The Chocolate Run by Dorothy Koomson

kissing my cheeks, my neck, my chin, my eyelids, my forehead, as though he wanted to devour me. All of me. He wanted to consume me with kisses.
    I closed my eyes, this was divine. Like eating my favourite chocolate, feeling it disintegrate in my mouth, languishing over my taste buds, sliding inside . . .
    ‘But you didn’t call.’ Divine or not, he didn’t pass the Forty-Eight-Hour Test.
    Greg carried on nuzzling my neck. ‘I wasn’t sure you wanted me to,’ he murmured through kisses. ‘You were so cool the morning after, I thought you wanted to forget it.’
    Cool? Since when did ‘You’re a cab’ classify as cool? ‘And you didn’t want to forget it?’ I asked.
    Greg abruptly stopped with the kissing, his roaming hand halted its progress over my curves and he found my eyes with his eyes. ‘Why, did you ?’
    ‘I know your MO,’ I said.
    ‘What?’ he said, taking a step back and robbing me of his body heat.
    ‘I know your modus operandi; I know how you operate.’
    ‘I know what MO means, thank you, I don’t understand what you mean.’
    ‘I mean, I know how you work. I’ve seen the carnage you leave behind when you charm a girl, make sure you’re all she thinks about, shag her then lead her a merry dance for a few weeks until you find someone else.’
    Greg’s face was a blank canvas, his eyes like glass as he stared at me.
    ‘I’ve become another notch on the very whittled Greg Walterson bedpost and that’s fine. I simply don’t want it to become something that will ruin our friendship or in any way jeopardise Matt and Jen’s relationship.’ Impressive, I could talk my way out of a shag quicker than anyone I knew.
    ‘You want to forget it,’ he stated, his voice as lifeless as it had been earlier in the evening.
    ‘Taxi? Taxi for, erm, Hyde Park and Horsforth? Greg and Amber?’
    I turned to the man who was leaning out of a white car with a taxi sign on top of it. ‘That’s us,’ I said, then headed for the back door.
    Greg stood staring into the space where I’d been, then slowly went around the front of the car, passed the front door, got in the back. I’d hoped he’d get into the front – we could ignore each other more effectively then.
    The taxi driver headed north east out of the city, past tall buildings I’d seen age over time. Age and decay and be torn down and then be rebuilt. It was a gorgeous city. Especially at night. You couldn’t see the grime at night. It was all bright lights, half-lit shapes, faceless people, hidden architecture. Like a kaleidoscope. Twist here, twist there, always the same elements, but never the same pattern.
    As we got nearer to Greg’s place, which was the first stop on the way from town, I turned towards him. We’d gone the past few miles in silence. Not the companionable silence of Friday night, nor the uncomfortable silence of earlier on. This was the sulky silence of a man called on his behaviour at the point in the game when women were usually under his spell. No woman challenged Greg on his reputation once she’d slept with him. She accepted his past – then tried to change him.
    But, in all fairness, he wasn’t sulking alone. I was miffed because I kept wondering if he shouldn’t have tried a teensy bit harder. I’d known men who were willing to walk through fire to get a flash of cleavage and this man hadn’t even trotted out some tired cliché-cum-lie about me being special to get my kit off. I was sulking because he obviously wasn’t that desperate to sleep with me again.
    ‘Erm,’ I cleared my throat, but he still showed me the back of his head. ‘What did you say to Matt about us? So I don’t let something slip.’
    Greg grudgingly acknowledged me: sneered down his slightly crooked nose as he carefully raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘I told him I’d met someone I really liked but not to say anything to anyone because . . .’ he gave a small, silent laugh, then returned his gaze to the window, ‘because I