Chapter 1

“JOHN?” Gill started the conversation rolling with a question.

Everyone Gill knew at the bank referred to John Jacob Nicholls as John. It was his given first name after all, although his family always called him by an abbreviation of his middle name, as both his late uncle and grandfather had been Johns. His great grandfather had been a Jacob, the fourth in line with that name, so were a number of uncles and, strangely enough, even a couple of great-aunts shared “Jacob” as a middle name. There was no way that Gill would have known any of that, of course.

“Everyone tells me that you are the person to ask,” continued Gill, a little nervously. Usually so decisive, the young department head was clearly out of her element here.

“Ask me what?” Jake looked up from filing his daily copy logs from yesterday in his binder, and concentrated his warm brown eyes, smiling expectantly at her.

‘Oh my god,’ the thought almost escaped Gill’s lips, ‘he looks like a cute puppy!’ She so wanted to kiss him and clutch his slim, hard body to her breast. She cleared her throat, ‘concentrate, girl!’

Gill was not to know it, but John Jacob Nicholls, or Jake to his family, had long had a thing about Gillian Jarvis. He always had, ever since he first saw her. She started working at the Standhope Winter merchant bank, off Cornhill, deep in the heart of the City of London, twelve years ago. This was about two years after Jake began working there in the copy/fax room.

When she started at the bank, Gill Jarvis worked part-time, as she still had two young children in nursery, and, as the latest office gopher, she needed to visit the copy room several times a day. Jake got to know her quite well, which only reinforced his initial positive feelings for her. Okay, he noticed the wedding band on her finger almost immediately and soon found out that as well as being married, she had two young children at home. That didn’t concern him, or affect his friendly relationship with her, as actual designs on her affections were quite the last thing on his mind. Even if Gillian Jarvis had been single he would have been reluctant to approach her with any romantic expectations, in fact, to approach any woman in that respect was at that time considered by him to be impossible.

But that was when he first knew her, would Jake make a move now, so many years later, if they were both single?

In the January update of the company telephone list, that Jake had printed out and circulated a couple of months earlier, the entry ‘Gillian Jarvis assistant manager enterprise asset management division’ had disappeared and a new entry, ‘Gillian Moorhouse manager enterprise asset management division’ appeared instead, a page or two further down the alphabetical list. Jake noted at the time that she must have taken the opportunity of her latest promotion to revise her amended surname.

Gill was what you would call petite, about 5 foot 3 inches tall, and naturally of slim build. Her hair was dark brown, thick, wavy and shoulder length. Her face was open and generally cheerful, with deep brown eyes, an upward curling mouth and the faintest cleft in her chin. She was pretty by any standards but Jake thought she was singularly beautiful. She was an efficient worker, had performed well in banking and management examinations, and had exceeded expectations in each of the bank positions she had undertaken during her career at Standhope Winter. Jake thought she could go all the way to the top and he was well aware that others independently held the same opinion.

Jake was about six inches taller and also a slim build, perhaps a little too slim, most of his acquaintance might suggest. He too, had an open countenance and was noticeably bright and attentive. He always dressed smartly and was extremely cool under pressure, he never let anyone down. Most of the girls, and some of the guys too, thought Jake was handsome, but he always fended off amorous advances in whatever guise they came. The girls assumed therefore that he was gay, while the gays were under no illusions that he was anything other than straight.

When he first started working at the private merchant bank, the copy room managed to carry a busy staff of four, with the room populated by a complex assortment of telex machines, faxes of different resolutions and speeds as well as a range of the latest photocopiers and flywheel printers. Now he was the only print room technician manning the department, the telexes and fax machines having long gone and the staff to operate them departed with them. There were slightly more multitasking copiers, which acted as scanners and computer printers of various sizes, and more binding equipment than before, but the degree of automation meant they were a lot less labour-intensive. Jake also stocked general office stationery and he scanned archive copies of documentation for the bank. He had now been in the same basic but continually evolving job for about fourteen years.

Gill was aware of the fact that Jake was not actually employed directly by the bank any more, but worked for a separate facilities management company, which leased and maintained their own copying equipment under a service contract with the bank. That policy had been put in place shortly before Gill started at the bank and the move was thought to have brought benefits in cost savings and efficiency. In theory, Gill thought, if Jake’s little department was ever closed at the bank, his company could move him onto another managed facility elsewhere; in practice, in the current economic and banking crisis which continued to rumble on, she thought he would probably be laid off.

Gill had headed up a cross-department committee looking into cost-cutting and efficient reduction of overheads a couple of years previously. It was the committee’s recommendation that the print department be shut down entirely, with the bank staff forced to do their own copying and printing, on cheaper desktop machines, in addition to their normal duties. However, the top management at the bank had, after due consideration, vetoed her committee’s recommendations without supplying any supporting arguments for overriding the recommendation.

There was nothing personal in Gill’s assessment of the cost-cutting exercise, it was purely economics. She had liked the young John Nicholls from the moment when she was first required to pop into the copy shop half a dozen times a day. The older staff in the room were generally always rude, negative and annoyingly vague about when her jobs would be ready. As the office junior she had no seniority and her jobs were often bumped down in order of priority, causing her to waste time making fruitless journeys and adding anxiety to her other pressures.

John was the most approachable of the copy shop team. He gave precise promises when her request would be ready and would come up with helpful suggestions in mitigation when schedules were too tight even for him to meet in their entirety. He was always bright and cheerful, in fact with his potential, Gill thought early on, John Nicholls was wasted in the copy shop. Even as time went by and only she visited occasionally, noting his efficient and economic bustle, she remained of that opinion. Her opportunities to see him became increasingly limited the higher up the promotion ladder she climbed.

When the print room inevitably closed, as she was convinced in time it would, she thought she would definitely seek to find a place for him in her department and realise the potential she had recognised. As far as she was concerned, the bank really couldn’t downsize any more than they had over the past two years.

In contrast to Jake’s apparent immobility, tied as he was to the Print Room, as it was now labelled, Gill had made significant career progress in the bank and was now a firmly respected member of the senior management team. This in effect meant that Jake had seen less and less of her in his domain over the past few years and had long ago resigned himself to continue observing her from a distance. His feelings for her hadn’t diminished one iota over the years.

So, he was quite pleasantly surprised to see Gill - indeed it was unusual to see anyone at all at that early hour - just three minutes past seven in the morning.

As usual the print room office door was wide open to show that they were open for business, with a stack of the previous day’s jobs ready for collection, piled up by custom on the table near the door. Jake had only been in for a few minutes and he was still in the process of getting the equipment switched on and warmed up, when he looked up and there she was, standing in the doorway, quietly watching him while he worked.

It was still far too early for the rest of the merchant bank workers. Jake usually arrived at least an hour or so earlier than the other staff, in order to sort out any prints that had appeared in the delivery trays overnight, so they were ready to collect or deliver as appropriate first thing.

Gill stood there empty-handed with her usual brilliant welcoming smile, while hesitating to declare what was on her mind. Jake swapped a ready smile with her and continued to bustle round the office, waiting for Gill to say what she had come to say. She clearly wasn’t carrying anything she wanted him to copy, and there was nothing in the overnight prints addressed to her, nor anything urgent for the department Gill managed.

While he busied himself around the office, he stole the occasional glance in her direction and realised how much slimmer she was since the last time he had seen her just a few weeks ago. She was 36 now, he knew, three years older than he was, and her weight had been creeping up ever so slightly over the years, he had noticed by his continual and close observations of her. However, in quite a short space of time, since Christmas he thought, she appeared to have lost all that excess, without appearing gaunt. She looked good, very good in fact.

She was similarly noticing how slim and athletic he looked and even this early in the spring season his skin on his face and hands appeared to have a tanned and healthy glow. Jake had a good-looking boyish face, he could’ve passed for twenty, but she knew he must be late twenties at least, he had worked at the bank as long as she had, maybe even longer. He might even be as old as thirty, she mused, a gap between them of around six years. Would that be too big a gap?

‘Yes,’ she thought sadly, ‘it probably would.’ She had just lost her marriage, she wouldn’t want to compound that shame by losing every scrap of her dignity as well.

He was much too young for her then, she thought, but instantly dismissed the very thought as a silly idea, he had never showed the slightest hint of romantic interest in her. Nor had he appeared to show interest any of the other girls in the office. He was simply equally friendly with everyone, it seemed, without going over the top.

Gill knew for a fact that over the years more than a couple of handfuls of the single girls, and she was certainly aware of one married woman, who had tried their luck tipping their hats in his direction, without him taking the slightest notice of taking up any offer. They were all sure he was still single, as he never brought a date to any of the bank’s social functions, although she wasn’t sure about last Christmas, as that was the first one that she and her ex-husband Wayne had missed. Anyway, the rumour among the young single ladies in Gill’s department, accompanied by deep meaningful sighs, was that John Nicholls was, unfortunately, almost certainly, gay.

His dark, almost black hair was always neat, cut quite short with a partly receding hairline at the front and a slight bald patch appearing on the crown of his head. He only really lacked a drooping moustache to tip him firmly into the gay category, Gill surmised.

Interrupting her thoughts just then, Jake had to reach over one of the printers at the back wall of the print room to replace the binder onto a shelf. Gill’s eyes were instantly drawn to the smoothly rounded shape of his buns as he stretched his body to reach.

Gill tore her eyes away and tried to focus on the ‘In Case of Fire’ notice on the wall.

‘Christ!’ she thought, ‘I must be the one on fire! I’m so sexually frustrated that I’m actually checking out a gay boy’s cute bum!’

She remembered all too vividly that the last time she had sex was a furtive quickie that she felt extremely guilty about at Christmas, almost three and a half months before. It was a rather unsatisfactory reconciliation-romp with Wayne, her ex-husband. That had been a total disaster, which meant the last meaningful sex she had had was the previous summer, although even that session and maybe the dozen or so before that had been pretty awful. As that was some time before she was aware of Wayne’s long-established affair, the gloss was taken right off most of the experiences of her marriage, other than the births of their two children.

‘Get real girl,’ Gill forcefully said to herself, ‘ask him what you came for and get out of this office and back onto safer ground.’

“John,” she started again, “everyone tells me that you are the person to ask,” she continued, a little nervously.

Chapter 2 »