Читать книгу Cecelia Ahern 2-Book Gift Collection: The Gift, Thanks for the Memories - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 18
ОглавлениеWhile Lou’s meeting with Mr Brennan about the – thankfully not rare but still problematic – slugs on the development site in County Cork was close to being wrapped up, Alison appeared at his office door, looking anxious, and with the pile of clothes for Gabe still draped in her outstretched arms.
‘Sorry, Barry, we’ll have to wrap it up now,’ Lou rushed. ‘I have to run, I’ve two places to be right now, both of them across town, and you know what the traffic is like.’ And just like that, with a porcelain smile and a firm warm handshake, Mr Brennan found himself back in the elevator descending to the ground floor, with his winter coat draped over one arm and his paperwork stuffed into his briefcase and tucked under the other. Yet, at the same time, it had been a pleasant meeting.
‘Did he say no?’ Lou asked Alison.
‘Who?’
‘Gabe? Did he not want the job?’
‘There was no one there.’ She looked confused. ‘I stood at reception calling and calling his name – God it was so embarrassing – and nobody came. Was this part of a joke, Lou? I can’t believe that after you made me show the Romanian rose-seller into Alfred’s office that I’d fall for this again.’
‘It’s not a joke.’ He took her arm and dragged her over to his window.
‘But there was no man there,’ she said with exasperation.
He looked out the window and saw Gabe still in the same place on the ground. A light rain was starting to fall, spitting against the window at first and then quickly making a tapping sound as it turned to hailstones. Gabe pushed himself back further into the doorway, tucking his feet in closer to his chest and away from the wet ground. He lifted the hood from his sweater over his head and pulled the drawstrings tightly, which from all the way up on the thirteenth floor seemed to be attached to Lou’s heartstrings.
‘Is that not a man?’ he asked, pointing out the window.
Alison squinted and moved her nose closer to the glass. ‘Yes, but –’
He grabbed the clothes from her arms. ‘I’ll do it myself,’ he said.
As soon as Lou stepped through the lobby’s revolving doors, the icy air whipped at his face. His breath was momentarily taken away by a great gush and the rain alone felt like ice-cubes hitting his skin. Gabe was concentrating intently on the shoes that passed him, focusing his mind on something else, no doubt to try to ignore the elements that were thrashing around him. In his mind he was elsewhere, anywhere but there. On a beach where it was warm, where the sand was like velvet and the Liffey before him was the endless sea. While in this other world he felt a kind of bliss that a man in his position shouldn’t.
His face, however, didn’t reflect that. Gone was the look of warm contentment of that morning. His blue eyes were colder than the heated pools of earlier as they followed Lou’s shoes from the revolving doors all the way to the edge of his blanket.
As Gabe watched the shoes, he was imagining them to be the feet of a local man working at the beach he was currently lounging on. The local was approaching him with a cocktail balanced dangerously in the centre of a tray, the tray held out and high from his body like the arms of a candelabra. Gabe had ordered this drink quite some time ago but he’d let the man away with the small delay. It was a hotter day than usual, the sand was crammed with glistening coconut-scented bodies and so he would forgive this local his shortcomings. The muggy air was slowing everybody down. The flipflop-clad feet that approached him sank into the sand, spraying grains of sand into the air with each step. As they neared him, the grains of sand became splashes of raindrops, and the flipflops became a familiar pair of shiny shoes. Gabe looked up, hoping to see a multicoloured cocktail filled with fruit and umbrellas on a tray. Instead, he saw Lou with a pile of clothes over his arm, and it took him a moment to adjust once again to the cold, the noise of the traffic and the hustle and bustle that had replaced his tropical paradise.
Lou’s appearance of earlier that morning had also altered. His hair had lost its Cary Grant-like sheen and neatly combed quiff, and the shoulders of his suit appeared to be covered in dandruff as the little white balls of ice falling from the sky nested in his expensive suit and took their time to melt. When they did, they left dark patches on the fabric. He was uncharacteristically windswept and his usually relaxed shoulders were instead hunched high in an effort to shield his ears from the cold. His body trembled, missing his cashmere coat like a sheep who’d just been sheared and now stood knobbly-kneed and naked.
‘You want a job?’ Lou asked confidently, but it came out quiet and meek as half of his volume was taken away by the wind and the question asked instead to a stranger further down the pavement.
Gabe simply smiled. ‘You’re sure?’
Confused by his reaction, Lou nodded. He wasn’t expecting a hug and a kiss but his offer seemed almost expected. This he didn’t like. He was more atuned to a song and a dance, an ooh and an ahh, a thank you and a declaration of indebtedness. But he didn’t get this from Gabe. What he did get was a quiet smile and, after Gabe had thrown off the blanket from his body and raised himself to his full height, a firm, thankful – and, in spite of the temperature, a surprisingly warm – handshake. Without Gabe hearing another word, it was as though they were already sealing a deal Lou couldn’t recall negotiating.
Standing at exactly the same height, their blue eyes gazed directly into one another’s, Gabe’s from under the hood that was pulled down low over his eyes, monk-like, boring into Lou’s with such intensity that Lou blinked and looked away. At the same time as that blink occurred, a doubt entered Lou’s mind, now that the mere thought of a good deed was becoming a reality. The doubt came breezing through like a stubborn guest through a hotel lobby with no booking, and Lou stood there, confused as to what decision to make. Where to put this doubt. Keep it or turn it away. He had many questions to ask Gabe, many questions he probably should have asked, but there was only one that he could think of right then.
‘Can I trust you?’ Lou asked.
He had wanted to be convinced, for his mind to be put at ease, but he did not count on receiving the kind of response he was given.
Gabe barely blinked. ‘With your life.’
The Presidential Suite for the gentleman and his word.
