Agnes

The noise in the background is the torrential rain. 

Agnes confuses me, ever since I’ve known her she’s looked at me with bedroom eyes while speaking to me with a boardroom voice. She flashes her flirtatious smile while keeping me at arm’s length. You sometimes see newspaper reports of signs in Leicester confusing drivers because they’re written in Welsh. That’s how I felt with Agnes, the signs were there, clear for the world to see, but god knows what they meant. Take tonight, she’d stuck to me like glue, sitting next to me at dinner, appearing at my side in the bar but then before I could make a move she disappeared to her room leaving me wondering if she’d wanted me to follow. But the signs just hadn’t been clear enough, the signals too blurred. She was a colleague, a senior colleague, I had a lot to lose if read the signs wrong.

Dejectedly I went to the bar and ordered another pint.

‘I’ll get that for you.’ I looked up and saw Claire standing next to me smiling with her cute dimples and sparkling eyes. She handed over the ten-pound note to the barman signalling it was for my drink too.

‘I’ll buy you one later.’ I said.

‘Or you can repay me another way.’  She put her hand on my chest and her dimples got a little deeper as her smile got wickeder.

Now these were signs I could read, they were in huge upper case letters and plain English.

Before long we were making plans. I’d leave the bar first and she’d follow me up in 10 minutes, she knew my room number and if she bumped into anyone she was coming for my phone charger. The plan worked a treat and soon we were on my hotel bed tearing at each other’s clothes.

The knock on the door brought us to a sudden halt. We looked at each other to see if we’d imagined it. Our hearts were beating from passion and fear. There it was again - a gentle knock. I put my finger to my lips to signal Claire should be quiet and then got up to answer the door, pulling on a t-shirt as I did so.

The room was kind of a fat L shape with the bed hidden from the door, so I could send whoever it was away without them seeing I had a guest and get back to business.

I opened the door just a crack, not quite sure what to expect, I certainly didn’t expect to see Agnes.

‘I thought we could have a night cap,’ she said brandishing two mini bar bottles. I stood there confused. I had a lovely woman in my bed and the woman I’d wanted for years at my door.

‘Well are you going to let me in?’ she said.

I looked down at my bare feet and wondered what the hell to do. There was no way I could let her in but no way I could let her go.