One Step Too Far Read Online Free PDF

desolate. She’d been so convinced there’d be an email waiting for her back at her desk that when there wasn’t the doubt flooded in. What the hell had she been thinking, being so forward? She re-read her email: “It’s important.” OK, could be, maybe she needed to talk to him. About what? About parachuting of course. “Have a drink?” The connotation was unmistakable. My God, he’d think she was a maniac, a stalker. And anyway he had a girlfriend, she’d seen them together – and even if he was single she’d looked so utterly crap that morning he couldn’t possibly have fancied her.
    “EMILY?” Maria, who sat next to her, leaned over and made exaggerated crosses with her hands across Emily’s face. Emily looked up, stricken. “Are you deaf? Can I borrow your stapler, someone’s had mine. Hey, what’s up?”
    “Nothing, I’ve got a headache.”
    ”You look like shit, why don’t you go home?” Maria said.
    “I’ve just got to finish this report, then I’m out of here. Here you go.” Emily handed over the stapler and turned away, her eyes filling, tears dropping onto her keyboard. She checked her email one more time – nothing – and then pressed the computer’s off key without bothering to log out. “Bye,” she said to Maria, as she stood up and hurried to the lift.
     
    At home Emily couldn’t settle. She checked her phone constantly, as though the call could have crept up on her while she wasn’t looking, despite it being in her pocket, despite her having changed the settings so it would ring and vibrate at the same time. Maybe he’d emailed her, she thought, if only she could check her emails at home. But he’d call now instead, wouldn’t he, she’d given him her number. Why hasn’t he called? She felt nauseous in that over-hungry, post-hangover way, but she couldn’t rouse herself to even make a sandwich. She looked in the fridge and found some cheddar, cracked with age, and some stale breadsticks in the cupboard, and she ate purely to take the edge off her hunger. She flicked through the TV channels, picked an old episode of The Simpsons she’d seen before, but she found she couldn’t follow the plot. Her mother rang – the thrill of the phone going and the disappointment of it not being Ben meant she couldn’t face picking up. She ran a bath, but lying there made her hot with shame. In the end she went to bed and finally found some solace, after ten o’clock, when she knew that he really wasn’t going to call tonight so she might as well stop thinking about it, and she fell exhaustedly into the seventeenth century underworld of her latest book.
     
    The buzzing and the ringing woke her. She grappled for the phone, on the table next to her bed – 11.28. “Hello,” she said.
    “Emily? It’s Ben. Hello? Er, it’s Ben – from parachuting. I’m so sorry to call so late, I’ve been on a course all day and then I was out at the pub and then for some reason I logged on when I got home and saw your mail.”
    “Oh,” Emily said.
    “What’s important?” Ben persisted, and she thought he sounded a bit drunk.
    “Oh, it doesn’t matter now.”
    “D’you still want to have a drink tonight?”
    “It’s 11.30,” Emily said. “It’s too late. There’s nowhere open.”
    “I could come over. Are you still in Chester?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Where are you?”
    “Trafford. What’s your address?”
    “That’s miles away. It would take you hours.”
    “I’ll get a cab. I could be there in an hour...”
    Emily was silent.
    “If you’d like me to?”
    Emily still hesitated. It was more than she could have hoped for, but now she was ambivalent. It was so late. She hardly knew him. What was she getting into?
    “Yes please,” she said, in the end.
    “I’ll see you soon,” he replied, and the tenderness in his voice reassured her.
     
    An hour and seven minutes later the buzzer rang. Emily had put on jeans and a slouchy jumper and piled her hair on top of her