Equal Opportunities Read online

  It was the very definition of frustration. So near, and yet…

  But I still didn’t give up. I tried to go vanilla. Consoling myself with reminders that Rich was heartbreakingly beautiful, and watching him glide around my flat in his chair like a ballerina on wheels should have been more than enough for me.

  But soon I was looking longingly over his shoulder at my toy box. At my glittering icy-cold chains, my butter-soft leather cuffs, my nasty little instruments of pain. And I would find myself daydreaming about things I’d done with stupid, dumb-ass, pig-headed, needy, greedy sub-Gavin. Like how, if I didn’t play dirty with him for a week or so, I’d come home to find Gavin casually wearing a leather collar, or with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist.

  So the relationship I had with Rich died a slow death, the slow death of no sex. And of my frustrated sexual desires for him, which were not reciprocated, well, not reciprocated in the way I wanted them to be. I think we were together for a little less than six months, and we probably stopped having sex altogether after two.

  When we finally split it was nasty. Rich was vicious about my dark side, my bedroom badness. When he left me he said, ‘Shit, Mary, seriously, do you really think any guy who is already disabled is going to want to get tied up? It’s stupid. You’re stupid. Sick and stupid.’ Or something like that. Which was one of the main factors in my decision to bury my desires for disabled men deep, deep in a part of my brain where even my subconscious was scared to visit.

  So then it was back to able-bodied guys. The wheelchair thing was firmly labelled a non-starter. Rich was right; I should keep my disgusting kinked-up self away from people who probably had enough to deal with.

  So after Rich – for eight long years – I stuck exclusively to able-bodied guys. Until now. Until David.

  And talking of now, weirdly, by the time I’ve finished thinking about Rich by way of David by way of Gavin and a few other chapters from the book entitled My Shady Past, I realise I have left the university library and walked all the way from campus into the town centre and I’m right in front of the other library, the public library. The place where I met David.

  Yeah, the same library I hardly ever go to.

  What on earth am I doing here?

  David

  I leave my cyberchick to her frustrated bedtime and dreams of extra large buttplugs, in favour of a bowl of breakfast cereal, followed by a drive over to mum’s house to drop off her library books.

  I know, I know, my life is just thrill-a-minute, isn’t it?

  I live in the heart of suburbia, just off the ring road, so after only a few twists and turns I am on the dual carriageway, the open road, with only the fifty trillion roundabouts that litter it to slow me down.

  I love driving my car. I love it almost as much as I used to love riding my bike. In fact, I might love it more, because now, in a way, driving makes me normal.

  Some people are surprised that I can. Which is a bit ridiculous – I mean, what century is this? But every so often I meet someone who does seem to find it incredible, even when I explain that the car I use is specially adapted for disabled drivers, so I can do everything I need to do with my hands. They still look at me like I’m making it all up. Like my brain has stopped working along with my legs and I have strange delusions that I can drive a car.

  I’m not scared of cars, or traffic, or anything, after what happened to me. Actually, as the driver of the car that hit me walked away from the accident practically unhurt, I find being inside the welded steel armour of a car makes me feel quite safe.

  After almost a full circuit of the ring road, I pull off at one of the roundabouts and drive into the town centre.

  Apparently my delightful home town is the largest place in the UK not to have its own branch of Marks and Spencer’s. My mum told me that. Actually, she told me before that mini-Marks food shop opened up in the precinct, but I don’t know if that counts as a Marks and Spencer’s in its own right. It sells knickers, so it probably does, which means we’ve probably lost that biggest-place-without-a-branch-of-Marks cachet now. Shame. Now the place is even more boring than it was before.

  I’ve lived here all my life. Well, except when I went to uni in Sheffield (Computer Science – I got a Desmond Tutu), and then I came back and got the job being a techie IT type at the uni here. Best job ever, that. Almost like still being a student. But it all went horribly wrong the night I went bumper to spine with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. After that I didn’t want to be around universities any more. Or students. Or people. So I left the job at the uni and set up my own little freelance racket, with plenty of compensation (and my mum’s hearty disapproval) to smooth the transition.

  And that, basically, is my life story.

  Unlike me, though, this town hasn’t changed much in the last twenty-six years. It’s still built entirely of post-war concrete. I don’t like it much. No one likes the place where they grew up, do they? Especially if they are twenty-six and still trapped there.

  I roll down the high street in my car, stop-starting to the rhythm of the pedestrian crossings and humming an old song about traffic lights I remember from playschool (‘if they’re red then no, no, no’) and becoming one with the one-way system (‘if they’re green then go, go, go’). At one of the sets of lights I notice a sunny-looking blonde girl at the wheel of a car in the next lane. When I manage to catch her eye, I give her a smile. And she smiles back.

  This is easily my favourite thing about driving. The flipside of the fact that people find it hard to believe that I can drive a car is the fact that when I’m sitting in the driving seat no one would suppose that I’m anything out of the ordinary. Even if they clock the blue badge, they probably assume a cocky young lad like me has just nicked it off his gran for the parking privileges.

  After all, from the waist up I’m still the same ladykiller I ever was. My upper body’s still a 99 per cent fat-free relief map of manly sexiness. My face still does the same excellent job it always did. And, as if to prove my point, sunny blonde is now biting her lip and looking coyly at me through her fringe.

  I give her a little eyebrow flash and grin. And then the left filter light comes on and I have to zoom away, with my confidence raised and my blood pumping a little faster than it was before.

  Leaving her for dust, I make a couple of lefts and rejoin the ring road, navigating a million-and-one more roundabouts before pulling off to end up outside my mum’s house, just two doors down from my own. Yep, I live almost but not quite next door to my mum, and it isn’t my favourite thing about my life right now. But it’s certainly an improvement on the situation a year ago, when, immediately post-hospital, I had no choice but to move in with my mum. I would happily have given up the use of my arms, too, to save myself from that particular purgatory.

  Anyway, at my mum’s house, I decide to indulge her by having a cup of tea, while she bores me half senseless for about three-quarters of an hour talking about her fantastic other son, my older brother, Simon, who has four fully working limbs and is doing great things as an estate agent (read: strutting wide boy) down in London town. She also asks me briefly, and slightly disapprovingly, how my work is going, so I deliberately blind her with science, talking about flash plug-ins and browser compatibility until she shuts up again.

  I don’t mean to be mean, but I know she is just pretending to care. After all, she was the one who was dead against me using my compensation for my own business. Too risky, she said. Too risky! Like risk was my main concern after what had just happened. I didn’t have a lot left to risk. Anyway, we can’t all be sodding estate agents, can we? And, well, the whole point of my starting my own business was to give me an opportunity to indulge in my new favourite hobby of almost pathological reclusiveness.

  I don’t do talking to other people any more. I get out, sure. I take a drive in my car most days. But I don’t get off on the idea of having to be sociable all the time.

  But, having said that … I don’t know what it is
about the little things I’ve done today, the cybersex and the in-car flirting, but it’s left me feeling weird and hollow. Stuff like that is usually among my favourite things, the little pleasures that get me through the day. Being someone else. Getting off as someone else. Hiding my disability with modern technology. But (and yeah, I guess Mary has something to do with this) now I feel that’s all a bit crap. I want to get off as me. All of me.

  I want to have sex with Mary again.

  So, while I’m sitting at my mum’s kitchen table not listening to her, I hatch a plan. It’s a little bit sad, but it’s also a little bit necessary. I’m going to go back to the library. I’m going to see if I can run into her again.

  OK, I might have totally agreed with her when we parted last night and she said that our brief moment of shag-madness should be pure one-night stuff, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe we both were. So maybe I can let fate sort that one out by going back to the library.

  And if she’s there, she’s there.

  And, god, I hope she is there.

  After I leave mum’s I drive back into town and park up by the public library. But I don’t go in straightaway. I delay it. Maybe because I want to put off the moment when I find out she’s not there. Because, deep down, I don’t really expect to find her.

  Or do I?

  Well, either way, I do have a few errands to run as well, so I make my trundly way into town. Shopping first – madness later.

  But madness seems to have other ideas, because the first thing I buy isn’t on my list, which is mainly boring essentials like printer cartridges and Post-Its. The first thing I buy is something rather more decadent than supplies for my stationery cupboard. I buy aftershave. (Well, I think technically what I buy is men’s fragrance.) And when the second thing I buy is condoms, I screw up my list, because sensible shopping is clearly beyond me, and head back to the library, where I know Mary isn’t going to be.

  But somehow I cling to the desperate hope that is burning a hole in my heart, along with the desperate need that is burning a hole in my underwear.

  Sad? Well, yeah. I guess.

  She isn’t there. I wheel my way round every part of the smooth-floored library. I’m not lying to myself any more. I’ve accepted that she isn’t here – wasn’t ever likely to be here. I am just looking for her in the most likely place I can think of. I found her here yesterday, after all.

  But she just isn’t here. Nevertheless, I do three full circuits to convince myself. I even – and this is where it gets really stupid – I even make a play of reaching for something on the top shelves in the fiction section. Wondering whether that is some kind of magic spell that will make her materialise at my elbow, lifting down a bloated volume of bonking-and-bling for me.

  Someone does come and help me, but it’s one of the library staff, wildly apologetic about the shelves being so high. An oversight apparently – they’ve applied for a grant to fix it, she explains, with a please-don’t-sue-us light in her eyes. She’s pretty. Not like my car-driving blonde, or my mental picture of my cybersex LA babe, but still pretty in a brunette kind of a way, a librarian kind of a way, a Mary kind of a way.

  As she checks out my randomly chosen six-hundred-odd pages of banality bites (and, no, I’ve never read this type of book before, why would I?), I give her a slightly sexy, slightly pouty, slightly winky smile. God knows why, because these days I have rules about flirting: strictly in the car or online only. It must be what happened here yesterday that’s making me behave in new and unusual ways. Because I definitely give her a bit of a come-on, and she gives me a far more blatant come-off-it. In fact she looks at me rather as she might look at someone she recognises from Crimewatch as a sex-crime suspect. Which just goes to show. I’m an untouchable and Mary is a pervert.

  I was right all along.

  Even so, I wish she was here.

  Mary

  Waitressing is not my ideal job by a long way. It involves far too much standing up and far, far too much smiling. And the pay is nowhere near enough to compensate. In fact, it’s worse than shitty.

  And it’s doubly humiliating, because before I decided to answer that nagging little voice that had been whispering ‘academia’ to me for the last eight years or so, I was a pretty big wig in PR. I ate in places like this. For breakfast. On expenses.

  However, this uniform-wearing, plate-shuffling stuff was the only thing I could find to top up my savings that fitted around my seminars, so I took it.

  The place where I work, La Lucas, is an upmarket kind of establishment. It specialises in bad food; more specifically, bad overpriced food. Never a good combination. Which is why it’s always half-empty. In fact this place is so lacklustre and going-down-the-pan, I’m half convinced most evenings that I can hear Gordon Ramsay in the distance, berating the kitchen staff with his delightful blend of raw sexuality and swearing.

  I do usually manage to enjoy myself working here, though. But it’s for such a sad reason. The saddest of the sad. The lamest of the lame. The fact is, I have a work crush.

  These things can happen to anyone. That’s why there are so many words for them. Crush, lust object, sex object (notice how even language can’t seem to wait to objectify him), forbidden fruit, temptation, eye candy, hunk, spunk, homme fatale, obsession. And that last one – obsession – is the best, I think. Because that’s what Thomas is. I have spent, at a rough estimate, far, far too much time thinking about him in the last few months.

  It started back in October, when I’d only just begun my course and finances forced me to take this job. It was while I was eyeing up the ‘Help Wanted’ sign that I spotted him through the shiny plate-glass windows, and, rather predictably, started eyeing him instead.

  And I don’t just fancy him because he’s young (he is) and fit (he is) and good looking (yep), but it’s also because he waits tables with an extreme kind of sullen resentment. It’s like he’s having an extremely stubborn wisdom tooth pulled out for every drink he refreshes and every bill he brings. He hates it. It’s beneath him.

  That. Is. So. Sexy. It’s that above everything else. That is so, so, I don’t know. It hits the button.

  It’s all of this – this perfect package – stuck in tight black trousers, white shirt and little white aprony thing. And that’s what gets me through every god-awful, mind-numbingly boring shift.

  Oh, and I do wonder what it is he thinks he ought to be doing rather than waiting La Lucas’s over-starched, over-priced tables. Fronting a rock band at Glastonbury maybe? Modelling underwear? Curing cancer? Whatever it is, fate clearly is keeping him from his calling for just a little longer, because right now he is just another waiter, albeit a cute one, with a nice line in unspoken insolence.

  The only problem with using Thomas as the mind-bending drug that helps me get through never-ending shifts at La Lucas is times like tonight, when he has the night off.

  But, luckily, it’s yet another slow night, and I’ve found a way to keep myself occupied.

  ‘And you know the really weird thing,’ I’m saying to Stacey, the new waitress I’ve been telling the entire story of the last twenty-four hours to, ‘this afternoon I found myself back at the library, no idea even why. I was thinking about something else and I just found myself standing outside it. Weird.’

  ‘Did you go in?’ says Stacey, chewing and looking bored. She is going to get into trouble when the duty manager sees that she is chewing gum on her shift.

  ‘Nah, no point. I mean, how likely is it that he would have been in there? He told me he never goes to the library and was only there that time because he was checking out some books for his mum.’

  I haven’t told Stacey about the wheelchair fetish thing, by the way. We only met this evening. In fact, now I come to think of it, I haven’t mentioned the wheelchair at all. Which is a good thing, surely? The wheelchair isn’t relevant. There is more to David than his disability. Right?

  Tell my libido that.

  Stacey frowns at me. ‘You should hav
e gone in. It was probably fate or something, bringing you back there. He could have been in there waiting for you. Like, maybe he’s your soulmate or something.’

  Aww, bless. Stacey is a waitressing student like me and Thomas, but she’s only nineteen. It shows, doesn’t it? I ask you, soulmate!

  Stacey and I don’t get much further with our discussion about how David and I could be writ in the stars, because things get a little busier in the restaurant after that. So Stacey doesn’t have the time to draw up my astrological chart (which she honestly did offer to do). For that, at least, I can be grateful to the rude, greedy, demanding patrons of La Lucas who interrupt my daydreaming and general idling while I am at work.

  Back at home I was planning to pull a late one and work on my dissertation, but I’m just too done in. Shagged, in actual fact, for the second night in a row.

  But I’m pretty sure, after a whole day of turning things over in my mind, that I am going to have to try and see David again, one way or another. The whole Gavin-Rich thing might have persuaded me that disabled guys are a recipe for heartbreak and made me vow to stay away from them, and I might think, deep down, that there is something weird and wrong about this part of my sexuality, but I just don’t have any choice. I can’t stop thinking about David. Even thinking about the hotness that is Thomas is more an excuse to muse on how much he looks like David than a full-on perve-a-thon.

  But there’s a problem with tracking down David. We both agreed it was a one-nighter. We didn’t exchange numbers or emails or anything like that. We shot out of each other’s lives as quickly and cleanly as we’d tumbled in. Well, apart from one thing.