Free Sleeping Arrangements by Madeleine Wickham Page B

found a comfortable sunbathing position, reached for her headphones and put them on. A moment later, she removed them and looked up. 'Hugh?'
    'Mmm?'
    'Can you pass me my Factor Eight?'
    Hugh opened his eyes and sat up and froze. Across the pool, with her back to him, Chloe was unbuttoning her old cotton dress. As it fell from her body, pooling on the ground, Hugh gazed, transfixed. She was wearing an old-fashioned rose-patterned swimsuit, and her fair hair was caught back in a single flower. Her legs were pale and slender; her shoulders fragile and vulnerable, like a child's. As she turned round, he couldn't prevent his eyes from running up her body to the faintest glimpse of white breast.
    'Hugh?' Beside him Amanda began to sit up; at the same time, Chloe looked across the pool, directly at him. As her eyes met his, Hugh felt a shocking stab of desire. Of guilt. The two seemed almost to be the same thing. Quickly he turned away.
    'Here you are,' he said, reaching randomly for a bottle and passing it to Amanda.
    'That isn't Factor Eight!' she said, impatiently. 'The big bottle.'
    'Right.' Hugh scrabbled for the correct bottle, thrust it at his wife, and lay down again, his heart thumping. He couldn't rid his mind of Chloe's face, of her searing, slightly contemptuous blue eyes. Of course she knew what he was thinking. Chloe had always known exactly what he was thinking.

    They had met fifteen years ago at an undergraduate party in London; a party full of eco-nomics and medical students, held in a shared flat in Stockwell. Gerard had been invited along as a friend of one of the economists—and, being Gerard, he had brought along a large uninvited crowd from his history of art degree course at the Courtauld. One of those was Chloe.
    Looking back, it seemed to Hugh that he had fallen in love with her straight away. She had been wearing a dress with a slightly quaint look to it, which set her apart from the others.
    They had begun talking about paintings, about which Hugh knew very little, and had somehow moved on to period costume—about which Hugh knew even less. Then, as an aside, Chloe had revealed that she herself had designed and made the dress she was wearing.
    'I don't believe you,' Hugh had said, fuelled by several glasses of wine, and anxious to move the conversation away from nineteenth-century buttonhooks. 'Prove it to me.'
    'All right, then,' Chloe had said, laughing slightly. She had reached down and lifted up the hem of her dress. 'Look at this seam. Look at the stitches. I put in every one of them by hand.'
    Hugh had looked obediently—but had not seen a single stitch. He had caught a glimpse of Chloe's slender legs, encased in sheer stockings, and had felt a startling, overwhelming desire for her. He had taken a swig of wine, trying to regain his composure, then looked cautiously into her eyes, expecting indifference, even antagonism. Instead, he had seen cool blue awareness. Chloe had known exactly what he wanted. She had wanted it herself.
    Later that night, in his Kilburn bedroom, she had forced him to peel her dress off in slow motion, pausing long enough for her to show him each handstitched seam in turn. By the time the dress was fully off, he'd wanted her more than he'd ever wanted any woman in his life.
    They had lain afterwards in silence. Hugh had already been thinking ahead to the next morning; to how he might extricate himself from spending the entire day in her company.
    When she had murmured something and got out of bed he had barely noticed. It was only when she was half dressed that he had realized, with a pang of genuine shock, that she was preparing to leave.
    'I have to get back,' she'd said, and given him a soft kiss on his brow. 'But maybe we can see each other again.' As she'd closed the door behind her, Hugh had realized, rather to his chagrin, that this was the first time he'd been the one left behind in an empty bed while his partner made excuses. To his faint surprise, he didn't like