Page 9 of Unstitch

I’d like to put you over my knee and spank that insolence out of you.

And I think you’d like that, too.

Jesus Christ. I think I would, too.

I suspect deflection is the best strategy here. ‘All I’m saying,’ I tell my sister, ‘is that you can’t protect me forever. I get around. I’m not some innocent little flower. If I want a big bad man to do bad things to me, I’ll let him. When I’m not at the club, my time’s my own. Got it?’

I’ll get on that stage.

I’ll dance.

I’ll fluff those guys at Alchemy till they’re rock fucking hard.

But now I’m back in Europe, I’m going to make sure I have fun.

And if that fun includes a few harmless spanks from Anton’s best man when the wedding comes around next month, so be it.

After all, I’m my sister’s bridesmaid.

It would be rude not to.

7

DEX

It’s slightly affronting that packing up to leave a country after an eight-year stint there should be so effortless. Plants without deep roots are far easier to transplant, I suppose.

It seems humans without deep roots are, too.

But when I look around my Upper East Side apartment, the neat pile of packing boxes strikes me as an equally neat metaphor for the complete lack of baggage that tethers me here. I can’t imagine the emotional stress of moving home will be any greater than the logistical stress.

I shrug aside the fleeting thought that if you flee to a place for the wrong reasons, some well-meaning part of your subconscious will prevent you from ever getting too attached to said place.

Because at some point, you’ll yield to the inevitable.

It’s almost time to go home.

Instead, I focus on the very appealing view in front of me. My west-facing apartment is a few floors away from being a penthouse, but it’s high enough that I’m blessed with the vista of a perfect June sunset. I love Manhattan at this time of year—it’s warm, but not stifling.

London will doubtless be prettier—it’s a far more graceful, elegant, green city than New York—but it won’t have the energy that’s kept me here this long. The energy that keeps me busy. Moving forward. Constantly in motion. I’m a great white shark, for whom movement is oxygen.

Even prettier than the sunset is the glossy, almost-naked brunette sitting on my kitchen island. Claudia is a gorgeous lawyer whose ambition matches mine and who puts in even longer hours than I do. That’s the beauty of working in the equity markets. At four each day, when the closing bell rings, your day is done.

For a junior partner in asset finance law, it’s pretty amazing that Claudia gets away from work as early as she does, but I have a feeling that has less to do with her commitment to proving herself at Clifford Chance and more to do with her attachment to me. While I don’t share that attachment, the fact that she’s crying pretty tears—she even cries prettily—at my impending departure enhances this evening, somehow.

It’s as if the fact that at least one of us has some emotional skin in the game will elevate our last coupling and allow me to feel something, even by proxy, with absolutely none of the guilt I might feel at breaking her heart, because this move isn’t on me.

It’s on Loeb, the Swiss boutique bank who sought out a meeting with me when I was in London recently and offered to bring me on board as a partner. It’s a far smaller outfit than my current employer, the mighty Goldman Sachs, but the latter is well known for dangling the carrot of partnership over its managing directors’ noses for years to keep them on the hook. I made the call that going in as a big fish to a far smaller pond with the partnership thing done and dusted was the right thing for my career.

You only get to make the trade from Goldman to another bank once. The money Loeb is laying out to poach me tells me this is the trade. And the fact that they’ve made me head of the entire Equities division, rather than just the Cash Equities role Goldman was proposing in London, has sealed the deal for me. I might have waited years and years to get that opportunity if I’d stayed put and drunk the Kool Aid like a loyal little Goldmanite.

Claudia understands you don’t leave something like this on the table. Still, I get that it sucks for her. I get that, over the month we’ve spent fooling around since our introduction by mutual friends at a charity gala, she’s fallen for me. And if I feel guilt, it’s that I didn’t nip this arrangement in the bud as quickly as I usually do because I was conscious that we had a natural expiration date.

Somehow, despite my having been unequivocally clear from the outset, Claudia has failed to get that memo.

‘I could come to London for the weekend,’ she sniffs, her perfect little nose rosy red and her huge brown eyes clouded with tears.

I step between her legs and she widens them for me. With my thumbs, I wipe away the tracks of her tears. ‘No, baby,’ I tell her as gently and clearly as I can. ‘There’s no point in prolonging the inevitable. We’ll both be working our arses off—I’ll have to seriously prove myself when I get over there. And you’ll finally be clear of unhelpful distractions.’ I smile at her. ‘Let’s just call this what it was—a really great time—and enjoy this last night together.’

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