Midnight Ch. 04

"Don't care!"

He sighed, "Okay."

We went inside and he did the deal. When he viewed the documentation, he laughed uproariously, "I don't believe you picked your car because of the colour."

When he showed me, I laughed too. The colour was listed as Midnight Blue.

"See? It's fate," I giggled.

I love that car. I named it Mofo because that's exactly what it is. A big, blue motherfucker!

Sometimes we would travel out in his car and usually share the driving. But the Mofo has one driver and one driver only... Me!

Unlike Nathan, I also kept my car spotless. And never, ever allowed him (Mofo is a boy) to miss a service. The fluids and tires are checked weekly and he gets washed and hoovered every month. My Mofo gets pampered, which is why I am still driving him to this day. I love my Mofo and he loves me... He does love me!

Anyway, life went on.

My social life suffered, there was no more going out with the girls, partying and shagging about.

And to be honest, I didn't miss it... At all. My life seemed to revolve around Nathan. It was almost as though I had cleaned up my act for him, like I was seeking his approval, like I wanted him to see that I was every bit as good as he seemed to think I was. The only thing that didn't change was my regular get togethers with Alan and Erica, and occasionally I would be able to drag Nathan along with me. After all, without me, he'd have absolutely no social life at all, apart from infrequent cocktail parties at the University.

One night I turned up to meet them at the Green Ginger Man and it was obvious that they were really getting along well. The clue was the rock the size of Texas on Erica's left hand.

I was fucking made up! Kisses and hugs all round and I insisted on hearing how Alan proposed.

"It was so romantic," beamed Erica, "We were at Mario's Restaurant and in front of everybody, he went down on one knee and said 'set phasers to marry me'. I held out my hand and answered 'engaged!'"

I gagged, "You infected my bestest friend with dweebyness! I won't forgive you for this. Fucking Trekkies! Shouldn't be allowed."

Then it was hugs and kisses all round again.

Another bit of news that night was that Erica had received her appointment at a clinic in London for her operation. She explained that it would be a two week stay in the clinic followed by another four weeks at home to recuperate. I promised that I'd make time to come and see her when she was back.

Life went on.

I got along fairly well with most of the people in Earth Sciences and I even stood in for Nathan sometimes on the weekly meetings if he was away out gallivanting around the place. The only flies in the ointment were Luke and Professor Johnstone, a twat who worked in Geology.

Both of them were the most arrogant and rude arseholes. Luke had a habit of either ignoring me completely when he came in the office and insisted on speaking directly with Nathan, who never seemed to notice Luke's rudeness, or when he absolutely had to deal with me, his attitude sucked. He made it perfectly clear that I was considerably beneath him. More than once I saw Paula mouth the word 'Twat' behind his back as he exited the office area.

Professor Johnstone had the same air about him. He wandered into our office one day for a chat with Nathan. He licked his fingers and his first words ever to me were, "You there, get me a tea would you? White, no sugar."

Nathan stared at him for a moment and then looked across at me as I sat in shock at this bloke's rudeness. He said, "Midnight, take your coffee break now. Give us twenty minutes would you please... And close the door behind you."

I snatched up my bag and legged it to the coffee shop.

I was mortified!

Apart from Luke, everyone had been so nice to me, especially Allison and Paula. My problem was, I didn't know how to combat it. I didn't know how to stand up for myself.

Okay! I admit it, these people intimidated me. I still felt like a fish not just of water, but halfway up a fucking mountain. I felt I was somehow beneath them, that they were so much better than me, because they were busy dealing with great mysteries and issues that I could never hope to understand. And what was I? A glorified clerk, besotted with a man who was clearly beyond my reach.

When I got back to the office, The twat had gone and Nathan was sat working at his desk in silence. He glanced, knee­tremblingly at me, but didn't speak. He merely gave me that smile and continued with his work.

I later found from Paula, that Nathan has surprised her by directing some very harsh words at Professor Johnston in quite forceful tones, who then left with a massive flea in his ear. The twat had reason to come back to the office for various reasons over time, but he never again spoke to me except when he absolutely had to, and then only in the coldest, most formally polite terms.

I started putting names to faces and more importantly I got Nathan organised so that he was able to concentrate on his actual job rather than get stuck dealing with administration.

I worked some fucking long hours, but I had never been happier... But it wasn't to last.

You see the thing is, as I took away the drudgery that was bogging Nathan down, it freed more his time for palaeontology and he filled it. There were more and more weeks away on various projects around the world. If he wasn't down at Cheddar Gorge he was jetting off to to Alberta in Canada or on the other side of the World to New Zealand and all points in between. Not only that, but his working hours at home started to creep back up as he worked on one important paper after another well into the early hours.

As I had pretty much set my routine in place and had organised everything to my satisfaction, I was now finding the time to start reading some of the articles and papers in the office. Don't get me wrong, almost all of them were very much over my head, but I did start to soak up snippets of information on various different aspects of history, archaeology and palaeontology, especially with the assistance of the reference manuals and glossaries of technical terms.

Sometimes, I would find myself staring into space daydreaming. There I was, striding across the Olduvai Valley dressed in a safari suit and pith helmet, discovering features and fossils that would unlock the history of man's evolution from Dryopithecus to Cro­Magnon, or perhaps wrapped in furs as I directed my team of diggers to chip the woolly mammoth from the permafrost, or even in a drysuit, deep in the Aegean Sea getting my hands on the Antikythera mechanism, that wonderful, mysterious device from Ancient Greece that shouldn't exist.

You see the thing is... Knowledge is like a drug to me. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I suppose you could say that I was trying to fill the void caused by Nathan's frequent absences, and you'd be right. At least partially right anyway. But my thirst for knowledge was always there. A hunger that needed to be fed.

Once, I remember I was reading an article entitled 'A Closer Look at Lucy: Sexual Dimorphism and Speciation in Australopithecus' when Dr Murtaugh, the head of Earth Sciences wandered past the office. He looked in and glanced at the title over my shoulder. He was a lovely, old man and very gently suggested that perhaps it was a little beyond me. He then scribbled down a list of books available in the library that might be better suited for a novice.

He was right. They were.

When Nathan was at home, I could see that he was tired and there seemed to be just a tinge of sadness in his eyes. Those magnificent eyes that continued to make me weak at the knees.

More than once I would chide him that he needed to learn to say no. That he didn't need to accept every invitation that came his way. But he would simply give me that smile of his, now tinged with a hint of melancholy... And accept them all anyway.

His lecturing dropped off as more and more of them would need to be covered by other staff. And there was definitely beginning to be a disconnect between him, Allison and Luke.

Oh we still communicated. When he was home, I made a point of staying up with him as he worked, more for the company than for any real need on my part. And I always kept him up to date on what was going on when he was away. We video chatted via Skype, usually in the evening. Normally the conversations would start out as all business, but we found ourselves wandering off into other areas. Late at night, I would sit up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate and my iPad, chatting with him. The darkness made a cocoon of intimacy beween us, and I found that I was more comfortable telling him things about myself, sharing details of my life that had led up to this point. I don't know why, I just found it so easy and so comfortable to open up to him. He was a good listener.

It wasn't lost on me, that over the weeks and months I always seemed to share more than he did.

Oh I found out that he had a twin sister called Philippa, that his widowed mother, Hattie lived in a large house in Royal Buckinghamshire and ran her own business called Harper­Smethwick Holdings (Holdings) Ltd and that his father had died when he was ten years old ... But that was pretty much it. He was free and easy with information about his career history, but the personal stuff... Not so much.

Me on the other hand, I was an open book. I spared him nothing... The loss of my parents, how I ended up working at the cafe and at the bar, my reputation as a slut, how I met Alan and Erica, everything. The only thing I never mentioned was Erica being a hermaphrodite. That was her secret, and it wasn't my place to share it.

Sometimes as I looked at his face on the iPad, I would gently stroke it with my thumb as we chatted. And he always signed of from our calls exactly the same way, "Sleep well, Midnight."

The thought occurred to me once, that it was strange how we could could talk to each other so easily over Skype, but not when we were together in person. Don't get me wrong, we talked whilst he was home, but it seemed... How can I put this?... There seemed to be a distance between us when he was home, conversation seemed to be restricted to work and somehow stilted, almost as though we really had nothing to say to each other. But when he was away and we chatted over Skype, work seemed to take second place to our more intimate chat.

I got the scary feeling that maybe he had picked up on my feelings for him and he was attempting to keep things on an employer/employee basis, but also that he wanted to remain friendly... Even if it was only when we were apart. Is that strange?

I'll be honest, it was getting to me.

One day, I arrived back home from the university and stood in the home office looking around.

Nathan had been away for a week and wasn't due back for another few days, and I realised that even with my busy lifestyle, my full working days dealing with people in Earth Sciences and talking to Nathan on Skype... It was just like Orchard Park... I was fucking lonely!

"Fuck it!" I thought, "I need to go and get drunk."

So I had a shower, climbed into my professional drinking kit and buggered off to the city centre to one of the louder and more raucous pubs. I was well into my white wine and feeling no pain, when he walked up to me, "Well look who it is," he smirked, "Long time, no see."

I turned around on my barstool and looked straight into the face of Steve Metcalfe.

I'll be honest, I was less than chuffed to see him after what I'd heard the last time I had been at his house, and was quick to tell him fuck off and leave me alone.

He seemed genuinely astonished at my outburst, "What's the problem? What did I do?"

So I explained in graphic detail what I'd heard that night when I went to see him.

Steve was crestfallen and seemed upset about it. He said, "I'm sorry about that, Manni. But I didn't insult you."

"No!" I shouted, "But I didn't fucking hear you defend me either!"

"Well if you'd stayed a bit longer, you might have. I ripped into him for that. Just a shame you never heard it."

Well that was it. He turned on the charm, bought me a few more drinks and soon we were thick as thieves again.

Blame it on my loneliness, or my drunken state, or on the fact that I could be a fucking idiot, but the end of the night found me in his bed getting fucked senseless. He gave me several orgasms, but the mood was not sensual. He was very rough on me that night. There was no tenderness, no gentle caressing. The only way I could describe it is... He hatefucked me. Almost as though he was teaching me a lesson, for not being available lately to satisfy his needs on demand.

Also when he finished, he rolled over and said, "Look Manni, that was good. But I need to be getting up early tomorrow. Let yourself out, eh?"

Then he farted, rolled over and fell asleep. The man was a walking fucking cliché.

I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

I rolled off the bed, climbed back into my clothes and walked home despising myself all the way there. I didn't know why, but for some reason I felt like I had somehow been unfaithful to Nathan. I mean, I had no clue if he viewed me as anything more than an employee and perhaps a friend, and to be honest I was too frightened to ask. But there it is.

I got home and showered. I wanted to wash away the stink of sex from my body. I didn't want to share my bed with any trace of Steve. As I lay down, I picked up my iPad from the bedside table and saw three missed Skype calls from Nathan and that made me feel even worse.

I couldn't believe it! I had foregone time with Nathan, even if it was via the Internet for some tawdry, meaningless, painful and ultimately, unsatisfying sex with Steve fucking Metcalfe.

And then I had an epiphany.

These unfamiliar feelings. My need for Nathan's approval. I knew why I was so upset about shagging Steve. I finally understood why Nathan affected me the way that he did.

I had fallen in love with him.

I was deeply, irrevocably in love with Nathan and I hated myself for fucking that arrogant, selfish bastard when I should have been on Skype with the man I loved.

This was terrible! Even when my life seemed to be on the up and up, I'd find a way to fuck things up.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

My mood remained black for the next few days, I buried myself in work, reading articles and Skyping with Nathan. He never asked why I hadn't been there that night and I never told him... I couldn't.

Then the day rolled round that Nathan was home again. As he walked through the front door, it took everything I had to greet him with a friendly smile and to hide just how awful I felt. I was determined that there would be no clue... No hint of just how much I despised myself.

And then... After just a few minutes in his company I was walking on air. One look at Nathan's sweet smile and a glance at those fucking eyes and I was lost... Until the time he had to go away on a trip, as I knew he inevitably would.

As it happened, his next trip out was just a short jaunt to York University. He was going to give a talk entitled, The Discovery of Paralititan Stomeri - A Giant Sauropod to the students of a friend of his and he invited me to go with him.

The reason was that he was unfamiliar with their presentation suite, so he felt it better that I would go with him and control the electronic bits and bobs. I was very excited. Would you believe that in all my life, this would be the first time I had left the City of Hull?

Anyway, we jumped into his car and headed out. I made sure that I had a flash drive with his presentation on it along with a DVD holding a couple of short films. When we arrived at the Science Department at York, we were met at the door by the force of nature that is Dr Diana Pranaju.

As we approached I saw a rather attractive woman of about 5'2" dressed in a smart blouse and skirt. I guessed her to be somewhere in her early forties with brunette hair in a short style, not quite long enough to be a bob, that hung to about halfway down her cheeks and the ends pointed forward like daggers. She had a somewhat curvy figure, but there was very little spare weight that I could see. Her hazel eyes sparkled with intelligence and sharp wit. I could tell that this woman was not a person you wanted as an enemy. She had a thick Yorkshire accent. Not like mine, after all, the Hull accent, whilst clearly a Yorkshire dialect, is different enough from the rest of Yorkshire to make it unique.

She smiled warmly and threw her arms around Nathan, "Good to see you again. Been too long!"

He grinned and returned the hug, patting her on the back gently. I felt a twinge of jealousy shoot through me as I watched them, wishing it was me in his arms and not her.

He released her and then made the introductions, "Diana, this is Manni, my EA. Midnight, this is my good friend, Diana."

We shook hands and she gave me a quizzical look, "Why did he call you Midnight?"

I grinned, "Long story. Very boring... Call me Manni."

She shrugged, "Okay," and then led us into the building to the lecture room. I looked over the stacked system built into the lectern, switched it all on and readied the DVD and presentation.

Then I placed myself on a chair off to one side of the stage holding the remote control for the stack system.

People started drifting in and took their seats. Once the room was about half full, and everyone who was coming were seated comfortably, Diana made the introductions and then let Nathan give his lecture. I was following the talk on a printed script and called up the images and videos as per the cues. I'll admit that I felt somewhat self­conscious sat there on stage in front of all those people, but Nathan seemed well at ease.

I'd noticed that about him. In a social setting he could be something of a wallflower, especially with people he didn't know, and rather reticent about talking... But put him in a professional situation and he shone.

Anyway, the lecture went well and then he fielded a few questions from the floor whilst I retrieved the flash drive and DVD and switched off the equipment.

Then we disappeared off to a cafe on campus with Diana for a bite of lunch. As we sat there chatting I learned more about their relationship. Diana had been on the board that had grilled him when he had to defend his Doctoral thesis. She had recognised something special in him and they had become firm friends. Nothing romantic, I was very pleased to hear, simply good friends. I think she was his 'Alan'.

Nathan had to excuse himself to nip to the gents, leaving me and Diana alone. She sat in silence as though she was studying me and after an excruciating pause, said, "So, Manni... Enjoying your job?"

"Oh fu... I mean, yes indeed. I love it."

"He's a good man. I hope he's looking after you like he should... And that you're looking after him."

I'll be honest, I was more than a little uncomfortable and then, thankfully I got itchy between the shoulder blades, I turned to look at Nathan as he approached and flashed him a smile.

He sat back down and the conversation turned to other things. I must admit, Diana was a fascinating woman and I got the impression that she was a complete outlaw. Whilst the chat remained light, I did spot her flashing me a searching look more than once. Nathan, of course, never noticed.

The time came for us to depart, so we made our goodbyes. We both got a hug and she whispered into my ear, "Yes. I think you two look after each other just fine."

When I cast her a questioning look, she merely smiled and waved us away back to the car.

The next few days passed quietly as Nathan had more than a week before his next trip.

Also, by this time, Erica had come back from hospital, so one evening, I bought some flowers and headed over to her flat. Alan invited me in and led me up to see her as she rested in bed. I handed over the flowers, which she appreciated and chased Alan off for vase to put them in.