BELLS
Three months had passed since my engagement to Theo. Three months of trying to convince myself I'd made the right choice, that safety and security trumped whatever dangerous pull Jude represented.
I made two more calls to him recently. Late calls, when Theo was traveling and wine had loosened the careful boundaries I'd constructed around my feelings. Unanswered of course. He never answered since the engagement.
But still, I tried. There was just something about hearing his voice in the darkness - lower, more intimate than his office persona - that I couldn't resist. He'd listen more than he spoke, but when words came they carried a weight that made my chest tighten. Less guarded than our professional exchanges. The contrast was jarring - and addictive.
At work, that vulnerability vanished. Monday mornings transformed him back into the sharp-edged businessman who kept me at a distance. Especially since Theo made that promise to me at the awards.
However he had looked at me rather intently just yesterday. I'd worn that little black dress, with a blazer draped over my shoulders to keep my attire in the "business casual" register. He must have recognised it from the night he nearly tore it off me in the cab…
The cab.
The "incident" had happened just a month after the awards ceremony.
The memory of it surfaced when I touched myself but couldn't finish. Until that image came. His fingers, my hands in his hair, his lips on my collar bone, me digging my nails into his arms, desperate… And then always, release.
I should have seen it coming that night. The client dinner, the wine, the way Jude's eyes had lingered on my neckline… Like he was memorising something he might never see again. The black dress with the plunging front - I'd chosen it deliberately, told myself it was for the client, for confidence. But we both knew who I was really dressing for.
Once the client left, Jude and I remained. He'd complimented me while looking at me, longing. We flirted a little. Chatting lightly, laughing.
Then Theo called. Offered to pick me up, his voice warm and concerned over the phone. Safe harbour, as always. But I heard myself say I'd take a cab. Laying the foundation for my own destruction as it later transpired.
Both Jude and I booked separately, as two colleagues upholding professional boundaries should, but when we stood and readied to go outside, the wine made me shaky.
Jude's hand slipped around my waist, steadying me, his fingers burning through the fabric like brands. He smelled the way dangerous men should smell. Cedarwood, whiskey, faint tobacco that should have repulsed me but didn't.
Outside, just a single cab waited. Mine had been cancelled. His hadn't.
"Let's share mine," he said, casual as if discussing the weather. "Drop you off first."
I agreed because my heels were already killing me, because saying no would have required admitting why I should say no. And I wasn't ready for that level of honesty, not with him, not with myself.
Inside the cab, I noticed the privacy screen. Later I'd wonder if he'd planned this, if he'd orchestrated the whole evening to arrive at this moment. Or if fate was just tired of watching us circle each other and decided to intervene.
We sat close. Far too close considering the space. The air between us dense with two years of accumulated want, all the meetings where our hands had brushed over documents, all the late nights when work had been an excuse to be alone together.
Rain began to fall, soft and steady on the roof, creating the kind of intimate cocoon that makes terrible decisions feel inevitable. We talked a little. Laughed once. Then silence stretched between us like a taut wire.
Jude looked out the window, jaw tense with whatever war he was fighting inside his own head. Then, without turning to meet my eyes, he rested his hand on my naked knee.
My breath caught in my throat. He still wasn't looking at me, as if acknowledging what he was doing would make it real, irreversible. We drove like that for minutes that felt like hours, his palm burning, my pulse hammering against my ribs like something caged trying to break free.
His hand began to move beneath my dress now. Upward. Slow. Possessive. Each inch a question I was answering with my silence, my stillness, the way my legs shifted slightly apart without conscious permission.
Then I turned to him then, grabbed his tie, pulled him toward me with force that surprised us both. We kissed like drowning people reaching for air. Hard, desperate, two years of suppressed want exploding between us in the back of a stranger's car.
He moved lower, his mouth finding my neck, my collarbone, each kiss a small betrayal that felt like coming home. His fingers found the edge of my underwear, lifting, seeking. When he touched me, I gasped at the certainty of it. No hesitation, no fumbling. He knew exactly what I needed, as if he'd been studying for this moment.
He found the right rhythm immediately, the perfect pressure. When he pushed two finders inside me, my head fell back against the leather seat as pleasure built in waves I hadn't felt in months of dutiful sex with my devoted fiancé.
"I want you inside me." The words escaped before I could stop them, breathless and shameless.
"I am." His voice was rough against my ear.
"The whole you."
He pulled back to look at me then, his eyes dark with want and something deeper. "Come to mine."
The invitation hung between us like a cliff edge. I could feel myself teetering on the precipice of a choice that would change everything.
"Do it here."
The words came from some reckless part of me that had been waiting two years for permission to surface. The part that was tired of being good, of being the perfect employee, the dutiful fiancée, the woman who always made the right choice even when it felt like dying inside.
Then the voice from the front seat cut through our private universe: "It's Bayswater Road, miss."
Reality, arriving right on schedule.
"Come to mine," Jude said again, his hand still between my legs, thumb moving in slow circles, fingers inside, it made thinking impossible but I tried.
"Jude... I can't." Even as I said it, my body betrayed me, hips shifting against his touch, chasing the release that felt so close I could taste it.
He didn't argue. Didn't push. Just leaned back and knocked twice on the privacy screen.
"Circle Hyde Park," he told the driver.
The driver didn't blink. London cabbies had seen everything, and this probably didn't even register in the top ten of their weekly stories.
What followed was inevitable as gravity. He pressed into me, lifted my dress fully now, his urgency matching my own. I slid my hand down, undoing his belt with fingers that shook from want rather than nerves. It was clumsy, desperate, everything proper sex wasn't supposed to be.
When he pushed inside me, I gasped at the completeness of it. How had I forgotten this feeling? How had I convinced myself that gentle, considerate lovemaking with Theo was enough when this existed - raw, consuming, the kind of connection that remade you at the cellular level?
He started slow, deep and deliberate, his mouth finding my ear, my jawline. I buried my fingers in his hair, holding on as if I might drown without an anchor. The rhythm built between us, rain falling harder outside, some slow song humming on the radio that felt like a soundtrack to my own moral collapse.
I bit my lip, already close again, his name forming on my tongue. He pulled down the top of my dress, and I should have stopped him, should have cared about propriety or dignity. Instead I arched beneath him, nails digging into his arms hard enough to leave marks, claiming him as I betrayed everything I was supposed to represent.
Our eyes met in the dim light from streetlamps passing outside. Raw. Honest in a way we'd never been in daylight. I shattered around him, a cry escaping my throat that sounded like surrender and victory rolled into one.
He followed seconds later, his control finally breaking, my name on his lips like something sacred.
Then silence. Heavy. Loaded with the weight of what we'd just done.
He moved off me, zipped up with the efficiency of someone who'd had practice compartmentalising. Passed me a tissue without meeting my eyes, the gesture both intimate and practical, just like our late night work sessions sometimes felt.
I fixed my dress, smoothed my hair, tried to reconstruct the woman who'd entered this cab twenty minutes ago. My phone buzzed. Theo's name on the screen.
Jude saw it, read the guilt that must have been written across my face like headlines.
He knocked again on the glass. A few minutes later, the cab stopped outside my building. I reached for the door handle, but the question escaped before I could stop it.
"Aren't you going to say anything?"
He turned to me then, his face already settling back into that mask of polite distance I knew so well. Calm. Controlled. But I registered something wounded in his eyes.
"Go home to him, Bells."
Five words that felt like a door closing. Five words that reminded me exactly what this was. A moment, a lapse in judgment that would have to be enough to last me the rest of my carefully planned life.
I climbed out into the London evening, my legs still shaky from what we'd done, and walked toward my front door. Toward Theo, waiting in the apartment with tea and questions about my day. Toward the life I'd chosen and would have to keep choosing, one lie at a time.
But as I climbed the stairs to my flat, I could still feel the ghost of Jude's hands on my skin, could still taste the truth we'd shared in the darkness: that some hungers can't be reasoned with, can't be denied forever.
And that I was in far more trouble than I'd ever admitted to myself.