Chapter 2
He
was startled by the sound of a car horn beside the cab. The cabbie leaned out
of his window and yelled at the nearby taxi trying to push into the queue ahead
of them. Eduardo didn’t understand the words, but there was no mistaking the
ferocity. He felt an ice-cold shiver of panic run down his back. His setback
was looking increasingly like a crisis. As soon as the man knew he didn’t have
enough money to pay the fare, Eduardo would face not merely humiliation but
serious trouble. Trouble of the yelling and gesticulating kind—the kind Eduardo
hated. Or maybe even trouble of the physical hurting kind. Like a hot-headed
Stanley Kowalski, the cabbie wouldn’t listen to reason, but would turn and grasp
Eduardo by the throat, shaking him like a rag doll, perhaps in the hope of a
shower of coins falling out of his jeans pockets.
“You’d
better let me out here,” he called through the transparent screen. He could
walk the rest of the way, though it may be more of a run at this rate. He
thought he’d left plenty of time to get to the audition, but it was already a
tight thing. A cab ride was always a hideous expense, but he’d been sure it’d
give him a better chance of getting across town in time. What lunacy had
possessed him? He should know the London traffic better than that—he’d lived in
that miniscule flat in Clapham for long enough.
He
thrust his handful of money at the driver with all the confidence he could
muster, and scrambled out of the cab. The uneven cobbles tripped him, and he
bumped into a couple of tourists as he tried to right himself. Now he needed to
scarper, and fast, before the cash was counted and the shortfall discovered. In
his mind, he saw himself turn and run like the wind, like the Chariots of Fire
opening sequence, though not in slow motion, of course, and without the benefit
of proper sports clothing because he was in his audition gear, that is,
trousers a little too tight since Christmas, and his favourite jacket that was
always going to be too hot for this time of year—
A
hand landed on his arm before he’d taken the first leap forward from the
imaginary sound of the starting pistol.
“It’s
not enough,” the cabbie said. He’d followed Eduardo out of the cab.
Eduardo
looked into deep, dark brown eyes set under heavy brows. The man’s skin was
dark, his jaw line and upper lip covered by similarly dark hair. Eduardo
couldn’t get away from the darktheme, and he wasn’t thinking of his
preferred type of boyfriend. The grip on his arm was tight and the cabbie
obviously wasn’t letting him go.
“I’m
late for an appointment,” Eduardo said. That wasn’t a tremble in his voice, was
it? “You must let me go. At once.”
“No,”
the cabbie said. His voice was strangely calm, but the deep tone made him sound
so much more assertive than Eduardo. Eduardo felt a warm, roiling feeling in
his gut. He was trapped! It was like one of the new breed of police thrillers,
the hero chased to the end of a dank, pitch black alley, then turning to face
his erstwhile attacker with nothing to defend himself except…
Eduardo
tightened his grip on his messenger bag. As if that were going to protect him,
as if his copy of The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit could be used as a club, as
if a selection of emery boards or his smartphone stylus could possibly morph
into his own personal lightsaber. No, he was trapped, alone, defenceless, and
hidden in the depths of gangland—
Except,
actually, he was pressed back against the side of a London black cab in broad
daylight in one of the most populated tourist areas. Even so, the trapped
feeling persisted. The cabbie’s chest was broad and his biceps bulged out from
under a tee shirt that had presumably shrunk in the wash. His throat was
sinewy, and hair from his chest curled up and over his low neckline. With a
further frisson of shock, Eduardo realised he was forced back against a flat
surface by a positive bear of a man. Delicious. His libido was liable to
wake up and lick its lips, although Eddy would have kicked himself at this
inappropriate reaction if he thought his legs could work normally. Instead, his
whole body was shaking and he felt more than a tad nauseous.
“Please,”
he said. “I must go.” How long did he have until the audition closed its doors?
Would they still see him if he were beaten and bruised, maybe even bleeding? He
wasn’t sure that was acceptable for a revival of one of Noel Coward's mannered
social commentaries.