Carrie Blake - The Woman Before You - An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist...

‘Excited to meet you, Riley,’ he said, watching me as I sat down.

I laughed and said something about the pleasure being all mine. This was a new role for me—the fumbling girl who couldn’t get the words out of her mouth in the right order. I blushed every time I looked at his smile, and had to look away.

He glanced at his watch and said something about having to be back to the office for a meeting later in the afternoon, then asked me what I did. I opened my mouth to start talking about my uncle’s lobster boat on the coast, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had this strange feeling that telling Matthew who I really was would make him like me even more.

‘Okay, so here’s the deal,’ I said. ‘My name isn’t Riley, and I’m not from Maine.’

He smiled but didn’t say anything. And so I did. I told him about growing up in Iowa and about moving to New York to be an actress and about failing at being an actress and about my ‘acting game’ with the dating apps and finally my sad life working for creepy Steve at Doctor Sleep, just down the street.

I laughed as I finished my confessional monologue, and leaned back in my chair, waiting for him to react.

He was quiet for a beat but his eyes were bright and working fast to take me in.

‘So that’s it? Any recent ex-boyfriend killing sprees? Any fetishes you want to confess?’

I laughed. ‘No. No. That can wait for our second date.’

‘Well then,’ he said, smiling as he leaned in closer to me. ‘I’m excited to meet you, Isabel .’

It was liberating to let someone in on my secret game. I had gotten the feeling that he would be okay with the story, but I was still surprised to realize that he was not only okay with it, he was thrilled by it. I was working hard to look cool and unfazed, but the way he said my name made it hard to stay composed.

‘Now your turn.’ I said. ‘Is your name really Matthew?’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That can wait for our second date.’

We both laughed.

He looked at his watch. I looked at my phone. My lunch hour was up and I had to be back at Doctor Sleep in a few minutes.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Matthew said, ‘Hey, I have a crazy question.’

‘Go for it,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me you have to go back to work. But I feel like I’ve only just met you, Isabel-formerly-known-as-Riley. And the truth is, I don’t want to stop being with you just yet.’

I was floating. I definitely didn’t want to leave him either. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’

‘Well, I don’t feel it’s fair to deprive the poor mattress shoppers of their favorite Sleep Doctor, so what if I came back to the store with you and pretended to be your customer? I’ll wait for a minute to come in so your boss won’t suspect a thing.’

I smiled and shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not?’ I knew Steve would be going on break when I got back from mine, anyway. It was probably the first time I had ever been excited to race back to the store from lunch.

When I walked back my whole body was buzzing. I was kind of okay with the idea of slipping on my uniform today.

I walked into the store and Steve said, ‘I’m going on break.’ The timing was too perfect. I wondered what Steve did when he left. I didn’t ask and I didn’t complain even though his breaks were getting longer and more frequent.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Take your time.’ The truth was, I usually hated being alone in there in plain view of every passing maniac who might think, Hey! Look! A young woman all by herself with a cash register and a lot of mattresses! But today, I was excited to be alone. Today, I wanted him to take his time.

The doorbell rang its fake sleigh-bell chime. I looked up. Matthew—or should I say, The Customer—stood in the doorway, back lit. Tall, thin, broad-shouldered.

I walked toward him, slipping into character; welcoming and friendly, but not pushy, hungry, or aggressive. That was what the mattress professional instruction manual said to do.

Close up, he was so handsome I had to look away—but not before I noticed his glossy dark hair, dark eyes, eyelashes longer than mine. His features were chiseled. He looked a little like Gary Cooper, a little like Robert Mitchum—like old-school movie stars used to look before actors began to look like the guy next door who’s going to get fat and bald and jowly the minute he turns forty.

In other words: He was hot.

I said, ‘Can I help you?’

He said, ‘I hope so. I’m moving soon, and I don’t see any point in taking my old mattress with me.’

If I had ten dollars for every time I heard someone say those exact words, I could have quit and lived on the money for the six months it might take me to find a better job. But sex and beauty change the conversation. Things you’ve heard a million times sound interesting, fresh and new.

I wanted to know everything. Where did he live? Why was he moving? Who would be sleeping on the new mattress? I loved this adaptation of my game—for two players now instead of one.

‘What sort of mattress are you looking for?’

He smiled and shrugged. He had a beautiful smile, a charming shrug.

‘A comfortable one,’ he said.

I said, ‘Okay, let me ask you.’ This was on script. ‘Do you like your current mattress?’

‘My mattress is ten years old, what would like mean?’ He smiled again.

I smiled back. So there we were.

I asked him the standard questions. Side sleeper? Back sleeper? Skeletal problems? Sleep issues? He slept like a baby. He closed his eyes and fell out, slept straight through the night. I wanted to lie next to him, with my head nestled on his chest.

I had never felt quite like that before. Certainly not about any other mattress store customer. It threw me off script.

‘Lucky you,’ I said.

He didn’t respond. He was making me do all the work.

‘I think I know what you might like. We have one on the floor that I can show you. Please come this way.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

I walked down the aisles lined with mattresses, looking back from time to time, as if to make sure that he was still behind me. I thought of Orpheus—don’t look back!—mostly to avoid thinking about how self-conscious I was, how aware that a man was following me, looking at me, at my back, my ass. Sometimes I wondered how a customer was responding to Steve’s weird medical decor, but now I wished The Customer would actually look at the gurney, at the bizarre medical stuff—at anything but me.

I stopped at the foot of the most expensive and luxurious mattress we had, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of organic German cotton, French wool layers, inner hand tufting. The celebrity movie star mattress, the Executive Deluxe Comfort Natural Pillowtop Set. As far as I knew, Steve had never sold a single one of them, but he insisted on having it on display. He said it improved the look of the ‘establishment,’ like my shorty jacket, I guess.

I could read The Customer’s mind well enough to know that this was the mattress he would want. But I also obviously knew he wasn’t going to buy it. I had no idea what he was thinking right that second. It was as if those circuits—my mind-reading window—were jammed by how sexy and handsome he was.

He asked, ‘Is this the best one you have?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I mean yes. Would you like to try it?’

‘No. You. I want you to try it. I’d appreciate that very much. If you wouldn’t mind lying down for a moment.’

It wasn’t that this never happened—that people asked me to lie on the mattress. But mostly it happened with very old people, or people with some physical damage, who came in with their caretakers. They couldn’t, or didn’t want to, risk being a spectacle, struggling to lie down. Or they couldn’t lie down without help. In that case, they might want to see me lie on the mattress, to see if I looked comfy.