?'
'Hmmm? Oh believe me, Will, I could report you to Talent Management over way worse than that,' she said to her notepad.
Will shut his eyes for a second and tried not to smile as hard as he felt like smiling. He knew what she meant, of course: she meant that she had early emails from him he'd rather not see printed, let alone forwarded to Talent Management. But judging by the fact that she'd just gasped audibly then turned beetroot red, Will felt free to conclude that she'd also meant exactly what she'd said.
That perhaps she hadn't not enjoyed it altogether. Clearly she wasn't happy about the experience now, in hindsight, but she could have no idea what a relief it was for him to know that maybe she hadn't hated kissing him as much as he'd loved kissing her.
'Great! So perhaps it wasn't even that bad,' he said, and watched her blush harder, and tried with dubious success to keep gloating to a minimum.
'That's a relief, really,' he continued, by way of understatement of the millennium, 'but if you're going to be gracious enough not to get me sacked over it, then I suggest we both just get over the fact that I like you, I like you a lot, even, and just get on with life. What do you say?'
Nothing, still, as it turned out. She flashed him the briefest stare of incomprehension. Quants:
'Oh come on, it's not that weird. How many girls like you do you know?'
She shook her head, blushed a little harder then turned her eyes back down to her blessed notepad.
Will realised he was still smiling, and that this might be adding to her confusion. Her rejection had been as unequivocal as it had been silent, and yet Will wasn't just glad he'd said what he'd said. He was proud of himself. And now he was a little proud of having kissed her too.
Not just because it had clearly been nicer than she'd expected, or could presently cope with. Above all he was proud of himself because whenever she did decide that Gunter the German engineer was the guy for her, of Francois Frederic de Tosseur or even Jan the Blooming Dane if he played whatever instrument it was that did rock her boat, then Will would still have got that one kiss, and that one night watching her cigar-smoke cast shadows on the hotel terrace. Sure they weren't much, but they were real. And they were his, whenever he cared to remember them.
'Right, chin up now, Elisabeth. You don't have to say anything. In fact you're right, silence between us can be extremely refreshing. But we do have some work to do, we've got that 3 o'clock with Deutsche tomorrow. So if I promise to be a good boy can we be cool?'
'Sure.'
'Great! Off we go then.'
He stood up.
'I'll just go to the...' Elisabeth said back on the desk, and Will made sure not to look at her until her back was turned and she was hurrying to the back staircase with her phone.
Had he just promised to be a good boy? That he might just about manage, but "being cool"? Around her?
Not likely.
On the Market is Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved.
Also: thanks to everyone who's given A Bee in her Bonnet a go this week, nice to see the numbers pick up a bit at last, keep it up!
And can you believe there's only three more chapters after this?
Til next week
Mel