My Clocking In System

Chapter 8: Jodie

Finally, she tossed a pair of plain dark leather boots with clean lines into the mix, an item the System on his phone would likely have classified as fitting.

She kept up a relentless, low-toned running commentary, half to him and half to herself.

With every garment she added, the painful weight of the last ten years seemed to thin out, the old high school ease creeping back into their rhythm despite their mutual reservations.

She tugged a hem straight, then took him by the shoulder, spinning him around to face the tall mirror at the back of the pavilion.

Smack!

She hit him once between the shoulder blades with the flat of her hand. "Straight. Lift your chin. There. God, look at that."

Danny looked. And for the first time in his adult life, he didn’t see a courier staring back.

In the reflection stood a tall, striking man in a structured charcoal overcoat that fell perfectly to his calf.

The dark crew neck anchored the look, a hint of the crisp white collar showing at the top, with the heavy leather boots grounding the entire silhouette. The wet hood and the split seams were completely gone.

Without them, he stood differently: taller, broader, a six-foot frame that a decade of poverty had successfully obscured.

His dark hair was pushed back off a face that was significantly sharper and more defined than he remembered.

A few days of dark stubble tracked along a hard, angular jawline, drawing focus straight to his eyes. The profound tiredness was still there, but the clothes had violently shoved it from the foreground to the very back of the image.

He had been handsome at seventeen. There it was in the glass, resurrected and dug out of the dirt by a woman with a pencil in her hair.

She stood just behind his shoulder in the reflection, half a head shorter.

Her hip was cocked against the mirror’s frame, her hazel eyes surveying her own handiwork with open, unbothered satisfaction. She looked so warm, so alive, and so entirely real in the glass that the old seventeen-year-old feelings surged up his throat so fast it terrified him.

He clamped down on it. Hard.

He had seven grand now of untrusted money, a sealed door waiting for him across the river, an erratic entity on his phone that might bleed him dry by Friday, and a life violently cracking open under his feet.

The one thing he absolutely could not afford this morning, the one luxury he had zero time for, was to fall back in love with Jodie Carter in the menswear section of Uniqlo before he even discovered what the world had decided he was worth.

There were doors to walk through first. Whatever this spark was, it would have to keep. Same as everything else.

"Thanks, Jode," he said, keeping his voice as flat and normal as humanly possible.

She looked away, suddenly folding a nearby shirt with far more precision than it actually required. "Don’t thank me. I was just enjoying myself, that’s all. Don’t go reading into it."

He bought every single item. A capsule wardrobe, she called it, enough to be an entirely different man for a fortnight without repeating a look.

Coat, jumpers, shirts, chinos, boots, and even socks and underwear because she insisted that "only an idiot buys a fresh outfit and keeps their old pants on."

It came to £640, more than he had spent on anything that was not rent in his whole adult life, and he paid it without his stomach so much as twitching. The card went through.

£640 gone on top of the rent, and the balance still sat at the better part of £6,847.58, money he had not had a fortnight of in his life.

Jodie’s eyebrow went up at the contactless limit being nowhere near it, but she said nothing, because that was the other thing about her he was remembering: she clocked everything and pried at nothing.

Beep.

The transaction cleared instantly. Jodie’s eyebrow shot up at a contactless limit that didn’t even cause the account to hesitate, but she said absolutely nothing. That was the other thing he was remembering about her: she clocked everything, but she never pried.

Then he looked at the massive haul: two giant paper bags and a third smaller one, and glanced out the plate-glass window at the compact Vespa. The day had handed him its first stupid logistical problem.

"That’s definitely not going on a scooter," Jodie said, following his gaze. A genuine laugh finally broke through her defenses.

"No," Danny admitted. "It is not."

"We do home delivery. Or click-and-collect, but since you’re already here..." She was already stepping behind the counter, brisk and entirely in her element.

"Give me an address. I’ll dispatch the bulk of it; you take what you’re currently wearing and one smaller bag on the bike. You’ll have the rest by tonight."

He gave her the Pembury Heights address: his real one, the only place that actually belonged to him. Watching her index the coordinates into the terminal, he felt a strange prickle of vulnerability. She knew where he lived again, after ten years of meticulous hiding.

He changed in the fitting room, stepping out in the sharp grey coat, the charcoal jumper, and the pristine leather boots.

He folded everything he had walked in wearing the split Deliveroo jacket, the thin grey jumper, the waterlogged trainers into a single paper carrier and took it past the tills.

Jodie was leaning against the main display, finishing up the receipt. She was stretched across the counter just enough to hike up the hem of her dark top, exposing a tantalizing sliver of bare, pale skin at her waist.

The angle pressed the heavy, soft curve of her breasts against the cotton, drawing his eye instantly. She watched him head for the exit, biting her lower full lip before speaking up quickly, as if forcing the words out.

"Danny."

He turned around.

She walked out from behind the register, her hips rolling with a slow, deliberate confidence that made the painted-on denim of her jeans look unfairly good.

She stopped right in front of him, close enough that he could smell her perfume, something warm and expensive, and held her phone out across a stack of folded sweaters.

The screen was illuminated, the keypad open, her jaw set firmly.

"Number. Your actual one. Not Dave the tiler from Croydon. If you’re going to be a real man again, be a man I can actually ring. And if you dare disappear on me a second time, Danny, I will personally hunt you down, and it will not be a pleasant conversation. Clear?"

Danny looked at the illuminated screen, then at her face, weighing a decade of running held out flat on a gorgeous woman’s palm on a Wednesday morning. Every instinct of his new life was screaming at him to keep moving, keep quiet, keep everyone at arm’s length, and trust absolutely nothing.

Tap, tap, tap, tap.

He took the device, his fingers lightly brushing the soft skin of her hand, and punched his digits in anyway. He hit the call button, waiting until his own phone started buzzing in his pocket before handing it back.

Bzzzt. Bzzzt.

"There," he said. "Now you’ve got it. And I’m not disappearing. Not this time."

"We’ll see," Jodie purred, the signature half-smile firmly back in place. Her bright hazel eyes raked down his newly tailored frame appreciatively, and that heated look followed him all the way to the glass doors.

Three shopfronts down the street, Danny stopped outside a charity shop.

Clunk.

He dropped the bag containing his old clothes straight into the metal donation bin without looking inside. Someone else could use the jacket, split seam and all.

He didn’t need it anymore. You didn’t get to become a new man while keeping the old one folded neatly in your closet like a skin you might crawl back into when things got tough.

He sat on the Vespa for a quiet moment, his single Uniqlo purchase wedged securely between his feet.

The cold wind whipped off the river, but his phone felt incredibly warm in his pocket, carrying a number that hadn’t been there an hour ago, and a woman he had spent a decade actively avoiding.

Doors first, he commanded himself, desperately trying to believe in the strict order he was forcing upon his life. The Sterling, then everything else.

Purrr!

He fired up the engine, twisted the throttle, and rode hard for the river heading toward the final sealed reward, and whatever a mysterious prompt on a screen had decided a man like him was actually worth.