Exposure by Avril Osborne

Author:Avril Osborne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-09-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The flat is untidy – she has barely had time to unpack after her return from Rome. She should clear up, run a bath and decide what to do with the rest of the weekend. Linda and Jane are probably enjoying the heat of Santiago. Bill is in Elba now. She could pick up her idea of going to see Mike Moss, but she knows where that would inevitably lead.

As she soaks in the bath in the room off her bedroom, her thoughts turn to her last indiscretion with the Italian. That was a nice encounter and so much safer than how things turned out with Ramsey. Alberto had all the sophistication of the international businessman who knows how these things are done. He sat with her, waiting for the same delayed flight from Rome to the city and engineered a seat beside hers on the flight when they eventually boarded. He was a man in his late forties, over to set up a new chain of executive hotels in the cities with flight routes to Rome. He knew how to seduce in the most charming of ways and she accepted his invitation to the hotel he was staying in, sure of her personal safety and of his confidentiality. It was as simple as that.

She is glad that she told Linda a little of all this. She feels better, somehow, for someone else knowing what is going on in her life.

And in her quiet moments, like now in her bath, she does have time for reflection. Her strongest feeling is that she has had a lucky escape over the Ramsey business. She feels an emotional frisson of fear at how differently the whole business could have worked out.

In her most private thoughts, she dwells on her sexual encounter with Ramsey, and with other men she has met on this basis. She does not profess to understand these sexual desires. But they have to be linked to a lack of affect in what she considers to be her real relationships – she does not know how else to describe the difference between her feelings for, say, Ramsey and, say, Bill. But she knows there has to be a connection between the lack of commitment she makes in her relationships and the anonymous sex to which she is attracted. Is it attraction, she wonders, or is it a compulsion, this anonymous sex?

And what of her wanderings? She uses the word wryly, laughing to herself as she soaps her arms. Her conclusion is surprising, even to herself. If you can’t beat it, she concludes, don’t fight it. She knows she could think about this till the cows come home and convince herself that she will not have anonymous sex again. She has done that often enough in the past. But she does not hold to it. It is a switch in her that simply turns on, in a particular set of circumstances. Sure, she could try to avoid the circumstances but, at the end of the day, it will happen again.

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