What a Girl Wants
What a Girl Wants
Lindsey Kelk
A new bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkBeing arrested in your own bedroom is never a good start to the day. Tess Brookes really needs to sort out her back-stabbing flatmate – and her life.Should she gamble all on the new photography job she’s landed, or snap up the offer from long-time crush and best friend Charlie to start up on their own – in more ways than one? There’s just one small thing she hasn’t mentioned. Or rather, one tall thing. He’s handsome, infuriating and called Nick…For the first time, Tess has to choose between the life she always dreamed of and a future she never imagined possible. From London to Milan, with high fashion and low behaviour thrown in, she’s going to have to make up her mind what a girl really wants…
Copyright (#ulink_efe361cb-6140-5c86-956d-c9149c0c8920)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublisher 2014
Cover illustration © Bree Leman 2014
Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007501533
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007501557
Version: 2018-09-24
Praise for About A Girl: (#ulink_19d71974-db57-5ec0-802b-7dc8f8217e33)
‘Fans of the I Heart series will instantly fall for this gorgeously funny and romantic read’
Closer
‘Perfect for your summer holiday!’
Bella
‘Kelk has a hilarious turn of phrase and a sparkling writing style …’
Daily Express
Dedication (#ulink_a6245f08-9018-5600-bb1b-07ec04b50186)
For Audrey Hardware.We never did come running to you when we’d broken both our legs but we did turn up with just about every other ailment on earth and you were always there. If I can find half the love, strength and resilience you had, I’ll be OK.
Contents
Title Page (#u9e3dc78a-ca54-5042-8a4e-496c472bd6e7)
Copyright (#u147900d0-ecf4-54dd-a5be-6483899163f9)
Praise (#ue9fb92ee-f787-5910-9afd-458341a6f613)
Dedication (#ud4d66970-1c82-5270-b7ef-7f968272e9d6)
Prologue (#u8467b599-0707-5942-9e23-39f082a659df)
Chapter One (#uf56afd7a-94bc-59eb-8977-5aae9c4ba446)
Chapter Two (#u585313d3-208c-5839-bdcf-ace73cedeaba)
Chapter Three (#ufbfa3497-90cb-537b-a0d6-20e45f76a11c)
Chapter Four (#ue31bb009-cfe2-5e03-9693-67b9cfa65f4b)
Chapter Five (#u3dd8b16a-1cfa-5a59-85dc-4c661b8c7e81)
Chapter Six (#u35246cff-9edd-5b96-a03b-5efbd42cff47)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading – A Girl’s Best Friend (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Q&A with Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_0dc63fcc-06b2-5259-ba61-5266a01cd43d)
On the one hand, you might have said my day wasn’t going terribly well.
But on the other, I had told Amy that I wanted to make big changes in my life and there weren’t many lifestyle changes more significant than swapping a luxury Italian palazzo for a prison cell.
And my second prison cell in two weeks, at that. Clearly I was going for some sort of record. It was one thing to say you wanted to start over, it was another thing to start over as someone on the ‘no fly’ list because you were considered an international flight risk. I was almost certain the generally accepted way of society was to go the other way.
I took a deep breath, blew it out hard and examined my bitten-down fingernails while trying to remain calm and wait for someone to appear and make this entire mess go away. Ideally someone I knew, accompanied by someone with a working knowledge of the Italian legal system, but at this point, as long as they didn’t have a gun, a pair of handcuffs or a pointy stick, I’d be happy. And if they did have a gun, a pair of handcuffs or a pointy stick, but also came bearing biscuits, I’d probably be just as happy. Did everyone get this hungry in prison? Had I missed dinnertime?
‘This is what happens when you’re too busy working to watch telly, like normal people,’ I admonished myself. ‘If I’d watched Bad Girls or Cell Block H like Amy, instead of doing my homework, I would know these things.’
I traced a shallow line in the cement floor with the bare big toe on my good foot and wondered how it got there in the first place. I’d been thoroughly searched on my way in and anything that might have hacked a seven-inch gash in a concrete floor had been removed from my person. Hairgrips, the belt from my dress, even my bra. I had nothing left on me but my knickers and my beautiful bright pink dress. At least, most of it was still bright pink – there was quite a lot of muck and a few well-placed splotches of blood around the hem. But still, I had told Kekipi not to give me a dress with a train, so this was entirely his fault. Well, apart from all the bits that were my fault. Which was most of them.
Making a noise that sounded a little bit like a frustrated walrus, I rolled myself onto my side, the rough concrete of the bench scratching against my skin. At least they had been consistent in their decorating, I thought. Very clear message: minimalist, spare, modern. And it really only smelled very faintly of piss. However, my hair had not fared well in the evening’s adventures and since no one in the police station had considered serum a basic human right, it was an unmanageable, knotted mess. I attempted to run my fingers through the dark copper curls, working them out slowly. If nothing else, it would pass the time until my fairy godlawyer appeared and made everything OK. I lasted about seventy-four seconds before I got bored and gave up. Plus, I really was hungry.
‘Excuse me,’ I called in a weak but terribly polite voice. ‘Excuse me? Is anyone there?’
Everything had been such a loud, Italiano, excitable mess on my way in that I couldn’t quite recall exactly what had happened. I remembered being pulled out of the car by the overenthusiastic police officer but with my hands cuffed behind my back and my hair flouncing around in my eyes, I had focused all my energy on not falling over, given that I was basically lame on one foot and wearing a full-length ballgown. After that there had been some shouting and some crying, both by me, then a woman police officer had come over, tutted a lot, then taken away my aforementioned stabbier items. At some point, a phone had been thrust into my hands but the only numbers I knew by heart were Amy’s and Charlie’s and there was no way on God’s green earth that Charlie was going to speak to me – which only left me with one option. And of course, Amy’s number went straight to voicemail. The next thing I knew, I was shoved back here with an antiseptic wipe for my foot and two plasters. Apparently you couldn’t kill yourself with two plasters.
I could hear the distant sounds of a busy police station beyond the reinforced walls, lots of doors slamming and distant sirens, but apparently no one could hear me. Or if they did, they didn’t care.
I was starting to lose my English temper.
‘Is anybody even there?’ I shouted from my concrete block. ‘Helloooo?’
Of course. When you wanted some privacy, there was an entire wedding’s worth of people around to witness your felonious behaviour, but when you were wondering whether or not it was possible to get a cup of tea and a biscuit, nothing but crickets.
No one was coming. No one cared. Nick didn’t care, Charlie didn’t care, Amy was otherwise engaged, and who on earth knew where she would be by now?
Just as I was considering fashioning a Blue Peter-style pillow out of my frock, there was a loud kerfuffle along the corridor: raised voices, jangling keys and a lot of scuffling. Ooh, maybe I was getting a cellmate.
I sat up straight, my heart pounding.
Shit! Maybe I was getting a cellmate.
Gathering my skirts up around my waist, I stood up and held my breath. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to achieve with my ready-to-pounce pose – I was still in a ten by ten cement cell with iron bars where a door should be – but whatever was coming my way, I was ready for it. Unless she or he was bigger than me, in which case they would be wearing me like a glove puppet by dawn. I was not cut out for life on the inside. I would make a terrible prison wife, I had no discernible crafting talents, and the time Amy tried to give me an amateur tattoo with her compass and a pot of Indian ink she nicked from the art room, I passed out behind the humanities block and missed the first ten minutes of my mock French GCSE.
Before I could work out the appropriate way to greet a fellow criminal in a language I couldn’t speak (not an easy task without my iPhone), two navy-clad officers burst through the door to the cell block, shouting at each other and the blur of arms and legs they held between them. I stepped back into the corner, trying to tie the skirts of my dress into a manageable knot in case I needed my legs free for kicking but there was no time. While I was faffing with the fabric, a third police officer was sliding open the bars so his mates could chuck my new best friend in beside me.
Only it wasn’t my new best friend.
It was very much my old best friend.
‘Police brutality!’ Amy shouted, scrambling to her feet and grabbing at the cell bars as the polizia scarpered as fast as possible. ‘I’m totally writing to my MP about this! As soon as I find out who my MP is.’
‘Amy?’ My skirts slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor with a damp slap.
‘Tess!’ She turned towards me, all wide eyes and filthy face, and flew over, wrapping her arms tightly around my cold shoulders. ‘You’re OK!’
‘I think we’re both pretty far from OK,’ I pointed out, glancing around at our less than salubrious surroundings. ‘What’s going on? Is Kekipi with you? They let me call someone and I called you but I got your voicemail.’
‘Oh, no way!’ She let go of my arms and laughed, before collapsing happily on my concrete block. ‘I called you! How funny is that?’
‘So funny that I might throw up,’ I replied, awkwardly folding myself up on the floor. My knees had decided that standing up was overrated. ‘Where’s Kekipi?’
‘Don’t know; I didn’t see him after they locked me up.’ Amy placed her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, her own floor-length gown having actually fared quite well. At least, hers didn’t have any blood on it. ‘I’m sure he’s coming. I’ve got to hand it to you – you don’t do things by halves these days. No one could accuse you of being boring any more, could they?’
I crawled forward a couple of feet and wrapped my hands around the bars, pushing my nose out as far as it would go and trying not to cry. I thought of Nick and the look on his face. I thought of Al and how disappointed he would be in me when he found out about all of this. And I thought of Charlie and how I could possibly ever make things up to him. Sniffing at the empty corridor and staring up at the full moon through a tiny window across the way, I sighed.
‘No,’ I said to a half-asleep Amy. ‘No one could accuse me of being boring.’
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_7717dde2-7a4a-59bb-bfe9-f50eaab8e721)
I stood on the street outside my flat for five full minutes before braving the four concrete steps up to the door.
For five long years I had wrestled with the knackered lock, shoulder-barged the warped wooden door open, and called this place home, but after three short days away I was petrified of stepping over the threshold. Admittedly, it was fair to say I hadn’t been on terribly good terms with my flatmate, Vanessa, when I left. For some reason, she hadn’t taken kindly to me borrowing her life for a week, though I’d done a pretty good job with it, even if I did say so myself. Of course, she had chosen not to focus on the elements of our ‘falling out’ that she was at least somewhat responsible for – like how she’d been passing my photos off as hers for years on end, and how she’d been shagging Charlie, my Charlie, behind my back. That all seemed to slip her mind when she stood screaming in the street that I was the crazy one and if I ever stepped foot in the flat again, she’d have me arrested.
Fingering the key ring in my pocket, I forced myself up another step. She couldn’t actually have me arrested for going into my own flat, I reminded myself, and besides, it was half past eleven on a Thursday morning: she wouldn’t be at home anyway. Given that Vanessa was absolutely shit at her job, her dad had been paying the mortgage on our flat since we moved in and she had a standing Thursday lunch date with him to justify her existence whenever she was in the country. I’d only met Vanessa’s father once, but I had to assume no matter how good he was at making Scrooge McDuck quantities of money, he couldn’t really be that bright because Vanessa had him wrapped around her little finger, even though he was pretty much the only man on earth she couldn’t sleep with to get what she wanted. The whole daddy–daughter thing was a mystery to me. Maybe if I batted eyelash extensions and tossed a long blonde mane at my dad, he would pay all my bills too. Unlikely, given that we hadn’t spoken in almost a decade, but you never know.
One more deep breath in and I was at the top of the stairs, face to face with my knackered red front door. Keys in hand, I rested one palm against the glass pane and pressed my ear against the wood, just to make sure. Hmm. Could I hear something? I should have brought Amy with me. Yes, my best friend was small in stature but she was very big on violence and I did not relish the thought of opening this door to a furious former flatmate without her by my side. Why was I here? Maybe I should just turn tail and run back to Amy’s house, get back under the covers, watch the rest of Step Up 3 and pretend I didn’t need any of my old things. And then I looked down at the T-shirt I had borrowed from Amy that morning. A five-foot-ten woman should never borrow clothes from a five-foot-nothing girl. I loved unicorns as much as the next girl but neon pink unicorns on a cropped black T-shirt? The world wasn’t ready to see my belly button and neither was I. I needed my things.
That was, provided Vanessa hadn’t burnt all my clothes, chucked them in the street or used them as tea towels and toilet paper. I let out a quiet laugh and shook my head: what a silly thought. She hadn’t used a tea towel in the five years I’d known her, so that was hardly about to change. But without me there to buy bog roll, that was a definite possibility.
‘You’re being stupid,’ I whispered to myself as I pulled my sad phone with its broken screen out of my pocket and forced it to shuffle through my contacts until I found the number for our landline. This was a telephone no one but my mother and the world’s finest telemarketers had attempted to call since 2007 and yet, every time it rang, Vanessa had the receiver in her hand within three seconds, ‘just in case’. I had to assume she had once given Brad Pitt that number in a bar and was still waiting for his call.
I listened as the line connected, the two long bleats on my phone translating into two short rings inside. It was fair to say I felt something of a twat, stood on my own doorstep, dialling my own landline from my own mobile, but I figured it was better to feel like a bit of a bell-end than to get into another public slanging match with a psycho. But when the phone inside stopped ringing and I heard the lovely lady from BT invite me to leave myself a message, I hung up and forced my key into the lock and merrily kicked the door wide open.
‘Home sweet home,’ I said with a sigh.
Even though it had only been three days since I’d left, the flat felt strange. The last time I’d left it, I’d been freaked out by the fact that nothing at all had changed in my absence. I wished I could say the same this time around. My keys always lived in the empty bowl by the door and I dropped them gently, listening to the familiar clatter before I stepped into the living room. Fuck. Me. Either Vanessa had started shagging the Tasmanian Devil or we’d been visited by seven very angry burglars. It was difficult to say which was more likely. The floor was covered in broken plates, broken glass and assorted empty bottles; picture frames had been pulled off the wall and dashed on the floor, which I figured explained the glass; and, most heartbreaking of all, my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs had been hurled around the room like mini Frisbees. She really knew how to hit a girl where it hurt. Picking my way through the debris, I grabbed handfuls of copper locks and tethered my hair back into a ponytail before I braved my bedroom, preparing myself for the inevitable devastation.
Pausing, I closed my eyes, pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Oh. Wow!’
If I’d walked in on a family of baby elephants having a tea party with Julia Roberts and the Queen, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My room was exactly as I had left it.
Closing my bedroom door behind me, I did a quick visual check. My suitcase was still sitting by the door, the bed sheets still rumpled from mine and Amy’s sleepover on Sunday night, the mug full of tea still on the nightstand, albeit a bit scummier than I had last seen it. My clothes were still in the wardrobe, unhung pictures still propped against the wall. Whatever madness had possessed Vanessa while she trashed the rest of the flat, she must have run out of steam before she could take my room apart.
Or she booby-trapped it … I froze for a second, taking another look around and searching specifically for anything explosive-looking.
Once I was satisfied there were no landmines hidden under my Ikea rug, I got down to business. Whatever had gone on while I’d been camped out in Shepherd’s Bush at Casa del Amy, all I wanted to do was get my things and go. Unzipping the still-full suitcase by the door and dumping the contents on my bed, I swapped out the dirty clothes for clean ones, mentally shaking my head at my wardrobe choices. To the left of my case, a sea of colourful silk lay on the bed – the clothes I’d borrowed from my friend Paige – and to the right, a regimented tumble of black trousers, white shirts and the odd navy jumper – my everyday outfits. I didn’t half love a V-neck. The wildest item of clothing in the right-hand pile was a houndstooth-check pencil skirt, and while I could try to pass that off as Mad Men chic, in reality it was something my mum had bought from the M&S outlet in Doncaster that didn’t fit her when she got home and she couldn’t be arsed to take it back. Surely there had to be some middle ground between a cropped neon unicorn T-shirt and the adult equivalent of a particularly crappy school uniform?
Once my suitcase was full of my depressingly few essentials, I sat myself down on the bed beside it and stared at my room for a moment. Now what was I supposed to do? Leave the rest of it and never return? I couldn’t stay with Amy much longer. Six people to one toilet was already madness and adding a seventh really seemed to have pushed a couple of her flatmates past their tentative grip on sanity, but moving into a new flat would mean finding the money for a deposit, furniture, toilet paper, washing-up liquid and Sky Plus, and I was completely broke.
I stared at the small rubber duck I had rescued from the bathroom and waited for a response. He usually had a lot to say for an inanimate object but in this instance he was uncharacteristically quiet.
‘Suppose I don’t have any choice,’ I said out loud, to break the eerie silence of the abandoned room. ‘Back to Amy’s it is.’
‘Or you could go to Milan,’ the duck pointed out. ‘That’s an option.’
‘Shut up, duck,’ I said, unzipping the suitcase and shoving him deep inside. That would teach me to look to a bathroom accessory for advice. ‘What do you know?’
Milan.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, swinging my legs back and forth, I pulled on the end of my ponytail. Milan, Milan, Milan.
And that was when I heard someone kicking the door open.
‘Shit bollocks bastard!’ I leapt to my feet, panicking at the sound of Vanessa’s voice right outside my bedroom. I looked left. A shoddily constructed wardrobe that would not hold an elf, let alone me. I looked right. Wall.
‘Yes, Daddy, I said I know.’
The front door slammed behind her and her keys clattered in the bowl beside the door: the bowl that I had dropped my keys into ten minutes earlier.
‘But I’m having a shitty week and I’m not in the mood for lunch,’ Vanessa whinged. ‘Why can’t you take me out for dinner instead?’
Without a better solution, I dropped to my knees and rolled underneath my bed, pulling my spare winter duvet over my head. Trying my best to splutter silently through many months of dust, single socks and poorly disposed of chocolate-bar wrappers, I shuffled backwards until my feet hit the wall. As I swiped loose strands of hair and dust bunnies away from my face, I felt something sharpish scratching against my skin. I grabbed at it, hoping that whatever it was, it had the power to grant wishes, only to discover it was, in fact, a condom – an out-of-date Durex condom, still in its shiny, promising wrapper.
And there we had it: I was twenty-eight years old, with my freezing cold tummy bared to my filthy bedroom floor in a two-sizes-too-small T-shirt, with a duvet over my head, being physically attacked by expired prophylactics.
There was no way to sink any further.
‘Somewhere nice …’ I listened while Vanessa continued to barter with her father, wondering whether or not I could pull the condom over my head like a stocking and charge out the front door without being recognized. ‘Nobu?’
I wanted to go to Nobu. Cow.
‘No, Daddy,’ she whined from the living room. It seemed the shithole she had created didn’t bother her nearly as much as it did me. ‘I have a headache. I need to stay home and rest this afternoon. I know, I’m probably working too hard.’
Well, that wasn’t brilliant news, was it? How was I supposed to get my case of clean knickers out of the flat if she wasn’t going to sod off back out for lunch? For the sake of my sanity, I forced myself to ignore the ‘working too hard’ comment.
‘OK, make it for eight. I’ll see you there.’
On the upside, it seemed as though she hadn’t seen my keys in the bowl by the door and so there was a chance I could get away with this if I stayed very quiet and didn’t attempt to move for the next seven hours. As unlikely as it sounded, that option did actually seem preferable to trying to get out of the flat while Vanessa was still in it, despite the fact I was suddenly desperate for a wee. My bladder had a terrible sense of humour. I imagined this was exactly how Anne Frank felt. Only worse.
I hated not being able to see what was going on. I hated lying underneath my filthy bed, clutching a broken phone in one hand and a condom that had gone off in 2012 in the other. I hated that this was how I found out that I was apparently claustrophobic. Hyperventilating ever so slightly and trying to ignore my as-yet-undiscovered claustrophobia, I concentrated on the sounds outside of my bedroom. A dustbin lorry in the street, high-heeled pacing in the other room, some muffled swearing. Then, after what felt like forever, I heard the shower running.
When you lived with someone for five years, you got pretty used to their bathroom habits and no matter how much of a rush Vanessa might be in, she was incapable of taking anything even approximating a quick shower. This was my chance. Scrambling out from under the bed, I tried to forget how badly I needed the toilet, grabbed my suitcase from the bed, and headed for the front door. Mere microseconds from freedom, my sweaty palm was on the door handle when a blurry silhouette appeared behind the pebbled glass and a sharp rap on the wood frightened me out of my skin.
‘Miss Kittler? It’s the police. Can you come to the door?’
The fucking police? Why were the police here? Although my curiosity had been well and truly piqued, I knew all too well what had happened to the curious cat and I didn’t have eight lives to spare.
I scuttled back into my bedroom as fast as my feet could carry me. As far as I could see, I had two choices. Either I went back under the bed with five years’ of filth and the saddest condom in existence, or I could climb out of my bedroom window. Which would be worse, having London’s finest find you hiding underneath your own bed or climbing out of a window and dropping twelve feet onto potentially spine-shattering concrete? Either way, I was very likely to wet myself. As a second knock rattled the door frame and the water stopped running in the bathroom, I made my decision. Spine-shattering concrete it was.
Pushing the window open, I pulled up the handle on my suitcase and dangled it down as far as it would go. When it was just a couple of feet off the floor, I let it drop, biting my lip to stop myself from screaming when it busted open in a silent explosion of M&S cotton pants, followed by a softened, but still sickening crack, as my camera made a mad dash for freedom across the courtyard.
‘Hold on, officers, I’m coming!’ Vanessa called out to the third rap on the door.
‘On the upside,’ I told myself as I hoisted myself up onto the windowsill and perched my bum right on the edge, ‘this isn’t even the second stupidest thing I’ve done this month.’
Peering down at the Rorschach test of underwear beneath me, I inched forwards, questioning more or less every choice I had ever made in my life. Well, at least if I fell and broke both my legs, that would answer the Milan question for me. There weren’t many fashion photographers jetting around the world in full-body casts. Peeping up at me from underneath next-door’s unbearably pretentious potted herb garden, the rubber duck raised a nonexistent eyebrow and waited, expectantly.
‘Oh God, I’m being so stupid.’ I no longer cared about being heard. I cared about not dying. ‘What am I doing? I’m not jumping out of my own bloody window!’
White knuckles wrapped around the window frame, I twisted around, ready to cock my leg over and in. Unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten that unless a certain Nick Miller was the one positioning my legs over my head, I was one of the least flexible women on the face of the earth. Getting back inside the flat was going to be a damn sight harder than getting out of it. Somehow, I had managed to get my back up against the UPVC frame and my bum half on and half off the ledge when I realized the belt loop of my jeans was stuck somewhere on the lock. And it was while wriggling around in this impossibly ridiculous position, one leg in and one leg out, doing the hokey cokey twelve feet above the floor, that my door flew open and two uniformed policemen and one towel-clad former flatmate burst into the room.
‘Don’t move!’ shouted policeman number one.
‘Come back inside the house!’ yelled policeman number two.
‘Without wanting to be rude …’ My voice was awfully high. ‘Can you pick one? I can probably do the don’t move one but I’m not sure I can get back inside the house.’
‘Stay where you are, Ms Kittler,’ said policeman number one, who seemed far more interested in what Vanessa was barely covering with her towel than whatever crime they imagined I had committed, ‘we’ve got this.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, a whimper escaping her throat as she cowered behind policeman number two. ‘I was so scared. She must have broken in while I was in the shower.’
‘What?’ I squeaked as policeman number one began to move slowly towards me. ‘I didn’t break in. I used my keys – I live here!’
‘We’ll sort all this out down at the station.’ Policeman number two approached with his hands held out towards me. And in one of those hands was a pair of handcuffs. ‘Now just get down off the ledge.’
‘I’m not going down to the station,’ I said, one hand up in a surrender-friendly position, the other still clinging to the window frame for dear life. ‘I didn’t break in.’
I stared at the scene in front of me with utter disbelief. Vanessa, safe behind the boys in blue, gave me a wicked grin while wrapping her towel a little tighter.
‘I want her arrested,’ she said. ‘Please take her away.’
‘I am so going to kill you!’ I let go of the window frame fully to try to unhook my jeans from the arm of the lock. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘You heard that!’ Vanessa shrieked. ‘She threatened to kill me!’
Everything that happened after that was a blur. I wasn’t sure if it was self-preservation or a rage-induced blackout, but without warning, I felt my mind leave my body and float up into a cobwebby corner of my bedroom, watching as the scene unfolded. The policeman that wasn’t copping a feel of my treacherous flatmate rushed over to me as soon as I let go of the window frame and reached behind my back. As he came towards me, my belt loop decided it didn’t need to be caught on the window lock after all and that’s when I realized the only thing that was keeping me balanced in the first place was said belt loop hooked around said window lock.
The fall from the window didn’t seem too bad. I did manage to land on top of my great big pile of pants, and at best I was a little bit dazed while at worst I was completely concussed. But looking on the bright side, it was probably better not to be entirely conscious when you were being read your rights and then carted off to the police station in handcuffs, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b153eb4f-2c95-51a0-bf0c-5a23b792cff9)
‘I’ve told you,’ I said, pressing my palm against the throbbing pain in my shoulder, ‘a thousand times. It’s my flat, my home. Yes, Vanessa owns the flat but I pay rent. My keys are in the bowl by the door. I didn’t break in.’
‘Then remind me why you were climbing out the window with a suitcase full of Miss Kittler’s belongings instead of using the front door?’
Once the officers had established none of my bones had been broken, it was off to the police station for questioning, despite my loud and varied protestations. So far, so The Bill. I had suffered assorted indignities, including being fingerprinted at the same time as a very large skinhead I was sure that I recognized, and then I was left in a small interview room with a female detective who looked about as happy to be there as I did, although she was considerably less bruised and considerably better dressed. Or at least her clothes seemed to a) fit her and b) actually belong to her.
I glanced around the interview room while I tried to work out what to say. It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. More Jobcentre waiting room than terrifying cell – and when you had a friend like Amy, you became very familiar with the inside of the Jobcentre waiting room.
‘We live together, we’ve had a bit of a domestic,’ I explained, wondering how likely a couple of Nurofen and a cup of tea were if I asked very nicely. ‘I didn’t want to talk to her so, you know, I jumped out of a window.’
Made perfect sense to me.
‘So you two are a couple?’ the detective asked, her eyebrow raising for a second and then dropping back into its standard position very quickly. Clearly someone had already had her sensitivity training.
‘We are so not a couple!’ I winced at both the idea of going out with Vanessa and the pain in my shoulder. ‘She’s horrible. She threw a cat at me once. I’d rather go out with you.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The cat was fine,’ I backtracked quickly. ‘Vanessa is my flatmate. Or I’m her flatmate. Or I was her flatmate. I’m moving out, clearly, but I have paid rent for this month so I wasn’t breaking in.’
‘Just breaking out,’ she said, incapable of keeping her eyebrow in its rightful place. ‘And why did you have Miss Kittler’s camera in your suitcase?’
This was the only part I was going to struggle with. ‘It used to be my camera,’ I said. ‘I gave it to her one month when I couldn’t pay my rent but then I borrowed it back for something. That’s all it was, I wasn’t stealing it.’
‘You were borrowing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is commonly known as stealing.’
I had been brought up to be very respectful of the police. Even now, I couldn’t walk past them in the street without feeling improbably guilty or mentally humming the tune to ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman’ but this was getting silly.
‘I really haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, attempting to remain as calm as humanly possible. ‘She’s just trying to cause trouble for me.’
‘It just sounds very unlikely, doesn’t it?’ The detective leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs at the knee and tapped a biro against the pad in front of her. ‘I mean, what would you think if you were me?’
‘I’d think I had better things to do than get involved in a petty squabble between two flatmates. Aren’t there proper criminals out there who need catching?’ I asked before snapping my mouth shut.
I really had to get a handle on my temper. This was just like the time I lost my shit at work and knocked that girl’s mug off her desk. Kind of …
‘Oh, yes, hundreds,’ the detective said, sitting up and brushing her dark blonde bob behind her ears. ‘Although I am really enjoying wasting hours of my time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on your petty squabble.’
Thoroughly chastened, I sank into my uncomfortable plastic chair and looked at the floor.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, working on my most humble expression. ‘Really, I am. Obviously I didn’t wake up this morning and plan on falling out of a window but the whole Vanessa thing really is a ridiculously long story and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘Why don’t you try me?’ she said. ‘I do like a good story and I’ve already heard most of them.’
‘Fine.’ I folded my arms carefully underneath my boobs. I didn’t like showing midriff to a police officer, especially a dirty midriff that had been sweeping my bedroom floor an hour ago. ‘But you really won’t believe it.’
‘I’m so sorry to have caused you so much trouble.’ Tracy the detective gave me a very gentle hug and carefully slid the strap of my handbag over my undamaged shoulder. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I’d be much happier if you’d let them check you out.’
‘I’m OK, really,’ I assured her. ‘All I need is a stiff drink.’
‘And somewhere to live,’ she added. ‘I’ll text you later about that friend of mine – she might still be looking for someone.’
‘Thanks. That would be awesome.’ I pulled the strap of my bag over my head. ‘I really appreciate it.’
It turned out Tracy could believe my story although she hadn’t heard one quite so dramatic in a good while. It also turned out she did not care for women who took advantage of other women or women who effed their friend’s would-be boyfriends behind their back. And while there was very little she could do about the fact that Vanessa had demanded her camera back, she could let me off with a warning and give me a nice cup of tea while I told my story. I even got my Nurofen in the end, but only after I had retold my story to every woman in the police station.
‘I can’t believe there are really women like that out there,’ Tracy said, shaking her head as she walked me out of the interview room, signalling for someone to bring me my battered suitcase. ‘I’m so sorry for the mix-up. I could have someone drive you to the flat and wait while you collect the rest of your stuff if you want?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, really just wanting to leave. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘OK, but you have to promise to let me know what you decide about Milan.’
There it was again. Milan.
I solemnly promised, and with one last round of hugs from every woman who happened to be in the general vicinity of Shoreditch police station, I gave them an awkward wave goodbye and padded outside into the sunshine. It had turned into a beautiful day. I hadn’t really noticed the weather when I was falling out my bedroom window and being bundled into a police car.
‘Of everyone we know, you are the last person I ever expected to be picking up from the cop shop.’
I squinted into the sunshine and my face relaxed into a smile. Leaning against the blue metal railings, phone in one hand, Tesco’s carrier bag in the other, was Charlie Wilder, all six wonderful feet and three beautiful inches of him.
‘Stagnate and die,’ I said, smiling at the sight of him, relieved, safe, awkward, a little bit giddy. ‘I’m mixing things up a bit.’
‘I had noticed,’ he said with a single nod.
We stood an uncomfortable three feet apart, neither of us moving in for our customary hug. I hadn’t seen Charlie since I started my self-imposed exile in Amy’s bedroom three days ago, and before that I hadn’t seen him since we got drunk, got naked, and got it on, so it was understandable that things might be a touch awkward.
‘Do you want to tell me how you managed to get arrested?’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Not really.’
‘Fair enough.’ Charlie held out the Tesco bag and took my suitcase without a word. Such a gent. ‘I got you these. I hear they’re not big on snacks in there. Not that I’d know first-hand, of course, never having actually been arrested myself.’
‘Actually they were very nice,’ I said, taking it and delving inside. Ooh, Galaxy. ‘Once I explained everything.’
‘Sure you don’t want to explain it to me?’ he asked, eyeing my T-shirt as I tore off the wrapper. ‘Are they making you wear that as part of your punishment?’
‘No and no.’ I gave him the side eye and rummaged around the rest of his offerings. Diet Coke, Skittles, a bag of those fresh-baked giant chocolate chip cookies – he’d made an effort, all my favourite unhealthy things.
‘Whatever, I’m glad you called me.’ He took a single step closer and I could smell his aftershave and see the almost black rings around his dark brown irises and his thick, curly copper hair and – oh bloody hell, I was about to fall over.
‘Woah!’ Charlie reached out and grabbed me before I could go down, pulling me in close and holding me upright. There were no two ways about it, being held by Charlie felt really, really good. ‘Let’s get you home. And then you can bloody well tell me what’s going on, whether you like it or not.’
Feeling equal parts faint and confused, with just an edge of lady horn, I let him wrap his arm around my shoulders and bundle me into a waiting Addison Lee taxi, leaving my new friends, Vanessa’s camera and any remaining shred of dignity with Shoreditch‘s finest.
Charlie’s flat was a typical man flat. The walls were white, the curtains were blue, and all of the furniture orbited an obscenely large television in the corner of the living room. Its satellite PlayStations and Xboxes blinked their welcomes as I dropped my handbag on the leather recliner and let Charlie guide me over to the sofa. I’d sat on this settee a million times – God, I’d gone to DFS and helped him choose it – but today I felt strangely uncomfortable, as though I didn’t know where I should look or what I could touch. The framed Goodfellas poster I had given him four Christmases ago stared down at me as I perched on the edge of the settee, pressed my thighs tightly together, and smiled gratefully when Charlie reappeared from the kitchen with a glass of water and the codeine I remembered feeding him when he knackered his knee the year before.
‘How many more years until you’ve actually paid for this?’ I asked, patting the settee as he sat down beside me, at a respectful distance. Which wasn’t that easy when he was six three and I was five ten. Charlie and I had a tendency to make most furniture look Lilliputian.
‘Three, I think.’ He pushed his coppery brown hair off his face, one or two strands refusing to comply and sticking to his forehead. ‘I’m assuming it’ll completely fall apart or something. That’s how I’ll know it’s officially mine.’
‘Right,’ I nodded in agreement and sipped my water. Water was good. A shower would be better, but I still felt a bit weird and I couldn’t see what good would come of him holding me up in there. ‘Yeah.’
I’d known Charlie Wilder for ten years. I knew his height and his date of birth and his blood type. Our hair and our eyes were exactly the same colour. I knew when he had lost his virginity, I knew he lied about having a trial for Newcastle when he was fifteen, but things had never, ever been weird between us until I knew what his penis looked like.
‘Right, yeah,’ Charlie echoed. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, attempting to sit more upright, look more composed. While wearing a cropped neon unicorn T-shirt? ‘Apart from falling out of a window and spending all afternoon in a police station, I, sir, am right as rain.’
‘I’m glad you called me,’ he said, taking the empty glass out of my hand and placing it on the floor. Our fingers didn’t touch once. ‘Been waiting to hear from you.’
What I wouldn’t have given to be having this conversation in any other outfit.
‘I know.’ I felt the edge of my thumbnail between my teeth and concentrated my attention on the blinking clock on his Blu-ray player. I was fairly certain it wasn’t six fifteen in the morning and I quite badly wanted to go over and fix it. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’ I watched as Charlie pushed his Converses off with his feet, one at a time, then kicked them across the room to their home beside the door. ‘I know I dropped a load of shit on you on Monday. It’s not like I expected you to have an answer right away.’
I smiled and looked down the sofa at my best friend and saw someone I wasn’t even sure I knew. ‘I always have an answer right away though, don’t I?’
‘Well yeah, there is that,’ he replied with a soft laugh. ‘Got to admit, I wasn’t expecting you to take this long to get back to me.’
I had been in love with Charlie from the very first day of university and every day since. He was The One. He was the man I imagined walking down the aisle with, the man I wanted to father my children. I wanted him to change my plugs and catch my spiders and know where we kept the paperwork for the car insurance and everything else that went along with a happy, long life together. Only, for ten long years, all I had been to Charlie was the one who reminded him about Mother’s Day, the one who was always available for lunch or a pint after work. I was the girl who explained that petrol station carnations were never an appropriate apology, the one who went with him to weddings when he didn’t have a girlfriend.
It turned out there were lots of different interpretations of The One.
And then, two weeks ago, under the most romantic of circumstances – drunk on cheap vodka on the bottom bunk of my childhood bed – we had finally done the deed. It had been wonderful and not just because I hadn’t had sex in so long that there were expired condoms underneath my bed; it had been genuinely, toe-curlingly fantastic. Right up until Charlie threw me the ‘I don’t want to ruin our friendship’ curveball the morning after and I found out he’d been secretly shagging Vanessa.
Of course, as soon as I told him to take his tainted peen as far away from me as humanly possible, he decided he wanted to make a go of it. And not only that, but he wanted us to start our own advertising agency together. Because going out with each other after everything that had happened wasn’t potentially messy enough, clearly we needed to throw a professional relationship into the mix as well.
‘There’s been a lot of stuff going on …’ I let out a tiny yawn, the pain in my shoulder ringing as I moved. Well, that was definitely the last time I jumped out of a window. ‘I don’t really know what else to say.’
‘I had noticed you’re not at your most chatty,’ he said. ‘You haven’t really told me anything about Hawaii. You still don’t want to talk about it?’
‘Honestly, I sort of just want to go to sleep,’ I admitted. ‘And maybe have a bath and not be wearing Amy’s clothes any more. Not necessarily in that order.’
What I really meant was, I’d rather go back to the police station than talk to Charlie about what had happened in Hawaii.
‘In that case …’ Charlie stood up and stretched. He was ever so tall. ‘I’m going to pretend to go and have a wee when really I’m going to clean the bath, then I’m going to fuck off and leave you to have a nap for a bit. Thank God that’s not your top. I was about to stage an intervention.’
‘I went to Hawaii,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t go insane.’
‘Understood.’ He saluted, picked up my empty glass, and headed for the kitchen. I was already fully foetal on the settee and snuggled into the cushions I had made him buy in the Heal’s sale when he returned.
‘Drink this,’ he ordered, holding out a fresh glass of water. ‘And I’ll run the bath.’
Lying on the settee, listening to the bath water run and watching dust dance around the living room in the late afternoon sunshine, I could easily imagine things working out with Charlie. It would be so nice to have someone to look after me and he knew me so well. It could be so wonderful. The job I’d always wanted, the man I’d always wanted. It was the life I’d dreamed of.
But I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what would happen if I went to Milan. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what might happen with Nick … Hooking my foot through the handle of my handbag because I was too lazy to sit up and get it, I dragged it along the settee and dug around for my phone. The screen was so badly shattered I had to tilt it this way and that to get a clear view of my inbox but it was pointless. There was nothing to see. No new emails, no missed calls, no new text messages. Nothing from Nick; nothing at all. Three days of silence, otherwise known as an eternity.
‘Do you want bubble bath?’ Charlie called from the bathroom. ‘I’ve got bubble bath. Why have I got bubble bath?’
‘Because you’re a woman?’ I asked, sliding my phone under my back and refastening my ponytail on top of my head. Long, thick curly hair looked amazing on celebrities. In real life, it was nothing but a pain in the arse. ‘Yes to bubble bath, please.’
‘Right, it’s running,’ Charlie said, emerging with his sleeves rolled up and a slightly flushed face. At least I knew the bath had been properly scrubbed. Charlie was one of those blokes who believed that because you cleaned yourself in the bathroom, somehow that made the room itself self-cleaning. I really hoped I was catching the towels on a good day … ‘You want a T-shirt or something? I don’t think I’ve got any underwear to lend you.’
‘I think that’s probably a good thing!’ I replied. ‘Thank you. For coming to get me and everything.’
‘It’s not as if you haven’t had to look after me before, is it?’ He stood at the side of the settee, staring down as if he’d never seen me before.
‘What?’ I stared back up. ‘What is it?’
‘I have missed you,’ he said.
I held my breath and felt my heartbeat skip a little faster than I might have liked.
‘You daft cow,’ he added.
My heartbeat slowed back down.
For a second, neither of us said anything and neither of us moved. I looked at Charlie, all tall and broad and floppy, brown hair. He looked at me, all tall and badly dressed and flat on my back.
‘I’ve got to go out for a bit,’ he said, breaking the silence and making for the door. ‘You know where everything is. I’ll be back for tea. See you in a bit,’ he said, shutting the front door carefully behind him.
‘See you in a bit,’ I repeated and waited until I heard the outside door slam shut before retrieving my phone from under my bum and dialling Amy’s number.
‘Yo yo yo,’ she answered immediately. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’
‘Been a long day,’ I replied. I wasn’t nearly awake enough to fill her in on my adventures in housebreaking. ‘I’m at Charlie’s.’
‘Oh really?’
‘No need to sound so scandalized,’ I said. ‘It’s just Charlie.’
‘Charlie who has been calling me every day because you’ve been refusing to speak to him?’
‘Yeah, that one.’ I stretched my legs out in front of me, my shoulder singing out in protest at all movement. Padding into the bathroom, I checked the running water. Charlie’s bath filled slowly – new information to add to my encyclopaedic knowledge of his existence.
‘Shall I come over? Bring snacks?’ Amy asked. ‘We could make him watch Notting Hill again. That’s always good for a laugh.’
‘I think I probably ought to talk to him about some stuff,’ I said with a yawn. Between the painkillers, the steamy promise of the tub and the general combined stress of the day, all I wanted to do was get in the bath and get into bed so I could pretend all of this was just a dream. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Yeah, you want to “talk” to Charlie,’ she said. ‘And I want to talk to Channing Tatum.’
‘Well, if he calls, send me a text.’ I yawned and dipped my hand into the water. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘Enjoy your “talk”.’
Setting my phone safely on top of Charlie’s bathroom cabinet, I stripped off and sat on the side of the bath. When I’d made my phone call, when I decided it was Charlie I wanted to see, I hadn’t really had too much of a plan. I couldn’t ask Amy to come and get me from the police station because then I’d have to explain how I got there in the first place and it would have been really hard for her to collect me if she was being arrested for killing Vanessa. Charlie was the easier option; he wouldn’t give me a hard time and he would also bring snacks. But it did mean I was going to have to have a conversation that I had been putting off for the best part of a week. And in less than twenty-four hours, I had to have another conversation I’d been avoiding: a meeting with my agent, a meeting about Milan.
Sliding into the tub, I tried to get my shoulder under the water without soaking my hair. It would take forever to dry.
All I had to do was work out what I wanted. That was easy, wasn’t it? Only I didn’t know what I wanted, and the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I didn’t just look before I leapt, I had visited the jump site, called the insurance company and done a full risk analysis and yet I still couldn’t come to a decision. I had never struggled like this before but ever since Hawaii, my compass was off. Instead of giving me a straight up yes or no, my brain had turned into a Magic 8 Ball. The outcome is unclear; ask again later; better not tell you now.
I opened the hot water tap with my big toe and watched as the mound of bubbles covering my body grew and grew and just as quickly, popped and vanished.
With a loud and obnoxious sigh, I slid deeper into the water. Sod my hair – it was already a mess.
Being a grown-up was rubbish.
The sun was fighting a losing battle when I woke up on the sofa. The room was pleasantly warm and you couldn’t tell how badly it needed hoovering now the light had faded away. I wriggled my toes inside the pair of socks I had found, sniffed and deemed fit to wear, and yawned loudly.
‘She wakes!’ Charlie called from the kitchen. ‘Better?’
‘Sooo much better,’ I said. The painkillers had reduced the shooting pains in my shoulder to a dull ache and my head felt altogether less stuffed with cotton wool after the nap. ‘You should get injured more often, I like those tablets a lot.’
‘Brilliant, you’ve been here for three hours and I’ve turned you into a junkie.’ He leaned around the door, spatula in hand. ‘What will Amy say?’
‘Amy will want to know why you’ve got a spatula in your hand,’ I suggested. ‘What’s going on in there?’
‘I’m making dinner.’ Charlie looked incredibly happy with himself. ‘I’m making dinner for us.’
‘I take it back, I’m not better,’ I sat up, pulling my second borrowed T-shirt of the day over my knickers. Amy’s was too small; Charlie’s was too big. Maybe one day I’d find one that was just right. ‘I must have hit my head as well as my arm because I think I’m hallucinating. You burn baked beans.’
‘Losing his job does strange things to a man,’ Charlie said, disappearing back into the kitchen. ‘I’ve had to amuse myself for too long. There’s only so many times you can play Grand Theft Auto and watch Breaking Bad before you start thinking a life of crime is a viable option.’
Until two weeks ago, Charlie and I had worked together at Donovan & Dunning, an advertising agency in Holborn. I ran the creative team and Charlie was an account manager, which mostly meant that I spent fourteen hours a day worrying over whether or not the target demographic would respond better to a happy squirrel selling them toilet paper or a friendly-looking bear, while he took the people who owned the toilet paper company out for dinner and then asked them for more money. But, like lots of agencies run by men who liked to blow all their money up their nose rather than into their employees’ pension fund, Donovan & Dunning was not prepared for the recession and had gone rather spectacularly bust, leaving me, Charlie, and about forty other people, out of a job.
‘So you’re going for Come Dine with Me instead?’ I asked. ‘This is a very interesting development.’
‘I’m not very good,’ he acknowledged, reappearing in the living room with two very full glasses of white wine. What went better with codeine than wine? ‘But I’ll get there. I’m making a chilli but I didn’t have any kidney beans so I used Heinz. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, sipping the wine and trying not to wince. Charlie had never been much of a wine drinker; clearly this had been bought in for my benefit. I couldn’t help but wish it hadn’t been. ‘You can’t put baked beans in a chilli, but I’m really impressed that you tried.’
‘Then you’ll be completely wowed by my ability to call for a pizza,’ he said, sitting down next to me and pulling his phone out of his back pocket. ‘Because I’m amazing at that.’
‘A man’s got to have a talent,’ I replied.
His legs pressed against his too-big socks I was wearing and squished my toes in a way that made me feel warm all over. Or it could have been the wine, I wasn’t sure. Whatever discomfort had been between us before my nap had dissolved and all I wanted to do was stare at him in silence while he faffed about with the Domino’s app. But that could have been the wine too.
‘Pizza will be here in forty-five minutes,’ he said and turned to me with a grin. I quickly sipped my wine and hoped my face didn’t look as red as it felt. ‘So what should we do for the next forty-five minutes?’
‘Stop it,’ I shouted, swatting Charlie’s arm away from my face. ‘I hate this.’
‘You’re so bad,’ he laughed, hammering the buttons on his control pad and beating my character into a bloody pulp on the screen in front of us. ‘How can you possibly be so bad?’
‘Because I’ve been drinking for the last hour on an empty stomach,’ I said, adding a hiccup for emphasis and throwing my controller down onto the sofa in protest as he ripped the head off my character with unrestrained glee. ‘And I don’t have a penis.’
‘Loads of girls are good at games,’ Charlie argued as his phone lit up on the sofa between us. ‘You’re just shit. Thank God the pizza is here so I don’t have to kill you again.’
Folding my legs up underneath me, I watched him run downstairs to pick up the pizza and smiled the smug smile of a woman who was spending the evening playing computer games and drinking wine with her crush. It was every girl’s dream, wasn’t it? Here I was, wearing his favourite Arsenal T-shirt and a pair of big floppy socks, looking adorable. Or at least I looked adorable in my imagination; I had no interest in checking out how true that assumption was in a mirror. This was everything I’d ever wanted. Well, maybe I hadn’t pictured quite so many rounds of Mortal Kombat in our future, but the pizza was definitely a plus.
‘Dinner is served!’ Charlie pushed through the door with an enormous white pizza box, a matching plastic bag hanging from his wrist. ‘Do you want some Coke?’
‘Is it diet?’
‘No, it isn’t diet.’ He placed the pizza carefully on the not-really-clean-enough floor and handed me a napkin.
‘Then I’ll stick with the wine.’ I held out my glass for a refill.
‘Wine and pizza …’ He grabbed the almost empty bottle from the side table and poured. ‘We’re practically Italian.’
I flipped open the lid of the pizza box and ignored him.
‘Hawaiian pizza?’ I asked. ‘I suppose you think you’re funny.’
‘I want to hear about it – Amy wouldn’t tell me anything.’ Charlie handed me a piece of kitchen towel in lieu of a plate and grabbed a huge, gooey slice of pizza before settling back onto the sofa. ‘Actually, she kept saying I was a cockwomble and told me to stop calling her. Was it amazing?’
‘It was amazing.’ I chose my words carefully, focusing on my memories of the sea and the sand and the smell of morning pastries and pretty pink flowers and pineapple that tasted nothing like the pineapple on this pizza. ‘It’s really beautiful.’
‘I still can’t believe you did it, Tess,’ he said. ‘Packed up, flew halfway round the world. It’s so not you.’
I shrugged, picking pieces of sad, tinned pineapple off my pizza. He didn’t know the half of it.
‘Being me wasn’t getting me very far, was it?’ I said, wiping my hands on a paper napkin and wrapping my hair around itself in a bun on the back of my head. ‘And I needed to get away from everything.’
The skinny blonde elephant in the corner of the room coughed delicately and tossed its hair.
‘Everything?’ Charlie repeated.
‘You know, work and everything,’ I said, attempting to clarify without using the V word. If I never heard the V word again as long as I lived, it would be too soon.
Charlie wrapped his huge hand around his delicate wine glass and nodded. ‘Vanessa.’
And we’d managed fifteen seconds. Not bad going.
‘You know …’ He cleared his throat and took a drink. ‘Me and her, it was nothing to do with me and you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, meaning it entirely.
‘It was a thing.’ For some reason, he hadn’t stopped talking. ‘It was not a clever thing, I know, but it was like she was in one box and you were in another and I never even thought about you being in that box because you’re you and she’s her and you were in a more important box anyway. Does that make sense?’
‘None, not even a little bit,’ I replied. ‘I really, really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I never had feelings for her,’ he said, continuing to talk in spite of specific instructions to the contrary. gesticulating wildly and using his pizza as a prop. ‘It was all, well, it was all that it was.’
‘It was just sex,’ I said, my mind wandering over to the last time I’d heard those words.
‘I know I’m an idiot and I know I was dick-led and I know you’ll never forgive me …’ I looked away but heard the clink of the wine bottle on the rim of the glass. ‘But yeah, it was just sex. I’m a bloke. I was drunk and a fit girl came on to me and I am fully aware that it was the worst decision I’ve ever made.’
Sipping my wine, I considered his words for a moment. Two weeks ago, that sort of defence would have made my head explode but now, having made my own bad decisions, with my own fit bloke, I could almost understand. Almost.
‘If I could take it back, I would.’ Charlie climbed off the settee, his long legs kneeling in the lid of the pizza box before he pushed it away and I watched it skate across the room and disappear under an armchair. ‘If I’d known what might happen with you, I would never—’
‘You’re drunk,’ I said, half-hopefully. ‘We don’t have to have this conversation now.’
‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this, Tess,’ he said, taking the wine glass and paper-towel pizza plate out of my hands.
His breath was warm and sharp from the wine but he smelled the way he had smelled since the very first day I had met him. A mixture of Head & Shoulders, the Issey Miyake aftershave he had spritzed on before he left the flat this morning and underneath all that, the same comforting Charlieness that had wrapped itself around me a thousand times.
‘I know I fucked up. And not just by what I did and who I did it with, but by not realizing how amazing you are bloody years ago. You’re my best friend. You make me laugh, you take care of me; you’re the one who is always there. You’re shit at beat-em-ups but I don’t care. There are too many awesome things about you. I can’t believe I didn’t work this out before.’
‘Like what?’ I said, nervous laughter in my voice. ‘What’s so awesome about me?’
‘Everything,’ he said, grinning. ‘We like all the same films, we like all the same TV shows, we like the same music. God, it’s like we were made for each other. You’re basically me and I’m basically you.’
I wanted my wine back. Was that true, really? Did we like all the same things? And did I want to be with someone who liked me because I was exactly like him? I hated to admit it but I had a feeling it would be more true to say I liked the things he liked so we would have more reasons to spend time together. We never, ever did anything I suggested – because I never suggested anything.
‘I need you in my life,’ Charlie said, not put off by my contemplative silence. ‘And not as a mate. I didn’t realize how much I needed you until now. Just don’t tell me it’s too late.’
As it was, he didn’t give me a chance to tell him anything. Instead he took my hands in his and pulled me towards him.
‘Tess,’ he whispered. ‘My Tess.’
It was what I wanted: to be his, to belong.
Softly, slowly he pressed his lips against mine and I was full of wine and butterflies, so I kissed him back. I closed my eyes, let myself drift and kissed Charlie Wilder as though there wasn’t a single other man on the planet.
Only, I knew that wasn’t true.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_aae1c8ee-e2c9-523f-b090-8300b26b7e7d)
It was very early the next morning when I woke up in Charlie’s bed. With Charlie, but without any clothes. The night before, it had seemed like such a good idea, the getting naked thing. I hadn’t had a good day by anyone’s standards and nothing seemed to take my mind off bigger problems like a good seeing-to. It was one of the fun new things I’d learned about myself of late. Unfortunately, for everything I’d learned, I seemed to have forgotten how much trouble dropping my knickers tended to land me in. Twelve hours earlier, the idea of sleeping with Charlie was warm and reassuring and comforting but when I woke up at dawn, the sunlight slicing across his blue-for-a-boy bedroom, there was one thought I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many times I tossed and turned.
Nick Miller.
Here I was, nestled in the nook of the man I’d been achingly in love with for ten long years, and all I could think about was how different it felt to waking up beside Nick. I kept trying to close my eyes but every time I began to drift off, there he was. His ashy blond hair and blue eyes staring right at me, making me shiver from head to toe.
Strangely enough, waking up naked with one man but only being able to think of another was a bit confusing and so, as quietly as I could, I slid out of bed, grabbed my clothes from last night and tiptoed towards the bedroom door. All I needed was ten minutes to make a cup of tea. Or maybe I could go for a quick walk, blow away the cobwebs. Actually, it might be a good idea to pop back to Amy’s. I could leave Charlie a note. Yeah, that was a good idea. As long as I left a note it was OK. Everyone loved a note …
‘Morning.’
I froze in the doorway, pulling my borrowed T-shirt past the hem of my knickers with one hand and trying to push my hair into some sort of shape with the other. Charlie rubbed at his face with the back of his hand and smiled.
‘Hello.’
Well, at least I didn’t have to worry about what to put in the note.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ he asked, stretching his entire body down the length of the bed as I averted my eyes. Even now, even at twenty-eight years old, I still couldn’t make direct eye contact with a penis. At least not in daylight. Definitely not sober.
‘Uh, just putting the kettle on,’ I replied, my hair flopping down over one eye. I can pull off sexy, I thought, planting my hand on my waist and dropping my hip. Then immediately standing up straight and feeling like a twat. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Not in the mood for a cup of tea,’ he said, pulling back the covers and patting the mattress. Once the duvet had been removed, it wasn’t hard to see what he was in the mood for. I coloured up from head to toe and averted my eyes. I had been fantasizing about Charlie for a decade and we’d had actual sex twice now, but seeing his actual peen with my actual eyes was still too much.
‘I need a wee,’ I said, the words falling out of my mouth before I could consider how incredibly unsexy they were. Charlie frowned and waved me away. ‘Back in a minute.’
Once the bathroom door was safely locked behind me, I sat down on the loo and pressed both hands against my face. What was wrong with me? Why was this weird?
If only I could stop thinking about Nick.
‘I’m not thinking about him at all,’ I corrected myself and ran the cold water over a dubious-looking flannel. ‘Not at all.’
Why would I be thinking about him? I had just woken up in the arms of a wonderful man who was over six feet tall, had all his own teeth and had bought me pizza. In an online dating world, Charlie was the catch of the century.
‘So I’m not thinking about Nick.’ I slapped myself around the chops with the icy flannel. ‘I am wishing I had never met him, but I am not thinking about him.’
There was nothing to think about anyway. So what if he was so attractive he made Matthew McConaughey look like he’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down? So what if he was intelligent and passionate and fascinating? So what if the sex was intense and so all-consuming that I still have pale yellow traces of his fingerprints on my arms and shoulders and hips and even thinking about our time together made me forget to breathe.
Nick was a fling. I had a fling and now that fling was over. And not just because he sent a heart-stoppingly brief ‘call me’ email a week ago and then failed to pick up his phone or answer anything subsequently, but because I had decided it was over. Hawaii was a fantasy; this was real life. And it wasn’t a bad trade by any stretch of the imagination.
‘Totally over the Nick situation.’ I was resolute underneath the flannel. ‘The fling has been flung.’
Not that I wasn’t a bit pissed off. Yes, he had good reason to be annoyed at me, but when a man sent you an email that said ‘call me’ and then didn’t actually answer your calls, that was enough to slot him firmly into the ‘douchebag’ category.
‘Why tell me to call if he didn’t want to speak to me?’ I asked the flannel.
It didn’t answer. It just smelled damp and sad.
‘Everything all right in there?’ Charlie knocked on the door. ‘You setting up shop or something?’
‘I was just, you know,’ I stood up and flushed for the want of a better response, ‘doing stuff.’
‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Oh. Right, uh, I’ll let you get on with that then.’
‘I’m not doing that,’ I shrieked, realizing he had added two and two and got something very unladylike. ‘I was just washing my face.’
I threw the door open and waved the damp flannel around to prove my innocence.
‘You didn’t use that, did you?’ Charlie asked, taking it from me with his thumb and forefinger and sniffing gingerly.
I pressed my fingers to my face. The skin was still all there. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’ He threw it over my shoulder into the bath and wiped his hand on the back of his boxer shorts. ‘Come here.’
Before I could protest, Charlie wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I clasped my hands behind his back and made myself smile, trying to relax into him. I’d always found Charlie hugs reassuring. He was so tall, he even dwarfed me when I wore heels and I was five ten. In bare feet, it was like being cuddled by a considerably cuter Bigfoot. I felt his chin on the top of my head and heard a purr-like noise emanate from his entire being.
‘Let’s go back to bed …’ His hands slid down my back and up underneath my borrowed T-shirt. ‘This is the first time I’ve been happy to not have a job since we got fired.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, writhing out of his reach and grabbing hold of both of his hands before I got carried away. Again. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
Even though I was congratulating myself for listening to my brain instead of my vagina, it was still hard not to fall right into Charlie’s arms and let him carry me back to bed. This was what happened when you didn’t have sex forever and then had all of the sex at once – you lost control of every single sensible impulse in your body.
‘A meeting?’ Charlie casually pushed his erection down like a bad dog. ‘Who have you got a meeting with? At this time in the morning?’
‘It’s an agent,’ I replied, my eyes squarely locked on his. ‘So … I was taking photos in Hawaii. For a magazine.’
‘You were taking photos?’ he asked, finally leaving his penis alone. ‘Like a photographer?’
‘Just like a photographer,’ I nodded and looked at my hands. How did I keep this as brief as possible? ‘I didn’t just decide to go to Hawaii. I went to take pictures of this man for Gloss magazine. He owns a fancy department store in New York and he’s retiring so they were doing a feature.’
‘And you were the photographer?’ Charlie crossed his arms, making his biceps pop. ‘You took the pictures?’
‘I took the pictures,’ I said, not looking at his arms at all. ‘I was the photographer.’
‘But you’re not a photographer,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re a creative director at an ad agency.’
‘Technically, I’m more of a photographer than a creative director right now,’ I replied. ‘You know I was always interested in photography.’
‘Do I?’
‘Anyway, they really like the photos – the magazine, and Al, the guy I was taking the photos of. So now he wants me to go to Milan and take some more photos for a project he’s working on. I guess it’s a career retrospective or something?’
‘Woah.’ Charlie breathed out, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. ‘That’s bloody amazing. Mental but amazing.’
‘I can see how you would get to mental,’ I said, wiggling one big toe and then the other. ‘But I really love taking photos and it turns out I’m good at it.’
‘Are you going to go?’ he asked. ‘To Milan?’
I scrunched up my face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘I want a cup of tea,’ I answered, standing up and walking straight into the kitchen. I knew his flat as well as I knew him and before he had even followed me, I had two cups on the counter, his instant boil kettle bubbling away.
‘You always want a cup of tea,’ Charlie said, opening the fridge and taking out the milk. ‘But do you really want to do it? This photo thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ I couldn’t look at him while I spoke. Why was this so hard? I placed a teabag in each cup and felt my eyes prickle with the tears of an awkward conversation.
‘When do you have to make a decision?’ he asked. This was why he was a great account manager, always on the details. ‘When would you have to go? Do you know how long you’d be away?’
‘Soon,’ I said, splashing my moo juice onto the kitchen top. ‘And I’d be away for a little bit.’
‘And how long is a little bit?’ He put the milk back in the fridge and took his tea. ‘Three days? Four?’
I stirred my tea with a teaspoon that didn’t match any of his other cutlery and watched the milk swirl away into an evenly coloured cuppa.
‘I’m not sure.’
I was lying. I did know. Agent Veronica had sent me several long and detailed emails about the job, each with an increasing degree of foul language. Agent Veronica did not believe in mincing words.
The job would take at least three months, probably more. The rest of July, August, September and some of October. I could easily be away until Christmas. Stood there in Charlie’s kitchen in my pants, holding a hot cup of tea, everything seemed to slow down to a complete standstill and I couldn’t quite seem to find the right words to tell him that. So I didn’t tell him anything. It was a serious problem I appeared to have developed.
‘Sounds like an amazing opportunity,’ Charlie said, heaping mounds of white sugar into his mug. I wasn’t allowed to put sugar in Charlie’s tea, I never added enough. ‘I mean, you never went travelling or anything after uni. It might be fun.’
‘It’s not just as easy as packing a bag and getting on a plane.’ I breathed in and felt the world shift back to a normal speed, rattling off the excuses I’d been telling myself, every time the tiniest buzz of excitement swelled up in my stomach. ‘I don’t have anywhere to live, I don’t have any money, I don’t even have a camera. And yes, the pictures from Hawaii worked out but this is a much bigger deal. It’s not a fun thing, it’s a proper job that a real photographer would kill for. I honestly don’t know if I’m up to it.’
‘You, Tess Brookes, are up to anything you put your mind to,’ Charlie said, his dark brown eyes clear and resolute. ‘You know that. Or at least I know that. How many times do I have to tell you?’
I looked up at him with a half-smile hidden behind my mug. Of course, he had to go and remind me that he wasn’t just a great shag and my lifelong crush, but my best friend as well.
‘A camera is easy enough to get, isn’t it? And you haven’t bloody shown me the pictures from Hawaii yet but I don’t believe you would do anything less than a perfect job. You always do.’
‘You mean because I’m OCD?’ I asked.
‘I mean because you work hard and you’re good at whatever you do,’ he said, splashing his tea around his bare feet. ‘As for the not-having-anywhere-to-live thing – you could always stay here.’
‘I’m not a very good roommate, as I’m sure Amy would tell you,’ I said, tearing off some kitchen towel and wiping up his mess, vaguely impressed in the back of my mind that he actually had kitchen towel. ‘And really, your spare room isn’t big enough to swing a cat. Plus you’ve got a surfboard in it. When was the last time you surfed?’
‘I didn’t mean move in as a roommate,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t want you in the spare room.’
I stood up slowly, clutching the grubby kitchen towel. His floors needed cleaning. ‘What?’
‘How’s your tea?’ he asked.
Leaning against his kitchen cabinets, resplendent in a creased-to-buggery boy’s T-shirt, with bird’s nest hair and a handful of dirty paper towel, I searched for the right words. Charlie crossed his legs, leaning against the fridge in an impressively casual display.
‘Did you just ask me to move in with you, in a non-roommate capacity?’ I asked, scrunching the paper towel into a tiny ball in my fist. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’d say “I know it seems a bit quick” but it doesn’t.’ He put his tea down and took the paper towel out of my hand before throwing it at the bin. And missing. ‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this and it was two weeks too many. I know how I feel about you. You’re my best mate and I reckon last night proved the amazing sex wasn’t just a one off, so why mess about?’
‘I can think of a few reasons,’ I replied. Actually, I couldn’t. I could only think of one but this really didn’t seem like the time to tell him I’d been shagging someone else the whole time I was in Hawaii, especially since he’d apparently been sitting on his arse in London, doing some pretty epic soul-searching. ‘It … it is a bit quick, Charlie. I feel a bit bleurgh about everything.’
‘Bleurgh?’ He looked understandably deflated.
‘Overwhelmed,’ I clarified. ‘Confused.’
‘So this wouldn’t be the right time to tell you I’ve accepted a pitch for our agency, then?’ he asked, wincing.
‘But we haven’t got an agency?’ I said. ‘What have you done?’
‘Don’t be mad at me.’ He held his hands out to defend himself against whatever puny attack he thought I might launch and grabbed a sneakily hidden copy of Marketing Week from the top of the microwave. ‘But I saw Perito’s were looking for a new agency and one of the blokes in their marketing department is on my football team and I knew you’d come up with an amazing campaign, so I asked him if we could pitch. And he said yes, because he totally loves your work.’
‘He loves my work?’ my ego asked on my behalf.
‘He was totally obsessed with you,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Knew loads of your campaigns.’
‘So just like that? We’ve got a pitch?’ I wondered if there was any wine left. Tea clearly was not strong enough for this conversation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But …’
‘But?’
‘He needs to see the pitch by next Friday because they’re seeing agencies the following Monday. And we’re going to be one of those agencies.’
‘That’s not even a week!’ I loved stating the obvious. ‘We would have to come up with an entire marketing campaign, just me and you, by next week?’
‘Yeah, but Tess, Perito’s Chicken as our first account? Our own agency?’ Charlie looked so excited. I recognized the enthusiasm; I used to share it. ‘How amazing would that be?’
Worryingly, if anyone had asked me that question two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to describe how amazing it would be. I’d have been like a pig in peri peri sauce.
Charlie Wilder was asking me to move in with him. Charlie Wilder was asking me to pitch an advertising campaign for a Portuguese chicken cook-in sauce. Charlie Wilder was asking me to start a brand new advertising agency with him. But no, I had to go off to Hawaii on a voyage of pissing self-discovery and meet a tosspot of a man who would be rolling around on the floor, sides positively splitting, at the sound of any of this.
‘And it isn’t just Perito’s.’ Charlie was still talking, still trying to win me round. ‘I talked to some of our old accounts and they’re interested. Squiggles’ Kitchen Towels wants to come with us.’
At least that explained why he had so much kitchen towel.
‘And there’s Brookes & Bryan, the jewellers we just signed; they’re up for it too. And I reckon I can totally get Noodle Pots. You’re the best creative director there is, Tess, and I can’t do this without you. They all want you, not some knobhead account manager. I need you.’
Charlie took a step towards me and reached out to run a hand through my hair.
‘Tell me you’re not just the littlest bit interested?’ he said, his hand getting stuck somewhere around my ear.
I shivered, trying to separate out my feelings of professional pride and sexual desire. I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. It was a bit disconcerting.
‘I’ve got to go to my meeting,’ I said in a weak voice. ‘Can we talk about this later?’
Sensing defeat, Charlie stopped. Part of me was so disappointed that he hadn’t grabbed hold of my hair, bent me over the oven and shagged me senseless until I agreed to all of his demands; but the part of me that got up at seven every morning, got dressed and went about her daily business in a sensible fashion, respected him for giving me the time and space to make a considered decision. After all, this was sweet, loving Charlie we were talking about, not filthy, tosspot Nick.
Not that I was thinking about Nick.
‘Tess-motherfucking-Brookes!’
Agent Veronica stood up, put out her fag and grabbed me for a stale, non-optional hug as soon as I set foot in her office.
‘Sit your arse down. Cup of tea? Cup of tea.’ She strode over to the door and coughed delicately. ‘Two cups of fucking tea when you’re ready, if it’s not too much fucking trouble?’
Slamming the door behind her, she shook her head and sat back down behind her desk. ‘Can’t get the staff,’ she lamented. ‘Now, do I need to slap some sense into you or have you just come to confirm your flights?’
Veronica, it was fair to say, was something of an imposing woman. Very blonde with very red lipstick and an ever-present fug of cigarette smoke that tended to knock the breath out of your lungs before you had a chance to get a word in edgeways. Not that you ever really had a chance to get a word in edgeways. She stubbed out a crimson-ringed dog-end with matching pointy nails and sat back in her seat. Perched on the edge of my chair, my bag safely on my knee, I waited for her to say something. It never hurt to put a potential weapon between Veronica and your vital organs.
Given that she hadn’t spoken in four seconds, I took it that I was safe to begin.
‘Well—’
‘I don’t want to hear “well”!’ she shouted, slapping her desk with her hand and grabbing a fresh pack of Silk Cut out of her drawer. ‘I want to hear, “sorry I’ve been such an ungrateful shithead all week, Veronica. You’re amazing, Veronica. When does my flight to Milan leave, Veronica?”’
‘I’ve had a lot of thinking to do,’ I protested as she savaged the plastic film around the cigarettes.
‘Wandering around in the rain? Staring out over the river and wondering “What if?”’ she asked. ‘Fuck that. You’re leaving on Sunday.’
‘It hasn’t rained this week …’ I muttered, confused. Then realized what she had said. ‘What?’
‘Sunday, you leave on Sunday.’ Veronica took care to enunciate each word very carefully, as though I were simple or slow. I was fairly certain she believed I was both. ‘You start work on Monday, so it seemed like a good idea to get you on a flight on Sunday. You comprende?’
‘I can’t leave on Sunday,’ I said, holding my bag closer into my body. ‘That’s in two days. I’m not ready.’
‘So what are you doing sat there like a bastard lemon then?’ she asked. ‘Go home, wash your fucking hair, pack a fucking bag, find your fucking passport. You’re going.’
‘Veronica …’ I started, reaching a hand up to touch my hair. ‘I can’t just up and leave on Sunday for three months.’
‘Why? You haven’t got a job, have you? You haven’t got anywhere to live …’ She paused to light up again, either oblivious or unconcerned by the laws about smoking in the workplace. I assumed the latter. ‘From what I’ve heard, you’re lucky you’re not having this conversation with me in a fetching orange onesie. Thank God they didn’t send you down, girl. Some butch bitch’d be wearing you like a glove puppet inside half an hour.’
‘Who told you …? You know what, never mind.’ I blinked, trying to erase the terrifying image she had just planted indelibly in my mind. ‘It’s still a lot. To go off to Italy for three months in two days. I can’t even speak Italian.’
‘They all speak English,’ she said, dismissing my fears with a sweep of her ignited arm.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Well, no, but if they don’t speak it, I doubt very much that they’ve got anything fucking interesting to say anyway.’ She pointed at me, making stabbing motions with her lit cigarette on every word. ‘You. Are. Going. To. Milan. On. Sunday.’
‘I can’t go for three months,’ I replied, my head full of Charlie’s morning erection and Perito’s spicy chicken. Not together though, eww. ‘I can’t.’
With a loud, fragrant sigh, Veronica leaned back in her chair and fixed me with a narrow-eyed stare as her assistant shuffled through the door and placed two cups of tea on the desk with a barely smothered cough.
‘You know you’re not supposed to smoke in the workplace, don’t you?’ I asked, chugging my tea so there would be one less hot thing for her to throw at me.
‘I eat here, I sleep here, I shit, shower and shag here.’ Veronica ground the half-smoked cig into her ashtray, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the desk with her blood-red talons. ‘Can’t imagine anyone’s going to tell me to put my fag out. Unless it’s bothering you?’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I find it quite comforting.’
‘Your parents smoke?’
‘No,’ I replied, feeling the fear of God in my gut. ‘Just, you don’t see it enough these days, do you?’
She sat back again, reaching behind her and shoving the window open. It wasn’t until I heard the amplified buzz of traffic outside that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Sweet Baby Jesus in the manger.
‘So you don’t want to go to Italy for three months?’ she asked, clicking her mouse a couple of times and looking over at the screen of her Mac.
Thank God, we were back to business.
‘Three months is so long. A lot can happen in three months,’ I said.
‘Oh, are you expecting some other fashion icon to appear from the heavens and offer you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?’ she asked, her hands clasped together in prayer.
‘I don’t want to agree to three months,’ I replied, as staunchly as possible. Playing hardball had never been my thing. Actually, playing any kind of ball had never been my thing, euphemistically or otherwise.
‘I’ll tell them you’ll go for a week, do a recce and then make a decision,’ she said. ‘And if that decision is anything other than “thanks for giving me this opportunity, Mr Bennett, now may I kiss your arse?” I’ll have you fucking killed.’
A week. I felt relief roll off my shoulders. I could do a week. I’d know how I felt in a week. Probably.
‘Thank you,’ I said, visions of Roman Holiday and big plates of pasta suddenly rushing through my head. Everything I’d held at bay until now crashed over me on one big Italiano-gasm. I was going to Milan.
‘That would be amazing. It’s just that I’ve got other stuff, maybe. I don’t want to commit to something I might not be able to do.’
Veronica’s head snapped round towards me so quickly, her hair almost moved. ‘You know I’m your agent? You can’t book a job without me because then I’d have to fucking kill you and I hate having to sort that out. Right pain in the tits.’
‘It’s not a photography job, it’s advertising,’ I said quickly, preparing for a slap. ‘Like I was doing before.’
‘Can you see me right now, Tess Brookes?’ Veronica pushed her massive leather chair over to the wall behind her and began knocking her head against the wallpaper harder than I could imagine was comfortable. ‘This is me, banging my head against a brick wall. And why do you think I’m doing that?’
‘Is it because I’m a fucking idiot?’
I thought it was worth a guess.
‘Ding ding ding!’ She waved her arms above her head like Kermit the Frog and thankfully stopped bashing her head against the wall. ‘You’re a fucking idiot. This is a chance that will never come around again. You are a twenty-eight-year-old untested, unproven, rookie photographer. You ought to be spending the next five years trekking around shit weddings in Bracknell, taking pictures over dinner because the main photographer can’t be arsed.’
It was a fair point.
‘At best, you’d be looking the other way while some big-shit fashion photographer got a blow job from some underage model while you changed the flash and spent so long holding up reflectors that you had a right bicep bigger than a world champion wanker.’
Again, not untrue.
‘Am I getting through to you? Shall we just go over what exactly is on the fucking table here?’
I didn’t feel like we especially needed to but I didn’t think it would be in my best interests to tell her no and so I went with a noncommittal half-shrug and made an awkward mewing noise in the back of my throat. Veronica sat forward and held out her hand, ticking off each of her points with so much force, I was worried she was going to break off her own fingers.
‘One first-class fucking trip to Italy, a base in Bertie-cocking-Bennett’s private apartments in Milan, a job working personally with Bennett himself that a million other photographers would happily bum a goat to get, and a proposed fee that is twice what I would have even attempted to get for you – and I, Tess Brookes, am a fucking ballbreaker when it comes to fees. So what, pray tell, is your opportunity? Because if it’s anything other than Jesus-fucking-Christ asking you to rebrand his bell-end, I’m afraid I’m not going to understand.’
I bit my lip and pulled my handbag closer to my chest.
‘Do you know Perito’s Portuguese Chicken?’
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_6bdcee52-57de-592e-b138-5e6079bcaae3)
According to a hastily scribbled note on the back of a Domino’s Pizza napkin, Amy was out at a job interview when I got back to the house and where her other five flatmates were, I didn’t care to know. Seizing my chance, I grabbed a semi-clean towel from Amy’s radiator and ran into the bathroom, locking the door. Sharing a bathroom with six other people, even temporarily, was enough to do terrible things to your sanity.
‘What am I going to do about Charlie?’ I asked my liberated rubber duck, who had insisted on accompanying me into the shower as I turned on the blessed hot water. ‘I do want to go to Milan but I really want to try for the pitch too.’
‘Can’t have it all,’ he replied with a silent quack. ‘But shouldn’t you try to clear your messes up here before you go gallivanting off to Italy? Are you moving in with Charlie? Why haven’t you called your mum? And how long has it been since you shaved your legs?’
‘I don’t think me or Charlie are ready to move in,’ I said, wondering whether or not that was actually true. It was only now that I realized how long it had been since I’d shaved my legs and he hadn’t complained about them once. ‘And my mum hasn’t called me, has she?’
It was fair to say my mother and I hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms the last time I’d been to visit.
‘You need to call her and you know it,’ the duck said.
Annoyingly, he was right. She might be a passive-aggressive pain in the arse but she was my passive-aggressive pain in the arse and the fact that we hadn’t spoken since our argument was starting to weigh on me.
‘And of course,’ Rubber Ducky wasn’t finished with his truth bombs, ‘you’re still thinking about Nick. Even though he hasn’t called you back.’
‘I am not!’ I snapped before realizing I was lying, not only to a rubber duck but also to myself. ‘But so what if I am? He told me to call and now he won’t speak to me. What if something has happened to him?’
‘Is that what you’re telling yourself now?’ he asked.
‘Fuck off.’
The ‘he must have died or he would have called’ rationale. Keeping single women delusional since the invention of the telephone.
‘I just don’t understand why he would ask me to call him and then not call me back.’
‘Could always move in here,’ Rubber Ducky suggested, changing the subject. ‘There’ll be a free room at the end of the month.’
‘I can’t live here.’ I shuddered at the thought as the water began to cool without me touching the thermostat. With still unshaven legs, I conceded defeat and turned off the shower. ‘No one should have to live here. Amy should have moved out years ago.’
‘I’m not arguing with that,’ he said. ‘This bathroom is disgusting. You’re going to have to make a decision about something and soon. I’m not showering in here again.’
Wrapped in my not-really-big-enough towel, I opened the bathroom door, trying to keep my vagina covered, and gave the rubber duck my best side eye.
‘Duly noted,’ I replied. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Hello?’
Somewhere on Parsons Green high street, en route to meet Paige on a shoot, I found the courage to call my mother. But my mother didn’t answer. Even though their voices were almost identical, I knew at once it was my younger sister, the eternally put-upon middle child, Mel.
‘All right,’ I said with a cough. ‘It’s Tess.’
‘Well.’
The ability to put that much weight behind that one word was a skill she had learned from our mother. I only got the boobs and the hair; Mel had inherited the whole passive-aggressive package.
‘Is Mum there?’ I was trying to keep my voice light in the hope that they had all forgotten me storming out of the house two weeks ago. Of course, it would have made more sense to hope I would bear witness to the second coming of Jesus but still, it was nice to be an optimist.
‘She is.’ She quickly switched to a yell that was entirely unnecessary given the size of my mother’s house. ‘Mum! It’s Tess!’
‘And what does Tess want?’ I heard Mum yell back.
‘She wants to know what you want,’ Mel relayed faithfully.
‘Can I just speak to her, please?’ I asked. My tolerance levels were dropping with every passing second. ‘It’ll be quicker.’
‘I’m very well, thanks for asking,’ she said. I had not caught my favourite sister in a good mood. ‘She says she wants to speak to you!’
‘Maybe I don’t want to speak to her,’ Mum replied, sounding very pleased with herself. ‘I haven’t forgotten what she said when she walked out of this house.’
‘She says—’
‘I heard what she bloody said.’ I cut Mel off before she could finish, wondering whether it wouldn’t be easier to just throw myself off the Westway and hope a passing bus was there to finish me off. ‘And I haven’t forgotten. I’m sorry for losing my temper and I shouldn’t have walked out without explaining what was going on but I was upset.’
‘She says she’s really sorry and she shouldn’t have walked out.’
‘That’s not exactly what I said, is it? Put her on the bloody phone, Mel.’
‘Don’t swear at your sister,’ my mum said, finally on the line without an interpreter. ‘You’re not in the position to be calling my house and being all high and mighty.’
I closed my eyes and rubbed the spot in the middle of my forehead that felt a tiny bit like it might actually explode. Still, better an aneurysm than an apology – that was the Brookes motto. Or at least it should be.
‘I wasn’t swearing at my sister—’
‘Yes, you were. I’ve got ears, you know.’
Breathe, Tess, breathe.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I corrected myself. ‘How are you?’
‘As if you’re bothered,’ Mum huffed audibly down the phone. ‘After that scene you caused.’
The scene she was referring to wasn’t so much ‘a scene I had caused’ as a scene caused by my sisters hanging me out to dry by telling my mother I had lost my job at Donovan & Dunning, at which point she had chucked a glass of red wine across the room and got into a screaming row with Amy. In the middle of a christening. Amy had of course diffused the situation by climbing onto a table and holding the baby aloft while singing The Circle of Life. Amy was wonderful.
‘And you’re the one who walked out and said you were never coming back.’
It was good to know she’d run everything through her own filter and come up with her own version of events. History was written by the winner. The winners and their mums.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as calmly as possible. There was no point in getting into another row; the only thing that would work here was blanket apologies. ‘I didn’t mean it. I was being stupid.’
‘Yes, you were.’ Clearly not enough apologies yet. ‘You sounded like you were off your head. Charlie says you’re not doing the heroin, though.’
And if Charlie said so, it must be true. The only person who had had a bigger crush on Charlie for the last decade was my mum. Mostly, it only manifested itself in overly maternal smothering when he went with me to visit, but I always felt a bit bad for my stepdad whenever she started pawing my best friend. Poor, lovely Brian. Patience of a saint, that man has.
‘I’m not doing heroin, I was just made redundant,’ I explained, the words still sticking in my throat. Me. Redundant. Bleurgh. ‘And it wasn’t only me, the whole company went under, so it wasn’t anything I did.’
‘There’s no need to be defensive,’ Mum sniffed. ‘No one said it was your fault.’
Another historical revision: that was exactly what she had said. Loudly, while throwing wine glasses around at a christening.
‘Hang on, if the company has gone under, what is Charlie doing?’
Deep, cleansing breaths.
‘Charlie is fine, Mum,’ I said. She was practically hyperventilating on the end of the line. ‘He’s setting up his own agency. We’re actually talking about doing it together.’
‘Oh, Tess!’ And just like that, her tone of voice altered completely. ‘Your own business? With Charlie? Well, that sounds like a very good idea. Would he be your boss, then?’
‘No, Mum, we’d be partners,’ I said as calmly as possible. Why had I called her again? Was I worried that my inevitable stroke wasn’t coming on quick enough? ‘He would run the client side and I would do the creative.’
‘I’m sure Charlie knows what he’s doing,’ she said, entirely turned around. ‘Mel, have you heard this? Charlie is starting his own advertising agency and giving Tess a job. She’s going to be the head of his creative.’
I heard some approving, disinterested noises in the background and decided it was time to wrap things up while I was, relatively speaking, ahead.
‘OK, that’s really all I called for,’ I started. ‘To say sorry and—’
‘You should both come for Sunday dinner,’ Mum declared, cutting me off mid-escape. ‘You should drive up and tell me all about it.’
‘I can’t Sunday.’ Oh, there was that throbbing in the forehead again. I stopped short on the edge of the pavement to let the number 85 bus go by.
‘And why not?’ she asked.
‘I won’t be here,’ I said, wondering whether or not throwing myself under the number 85 bus might not have been a bit easier than having this conversation.
‘Not here? What does that mean?’
Don’t tell her about Milan, don’t tell her about Milan, don’t tell her about Milan …
‘I’m going to Milan.’
Oh, fuck me.
‘What are you going to Milan for?’ Mum shrieked so loudly that even the nice old lady coming out of Costa could hear her. ‘You haven’t got time to be gallivanting around on holiday when Charlie’s trying to start a business.’
‘I’m actually going for work,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to work out how to phrase this. ‘I’m taking some photos for someone.’
‘What have I told you about this photography nonsense, Tess?’ she said after one too many moments of silence. ‘You don’t let a hobby get in the way of a career. We had this conversation a long time ago.’
In truth, there had never really been much of a conversation. I had loved taking pictures when I was growing up – it was one of the few things I had shared with my dad before he left us to have another go at starting a family – and I’d begged my mum to buy me a camera of my own when I turned eighteen. But whenever she found me poring over photography books, or looking at my pictures, she would pop up with a snide comment or a stark reminder of how hard it was to make it in a creative field, that a proper job was much more secure and the right thing to do. I’d believed her, of course, and put my camera to one side to concentrate on my marketing degree, but the passion had always been there. Maybe it was buried deep under PowerPoint presentations and the desire for a company pension, but it was there.
‘And they’re paying you to take photos, are they?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, hoping for another number 85 bus.
‘With what, magic beans?’
‘Honestly, Mum, it’s a long story.’ At least she couldn’t accuse me of lying on that one. ‘And I really have to go now but I’ll call you later and tell you all about it, yeah?’
As if it was going to be that easy.
‘I’ve got to say, I think you’re making a very big mistake. Charlie’s offering you a job on a plate and you want to fanny off to Italy and take photos. Italy!’
She applied the same emphasis to ‘take photos’ as someone else’s mum might to ‘sacrifice virgins’.
‘But if you want to waste your time on silly adventures, you go ahead and do it,’ she said with a cluck, apparently done with the conversation. ‘Give my love to Charlie.’
As if it was going to be that easy.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_73c825cd-21fa-5820-b21b-a8dfd0b59bff)
‘I’m glad you’ve been keeping busy,’ Paige said, completely ignoring the four half-naked men to her left, after I brought her up to speed on my current predicament. ‘You can’t help but get into trouble, can you?’
‘You know me,’ I replied, staring at the four half-naked men to Paige’s left. ‘I like to keep myself occupied.’
‘What was it like, getting arrested?’ she asked. ‘Did you have to wear an orange onesie? Orange would look terrible on you.’
I nodded, not entirely sure what I was agreeing about while four of the most handsome men I had ever seen, all wearing black eye masks and very little else, hoisted one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen high above their heads. I gazed at the photographer’s big, beautiful Nikon camera with so much envy, I thought that it might fly up into the air and land in my hands. It didn’t.
‘You know, this is incredibly distracting,’ I said, turning fully in my chair to peer over the mezzanine onto the set below. We were in a very fancy studio on a very fancy street in a very fancy area and I was terrified of touching anything.‘How do you ever get any work done?’
‘This, my love, is work,’ Paige said, curving her scarlet lips into a very happy smile. ‘I’m the art director. I’m directing the art.’
I nodded, resting my chin on the balcony and trying not to gawp. Paige worked for Gloss magazine, coming up with the ideas for photoshoots and executing the creative. We had met in Hawaii and, after a few teething problems, she had come to my rescue more than once and, as everyone knows, a friendship forged in the fires of adversity is as strong as one that has weathered the test of time. Or something. One of the models caught me staring and flexed his pecs while flashing me a grin. This was the best reason I had come up with to get into fashion photography so far.
‘What are they doing exactly?’
‘It’s a lingerie shoot for the October issue,’ she explained. ‘Halloween vibe – hence the masks. But given that most women will never look like that girl in just their knickers, I thought it might soften the blow to chuck in something easy on the eye.’
‘Or four somethings,’ I clarified. ‘Are they their actual abs? They’re not drawn on or anything?’
‘You know, sometimes the photographer casts the models,’ she said. ‘And that photographer could be you.’
I gulped.
‘Look, only you know what you really want to do,’ Paige said, slapping me gently on the arm. ‘I really haven’t known you that long and I’ve only seen you as a photographer so I can only comment on that; and my comment is, you’ve got a raw talent not many people have. If it’s something you really want to pursue, now is the time. There won’t be many more opportunities like this. Make the most of it.’
I tried to make myself look away from the orgy of muscles and hair gel below and concentrate, my heart thrumming at the words ‘raw talent’.
‘I know it looks obvious from the outside,’ I said, playing with the hem of my stripy T-shirt. ‘But I really do love advertising. Maybe it doesn’t sound as sexy and exciting as being a photographer, but it is to me. It’s not like I was looking for something to save me from the dark, depressing days of a real job. Starting my own agency was something I used to dream about and let’s be real, it’s a more sensible option than starting out as a photographer at twenty-eight; it’s definitely more secure.’
Paige nodded slowly. ‘Starting out in the business isn’t easy,’ she admitted. ‘I’d hire you though.’
’Thanks,’ I said with a smile.
‘You’d be cheap,’ she added.
‘Thanks,’ I said without a smile.
‘So, only you can answer the question.’ Paige shrugged her shoulders, sending her long curtain of blonde hair cascading down her back. I made a mental note to ask her which conditioner she used before I left. And then to scalp her. ‘Is it going to be photography or advertising?’
‘That’s not really the question though, is it?’ Amy barrelled up the stairs behind me and blew into Paige with a hug so aggressive, anyone would have been forgiven for thinking she hadn’t seen her in ten years. It had been three days. And that was the first time they had ever met. Five seconds later, she dropped Paige in a heap and hurled herself across the sofa to treat me to the same hello.
‘You got my text then?’ I choked when she finally let me go. Amy nodded, her black hair glossy under the studio lights and her polka-dot shorts riding up dangerously high as she leapt up and threw herself towards the mezzanine railings.
‘Fuck me,’ She spun around to face us and pointed down at the shoot below. ‘I’ll take the blond. Or the brunette.’
‘Which one?’ Paige asked.
‘I don’t care,’ Amy replied. ‘This is amazing.’
‘Didn’t you have a job interview today?’ I asked. ‘How did it go?’
‘Shit,’ she said, pinching the tight skin above her exposed belly button. ‘It was for TopShop. They wanted me to work weekends. And they kept asking me whether or not I thought I was reliable and professional.’
‘Well, yeah, I think most Topshops are open on the weekend.’ I didn’t bother to ask if that was what she had worn to the interview because I already knew that it was. But what did I know? Maybe nothing said ‘please give me a job in fashion retail’ more than denim polka-dot shorts and a cropped pink T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘It’s not me, it’s you’. I think you’re reliable and professional.’
It was a lie. I thought she was reliable when it came to turning up on my doorstep with a bag full of Galaxy and three bottles of wine, but I thought she was horribly unreliable and, if possible, even more unprofessional when it came to keeping a job. And mostly I thought that because it was true. In and out of retail jobs, a brief flirtation with teacher training and a puppy love infatuation with the idea of becoming a twenty-first century Avon lady, Amy had a commitment problem when it came to work. And men. And everything else on earth.
However, that didn’t seem like a helpful opinion in that moment so I kept my mouth shut and smiled. Amy gave me a cheerful grin in return and slipped her arm through mine. Ours was a long-term love affair. We’d been friends since before we could talk and some days I wished we could go back to those times. Like now.
‘That is very good to know,’ she said with a big grin. ‘Because I’ve been thinking. You clearly can’t work out whether to shit or wind your watch without help so I’m coming to Milan with you.’
‘No you aren’t,’ I said, stunned.
‘I am,’ she corrected. ‘I’m going to be your assistant. Like that lady down there.’
I peered over the balcony and saw an exhausted, harangued-looking girl rubbing oil into one of the model’s chests.
‘You might actually need an assistant,’ Paige said, shrugging. ‘And god knows, you do need a life coach. Like, all the time.’
‘And that’s what I’m here for.’ Amy spread out her arms with a flourish. ‘I can fetch, carry and make sure you don’t ruin your life, all at the same time.’
‘Amy, I—’
‘I’m a great multitasker,’ she added, nodding at Paige.
I sat and stared at my best friend, clicking the tips of my bitten-down fingernails together.
‘Tess …’ Amy reached across the sofa and took both my hands in hers. ‘It’s going to be awesome.’
Why did her words sound more like a threat than a promise?
‘I’ll have to clear it with my agent,’ I muttered, accepting defeat far too easily. I’d never been able to say no to Amy. It was like denying a pitbull puppy a treat. So little and cute, you couldn’t bear to turn it down and you kind of knew that if you did, it would rip your hand off and take it anyway.
‘Now, are we still pretending to talk about work? Is this yours?’ she asked me, letting go of my hands and reaching over to grab a full-to-the-brim glass of white wine from the coffee table. ‘Amazing, thank you.’
‘What else would we be talking about?’ Paige asked, straightening her pink silk top and grabbing her own wine to get it out of Amy’s reach. It was nice to see the new friends had at least one thing in common: getting hammered in the middle of a work day.
‘Nothing,’ I replied as fast as I could, quietly glad that Amy had taken away my wine. I was not a good drinker. ‘One hundred per cent work talk only.’
‘If you really want to go for the advertising job as much as you say you do, maybe you should go for it.’ Paige casually glanced over at the shirtless men, flickered an eyebrow and shook her head. ‘Photography won’t be the easy option.’
‘Yeah, and maybe you could even go from working six days a week to the full seven?’ Amy replied. ‘I’m sure it would only freak you out to have to spend your birthday with your friends instead of in the office. Or Christmas. Or New Year.’
‘You work over Christmas?’ Paige looked horrified. Then took a drink. Then looked horrified again.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Amy said, waving her hands and her wine around in the air. ‘Tess isn’t normal. Tess is a martyr. She’s happiest when she’s miserable.’
Paige nodded. ‘That explains why she went for Nick.’
‘I’m happiest when I’m busy,’ I said before Amy could pounce on the mention of his name. ‘There’s a difference.’
For the want of a better plan, I picked up an empty glass and poured in a couple of slugs of wine. I was not a big drinker for good reason. More than three drinks and I could not be held responsible for my actions. More than four and I couldn’t remember them anyway. But this definitely felt like a legitimate wine-to-the-rescue moment. Amy took hold of my wrist, raising the glass to my mouth, and I drank obediently, disappointed in my appalling lack of willpower.
‘How do you feel right now?’ Paige asked. ‘If you had to make the decision right now, pick one and never do the other ever again, which would it be?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing I didn’t see Nick and Charlie in my head when she asked that question. ‘I had a plan, you know? I knew where I was going and I knew what I wanted. And now it’s like, boom! decision time. But if I make the wrong decision, what happens then? I’m buggered. Completely buggered and miserable and I die alone with seventeen cats all called Steve. It’s too hard.’
‘Have I missed something? How does picking the wrong job leave you as a crazy cat lady?’ Paige looked swiftly from me to Amy and back again. ‘Were you drinking before you got here?’
‘She’s not drunk,’ Amy said, patting my hand as though I was a deranged nana. ‘She’s just not really thinking about the jobs, are you?’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ Paige rolled her eyes. ‘And we were doing so well at avoiding the subject of cock. OK. Hang on a sec, I just need to set up this last shot and then we can get trashed and talk about this properly.’
Trashed? I looked at my watch. It was barely even three o’clock.
Amy looked at me with a ‘well?’ expression, an already empty wine glass in her hand. I genuinely didn’t know where she put it; the woman was miniscule and drank more than Lindsay Lohan on the average Thursday.
‘What?’ I picked up my glass and gave my wine one more sip. ‘Spit it out.’
‘Have you explained it all to Charlie?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Have you heard from the other one?’
‘No.’
Just then, my text message alert sounded loudly in the bottom of my handbag and every internal organ jumped. Even my spleen wanted to know who was it was from. It was Charlie.
One by one, my organs settled back into their usual positions, consoling each other on their way down. I didn’t know why I was surprised. Nick wasn’t going to call. Nick wasn’t going to call. Nick wasn’t going to call. And no matter how many times I told myself that, it did not feel any better.
‘Speak of the devil,’ I said, my voice unexpectedly scratchy. ‘Charlie wants to know where we are.’
‘Tell him to fuck the fuck off, we’re talking about him, not to him,’ Amy replied. ‘You thought it was Nick, didn’t you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said for the millionth time, tapping out a quick message to Charlie. ‘Everything is fine.’
‘So,’ Paige reappeared at the top of the stairs with her hands on her annoyingly slim hips, ‘can we please get to the bottom of this?’
‘Yes please.’ Amy cocked her head to one side and squinted at me. ‘But we’ve been going too easy on her. Tess, quick-fire decision time: Charlie or Nick?’
‘There is no decision to make.’ I could hear my voice rising along with my blood pressure as I spoke every syllable. ‘You know we’re not talking about him.’
‘The name Nick is verboten,’ Amy explained to Paige. ‘I’m not allowed to mention him, even though she’s been checking her phone to see if he’s called every other second since Monday night.’
‘Well, I haven’t agreed to that,’ Paige replied. ‘So she’s going to have to talk about it, isn’t she?’
‘Can I have another drink, please?’ I asked, holding out my suddenly empty glass.
‘What do you want?’ She reached over to the small fridge beside her. ‘Wine, champagne, beer, Pimm’s in a can – ick – or I think there’s some vodka in the freezer? I bet one of the models is holding, if you want anything else.’
‘Holding what?’ I asked.
‘Bless her, she’s very naïve,’ Amy said, rolling off the settee and crawling into the fridge to grab the other bottle of white. ‘So, Nick or Charlie? If you had to marry one and throw the other off the side of a boat?’
‘Why are we having this conversation when there is no Nick in the equation?’ I asked. I hated myself for it but even saying his name out loud made me want to do a little cry. The sharp ‘k’ sound at the end of his name seemed to hang in the air forever and I felt like I’d been punched. ‘There is only Charlie.’
‘And if this was three weeks ago, you would be jumping up and down and picking out Tiffany engagement rings by now,’ Amy replied. ‘So how come you’re sitting here, drinking Paige’s wine with a face like an arse instead of at Charlie’s, drinking his wine and throwing out all his porn?’
All four of the male models looked up at us with their blank, handsome faces. The female model didn’t even blink.
I blinked. I refilled my glass. I sighed. My daydreams of being in love with Charlie and Charlie being in love with me rarely got as far as domesticity and I felt like a dog that had been chasing a car – I finally had what I’d always wanted and now what was I supposed to do with it?
‘I know I should be stashing my pink toothbrush next to Charlie’s toothbrush and doing a happy dance,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with me.’
‘You’re such a liar.’ Was it just me or did Paige look a little bit annoyed? ‘Just admit it.’
‘I need time to think about things.’ I was not going to say it. ‘Charlie was totally cool about it.’
‘Good for Charlie,’ she replied. ‘I don’t want to be biased or anything, but I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t see any competition. I know Nick is hot and everything but Tess, he’s such a twat.’
‘I know,’ I nodded. There was that sick feeling again. Why did I want to defend him? She was right, after all.
‘And Charlie fucked up, he did, but he’s only a man,’ she went on. ‘Vanessa is hot and we’ve only got to look at Angelina Jolie to know that men have no control over themselves when it comes to hot women. Brad cheated on Jen because of a hot woman. On Jen, Tess, Rachel from Friends. Do you see what I’m saying?’
‘Sort of …’ I frowned.
‘You weren’t together when it happened, you know. You can’t hold this against him forever.’
‘I bet I could,’ Amy said. ‘Charlie’s not good enough for you.’
‘And what’s not good enough?’ I asked, coming over all spikey and defensive on Charlie’s behalf. I was giving myself emotional whiplash. ‘The fact that he’s sweet and caring and funny? That he’s always been there for you and me whenever we’ve really needed him? That he comes home with me so I don’t have to deal with my mum on my own? Shit, the fact that he’s met my mum and still wants to be with me should be reason enough to put a bloody ring on it.’
‘Fine, I’m convinced,’ she replied. ‘After ten years of you giving him the puppy dog eyes, Charlie Wilder is the world’s most amazing man, apart from when he’s being a thoughtless shithead, and has finally woken up and realized that you are the absolute dog’s bollocks and that he wants to make an honest woman out of you, conveniently at the exact time you’re looking elsewhere. He wants what he suddenly might not be able to have. Awesome.’
‘It’s not like that,’ I said, wondering whether or not it might not be a little bit like that.
But Amy wasn’t finished. ‘And regardless of how you feel about Charlie and regardless of how many phone calls or emails you have not received, you cannot sit there and tell me you don’t have feelings for Nick which, at the very least, says something about your feelings for Charlie.’
It was altogether too close to home.
‘What have I told you about using the “N” word?’ I pulled my feet up underneath me, burrowing into the settee.
‘And you can’t keep referring to him as “the N word”,’ she said. ‘People really aren’t going to be OK with that.’
‘What’s happening with him anyway? You called him and he hasn’t called you back?’ Paige was trying to look supportive but I knew it was a strain. After all, she had history with Nick and much more of a history than I did, even if it was a history of rejection.
‘Pretty much.’ I shook my head. ‘But what’s the point anyway? It was a holiday fling. He didn’t even know my real name, for God’s sake. This is real life: Charlie and the agency and chicken cook-in sauces. Maybe that doesn’t seem as glamorous and exciting to everyone as Milan and photoshoots, but it’s exciting to me. And the Charlie thing … It’s throwing me because I’ve wanted this for so long and now maybe I have it. How would that not be confusing? To anyone?’
‘That’s how I felt when I got my first Chanel 2.55 bag,’ Paige nodded with genuine sympathy this time. ‘It was like “can I actually take this out? Can I actually use this?” It’s hard.’
‘You’re both fucking mental.’ Amy was not big on Chanel bags or metaphors. ‘And Tess, I know how long you’ve been in love with that cockwomble, but you’re not the kind of girl who only wants what she can’t have. I should know, because I am. So if you’re not champing at the bit to shack up with Mr Wonderful, there’s a good reason for it and I don’t believe it’s just nerves. I think you’ve got real feelings for Nick and I don’t think you can ignore that.’
‘How can I have real feelings for him?’ I asked, burning up. ‘I only knew him for a week. And he didn’t really know me at all.’
It was a question I’d been asking myself a lot, only Amy and Paige didn’t realize it was rhetorical. I did have feelings for him – big, scary feelings that I didn’t understand and, in all honesty, did not want to. I’d always been so safe and secure in my feelings for Charlie but every time I thought about Nick, my stomach clenched and my hands made tiny fists and I wanted to hit something. Preferably him. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up with nothing but my über-crush on Charlie back the way it was. Everything would be so much simpler.
‘To be fair, you did lie to the man about your entire existence while merrily shagging him senseless,’ Amy said. ‘Even after he bared his soul to you. I might take a few days to call you back for a chat, to be fair.’
‘He bared his soul?’ Paige looked less than impressed. ‘You mean, he pulled out some of his cheesy old lines?’
‘There were cheesy lines in the beginning,’ I admitted, not wanting to come to his defence but entirely incapable of stopping myself, ‘but there was a certain degree of soul-baring after a bit. Maybe not baring, maybe it was more like soul-flashing.’
‘What a knob,’ she breathed, taking a big deep drink of her wine. ‘Him, not you.’
‘It’s starting to feel like it never happened.’ I flipped to the sent messages in my phone and saw his name over and over. I wondered what would give out first, his refusal to reply or my dignity. ‘Every morning when I wake up, it feels more and more like I was never in Hawaii, like he never existed.’
‘Don’t upset yourself over it,’ Paige said, shifting in her seat. ‘I’m sure it was all bullshit. I don’t know if that man is capable of anything other than trying to get into a woman’s pants.’
Paige had known Nick a lot longer than I had and I was fully aware that she had tried very hard to get into his pants, and not the other way around. And that didn’t make this conversation awkward at all.
‘Bottom line is,’ Amy shrugged and emptied her second glass of wine, ‘something is stopping you from moving on with Charlie. Something’s got you stuck. That something is Nick.’
‘Paige, can you come and check these shots?’ the photographer bellowed from the set below. With a very grumpy look on her face, Paige dutifully stood up and marched down the stairs.
‘Shout if the models need oiling. The male models,’ Amy yelled as she went before turning her attention back to me. ‘I know I haven’t been entirely Team Charlie when it comes to you two being together-together but if you tell me this is what you really, really want, I will shut my mouth, buy you a shit housewarming present and never say the “N” word again. But you have to be entirely honest before you get yourself into something you might regret.’
‘You really have got to stop calling him that,’ I sighed.
There it was again. What did I want? ‘I don’t want to ruin everything because of a holiday romance hangover.
‘Life isn’t a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, Amy,’ I said. ‘If I cock this up, I can’t just go back to the end of the last chapter and try something else.’
‘Oh, Tess,’ She smiled and hugged me, squeezing my shoulders tightly. ‘That’s exactly what life is: nothing is set in stone, nothing has already been decided. That’s where you’ve been going wrong all these years.’
‘Am I interrupting something beautiful?’ Charlie’s voice broke through our Kodak moment, making Amy jump and spill my wine before I could drink it. Which was probably best. ‘Don’t let me stop you, I always knew there was something going on with you two.’
‘Didn’t I tell you not to tell him where we were?’ Amy jumped to her feet, kissed him on the cheek and bounced off downstairs to the set. ‘Just because she’d rather be in bed with me than you. No need to be jealous, Wilder.’
‘Amy,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Always a pleasure.’
He clambered onto the settee, all arms and legs and coppery curls, looking like a sexy hipster Bambi man.
‘I see she’s taking this well?’ he said, pulling the strap of his man-bag over his head and setting it carefully on the cushion between us. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ I nodded with too much enthusiasm, not sure what to do. Normally we’d have hugged by now or I’d have taken the piss out of him for his jeans being too skinny or unfastened the second button of his T-shirt because one wasn’t enough and three would be too many. Instead, I put my wine glass down and sat on my hands. ‘You had a busy day?’
‘I played football manager for about three hours and then I remembered outside existed so I went out and got you this.’ He pulled a blue carrier bag out of his messenger bag and handed it to me with a flourish. ‘Sorry it’s not wrapped.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. I bloody loved presents. Surprises not so much, but presents? Yes, please.
‘Open it,’ he said, his smile almost bigger than mine. ‘I hope it’s right.’
Inside the bag was a box and inside that box, was a camera.
‘Oh, Charlie, you didn’t!’ I tore away the packaging as carefully as I could and pulled out a brand-new Canon camera. It was almost identical to my old one, lighter and shinier and with fewer bumps and bruises on the body, but the buttons were all in the same places and she fell into my hands as though I’d known her forever. ‘You can’t have!’
He inched over on the sofa and squeezed my knee, his huge hand covering half my thigh in the process. ‘I can and I did,’ he said in a low voice that made every inch of my skin prickle. ‘And you’re going to go to Milan and take amazing photos of Mr – I forget his first name – Bennett and his clothes and whatever else you want to take amazing photos of and you’re going to be amazing at it.’
‘But the pitch?’ I looked up at him and then at my camera, my beautiful camera; beautiful, beautiful Charlie. ‘It’s only a week away.’
‘Yes it is,’ he said as I reached out to unfasten his second button; I couldn’t look at it for a moment longer. Charlie covered my hand with his and I felt a warmth wash over my entire body. ‘But I don’t want to wake up next to you every morning, not knowing whether or not you’re wondering “what if?” because I know you’d never say anything. So I’m not giving you the chance to regret this. OK?’
Just when you thought you knew everything about someone, they had to go one better.
‘This is amazing,’ I said, cradling the camera in my lap and leaning over to give Charlie the biggest hug I could muster. ‘You’re amazing.’
‘I’m all right,’ he replied. ‘And let’s be honest, I’m just trying to warm you up for later.’
I looked away so he wouldn’t see me blush. We’d always flirted with each other but now I knew I was going to have to follow through, I couldn’t seem to keep the colour out of my cheeks.
‘I talked to my mate at Perito’s this morning,’ he said, squeezing my knee. ‘He’s going over to Portugal with his team on Monday and he asked if we wanted to go along, meet the founders of the company and all that.’
‘But Milan?’ I held my camera tightly. ‘And you hate flying?’
‘I told him you were already otherwise engaged,’ he said, fiddling with his newly opened button. ‘But I said I’d go. Double scotch and some positive thinking and I’ll be OK. It’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s an amazing sign,’ I agreed, a twinge of jealousy in my chest that I wouldn’t get to go along. Not that I didn’t have an adventure of my own to worry about. ‘I’m really excited.’
Admittedly, I didn’t sound that excited but I was somewhat distracted by what was happening below us in the studio.
‘Is there any point in asking what’s going on down there?’ Charlie asked, nodding at the set downstairs.
Amy had done a fine job of making herself useful. I watched as she merrily rubbed moisturizer into the chest of one of the male models, bouncing from foot to foot, while Paige was on all fours on the bed, demonstrating a particularly uncomfortable-looking pose for the female model, who still looked bored. Gorgeous, but bored.
‘There is not,’ I replied, turning my back on it all and looking back down at my lovely camera again. ‘This really is amazing, you know.’
‘Doesn’t really feel like the right time to get all heavy …’ He gestured over to where Amy was now rubbing lotion into the chests of two men at once with her eyes closed. ‘But I wanted you to know I’m serious about this. And that I’m going to do whatever I can do to make you happy. It’s all I can think about, that we should be together. You’re what I care about.’
I still couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. ‘More than Arsenal?’ I asked, doubtful.
‘Let’s not go completely crazy.’ He ran his hand through his already messy hair and grinned. It was so fucking adorable, my heart almost exploded. ‘But getting there, at the very least. So, can we go?’
‘Go?’
‘Home?’ he said, taking the camera out of my hands and slipping it back inside the box. I fought the urge to slap his hands away – given that he had paid for it in the first place I supposed he was allowed to touch it. ‘I’ve cleared out two entire drawers. For you.’
Oh yeah, he’d asked me to move in. And while I hadn’t said no, I hadn’t said yes, either. In fact, if I recalled correctly, I’d said I needed time to think. I rested my hand on the camera box and breathed out slowly, confused by the thought that it might not be a lovely, thoughtful gift but a very expensive pat on the head. Had he just assumed I was going to move in? That I was going to say yes to joining the agency?
‘I said I’d stay with Amy tonight,’ I said. ‘She had a job interview today and it didn’t go very well and she’s stressing out so …’
‘She doesn’t look that stressed,’ Charlie said, disappointment all over his face. ‘Are you sure? I was going to cook for you.’
‘Now I’m definitely sure!’ I took the camera, safely back in its plastic bag, and gripped the handles tightly. My precious camera. My precious, emotionally loaded, symbolic camera. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken. I know I can’t cook for shit,’ he said with a shrug. ‘To be honest, I was hoping you’d take over halfway through anyway.’
‘Because I’m such a domestic goddess?’ I stood when he stood, leaning into a kiss that still felt strange. Lovely, but strange. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Will you though?’ Charlie pulled his Oyster card out of his bag and stuck it in his back pocket. ‘Because I’ve heard that one before.’
‘Odds are good,’ I confirmed. ‘I’d say better than fifty per cent.’
‘OK. Tess?’ He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked back up at me, all pale skin and big eyes and wide, happy mouth.
‘Charlie?’ I sat back down on the settee, happily stroking my camera. I was probably overreacting. He wasn’t trying to force me into a decision I wasn’t ready to make. That wasn’t Charlie at all. He wouldn’t do something like that.
‘I love you.’
My eyebrows shot up so high I assumed they were forever lost in orbit around the earth.
It was hardly the first time the ‘L’ word had left Charlie’s lips and found my ears but this was different. This wasn’t the same as when I brought him an Egg McMuffin because he had a hangover or called him an Addison Lee because he was too lazy to get the night bus from mine. This was a legitimate ‘I Love You’. This was my first ever ‘I Love You’. I had no idea what to do.
‘OK,’ I replied, nodding and trying not to be sick. ‘That’s brilliant.’
Charlie scratched his head and I knew he was waiting for me to say something else but my mind was completely blank. Charlie Wilder had told me he loved me and I had no words. None of them.
‘OK,’ I said again.
And then it was happening again. I felt myself leaving my body and floating up into the corner of the room, watching as I stared blankly at the first man to tell me he loved me.
This is where you’re meant to say ‘I love you too,’ my brain whispered.
And I knew that. I’d been waiting for this moment forever. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I smiled brightly and gave him a double thumbs up.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he echoed, staring at me from the top of the stairs. ‘Brilliant.’
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b0cfd1b2-1e12-5611-9d3f-1518e106ab56)
‘I cannot believe you gave him a thumbs up!’
Out of everything I’d ever done, nothing had tickled Amy quite like this.
‘Double thumbs up,’ I corrected. ‘It was a double thumbs up.’
‘I’d take that if it were me,’ she said, heaving her first enormous suitcase off the luggage carousel at Malpensa airport, barely blinking at the fact it weighed almost as much as she did. Agent Veronica had assented to my bringing her to Milan as my assistant with only four ‘fuck you’s’ and one use of the ‘c’ word. It was as though she was starting to like me. ‘Charlie Wilder finally drops the L bomb and you give him the double thumbs up and say thank you. Thank you!’
‘I didn’t say “thank you”,’ I said, looking for my own sad little bag. A hasty patch-up job with duct tape meant it was very, very recognisable. ‘I said, “brilliant” and I haven’t heard from him since. Now, can we agree to never speak of it again?’
‘What did you expect him to do?’ she asked as she pulled up the suitcase handle and leaned forward, using it as a chin rest. ‘Propose? “Oh, I just told a girl I love her and she said ‘Brilliant’ so I should totes put a ring on it?”’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘And you gave him a double thumbs up,’ Amy stretched her arms over her head and smiled. ‘Good job on getting the camera out of him first.’ The camera. He gave me a camera, told me loved me and I gave him the thumbs up. What a knobhead. ‘You can’t really be surprised that he’s pissed off, can you?’
I shrugged, eyeing my case as it rattled along the conveyor belt towards me. Half the size and a third the weight of Amy’s case; I couldn’t even begin to work out what she had brought with her.
‘No,’ I protested, grabbing my case and wrenching my still-sore shoulder as I pulled it from the belt. ‘Of course not. But I didn’t think he’d be so flippant about the whole thing.’
‘He isn’t being flippant.’ She pushed her hair out of her face and sighed. ‘He’s being hurt. This is what hurt looks like. Isn’t it obvious?’
Honestly, my hurting Charlie was an entirely new concept. I’d spent so long nursing my unrequited crush that the thought that I could actually damage his feelings was a bit of a mind-blower. But she was right.
We’d spoken on Saturday night when I called, determined to make things right between us before I left for Italy. Unlike a certain other man I would not name, Charlie answered his phone when I called it. But similarly to Mr Unmentionable, he wasn’t best pleased with me. I was met with a variety of one-word responses to my every question, and when I finally suggested we get together for dinner as I was leaving for Milan in the morning, he declined, citing prior plans for his mate’s birthday. Since I had been his social secretary forever, I knew it really was Robbo’s birthday, but I also knew when Charlie was pissed off. And above all else, I knew a man would never put the thirty-second birthday of a passing acquaintance above the opportunity for a shag. Not that I was planning to shag him, but clearly my track record of declining a sleepover wasn’t fantastic in these situations. After blowing me off, he switched to the pitch, telling me he was leaving for Portugal on Monday morning and that I should email him my stuff for the pitch so he could work everything up for Friday, then hung up. No ‘have fun’, no mention of us living together, no mention of his declaration of love, no mention of my appalling response to said declaration. He was all business.
As was quite obvious to everyone alive, I was not an expert in men but I was an expert in Charlie. He was clearly furious. The only time he’d been this cold to me in the last decade was when I accidentally washed a pair of his jeans that had tickets to the FA Cup final in the back pocket. That resulted in almost a week of stony silence but he soon came round when he needed help picking a birthday present for his then girlfriend. Suffering the indignity of trying on lingerie that was going to be worn by a woman who was sleeping with the man I believed was the only possible father to my future children felt like more than enough punishment for denying Charlie the opportunity to see Arsenal lose on penalties in extra time.
But knowing he was perfectly justified in his huff didn’t help me. It still felt overwhelming – starting a business, moving in together, the first ‘I Love You’ and a chicken cook-in sauce? Who did he think I was, Beyoncé? I was an organized person who liked a plan, and in my head I had always imagined these things happening in a timely, organized fashion. I’d waited ten years – why did they all have to appear at once?
‘This is good timing,’ I said, wiping away an errant tear that had crept out of nowhere before Amy saw. Stupid eyes. ‘This slows things down. We’ll both be so busy this week, we won’t have time to stew on stuff. And when I get back, it’ll all be OK.’
‘Totally healthy reaction,’ Amy said, shoving her passport in the back pocket of her hot-pink jeans. ‘You’re so on top of this.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ I replied, pulling her passport out of her back pocket without her even noticing and placing it safely into my travel wallet with my passport. ‘I can make my own decisions.’
My suitcase was light to the point of embarrassment, compared to Amy’s gargantuan twosome. All I had packed were comfy jeans, a few T-shirts and shirts and a couple of jumpers in case it got cold at night, even though I had been soundly assured by Agent Veronica that Milan in July would be ‘fucking roasting red hot like the seventh circle of hell’ and that she would rather hang herself by her own ovaries than ‘spend a second in that shithole’. It wasn’t all boring though; I had been to M&S and bought two new packs of pants especially for the trip. It hardly mattered what I wore on my nether regions, since Amy was the only person who was likely to see them and, given my natural tendency to be a never-nude, that tended to be unplanned and against my will anyway.
‘So,’ Amy waved at a driver holding a board showing my name and waited for me to find my feet, ‘what would you do if you turned around and Charlie was stood on one side of the airport and Nick was on the other?’
‘Turn back around and keep walking?’ I said, still breathless. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, they’re not are they?’ I hardly dared move.
‘Well, Charlie isn’t,’ she shrugged. ‘And since you apparently managed to spend a week in playing photographer without taking a single bloody shot of Mr Miller, I don’t know what he looks like, do I?’
‘If you’re going to tell me you haven’t googled him,’ I nodded at the driver as we trotted towards him, overly excited to see my own name badly written in wonky black marker, ‘I’m going to call you a liar.’
‘Do you have any idea how many Nick Millers there are in the world?’ Amy said. ‘Not including a character in a very popular sitcom?’
‘A few?’
Secretly, I was pleased that she’d had a hard time finding him. If Amy had got so much as a peek at Nick, we wouldn’t be in Milan right now. We’d be wherever in the world he might be so she could hunt him down and force us down the aisle with a shotgun.
‘You’re a pain in my arse, Brookes,’ she muttered. ‘I never tell you a story without visual aids.’
‘Yeah, and if you could stop texting me pictures of your one-night stands while they’re sleeping, that would be brilliant,’ I replied.
With a big wide smile, Amy turned and gave me a double thumbs up.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s brilliant.’
‘Remind me again why I brought you with me?’ I asked my alleged best friend, fighting the urge to punch her in the face.
‘Because you love me,’ she said, weaving her arm through mine, as our driver piled our bags onto a trolley. ‘And you couldn’t possibly survive another adventure without me.’
‘Totally should have brought Paige,’ I mumbled to myself as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport into a heat that almost made me crumble to my denim-clad knees. So this was the seventh circle of ovary-hanging hell Veronica had talked about.
‘Warm out,’ Amy said, sliding on her sunglasses. ‘This is going to be fun.’
‘It’s going to be something,’ I replied, looking for my own sunglasses in my handbag and having a sudden flashback to leaving them on top of Amy’s dresser in the rush to get her out and into the taxi that had been waiting for us for twenty minutes. ‘It’s definitely going to be something.’
‘Oh my God!’
Amy hadn’t stopped talking since customs so it was a testament to just how impressive Bertie Bennett’s Italian home was that it had managed to shut her up so successfully. Even when I had explained that the clouds that looked so much like mountains were, in fact, mountains, she hadn’t stopped for breath so the look of dazed amazement that had come over her now was wonderful to behold for many reasons. From a best-friend perspective, I was happy to see her look so happy. From a human-being perspective, I could have cried with joy at the first moment of silence in over an hour.
As the car pulled off the road and a pair of huge iron gates swung open to allow us inside, I pressed my fingertips against the window of the car. When I’d arrived at Bertie Bennett’s house in Hawaii, I thought I had accidentally wandered into heaven. The wonderful modernist architecture, the sea, the sand, the way the air smelled so sweet and welcoming. But this was something else; this was like something I had only seen in fairytales. One moment we were on a perfectly normal-looking city street while Amy regaled the driver with tales of her latest urinary tract infection and the next we were sitting in complete silence and rolling into the courtyard of the most beautiful, stately building I had ever seen.
When I was sixteen, my entire class had gone on a school trip to London and I distinctly remembered being more than a little bit disappointed by Buckingham Palace. Not that it wasn’t impressive; but my imagination had been ruined by too many Disney movies, so it had too many corners and not enough turrets for my liking. But this place? Al’s Milan pied-à-terre made Buck House look like a two-up, two-down council house.
It wasn’t that it was enormous or sprawling or set in acres of artfully landscaped grounds, it was just impossibly beautiful. The house was elegant and simple with so many big, sparkling windows I couldn’t even count them all. Everything was symmetrical, which brought out the ecstatic OCD in me and I kept looking up to the top floor, expecting to see a princess combing out her hair on one of the balconies. Passing through the gate, the car came to a halt in the courtyard, a stone fountain bubbling away in the centre, more archways leading off to small but perfectly formed manicured lawns, decorated with trees and plants. Gorgeous to look at, but just like his super-modern home in Hawaii, entirely inviting. Nothing about this storybook palace said ‘do not touch’; it was far more ‘feel free to take off your shoes and run around barefoot and would you like a bottle of wine and a straw while you’re doing that?’
A white-glove-wearing footman opened the passenger door and I climbed out of the car, eyes still skyward, taking in each of the three levels of Al’s second home. Unlike Hawaii, there was endless activity behind each of the arched windows. I could see people rushing around from one room to the next, curtains pulled back and windows thrown open. Clearly, someone was in a rush to get ready for something.
‘Tess?’ Amy peered at me over the top of the car, wavering on her tiptoes. ‘Are we in the right place?’
‘I don’t know about you,’ I replied, watching the huge wooden double door creak open to reveal a familiar face. ‘But I’m pretty bloody sure that I am.’
‘My darling!’ A short, handsome man with coffee-coloured skin and impeccably parted jet-black hair rushed across the courtyard, barrelling past assorted staff members who were trying to go about their business, and scooped me up in an impressive hug. Mostly impressive because I was at least five inches taller than him. ‘Aloha!’
‘Kekipi!’ I hoped he wouldn’t find the fact I still had my feet on the ground as awkward as I did. ‘Aloha.’
Nestling his head into my boobs, he looked up at me and grinned. Apparently he did not find it awkward at all. ‘Now are we Tess or Vanessa today?’
‘Tess,’ I said quickly. ‘Today, tomorrow and until the end of the world.’
‘That could be tomorrow if things don’t calm down in there.’ He gestured back towards the house before turning his attention to Amy.
My bestie was vibrating with barely restrained giddiness and not for the first time since I’d invited her along on this trip, I wondered whether introducing the two of them was, in fact, an incredibly bad idea.
‘You must be Amy the Assistant.’ He decided to forego the formalities of introductions and planted two big kisses on Amy’s cheeks. ‘I like you already, you make me look tall.’
The first time I met Kekipi, it had been in an entirely official capacity and even though the pretence of professionalism fell by the wayside relatively quickly, something was definitely different this time. Gone was the black uniform he had sported as the estate manager of Bertie Bennett’s Hawaiian hideout, and in its place was a bright aqua-blue trousers and hot-pink shirt combo. In fact, Kekipi’s shirt coordinated with Amy’s jeans so well, you would have been forgiven for thinking they had planned their outfits together. Which I imagined would be happening daily from tomorrow morning.
‘We’re so glad you decided to come,’ Kekipi said, waving for two men in light grey trousers and white shirts, apparently the official ensembles of the Milanese Bennett household, to whisk our suitcases out of sight. ‘It’s been a very dramatic week. Senior and Junior have not been getting along at all and Senior is having what can only be described as one of his “artistic” moments.’
‘Is that good?’ I asked, following him into the entranceway of the house. Kekipi pursed his lips and shook his head.
I’d met Al’s son, Artie, in Hawaii and he was a curious man to say the least. There was a lot of tension between them, and while I loved Al with a fierce and fiery passion reserved for the very best grandpa substitutes the world had to offer, clearly something was up between father and son. Plus, Artie had a handlebar moustache, and given that he did not work at a circus, that made me immediately suspicious.
‘While I am pleased to see him so active after such a long time,’ he replied with an arched eyebrow, ‘he needs to calm down a little. He isn’t as young as he used to be and Mr Bennett the younger isn’t nearly as tolerant of his father’s whims as we might all like.’
‘Where is Al?’ I asked, trying not to trip over my feet as I tiptoed across the beautiful, intricately tiled floors, my shoulders unrolling as the air conditioning washed over me. ‘Is he here?’
‘We arrived yesterday,’ Kekipi confirmed. ‘He’s in his room, working, working, working. He’ll be at dinner later.’
When I finally forced my eyes off the floor, I saw that there were flowers everywhere. Every surface held vases upon vases of beautiful, freshly cut blooms, all of them in shades of white and peach.
‘Are these for me?’ Amy asked, plucking a white rose from a vase and placing it behind her ear. Reaching out to grab the banister of an elaborate, twisting staircase, I fought off a flashback. Nick, a single flower, the waterfall … ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t,’ Kekipi said with unmistakable disdain. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I know the value of a good floral arrangement but this is all Domenico’s doing.’
‘Domenico?’ I asked.
‘Miss Brookes.’
A tall, slender man descended the staircase in the requisite grey trousers, a matching jacket and added slim black tie. How he was wearing a suit and tie in this weather was beyond me – I was sweating so much I looked as though I had entered a wet T-shirt competition. But while he looked every inch the perfect butler, his stiff demeanour felt at odds with the make-yourself-at-home atmosphere of Al’s palazzo.
‘Domenico,’ Kekipi said with a flourish. ‘The estate manager here in Milan.’
‘He’s the Italian you?’ I asked, wiping my hand on the back of my jeans and achieving nothing more than making a sticky situation stickier.
‘Please,’ Kekipi sniffed. ‘I’ve never been so offended.’
‘Miss Brookes.’ The tall man greeted me with three air kisses, very carefully avoiding touching any part of my actual being. Not that I blamed him but it did make things feel ever so slightly awkward. ‘I am Domenico, Mr Bennett’s number two here at the Palazzo Della Stelline; we are so pleased that you have arrived.’
He turned to Amy and gave her a small bow, no kisses.
‘And you are Miss Brooke’s assistant?’
She looked at me, looked back at him and shrugged. ‘I suppose I am.’
Uh-oh. Clearly not impressed.
‘Excellent. I have rooms prepared for both of you in Mr Bennett’s most beautiful guest apartments. I would be very happy to show them to you if you would be so kind as to follow me.’ Domenico gestured up the stairs with an elaborate flourish of his arm and a far-too-wide smile. I’d seen waxworks show more authenticity.
‘I’ll take the ladies to their rooms,’ Kekipi said, knocking Domenico’s hand to his side and sweeping his hair from his forehead. ‘What time is dinner?’
‘Mr Bennett has suggested the ladies dine with him in the grand salon at seven,’ he replied, bowing his head graciously. ‘If you require anything at all before that time, please do let me know. Pressing 1 on the phone in your room will connect you directly to housekeeping and they will be happy to help you with whatever you might need.’
Kekipi stood on the first step of the staircase behind his Italian counterpart and clutched the wooden banister, eyes narrowed, knuckles white. He was seething.
‘And we will dine downstairs.’ Domenico turned to give Kekipi the full weight of his stare. Even though he was standing on the stairs, Kekipi was still the shorter of the two but height difference wasn’t going to be enough to win this battle. ‘Afterwards.’
‘OK, Mr Downton,’ he said, hand on hip. ‘Maybe Artie likes to keep things upstairs downstairs but I’ll be eating with Mr Bennett and the ladies in the dining room at seven. And I’m lactose intolerant, so keep that in mind while you’re preparing your feast. Ladies.’ He snapped his fingers and pointed up the stairs. ‘Follow me.’
‘Tess, he’s fabulous,’ Amy whispered. ‘He’s the most best gay man I’ve ever met. And I’ve met all the gay men, fabulous or otherwise.’
‘I think he might actually be the best man, gay or otherwise,’ I replied. ‘Just wait until you get him to do karaoke. He’s a God.’
‘Thank you so much, Domenico,’ I said, repeatedly dipping in mini bows as we scooted around him and up the stairs after Kekipi. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. But thank you. And for dinner. Thanks.’
‘Stop thanking him,’ Kekipi yelled without looking back. ‘It’s his job.’
‘Thank you,’ I mouthed.
‘Prego,’ Domenico said with a small smile. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘So what was that all about?’ Amy asked as she and Kekipi bounced up a second staircase and along the hallway on the third floor. ‘You two don’t get on, I take it?’
‘I’ve been with Al for a very long time,’ Kekipi explained, linking arms with Amy as they trotted on in front of me. I dawdled behind, running my fingertips along the heavy patterned silk that lined the walls.
‘When the Bennetts purchased this palazzo in the late seventies, it was Jane, Mrs Bennett’s, passion project. She renovated the entire place, designed the gardens, the colour schemes. She spent years pulling together the furniture …’ His voice grew soft with recollection as we turned a corner into an identical hallway. It was like being lost in a beautiful hall of mirrors.
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Lindsey Kelk
A new bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkBeing arrested in your own bedroom is never a good start to the day. Tess Brookes really needs to sort out her back-stabbing flatmate – and her life.Should she gamble all on the new photography job she’s landed, or snap up the offer from long-time crush and best friend Charlie to start up on their own – in more ways than one? There’s just one small thing she hasn’t mentioned. Or rather, one tall thing. He’s handsome, infuriating and called Nick…For the first time, Tess has to choose between the life she always dreamed of and a future she never imagined possible. From London to Milan, with high fashion and low behaviour thrown in, she’s going to have to make up her mind what a girl really wants…
Copyright (#ulink_efe361cb-6140-5c86-956d-c9149c0c8920)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublisher 2014
Cover illustration © Bree Leman 2014
Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007501533
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007501557
Version: 2018-09-24
Praise for About A Girl: (#ulink_19d71974-db57-5ec0-802b-7dc8f8217e33)
‘Fans of the I Heart series will instantly fall for this gorgeously funny and romantic read’
Closer
‘Perfect for your summer holiday!’
Bella
‘Kelk has a hilarious turn of phrase and a sparkling writing style …’
Daily Express
Dedication (#ulink_a6245f08-9018-5600-bb1b-07ec04b50186)
For Audrey Hardware.We never did come running to you when we’d broken both our legs but we did turn up with just about every other ailment on earth and you were always there. If I can find half the love, strength and resilience you had, I’ll be OK.
Contents
Title Page (#u9e3dc78a-ca54-5042-8a4e-496c472bd6e7)
Copyright (#u147900d0-ecf4-54dd-a5be-6483899163f9)
Praise (#ue9fb92ee-f787-5910-9afd-458341a6f613)
Dedication (#ud4d66970-1c82-5270-b7ef-7f968272e9d6)
Prologue (#u8467b599-0707-5942-9e23-39f082a659df)
Chapter One (#uf56afd7a-94bc-59eb-8977-5aae9c4ba446)
Chapter Two (#u585313d3-208c-5839-bdcf-ace73cedeaba)
Chapter Three (#ufbfa3497-90cb-537b-a0d6-20e45f76a11c)
Chapter Four (#ue31bb009-cfe2-5e03-9693-67b9cfa65f4b)
Chapter Five (#u3dd8b16a-1cfa-5a59-85dc-4c661b8c7e81)
Chapter Six (#u35246cff-9edd-5b96-a03b-5efbd42cff47)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading – A Girl’s Best Friend (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Q&A with Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_0dc63fcc-06b2-5259-ba61-5266a01cd43d)
On the one hand, you might have said my day wasn’t going terribly well.
But on the other, I had told Amy that I wanted to make big changes in my life and there weren’t many lifestyle changes more significant than swapping a luxury Italian palazzo for a prison cell.
And my second prison cell in two weeks, at that. Clearly I was going for some sort of record. It was one thing to say you wanted to start over, it was another thing to start over as someone on the ‘no fly’ list because you were considered an international flight risk. I was almost certain the generally accepted way of society was to go the other way.
I took a deep breath, blew it out hard and examined my bitten-down fingernails while trying to remain calm and wait for someone to appear and make this entire mess go away. Ideally someone I knew, accompanied by someone with a working knowledge of the Italian legal system, but at this point, as long as they didn’t have a gun, a pair of handcuffs or a pointy stick, I’d be happy. And if they did have a gun, a pair of handcuffs or a pointy stick, but also came bearing biscuits, I’d probably be just as happy. Did everyone get this hungry in prison? Had I missed dinnertime?
‘This is what happens when you’re too busy working to watch telly, like normal people,’ I admonished myself. ‘If I’d watched Bad Girls or Cell Block H like Amy, instead of doing my homework, I would know these things.’
I traced a shallow line in the cement floor with the bare big toe on my good foot and wondered how it got there in the first place. I’d been thoroughly searched on my way in and anything that might have hacked a seven-inch gash in a concrete floor had been removed from my person. Hairgrips, the belt from my dress, even my bra. I had nothing left on me but my knickers and my beautiful bright pink dress. At least, most of it was still bright pink – there was quite a lot of muck and a few well-placed splotches of blood around the hem. But still, I had told Kekipi not to give me a dress with a train, so this was entirely his fault. Well, apart from all the bits that were my fault. Which was most of them.
Making a noise that sounded a little bit like a frustrated walrus, I rolled myself onto my side, the rough concrete of the bench scratching against my skin. At least they had been consistent in their decorating, I thought. Very clear message: minimalist, spare, modern. And it really only smelled very faintly of piss. However, my hair had not fared well in the evening’s adventures and since no one in the police station had considered serum a basic human right, it was an unmanageable, knotted mess. I attempted to run my fingers through the dark copper curls, working them out slowly. If nothing else, it would pass the time until my fairy godlawyer appeared and made everything OK. I lasted about seventy-four seconds before I got bored and gave up. Plus, I really was hungry.
‘Excuse me,’ I called in a weak but terribly polite voice. ‘Excuse me? Is anyone there?’
Everything had been such a loud, Italiano, excitable mess on my way in that I couldn’t quite recall exactly what had happened. I remembered being pulled out of the car by the overenthusiastic police officer but with my hands cuffed behind my back and my hair flouncing around in my eyes, I had focused all my energy on not falling over, given that I was basically lame on one foot and wearing a full-length ballgown. After that there had been some shouting and some crying, both by me, then a woman police officer had come over, tutted a lot, then taken away my aforementioned stabbier items. At some point, a phone had been thrust into my hands but the only numbers I knew by heart were Amy’s and Charlie’s and there was no way on God’s green earth that Charlie was going to speak to me – which only left me with one option. And of course, Amy’s number went straight to voicemail. The next thing I knew, I was shoved back here with an antiseptic wipe for my foot and two plasters. Apparently you couldn’t kill yourself with two plasters.
I could hear the distant sounds of a busy police station beyond the reinforced walls, lots of doors slamming and distant sirens, but apparently no one could hear me. Or if they did, they didn’t care.
I was starting to lose my English temper.
‘Is anybody even there?’ I shouted from my concrete block. ‘Helloooo?’
Of course. When you wanted some privacy, there was an entire wedding’s worth of people around to witness your felonious behaviour, but when you were wondering whether or not it was possible to get a cup of tea and a biscuit, nothing but crickets.
No one was coming. No one cared. Nick didn’t care, Charlie didn’t care, Amy was otherwise engaged, and who on earth knew where she would be by now?
Just as I was considering fashioning a Blue Peter-style pillow out of my frock, there was a loud kerfuffle along the corridor: raised voices, jangling keys and a lot of scuffling. Ooh, maybe I was getting a cellmate.
I sat up straight, my heart pounding.
Shit! Maybe I was getting a cellmate.
Gathering my skirts up around my waist, I stood up and held my breath. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to achieve with my ready-to-pounce pose – I was still in a ten by ten cement cell with iron bars where a door should be – but whatever was coming my way, I was ready for it. Unless she or he was bigger than me, in which case they would be wearing me like a glove puppet by dawn. I was not cut out for life on the inside. I would make a terrible prison wife, I had no discernible crafting talents, and the time Amy tried to give me an amateur tattoo with her compass and a pot of Indian ink she nicked from the art room, I passed out behind the humanities block and missed the first ten minutes of my mock French GCSE.
Before I could work out the appropriate way to greet a fellow criminal in a language I couldn’t speak (not an easy task without my iPhone), two navy-clad officers burst through the door to the cell block, shouting at each other and the blur of arms and legs they held between them. I stepped back into the corner, trying to tie the skirts of my dress into a manageable knot in case I needed my legs free for kicking but there was no time. While I was faffing with the fabric, a third police officer was sliding open the bars so his mates could chuck my new best friend in beside me.
Only it wasn’t my new best friend.
It was very much my old best friend.
‘Police brutality!’ Amy shouted, scrambling to her feet and grabbing at the cell bars as the polizia scarpered as fast as possible. ‘I’m totally writing to my MP about this! As soon as I find out who my MP is.’
‘Amy?’ My skirts slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor with a damp slap.
‘Tess!’ She turned towards me, all wide eyes and filthy face, and flew over, wrapping her arms tightly around my cold shoulders. ‘You’re OK!’
‘I think we’re both pretty far from OK,’ I pointed out, glancing around at our less than salubrious surroundings. ‘What’s going on? Is Kekipi with you? They let me call someone and I called you but I got your voicemail.’
‘Oh, no way!’ She let go of my arms and laughed, before collapsing happily on my concrete block. ‘I called you! How funny is that?’
‘So funny that I might throw up,’ I replied, awkwardly folding myself up on the floor. My knees had decided that standing up was overrated. ‘Where’s Kekipi?’
‘Don’t know; I didn’t see him after they locked me up.’ Amy placed her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, her own floor-length gown having actually fared quite well. At least, hers didn’t have any blood on it. ‘I’m sure he’s coming. I’ve got to hand it to you – you don’t do things by halves these days. No one could accuse you of being boring any more, could they?’
I crawled forward a couple of feet and wrapped my hands around the bars, pushing my nose out as far as it would go and trying not to cry. I thought of Nick and the look on his face. I thought of Al and how disappointed he would be in me when he found out about all of this. And I thought of Charlie and how I could possibly ever make things up to him. Sniffing at the empty corridor and staring up at the full moon through a tiny window across the way, I sighed.
‘No,’ I said to a half-asleep Amy. ‘No one could accuse me of being boring.’
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_7717dde2-7a4a-59bb-bfe9-f50eaab8e721)
I stood on the street outside my flat for five full minutes before braving the four concrete steps up to the door.
For five long years I had wrestled with the knackered lock, shoulder-barged the warped wooden door open, and called this place home, but after three short days away I was petrified of stepping over the threshold. Admittedly, it was fair to say I hadn’t been on terribly good terms with my flatmate, Vanessa, when I left. For some reason, she hadn’t taken kindly to me borrowing her life for a week, though I’d done a pretty good job with it, even if I did say so myself. Of course, she had chosen not to focus on the elements of our ‘falling out’ that she was at least somewhat responsible for – like how she’d been passing my photos off as hers for years on end, and how she’d been shagging Charlie, my Charlie, behind my back. That all seemed to slip her mind when she stood screaming in the street that I was the crazy one and if I ever stepped foot in the flat again, she’d have me arrested.
Fingering the key ring in my pocket, I forced myself up another step. She couldn’t actually have me arrested for going into my own flat, I reminded myself, and besides, it was half past eleven on a Thursday morning: she wouldn’t be at home anyway. Given that Vanessa was absolutely shit at her job, her dad had been paying the mortgage on our flat since we moved in and she had a standing Thursday lunch date with him to justify her existence whenever she was in the country. I’d only met Vanessa’s father once, but I had to assume no matter how good he was at making Scrooge McDuck quantities of money, he couldn’t really be that bright because Vanessa had him wrapped around her little finger, even though he was pretty much the only man on earth she couldn’t sleep with to get what she wanted. The whole daddy–daughter thing was a mystery to me. Maybe if I batted eyelash extensions and tossed a long blonde mane at my dad, he would pay all my bills too. Unlikely, given that we hadn’t spoken in almost a decade, but you never know.
One more deep breath in and I was at the top of the stairs, face to face with my knackered red front door. Keys in hand, I rested one palm against the glass pane and pressed my ear against the wood, just to make sure. Hmm. Could I hear something? I should have brought Amy with me. Yes, my best friend was small in stature but she was very big on violence and I did not relish the thought of opening this door to a furious former flatmate without her by my side. Why was I here? Maybe I should just turn tail and run back to Amy’s house, get back under the covers, watch the rest of Step Up 3 and pretend I didn’t need any of my old things. And then I looked down at the T-shirt I had borrowed from Amy that morning. A five-foot-ten woman should never borrow clothes from a five-foot-nothing girl. I loved unicorns as much as the next girl but neon pink unicorns on a cropped black T-shirt? The world wasn’t ready to see my belly button and neither was I. I needed my things.
That was, provided Vanessa hadn’t burnt all my clothes, chucked them in the street or used them as tea towels and toilet paper. I let out a quiet laugh and shook my head: what a silly thought. She hadn’t used a tea towel in the five years I’d known her, so that was hardly about to change. But without me there to buy bog roll, that was a definite possibility.
‘You’re being stupid,’ I whispered to myself as I pulled my sad phone with its broken screen out of my pocket and forced it to shuffle through my contacts until I found the number for our landline. This was a telephone no one but my mother and the world’s finest telemarketers had attempted to call since 2007 and yet, every time it rang, Vanessa had the receiver in her hand within three seconds, ‘just in case’. I had to assume she had once given Brad Pitt that number in a bar and was still waiting for his call.
I listened as the line connected, the two long bleats on my phone translating into two short rings inside. It was fair to say I felt something of a twat, stood on my own doorstep, dialling my own landline from my own mobile, but I figured it was better to feel like a bit of a bell-end than to get into another public slanging match with a psycho. But when the phone inside stopped ringing and I heard the lovely lady from BT invite me to leave myself a message, I hung up and forced my key into the lock and merrily kicked the door wide open.
‘Home sweet home,’ I said with a sigh.
Even though it had only been three days since I’d left, the flat felt strange. The last time I’d left it, I’d been freaked out by the fact that nothing at all had changed in my absence. I wished I could say the same this time around. My keys always lived in the empty bowl by the door and I dropped them gently, listening to the familiar clatter before I stepped into the living room. Fuck. Me. Either Vanessa had started shagging the Tasmanian Devil or we’d been visited by seven very angry burglars. It was difficult to say which was more likely. The floor was covered in broken plates, broken glass and assorted empty bottles; picture frames had been pulled off the wall and dashed on the floor, which I figured explained the glass; and, most heartbreaking of all, my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs had been hurled around the room like mini Frisbees. She really knew how to hit a girl where it hurt. Picking my way through the debris, I grabbed handfuls of copper locks and tethered my hair back into a ponytail before I braved my bedroom, preparing myself for the inevitable devastation.
Pausing, I closed my eyes, pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Oh. Wow!’
If I’d walked in on a family of baby elephants having a tea party with Julia Roberts and the Queen, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My room was exactly as I had left it.
Closing my bedroom door behind me, I did a quick visual check. My suitcase was still sitting by the door, the bed sheets still rumpled from mine and Amy’s sleepover on Sunday night, the mug full of tea still on the nightstand, albeit a bit scummier than I had last seen it. My clothes were still in the wardrobe, unhung pictures still propped against the wall. Whatever madness had possessed Vanessa while she trashed the rest of the flat, she must have run out of steam before she could take my room apart.
Or she booby-trapped it … I froze for a second, taking another look around and searching specifically for anything explosive-looking.
Once I was satisfied there were no landmines hidden under my Ikea rug, I got down to business. Whatever had gone on while I’d been camped out in Shepherd’s Bush at Casa del Amy, all I wanted to do was get my things and go. Unzipping the still-full suitcase by the door and dumping the contents on my bed, I swapped out the dirty clothes for clean ones, mentally shaking my head at my wardrobe choices. To the left of my case, a sea of colourful silk lay on the bed – the clothes I’d borrowed from my friend Paige – and to the right, a regimented tumble of black trousers, white shirts and the odd navy jumper – my everyday outfits. I didn’t half love a V-neck. The wildest item of clothing in the right-hand pile was a houndstooth-check pencil skirt, and while I could try to pass that off as Mad Men chic, in reality it was something my mum had bought from the M&S outlet in Doncaster that didn’t fit her when she got home and she couldn’t be arsed to take it back. Surely there had to be some middle ground between a cropped neon unicorn T-shirt and the adult equivalent of a particularly crappy school uniform?
Once my suitcase was full of my depressingly few essentials, I sat myself down on the bed beside it and stared at my room for a moment. Now what was I supposed to do? Leave the rest of it and never return? I couldn’t stay with Amy much longer. Six people to one toilet was already madness and adding a seventh really seemed to have pushed a couple of her flatmates past their tentative grip on sanity, but moving into a new flat would mean finding the money for a deposit, furniture, toilet paper, washing-up liquid and Sky Plus, and I was completely broke.
I stared at the small rubber duck I had rescued from the bathroom and waited for a response. He usually had a lot to say for an inanimate object but in this instance he was uncharacteristically quiet.
‘Suppose I don’t have any choice,’ I said out loud, to break the eerie silence of the abandoned room. ‘Back to Amy’s it is.’
‘Or you could go to Milan,’ the duck pointed out. ‘That’s an option.’
‘Shut up, duck,’ I said, unzipping the suitcase and shoving him deep inside. That would teach me to look to a bathroom accessory for advice. ‘What do you know?’
Milan.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, swinging my legs back and forth, I pulled on the end of my ponytail. Milan, Milan, Milan.
And that was when I heard someone kicking the door open.
‘Shit bollocks bastard!’ I leapt to my feet, panicking at the sound of Vanessa’s voice right outside my bedroom. I looked left. A shoddily constructed wardrobe that would not hold an elf, let alone me. I looked right. Wall.
‘Yes, Daddy, I said I know.’
The front door slammed behind her and her keys clattered in the bowl beside the door: the bowl that I had dropped my keys into ten minutes earlier.
‘But I’m having a shitty week and I’m not in the mood for lunch,’ Vanessa whinged. ‘Why can’t you take me out for dinner instead?’
Without a better solution, I dropped to my knees and rolled underneath my bed, pulling my spare winter duvet over my head. Trying my best to splutter silently through many months of dust, single socks and poorly disposed of chocolate-bar wrappers, I shuffled backwards until my feet hit the wall. As I swiped loose strands of hair and dust bunnies away from my face, I felt something sharpish scratching against my skin. I grabbed at it, hoping that whatever it was, it had the power to grant wishes, only to discover it was, in fact, a condom – an out-of-date Durex condom, still in its shiny, promising wrapper.
And there we had it: I was twenty-eight years old, with my freezing cold tummy bared to my filthy bedroom floor in a two-sizes-too-small T-shirt, with a duvet over my head, being physically attacked by expired prophylactics.
There was no way to sink any further.
‘Somewhere nice …’ I listened while Vanessa continued to barter with her father, wondering whether or not I could pull the condom over my head like a stocking and charge out the front door without being recognized. ‘Nobu?’
I wanted to go to Nobu. Cow.
‘No, Daddy,’ she whined from the living room. It seemed the shithole she had created didn’t bother her nearly as much as it did me. ‘I have a headache. I need to stay home and rest this afternoon. I know, I’m probably working too hard.’
Well, that wasn’t brilliant news, was it? How was I supposed to get my case of clean knickers out of the flat if she wasn’t going to sod off back out for lunch? For the sake of my sanity, I forced myself to ignore the ‘working too hard’ comment.
‘OK, make it for eight. I’ll see you there.’
On the upside, it seemed as though she hadn’t seen my keys in the bowl by the door and so there was a chance I could get away with this if I stayed very quiet and didn’t attempt to move for the next seven hours. As unlikely as it sounded, that option did actually seem preferable to trying to get out of the flat while Vanessa was still in it, despite the fact I was suddenly desperate for a wee. My bladder had a terrible sense of humour. I imagined this was exactly how Anne Frank felt. Only worse.
I hated not being able to see what was going on. I hated lying underneath my filthy bed, clutching a broken phone in one hand and a condom that had gone off in 2012 in the other. I hated that this was how I found out that I was apparently claustrophobic. Hyperventilating ever so slightly and trying to ignore my as-yet-undiscovered claustrophobia, I concentrated on the sounds outside of my bedroom. A dustbin lorry in the street, high-heeled pacing in the other room, some muffled swearing. Then, after what felt like forever, I heard the shower running.
When you lived with someone for five years, you got pretty used to their bathroom habits and no matter how much of a rush Vanessa might be in, she was incapable of taking anything even approximating a quick shower. This was my chance. Scrambling out from under the bed, I tried to forget how badly I needed the toilet, grabbed my suitcase from the bed, and headed for the front door. Mere microseconds from freedom, my sweaty palm was on the door handle when a blurry silhouette appeared behind the pebbled glass and a sharp rap on the wood frightened me out of my skin.
‘Miss Kittler? It’s the police. Can you come to the door?’
The fucking police? Why were the police here? Although my curiosity had been well and truly piqued, I knew all too well what had happened to the curious cat and I didn’t have eight lives to spare.
I scuttled back into my bedroom as fast as my feet could carry me. As far as I could see, I had two choices. Either I went back under the bed with five years’ of filth and the saddest condom in existence, or I could climb out of my bedroom window. Which would be worse, having London’s finest find you hiding underneath your own bed or climbing out of a window and dropping twelve feet onto potentially spine-shattering concrete? Either way, I was very likely to wet myself. As a second knock rattled the door frame and the water stopped running in the bathroom, I made my decision. Spine-shattering concrete it was.
Pushing the window open, I pulled up the handle on my suitcase and dangled it down as far as it would go. When it was just a couple of feet off the floor, I let it drop, biting my lip to stop myself from screaming when it busted open in a silent explosion of M&S cotton pants, followed by a softened, but still sickening crack, as my camera made a mad dash for freedom across the courtyard.
‘Hold on, officers, I’m coming!’ Vanessa called out to the third rap on the door.
‘On the upside,’ I told myself as I hoisted myself up onto the windowsill and perched my bum right on the edge, ‘this isn’t even the second stupidest thing I’ve done this month.’
Peering down at the Rorschach test of underwear beneath me, I inched forwards, questioning more or less every choice I had ever made in my life. Well, at least if I fell and broke both my legs, that would answer the Milan question for me. There weren’t many fashion photographers jetting around the world in full-body casts. Peeping up at me from underneath next-door’s unbearably pretentious potted herb garden, the rubber duck raised a nonexistent eyebrow and waited, expectantly.
‘Oh God, I’m being so stupid.’ I no longer cared about being heard. I cared about not dying. ‘What am I doing? I’m not jumping out of my own bloody window!’
White knuckles wrapped around the window frame, I twisted around, ready to cock my leg over and in. Unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten that unless a certain Nick Miller was the one positioning my legs over my head, I was one of the least flexible women on the face of the earth. Getting back inside the flat was going to be a damn sight harder than getting out of it. Somehow, I had managed to get my back up against the UPVC frame and my bum half on and half off the ledge when I realized the belt loop of my jeans was stuck somewhere on the lock. And it was while wriggling around in this impossibly ridiculous position, one leg in and one leg out, doing the hokey cokey twelve feet above the floor, that my door flew open and two uniformed policemen and one towel-clad former flatmate burst into the room.
‘Don’t move!’ shouted policeman number one.
‘Come back inside the house!’ yelled policeman number two.
‘Without wanting to be rude …’ My voice was awfully high. ‘Can you pick one? I can probably do the don’t move one but I’m not sure I can get back inside the house.’
‘Stay where you are, Ms Kittler,’ said policeman number one, who seemed far more interested in what Vanessa was barely covering with her towel than whatever crime they imagined I had committed, ‘we’ve got this.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, a whimper escaping her throat as she cowered behind policeman number two. ‘I was so scared. She must have broken in while I was in the shower.’
‘What?’ I squeaked as policeman number one began to move slowly towards me. ‘I didn’t break in. I used my keys – I live here!’
‘We’ll sort all this out down at the station.’ Policeman number two approached with his hands held out towards me. And in one of those hands was a pair of handcuffs. ‘Now just get down off the ledge.’
‘I’m not going down to the station,’ I said, one hand up in a surrender-friendly position, the other still clinging to the window frame for dear life. ‘I didn’t break in.’
I stared at the scene in front of me with utter disbelief. Vanessa, safe behind the boys in blue, gave me a wicked grin while wrapping her towel a little tighter.
‘I want her arrested,’ she said. ‘Please take her away.’
‘I am so going to kill you!’ I let go of the window frame fully to try to unhook my jeans from the arm of the lock. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘You heard that!’ Vanessa shrieked. ‘She threatened to kill me!’
Everything that happened after that was a blur. I wasn’t sure if it was self-preservation or a rage-induced blackout, but without warning, I felt my mind leave my body and float up into a cobwebby corner of my bedroom, watching as the scene unfolded. The policeman that wasn’t copping a feel of my treacherous flatmate rushed over to me as soon as I let go of the window frame and reached behind my back. As he came towards me, my belt loop decided it didn’t need to be caught on the window lock after all and that’s when I realized the only thing that was keeping me balanced in the first place was said belt loop hooked around said window lock.
The fall from the window didn’t seem too bad. I did manage to land on top of my great big pile of pants, and at best I was a little bit dazed while at worst I was completely concussed. But looking on the bright side, it was probably better not to be entirely conscious when you were being read your rights and then carted off to the police station in handcuffs, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b153eb4f-2c95-51a0-bf0c-5a23b792cff9)
‘I’ve told you,’ I said, pressing my palm against the throbbing pain in my shoulder, ‘a thousand times. It’s my flat, my home. Yes, Vanessa owns the flat but I pay rent. My keys are in the bowl by the door. I didn’t break in.’
‘Then remind me why you were climbing out the window with a suitcase full of Miss Kittler’s belongings instead of using the front door?’
Once the officers had established none of my bones had been broken, it was off to the police station for questioning, despite my loud and varied protestations. So far, so The Bill. I had suffered assorted indignities, including being fingerprinted at the same time as a very large skinhead I was sure that I recognized, and then I was left in a small interview room with a female detective who looked about as happy to be there as I did, although she was considerably less bruised and considerably better dressed. Or at least her clothes seemed to a) fit her and b) actually belong to her.
I glanced around the interview room while I tried to work out what to say. It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. More Jobcentre waiting room than terrifying cell – and when you had a friend like Amy, you became very familiar with the inside of the Jobcentre waiting room.
‘We live together, we’ve had a bit of a domestic,’ I explained, wondering how likely a couple of Nurofen and a cup of tea were if I asked very nicely. ‘I didn’t want to talk to her so, you know, I jumped out of a window.’
Made perfect sense to me.
‘So you two are a couple?’ the detective asked, her eyebrow raising for a second and then dropping back into its standard position very quickly. Clearly someone had already had her sensitivity training.
‘We are so not a couple!’ I winced at both the idea of going out with Vanessa and the pain in my shoulder. ‘She’s horrible. She threw a cat at me once. I’d rather go out with you.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The cat was fine,’ I backtracked quickly. ‘Vanessa is my flatmate. Or I’m her flatmate. Or I was her flatmate. I’m moving out, clearly, but I have paid rent for this month so I wasn’t breaking in.’
‘Just breaking out,’ she said, incapable of keeping her eyebrow in its rightful place. ‘And why did you have Miss Kittler’s camera in your suitcase?’
This was the only part I was going to struggle with. ‘It used to be my camera,’ I said. ‘I gave it to her one month when I couldn’t pay my rent but then I borrowed it back for something. That’s all it was, I wasn’t stealing it.’
‘You were borrowing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is commonly known as stealing.’
I had been brought up to be very respectful of the police. Even now, I couldn’t walk past them in the street without feeling improbably guilty or mentally humming the tune to ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman’ but this was getting silly.
‘I really haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, attempting to remain as calm as humanly possible. ‘She’s just trying to cause trouble for me.’
‘It just sounds very unlikely, doesn’t it?’ The detective leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs at the knee and tapped a biro against the pad in front of her. ‘I mean, what would you think if you were me?’
‘I’d think I had better things to do than get involved in a petty squabble between two flatmates. Aren’t there proper criminals out there who need catching?’ I asked before snapping my mouth shut.
I really had to get a handle on my temper. This was just like the time I lost my shit at work and knocked that girl’s mug off her desk. Kind of …
‘Oh, yes, hundreds,’ the detective said, sitting up and brushing her dark blonde bob behind her ears. ‘Although I am really enjoying wasting hours of my time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on your petty squabble.’
Thoroughly chastened, I sank into my uncomfortable plastic chair and looked at the floor.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, working on my most humble expression. ‘Really, I am. Obviously I didn’t wake up this morning and plan on falling out of a window but the whole Vanessa thing really is a ridiculously long story and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘Why don’t you try me?’ she said. ‘I do like a good story and I’ve already heard most of them.’
‘Fine.’ I folded my arms carefully underneath my boobs. I didn’t like showing midriff to a police officer, especially a dirty midriff that had been sweeping my bedroom floor an hour ago. ‘But you really won’t believe it.’
‘I’m so sorry to have caused you so much trouble.’ Tracy the detective gave me a very gentle hug and carefully slid the strap of my handbag over my undamaged shoulder. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I’d be much happier if you’d let them check you out.’
‘I’m OK, really,’ I assured her. ‘All I need is a stiff drink.’
‘And somewhere to live,’ she added. ‘I’ll text you later about that friend of mine – she might still be looking for someone.’
‘Thanks. That would be awesome.’ I pulled the strap of my bag over my head. ‘I really appreciate it.’
It turned out Tracy could believe my story although she hadn’t heard one quite so dramatic in a good while. It also turned out she did not care for women who took advantage of other women or women who effed their friend’s would-be boyfriends behind their back. And while there was very little she could do about the fact that Vanessa had demanded her camera back, she could let me off with a warning and give me a nice cup of tea while I told my story. I even got my Nurofen in the end, but only after I had retold my story to every woman in the police station.
‘I can’t believe there are really women like that out there,’ Tracy said, shaking her head as she walked me out of the interview room, signalling for someone to bring me my battered suitcase. ‘I’m so sorry for the mix-up. I could have someone drive you to the flat and wait while you collect the rest of your stuff if you want?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, really just wanting to leave. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘OK, but you have to promise to let me know what you decide about Milan.’
There it was again. Milan.
I solemnly promised, and with one last round of hugs from every woman who happened to be in the general vicinity of Shoreditch police station, I gave them an awkward wave goodbye and padded outside into the sunshine. It had turned into a beautiful day. I hadn’t really noticed the weather when I was falling out my bedroom window and being bundled into a police car.
‘Of everyone we know, you are the last person I ever expected to be picking up from the cop shop.’
I squinted into the sunshine and my face relaxed into a smile. Leaning against the blue metal railings, phone in one hand, Tesco’s carrier bag in the other, was Charlie Wilder, all six wonderful feet and three beautiful inches of him.
‘Stagnate and die,’ I said, smiling at the sight of him, relieved, safe, awkward, a little bit giddy. ‘I’m mixing things up a bit.’
‘I had noticed,’ he said with a single nod.
We stood an uncomfortable three feet apart, neither of us moving in for our customary hug. I hadn’t seen Charlie since I started my self-imposed exile in Amy’s bedroom three days ago, and before that I hadn’t seen him since we got drunk, got naked, and got it on, so it was understandable that things might be a touch awkward.
‘Do you want to tell me how you managed to get arrested?’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Not really.’
‘Fair enough.’ Charlie held out the Tesco bag and took my suitcase without a word. Such a gent. ‘I got you these. I hear they’re not big on snacks in there. Not that I’d know first-hand, of course, never having actually been arrested myself.’
‘Actually they were very nice,’ I said, taking it and delving inside. Ooh, Galaxy. ‘Once I explained everything.’
‘Sure you don’t want to explain it to me?’ he asked, eyeing my T-shirt as I tore off the wrapper. ‘Are they making you wear that as part of your punishment?’
‘No and no.’ I gave him the side eye and rummaged around the rest of his offerings. Diet Coke, Skittles, a bag of those fresh-baked giant chocolate chip cookies – he’d made an effort, all my favourite unhealthy things.
‘Whatever, I’m glad you called me.’ He took a single step closer and I could smell his aftershave and see the almost black rings around his dark brown irises and his thick, curly copper hair and – oh bloody hell, I was about to fall over.
‘Woah!’ Charlie reached out and grabbed me before I could go down, pulling me in close and holding me upright. There were no two ways about it, being held by Charlie felt really, really good. ‘Let’s get you home. And then you can bloody well tell me what’s going on, whether you like it or not.’
Feeling equal parts faint and confused, with just an edge of lady horn, I let him wrap his arm around my shoulders and bundle me into a waiting Addison Lee taxi, leaving my new friends, Vanessa’s camera and any remaining shred of dignity with Shoreditch‘s finest.
Charlie’s flat was a typical man flat. The walls were white, the curtains were blue, and all of the furniture orbited an obscenely large television in the corner of the living room. Its satellite PlayStations and Xboxes blinked their welcomes as I dropped my handbag on the leather recliner and let Charlie guide me over to the sofa. I’d sat on this settee a million times – God, I’d gone to DFS and helped him choose it – but today I felt strangely uncomfortable, as though I didn’t know where I should look or what I could touch. The framed Goodfellas poster I had given him four Christmases ago stared down at me as I perched on the edge of the settee, pressed my thighs tightly together, and smiled gratefully when Charlie reappeared from the kitchen with a glass of water and the codeine I remembered feeding him when he knackered his knee the year before.
‘How many more years until you’ve actually paid for this?’ I asked, patting the settee as he sat down beside me, at a respectful distance. Which wasn’t that easy when he was six three and I was five ten. Charlie and I had a tendency to make most furniture look Lilliputian.
‘Three, I think.’ He pushed his coppery brown hair off his face, one or two strands refusing to comply and sticking to his forehead. ‘I’m assuming it’ll completely fall apart or something. That’s how I’ll know it’s officially mine.’
‘Right,’ I nodded in agreement and sipped my water. Water was good. A shower would be better, but I still felt a bit weird and I couldn’t see what good would come of him holding me up in there. ‘Yeah.’
I’d known Charlie Wilder for ten years. I knew his height and his date of birth and his blood type. Our hair and our eyes were exactly the same colour. I knew when he had lost his virginity, I knew he lied about having a trial for Newcastle when he was fifteen, but things had never, ever been weird between us until I knew what his penis looked like.
‘Right, yeah,’ Charlie echoed. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, attempting to sit more upright, look more composed. While wearing a cropped neon unicorn T-shirt? ‘Apart from falling out of a window and spending all afternoon in a police station, I, sir, am right as rain.’
‘I’m glad you called me,’ he said, taking the empty glass out of my hand and placing it on the floor. Our fingers didn’t touch once. ‘Been waiting to hear from you.’
What I wouldn’t have given to be having this conversation in any other outfit.
‘I know.’ I felt the edge of my thumbnail between my teeth and concentrated my attention on the blinking clock on his Blu-ray player. I was fairly certain it wasn’t six fifteen in the morning and I quite badly wanted to go over and fix it. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’ I watched as Charlie pushed his Converses off with his feet, one at a time, then kicked them across the room to their home beside the door. ‘I know I dropped a load of shit on you on Monday. It’s not like I expected you to have an answer right away.’
I smiled and looked down the sofa at my best friend and saw someone I wasn’t even sure I knew. ‘I always have an answer right away though, don’t I?’
‘Well yeah, there is that,’ he replied with a soft laugh. ‘Got to admit, I wasn’t expecting you to take this long to get back to me.’
I had been in love with Charlie from the very first day of university and every day since. He was The One. He was the man I imagined walking down the aisle with, the man I wanted to father my children. I wanted him to change my plugs and catch my spiders and know where we kept the paperwork for the car insurance and everything else that went along with a happy, long life together. Only, for ten long years, all I had been to Charlie was the one who reminded him about Mother’s Day, the one who was always available for lunch or a pint after work. I was the girl who explained that petrol station carnations were never an appropriate apology, the one who went with him to weddings when he didn’t have a girlfriend.
It turned out there were lots of different interpretations of The One.
And then, two weeks ago, under the most romantic of circumstances – drunk on cheap vodka on the bottom bunk of my childhood bed – we had finally done the deed. It had been wonderful and not just because I hadn’t had sex in so long that there were expired condoms underneath my bed; it had been genuinely, toe-curlingly fantastic. Right up until Charlie threw me the ‘I don’t want to ruin our friendship’ curveball the morning after and I found out he’d been secretly shagging Vanessa.
Of course, as soon as I told him to take his tainted peen as far away from me as humanly possible, he decided he wanted to make a go of it. And not only that, but he wanted us to start our own advertising agency together. Because going out with each other after everything that had happened wasn’t potentially messy enough, clearly we needed to throw a professional relationship into the mix as well.
‘There’s been a lot of stuff going on …’ I let out a tiny yawn, the pain in my shoulder ringing as I moved. Well, that was definitely the last time I jumped out of a window. ‘I don’t really know what else to say.’
‘I had noticed you’re not at your most chatty,’ he said. ‘You haven’t really told me anything about Hawaii. You still don’t want to talk about it?’
‘Honestly, I sort of just want to go to sleep,’ I admitted. ‘And maybe have a bath and not be wearing Amy’s clothes any more. Not necessarily in that order.’
What I really meant was, I’d rather go back to the police station than talk to Charlie about what had happened in Hawaii.
‘In that case …’ Charlie stood up and stretched. He was ever so tall. ‘I’m going to pretend to go and have a wee when really I’m going to clean the bath, then I’m going to fuck off and leave you to have a nap for a bit. Thank God that’s not your top. I was about to stage an intervention.’
‘I went to Hawaii,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t go insane.’
‘Understood.’ He saluted, picked up my empty glass, and headed for the kitchen. I was already fully foetal on the settee and snuggled into the cushions I had made him buy in the Heal’s sale when he returned.
‘Drink this,’ he ordered, holding out a fresh glass of water. ‘And I’ll run the bath.’
Lying on the settee, listening to the bath water run and watching dust dance around the living room in the late afternoon sunshine, I could easily imagine things working out with Charlie. It would be so nice to have someone to look after me and he knew me so well. It could be so wonderful. The job I’d always wanted, the man I’d always wanted. It was the life I’d dreamed of.
But I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what would happen if I went to Milan. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what might happen with Nick … Hooking my foot through the handle of my handbag because I was too lazy to sit up and get it, I dragged it along the settee and dug around for my phone. The screen was so badly shattered I had to tilt it this way and that to get a clear view of my inbox but it was pointless. There was nothing to see. No new emails, no missed calls, no new text messages. Nothing from Nick; nothing at all. Three days of silence, otherwise known as an eternity.
‘Do you want bubble bath?’ Charlie called from the bathroom. ‘I’ve got bubble bath. Why have I got bubble bath?’
‘Because you’re a woman?’ I asked, sliding my phone under my back and refastening my ponytail on top of my head. Long, thick curly hair looked amazing on celebrities. In real life, it was nothing but a pain in the arse. ‘Yes to bubble bath, please.’
‘Right, it’s running,’ Charlie said, emerging with his sleeves rolled up and a slightly flushed face. At least I knew the bath had been properly scrubbed. Charlie was one of those blokes who believed that because you cleaned yourself in the bathroom, somehow that made the room itself self-cleaning. I really hoped I was catching the towels on a good day … ‘You want a T-shirt or something? I don’t think I’ve got any underwear to lend you.’
‘I think that’s probably a good thing!’ I replied. ‘Thank you. For coming to get me and everything.’
‘It’s not as if you haven’t had to look after me before, is it?’ He stood at the side of the settee, staring down as if he’d never seen me before.
‘What?’ I stared back up. ‘What is it?’
‘I have missed you,’ he said.
I held my breath and felt my heartbeat skip a little faster than I might have liked.
‘You daft cow,’ he added.
My heartbeat slowed back down.
For a second, neither of us said anything and neither of us moved. I looked at Charlie, all tall and broad and floppy, brown hair. He looked at me, all tall and badly dressed and flat on my back.
‘I’ve got to go out for a bit,’ he said, breaking the silence and making for the door. ‘You know where everything is. I’ll be back for tea. See you in a bit,’ he said, shutting the front door carefully behind him.
‘See you in a bit,’ I repeated and waited until I heard the outside door slam shut before retrieving my phone from under my bum and dialling Amy’s number.
‘Yo yo yo,’ she answered immediately. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’
‘Been a long day,’ I replied. I wasn’t nearly awake enough to fill her in on my adventures in housebreaking. ‘I’m at Charlie’s.’
‘Oh really?’
‘No need to sound so scandalized,’ I said. ‘It’s just Charlie.’
‘Charlie who has been calling me every day because you’ve been refusing to speak to him?’
‘Yeah, that one.’ I stretched my legs out in front of me, my shoulder singing out in protest at all movement. Padding into the bathroom, I checked the running water. Charlie’s bath filled slowly – new information to add to my encyclopaedic knowledge of his existence.
‘Shall I come over? Bring snacks?’ Amy asked. ‘We could make him watch Notting Hill again. That’s always good for a laugh.’
‘I think I probably ought to talk to him about some stuff,’ I said with a yawn. Between the painkillers, the steamy promise of the tub and the general combined stress of the day, all I wanted to do was get in the bath and get into bed so I could pretend all of this was just a dream. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Yeah, you want to “talk” to Charlie,’ she said. ‘And I want to talk to Channing Tatum.’
‘Well, if he calls, send me a text.’ I yawned and dipped my hand into the water. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘Enjoy your “talk”.’
Setting my phone safely on top of Charlie’s bathroom cabinet, I stripped off and sat on the side of the bath. When I’d made my phone call, when I decided it was Charlie I wanted to see, I hadn’t really had too much of a plan. I couldn’t ask Amy to come and get me from the police station because then I’d have to explain how I got there in the first place and it would have been really hard for her to collect me if she was being arrested for killing Vanessa. Charlie was the easier option; he wouldn’t give me a hard time and he would also bring snacks. But it did mean I was going to have to have a conversation that I had been putting off for the best part of a week. And in less than twenty-four hours, I had to have another conversation I’d been avoiding: a meeting with my agent, a meeting about Milan.
Sliding into the tub, I tried to get my shoulder under the water without soaking my hair. It would take forever to dry.
All I had to do was work out what I wanted. That was easy, wasn’t it? Only I didn’t know what I wanted, and the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I didn’t just look before I leapt, I had visited the jump site, called the insurance company and done a full risk analysis and yet I still couldn’t come to a decision. I had never struggled like this before but ever since Hawaii, my compass was off. Instead of giving me a straight up yes or no, my brain had turned into a Magic 8 Ball. The outcome is unclear; ask again later; better not tell you now.
I opened the hot water tap with my big toe and watched as the mound of bubbles covering my body grew and grew and just as quickly, popped and vanished.
With a loud and obnoxious sigh, I slid deeper into the water. Sod my hair – it was already a mess.
Being a grown-up was rubbish.
The sun was fighting a losing battle when I woke up on the sofa. The room was pleasantly warm and you couldn’t tell how badly it needed hoovering now the light had faded away. I wriggled my toes inside the pair of socks I had found, sniffed and deemed fit to wear, and yawned loudly.
‘She wakes!’ Charlie called from the kitchen. ‘Better?’
‘Sooo much better,’ I said. The painkillers had reduced the shooting pains in my shoulder to a dull ache and my head felt altogether less stuffed with cotton wool after the nap. ‘You should get injured more often, I like those tablets a lot.’
‘Brilliant, you’ve been here for three hours and I’ve turned you into a junkie.’ He leaned around the door, spatula in hand. ‘What will Amy say?’
‘Amy will want to know why you’ve got a spatula in your hand,’ I suggested. ‘What’s going on in there?’
‘I’m making dinner.’ Charlie looked incredibly happy with himself. ‘I’m making dinner for us.’
‘I take it back, I’m not better,’ I sat up, pulling my second borrowed T-shirt of the day over my knickers. Amy’s was too small; Charlie’s was too big. Maybe one day I’d find one that was just right. ‘I must have hit my head as well as my arm because I think I’m hallucinating. You burn baked beans.’
‘Losing his job does strange things to a man,’ Charlie said, disappearing back into the kitchen. ‘I’ve had to amuse myself for too long. There’s only so many times you can play Grand Theft Auto and watch Breaking Bad before you start thinking a life of crime is a viable option.’
Until two weeks ago, Charlie and I had worked together at Donovan & Dunning, an advertising agency in Holborn. I ran the creative team and Charlie was an account manager, which mostly meant that I spent fourteen hours a day worrying over whether or not the target demographic would respond better to a happy squirrel selling them toilet paper or a friendly-looking bear, while he took the people who owned the toilet paper company out for dinner and then asked them for more money. But, like lots of agencies run by men who liked to blow all their money up their nose rather than into their employees’ pension fund, Donovan & Dunning was not prepared for the recession and had gone rather spectacularly bust, leaving me, Charlie, and about forty other people, out of a job.
‘So you’re going for Come Dine with Me instead?’ I asked. ‘This is a very interesting development.’
‘I’m not very good,’ he acknowledged, reappearing in the living room with two very full glasses of white wine. What went better with codeine than wine? ‘But I’ll get there. I’m making a chilli but I didn’t have any kidney beans so I used Heinz. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, sipping the wine and trying not to wince. Charlie had never been much of a wine drinker; clearly this had been bought in for my benefit. I couldn’t help but wish it hadn’t been. ‘You can’t put baked beans in a chilli, but I’m really impressed that you tried.’
‘Then you’ll be completely wowed by my ability to call for a pizza,’ he said, sitting down next to me and pulling his phone out of his back pocket. ‘Because I’m amazing at that.’
‘A man’s got to have a talent,’ I replied.
His legs pressed against his too-big socks I was wearing and squished my toes in a way that made me feel warm all over. Or it could have been the wine, I wasn’t sure. Whatever discomfort had been between us before my nap had dissolved and all I wanted to do was stare at him in silence while he faffed about with the Domino’s app. But that could have been the wine too.
‘Pizza will be here in forty-five minutes,’ he said and turned to me with a grin. I quickly sipped my wine and hoped my face didn’t look as red as it felt. ‘So what should we do for the next forty-five minutes?’
‘Stop it,’ I shouted, swatting Charlie’s arm away from my face. ‘I hate this.’
‘You’re so bad,’ he laughed, hammering the buttons on his control pad and beating my character into a bloody pulp on the screen in front of us. ‘How can you possibly be so bad?’
‘Because I’ve been drinking for the last hour on an empty stomach,’ I said, adding a hiccup for emphasis and throwing my controller down onto the sofa in protest as he ripped the head off my character with unrestrained glee. ‘And I don’t have a penis.’
‘Loads of girls are good at games,’ Charlie argued as his phone lit up on the sofa between us. ‘You’re just shit. Thank God the pizza is here so I don’t have to kill you again.’
Folding my legs up underneath me, I watched him run downstairs to pick up the pizza and smiled the smug smile of a woman who was spending the evening playing computer games and drinking wine with her crush. It was every girl’s dream, wasn’t it? Here I was, wearing his favourite Arsenal T-shirt and a pair of big floppy socks, looking adorable. Or at least I looked adorable in my imagination; I had no interest in checking out how true that assumption was in a mirror. This was everything I’d ever wanted. Well, maybe I hadn’t pictured quite so many rounds of Mortal Kombat in our future, but the pizza was definitely a plus.
‘Dinner is served!’ Charlie pushed through the door with an enormous white pizza box, a matching plastic bag hanging from his wrist. ‘Do you want some Coke?’
‘Is it diet?’
‘No, it isn’t diet.’ He placed the pizza carefully on the not-really-clean-enough floor and handed me a napkin.
‘Then I’ll stick with the wine.’ I held out my glass for a refill.
‘Wine and pizza …’ He grabbed the almost empty bottle from the side table and poured. ‘We’re practically Italian.’
I flipped open the lid of the pizza box and ignored him.
‘Hawaiian pizza?’ I asked. ‘I suppose you think you’re funny.’
‘I want to hear about it – Amy wouldn’t tell me anything.’ Charlie handed me a piece of kitchen towel in lieu of a plate and grabbed a huge, gooey slice of pizza before settling back onto the sofa. ‘Actually, she kept saying I was a cockwomble and told me to stop calling her. Was it amazing?’
‘It was amazing.’ I chose my words carefully, focusing on my memories of the sea and the sand and the smell of morning pastries and pretty pink flowers and pineapple that tasted nothing like the pineapple on this pizza. ‘It’s really beautiful.’
‘I still can’t believe you did it, Tess,’ he said. ‘Packed up, flew halfway round the world. It’s so not you.’
I shrugged, picking pieces of sad, tinned pineapple off my pizza. He didn’t know the half of it.
‘Being me wasn’t getting me very far, was it?’ I said, wiping my hands on a paper napkin and wrapping my hair around itself in a bun on the back of my head. ‘And I needed to get away from everything.’
The skinny blonde elephant in the corner of the room coughed delicately and tossed its hair.
‘Everything?’ Charlie repeated.
‘You know, work and everything,’ I said, attempting to clarify without using the V word. If I never heard the V word again as long as I lived, it would be too soon.
Charlie wrapped his huge hand around his delicate wine glass and nodded. ‘Vanessa.’
And we’d managed fifteen seconds. Not bad going.
‘You know …’ He cleared his throat and took a drink. ‘Me and her, it was nothing to do with me and you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, meaning it entirely.
‘It was a thing.’ For some reason, he hadn’t stopped talking. ‘It was not a clever thing, I know, but it was like she was in one box and you were in another and I never even thought about you being in that box because you’re you and she’s her and you were in a more important box anyway. Does that make sense?’
‘None, not even a little bit,’ I replied. ‘I really, really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I never had feelings for her,’ he said, continuing to talk in spite of specific instructions to the contrary. gesticulating wildly and using his pizza as a prop. ‘It was all, well, it was all that it was.’
‘It was just sex,’ I said, my mind wandering over to the last time I’d heard those words.
‘I know I’m an idiot and I know I was dick-led and I know you’ll never forgive me …’ I looked away but heard the clink of the wine bottle on the rim of the glass. ‘But yeah, it was just sex. I’m a bloke. I was drunk and a fit girl came on to me and I am fully aware that it was the worst decision I’ve ever made.’
Sipping my wine, I considered his words for a moment. Two weeks ago, that sort of defence would have made my head explode but now, having made my own bad decisions, with my own fit bloke, I could almost understand. Almost.
‘If I could take it back, I would.’ Charlie climbed off the settee, his long legs kneeling in the lid of the pizza box before he pushed it away and I watched it skate across the room and disappear under an armchair. ‘If I’d known what might happen with you, I would never—’
‘You’re drunk,’ I said, half-hopefully. ‘We don’t have to have this conversation now.’
‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this, Tess,’ he said, taking the wine glass and paper-towel pizza plate out of my hands.
His breath was warm and sharp from the wine but he smelled the way he had smelled since the very first day I had met him. A mixture of Head & Shoulders, the Issey Miyake aftershave he had spritzed on before he left the flat this morning and underneath all that, the same comforting Charlieness that had wrapped itself around me a thousand times.
‘I know I fucked up. And not just by what I did and who I did it with, but by not realizing how amazing you are bloody years ago. You’re my best friend. You make me laugh, you take care of me; you’re the one who is always there. You’re shit at beat-em-ups but I don’t care. There are too many awesome things about you. I can’t believe I didn’t work this out before.’
‘Like what?’ I said, nervous laughter in my voice. ‘What’s so awesome about me?’
‘Everything,’ he said, grinning. ‘We like all the same films, we like all the same TV shows, we like the same music. God, it’s like we were made for each other. You’re basically me and I’m basically you.’
I wanted my wine back. Was that true, really? Did we like all the same things? And did I want to be with someone who liked me because I was exactly like him? I hated to admit it but I had a feeling it would be more true to say I liked the things he liked so we would have more reasons to spend time together. We never, ever did anything I suggested – because I never suggested anything.
‘I need you in my life,’ Charlie said, not put off by my contemplative silence. ‘And not as a mate. I didn’t realize how much I needed you until now. Just don’t tell me it’s too late.’
As it was, he didn’t give me a chance to tell him anything. Instead he took my hands in his and pulled me towards him.
‘Tess,’ he whispered. ‘My Tess.’
It was what I wanted: to be his, to belong.
Softly, slowly he pressed his lips against mine and I was full of wine and butterflies, so I kissed him back. I closed my eyes, let myself drift and kissed Charlie Wilder as though there wasn’t a single other man on the planet.
Only, I knew that wasn’t true.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_aae1c8ee-e2c9-523f-b090-8300b26b7e7d)
It was very early the next morning when I woke up in Charlie’s bed. With Charlie, but without any clothes. The night before, it had seemed like such a good idea, the getting naked thing. I hadn’t had a good day by anyone’s standards and nothing seemed to take my mind off bigger problems like a good seeing-to. It was one of the fun new things I’d learned about myself of late. Unfortunately, for everything I’d learned, I seemed to have forgotten how much trouble dropping my knickers tended to land me in. Twelve hours earlier, the idea of sleeping with Charlie was warm and reassuring and comforting but when I woke up at dawn, the sunlight slicing across his blue-for-a-boy bedroom, there was one thought I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many times I tossed and turned.
Nick Miller.
Here I was, nestled in the nook of the man I’d been achingly in love with for ten long years, and all I could think about was how different it felt to waking up beside Nick. I kept trying to close my eyes but every time I began to drift off, there he was. His ashy blond hair and blue eyes staring right at me, making me shiver from head to toe.
Strangely enough, waking up naked with one man but only being able to think of another was a bit confusing and so, as quietly as I could, I slid out of bed, grabbed my clothes from last night and tiptoed towards the bedroom door. All I needed was ten minutes to make a cup of tea. Or maybe I could go for a quick walk, blow away the cobwebs. Actually, it might be a good idea to pop back to Amy’s. I could leave Charlie a note. Yeah, that was a good idea. As long as I left a note it was OK. Everyone loved a note …
‘Morning.’
I froze in the doorway, pulling my borrowed T-shirt past the hem of my knickers with one hand and trying to push my hair into some sort of shape with the other. Charlie rubbed at his face with the back of his hand and smiled.
‘Hello.’
Well, at least I didn’t have to worry about what to put in the note.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ he asked, stretching his entire body down the length of the bed as I averted my eyes. Even now, even at twenty-eight years old, I still couldn’t make direct eye contact with a penis. At least not in daylight. Definitely not sober.
‘Uh, just putting the kettle on,’ I replied, my hair flopping down over one eye. I can pull off sexy, I thought, planting my hand on my waist and dropping my hip. Then immediately standing up straight and feeling like a twat. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Not in the mood for a cup of tea,’ he said, pulling back the covers and patting the mattress. Once the duvet had been removed, it wasn’t hard to see what he was in the mood for. I coloured up from head to toe and averted my eyes. I had been fantasizing about Charlie for a decade and we’d had actual sex twice now, but seeing his actual peen with my actual eyes was still too much.
‘I need a wee,’ I said, the words falling out of my mouth before I could consider how incredibly unsexy they were. Charlie frowned and waved me away. ‘Back in a minute.’
Once the bathroom door was safely locked behind me, I sat down on the loo and pressed both hands against my face. What was wrong with me? Why was this weird?
If only I could stop thinking about Nick.
‘I’m not thinking about him at all,’ I corrected myself and ran the cold water over a dubious-looking flannel. ‘Not at all.’
Why would I be thinking about him? I had just woken up in the arms of a wonderful man who was over six feet tall, had all his own teeth and had bought me pizza. In an online dating world, Charlie was the catch of the century.
‘So I’m not thinking about Nick.’ I slapped myself around the chops with the icy flannel. ‘I am wishing I had never met him, but I am not thinking about him.’
There was nothing to think about anyway. So what if he was so attractive he made Matthew McConaughey look like he’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down? So what if he was intelligent and passionate and fascinating? So what if the sex was intense and so all-consuming that I still have pale yellow traces of his fingerprints on my arms and shoulders and hips and even thinking about our time together made me forget to breathe.
Nick was a fling. I had a fling and now that fling was over. And not just because he sent a heart-stoppingly brief ‘call me’ email a week ago and then failed to pick up his phone or answer anything subsequently, but because I had decided it was over. Hawaii was a fantasy; this was real life. And it wasn’t a bad trade by any stretch of the imagination.
‘Totally over the Nick situation.’ I was resolute underneath the flannel. ‘The fling has been flung.’
Not that I wasn’t a bit pissed off. Yes, he had good reason to be annoyed at me, but when a man sent you an email that said ‘call me’ and then didn’t actually answer your calls, that was enough to slot him firmly into the ‘douchebag’ category.
‘Why tell me to call if he didn’t want to speak to me?’ I asked the flannel.
It didn’t answer. It just smelled damp and sad.
‘Everything all right in there?’ Charlie knocked on the door. ‘You setting up shop or something?’
‘I was just, you know,’ I stood up and flushed for the want of a better response, ‘doing stuff.’
‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Oh. Right, uh, I’ll let you get on with that then.’
‘I’m not doing that,’ I shrieked, realizing he had added two and two and got something very unladylike. ‘I was just washing my face.’
I threw the door open and waved the damp flannel around to prove my innocence.
‘You didn’t use that, did you?’ Charlie asked, taking it from me with his thumb and forefinger and sniffing gingerly.
I pressed my fingers to my face. The skin was still all there. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’ He threw it over my shoulder into the bath and wiped his hand on the back of his boxer shorts. ‘Come here.’
Before I could protest, Charlie wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I clasped my hands behind his back and made myself smile, trying to relax into him. I’d always found Charlie hugs reassuring. He was so tall, he even dwarfed me when I wore heels and I was five ten. In bare feet, it was like being cuddled by a considerably cuter Bigfoot. I felt his chin on the top of my head and heard a purr-like noise emanate from his entire being.
‘Let’s go back to bed …’ His hands slid down my back and up underneath my borrowed T-shirt. ‘This is the first time I’ve been happy to not have a job since we got fired.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, writhing out of his reach and grabbing hold of both of his hands before I got carried away. Again. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
Even though I was congratulating myself for listening to my brain instead of my vagina, it was still hard not to fall right into Charlie’s arms and let him carry me back to bed. This was what happened when you didn’t have sex forever and then had all of the sex at once – you lost control of every single sensible impulse in your body.
‘A meeting?’ Charlie casually pushed his erection down like a bad dog. ‘Who have you got a meeting with? At this time in the morning?’
‘It’s an agent,’ I replied, my eyes squarely locked on his. ‘So … I was taking photos in Hawaii. For a magazine.’
‘You were taking photos?’ he asked, finally leaving his penis alone. ‘Like a photographer?’
‘Just like a photographer,’ I nodded and looked at my hands. How did I keep this as brief as possible? ‘I didn’t just decide to go to Hawaii. I went to take pictures of this man for Gloss magazine. He owns a fancy department store in New York and he’s retiring so they were doing a feature.’
‘And you were the photographer?’ Charlie crossed his arms, making his biceps pop. ‘You took the pictures?’
‘I took the pictures,’ I said, not looking at his arms at all. ‘I was the photographer.’
‘But you’re not a photographer,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re a creative director at an ad agency.’
‘Technically, I’m more of a photographer than a creative director right now,’ I replied. ‘You know I was always interested in photography.’
‘Do I?’
‘Anyway, they really like the photos – the magazine, and Al, the guy I was taking the photos of. So now he wants me to go to Milan and take some more photos for a project he’s working on. I guess it’s a career retrospective or something?’
‘Woah.’ Charlie breathed out, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. ‘That’s bloody amazing. Mental but amazing.’
‘I can see how you would get to mental,’ I said, wiggling one big toe and then the other. ‘But I really love taking photos and it turns out I’m good at it.’
‘Are you going to go?’ he asked. ‘To Milan?’
I scrunched up my face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘I want a cup of tea,’ I answered, standing up and walking straight into the kitchen. I knew his flat as well as I knew him and before he had even followed me, I had two cups on the counter, his instant boil kettle bubbling away.
‘You always want a cup of tea,’ Charlie said, opening the fridge and taking out the milk. ‘But do you really want to do it? This photo thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ I couldn’t look at him while I spoke. Why was this so hard? I placed a teabag in each cup and felt my eyes prickle with the tears of an awkward conversation.
‘When do you have to make a decision?’ he asked. This was why he was a great account manager, always on the details. ‘When would you have to go? Do you know how long you’d be away?’
‘Soon,’ I said, splashing my moo juice onto the kitchen top. ‘And I’d be away for a little bit.’
‘And how long is a little bit?’ He put the milk back in the fridge and took his tea. ‘Three days? Four?’
I stirred my tea with a teaspoon that didn’t match any of his other cutlery and watched the milk swirl away into an evenly coloured cuppa.
‘I’m not sure.’
I was lying. I did know. Agent Veronica had sent me several long and detailed emails about the job, each with an increasing degree of foul language. Agent Veronica did not believe in mincing words.
The job would take at least three months, probably more. The rest of July, August, September and some of October. I could easily be away until Christmas. Stood there in Charlie’s kitchen in my pants, holding a hot cup of tea, everything seemed to slow down to a complete standstill and I couldn’t quite seem to find the right words to tell him that. So I didn’t tell him anything. It was a serious problem I appeared to have developed.
‘Sounds like an amazing opportunity,’ Charlie said, heaping mounds of white sugar into his mug. I wasn’t allowed to put sugar in Charlie’s tea, I never added enough. ‘I mean, you never went travelling or anything after uni. It might be fun.’
‘It’s not just as easy as packing a bag and getting on a plane.’ I breathed in and felt the world shift back to a normal speed, rattling off the excuses I’d been telling myself, every time the tiniest buzz of excitement swelled up in my stomach. ‘I don’t have anywhere to live, I don’t have any money, I don’t even have a camera. And yes, the pictures from Hawaii worked out but this is a much bigger deal. It’s not a fun thing, it’s a proper job that a real photographer would kill for. I honestly don’t know if I’m up to it.’
‘You, Tess Brookes, are up to anything you put your mind to,’ Charlie said, his dark brown eyes clear and resolute. ‘You know that. Or at least I know that. How many times do I have to tell you?’
I looked up at him with a half-smile hidden behind my mug. Of course, he had to go and remind me that he wasn’t just a great shag and my lifelong crush, but my best friend as well.
‘A camera is easy enough to get, isn’t it? And you haven’t bloody shown me the pictures from Hawaii yet but I don’t believe you would do anything less than a perfect job. You always do.’
‘You mean because I’m OCD?’ I asked.
‘I mean because you work hard and you’re good at whatever you do,’ he said, splashing his tea around his bare feet. ‘As for the not-having-anywhere-to-live thing – you could always stay here.’
‘I’m not a very good roommate, as I’m sure Amy would tell you,’ I said, tearing off some kitchen towel and wiping up his mess, vaguely impressed in the back of my mind that he actually had kitchen towel. ‘And really, your spare room isn’t big enough to swing a cat. Plus you’ve got a surfboard in it. When was the last time you surfed?’
‘I didn’t mean move in as a roommate,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t want you in the spare room.’
I stood up slowly, clutching the grubby kitchen towel. His floors needed cleaning. ‘What?’
‘How’s your tea?’ he asked.
Leaning against his kitchen cabinets, resplendent in a creased-to-buggery boy’s T-shirt, with bird’s nest hair and a handful of dirty paper towel, I searched for the right words. Charlie crossed his legs, leaning against the fridge in an impressively casual display.
‘Did you just ask me to move in with you, in a non-roommate capacity?’ I asked, scrunching the paper towel into a tiny ball in my fist. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’d say “I know it seems a bit quick” but it doesn’t.’ He put his tea down and took the paper towel out of my hand before throwing it at the bin. And missing. ‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this and it was two weeks too many. I know how I feel about you. You’re my best mate and I reckon last night proved the amazing sex wasn’t just a one off, so why mess about?’
‘I can think of a few reasons,’ I replied. Actually, I couldn’t. I could only think of one but this really didn’t seem like the time to tell him I’d been shagging someone else the whole time I was in Hawaii, especially since he’d apparently been sitting on his arse in London, doing some pretty epic soul-searching. ‘It … it is a bit quick, Charlie. I feel a bit bleurgh about everything.’
‘Bleurgh?’ He looked understandably deflated.
‘Overwhelmed,’ I clarified. ‘Confused.’
‘So this wouldn’t be the right time to tell you I’ve accepted a pitch for our agency, then?’ he asked, wincing.
‘But we haven’t got an agency?’ I said. ‘What have you done?’
‘Don’t be mad at me.’ He held his hands out to defend himself against whatever puny attack he thought I might launch and grabbed a sneakily hidden copy of Marketing Week from the top of the microwave. ‘But I saw Perito’s were looking for a new agency and one of the blokes in their marketing department is on my football team and I knew you’d come up with an amazing campaign, so I asked him if we could pitch. And he said yes, because he totally loves your work.’
‘He loves my work?’ my ego asked on my behalf.
‘He was totally obsessed with you,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Knew loads of your campaigns.’
‘So just like that? We’ve got a pitch?’ I wondered if there was any wine left. Tea clearly was not strong enough for this conversation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But …’
‘But?’
‘He needs to see the pitch by next Friday because they’re seeing agencies the following Monday. And we’re going to be one of those agencies.’
‘That’s not even a week!’ I loved stating the obvious. ‘We would have to come up with an entire marketing campaign, just me and you, by next week?’
‘Yeah, but Tess, Perito’s Chicken as our first account? Our own agency?’ Charlie looked so excited. I recognized the enthusiasm; I used to share it. ‘How amazing would that be?’
Worryingly, if anyone had asked me that question two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to describe how amazing it would be. I’d have been like a pig in peri peri sauce.
Charlie Wilder was asking me to move in with him. Charlie Wilder was asking me to pitch an advertising campaign for a Portuguese chicken cook-in sauce. Charlie Wilder was asking me to start a brand new advertising agency with him. But no, I had to go off to Hawaii on a voyage of pissing self-discovery and meet a tosspot of a man who would be rolling around on the floor, sides positively splitting, at the sound of any of this.
‘And it isn’t just Perito’s.’ Charlie was still talking, still trying to win me round. ‘I talked to some of our old accounts and they’re interested. Squiggles’ Kitchen Towels wants to come with us.’
At least that explained why he had so much kitchen towel.
‘And there’s Brookes & Bryan, the jewellers we just signed; they’re up for it too. And I reckon I can totally get Noodle Pots. You’re the best creative director there is, Tess, and I can’t do this without you. They all want you, not some knobhead account manager. I need you.’
Charlie took a step towards me and reached out to run a hand through my hair.
‘Tell me you’re not just the littlest bit interested?’ he said, his hand getting stuck somewhere around my ear.
I shivered, trying to separate out my feelings of professional pride and sexual desire. I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. It was a bit disconcerting.
‘I’ve got to go to my meeting,’ I said in a weak voice. ‘Can we talk about this later?’
Sensing defeat, Charlie stopped. Part of me was so disappointed that he hadn’t grabbed hold of my hair, bent me over the oven and shagged me senseless until I agreed to all of his demands; but the part of me that got up at seven every morning, got dressed and went about her daily business in a sensible fashion, respected him for giving me the time and space to make a considered decision. After all, this was sweet, loving Charlie we were talking about, not filthy, tosspot Nick.
Not that I was thinking about Nick.
‘Tess-motherfucking-Brookes!’
Agent Veronica stood up, put out her fag and grabbed me for a stale, non-optional hug as soon as I set foot in her office.
‘Sit your arse down. Cup of tea? Cup of tea.’ She strode over to the door and coughed delicately. ‘Two cups of fucking tea when you’re ready, if it’s not too much fucking trouble?’
Slamming the door behind her, she shook her head and sat back down behind her desk. ‘Can’t get the staff,’ she lamented. ‘Now, do I need to slap some sense into you or have you just come to confirm your flights?’
Veronica, it was fair to say, was something of an imposing woman. Very blonde with very red lipstick and an ever-present fug of cigarette smoke that tended to knock the breath out of your lungs before you had a chance to get a word in edgeways. Not that you ever really had a chance to get a word in edgeways. She stubbed out a crimson-ringed dog-end with matching pointy nails and sat back in her seat. Perched on the edge of my chair, my bag safely on my knee, I waited for her to say something. It never hurt to put a potential weapon between Veronica and your vital organs.
Given that she hadn’t spoken in four seconds, I took it that I was safe to begin.
‘Well—’
‘I don’t want to hear “well”!’ she shouted, slapping her desk with her hand and grabbing a fresh pack of Silk Cut out of her drawer. ‘I want to hear, “sorry I’ve been such an ungrateful shithead all week, Veronica. You’re amazing, Veronica. When does my flight to Milan leave, Veronica?”’
‘I’ve had a lot of thinking to do,’ I protested as she savaged the plastic film around the cigarettes.
‘Wandering around in the rain? Staring out over the river and wondering “What if?”’ she asked. ‘Fuck that. You’re leaving on Sunday.’
‘It hasn’t rained this week …’ I muttered, confused. Then realized what she had said. ‘What?’
‘Sunday, you leave on Sunday.’ Veronica took care to enunciate each word very carefully, as though I were simple or slow. I was fairly certain she believed I was both. ‘You start work on Monday, so it seemed like a good idea to get you on a flight on Sunday. You comprende?’
‘I can’t leave on Sunday,’ I said, holding my bag closer into my body. ‘That’s in two days. I’m not ready.’
‘So what are you doing sat there like a bastard lemon then?’ she asked. ‘Go home, wash your fucking hair, pack a fucking bag, find your fucking passport. You’re going.’
‘Veronica …’ I started, reaching a hand up to touch my hair. ‘I can’t just up and leave on Sunday for three months.’
‘Why? You haven’t got a job, have you? You haven’t got anywhere to live …’ She paused to light up again, either oblivious or unconcerned by the laws about smoking in the workplace. I assumed the latter. ‘From what I’ve heard, you’re lucky you’re not having this conversation with me in a fetching orange onesie. Thank God they didn’t send you down, girl. Some butch bitch’d be wearing you like a glove puppet inside half an hour.’
‘Who told you …? You know what, never mind.’ I blinked, trying to erase the terrifying image she had just planted indelibly in my mind. ‘It’s still a lot. To go off to Italy for three months in two days. I can’t even speak Italian.’
‘They all speak English,’ she said, dismissing my fears with a sweep of her ignited arm.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Well, no, but if they don’t speak it, I doubt very much that they’ve got anything fucking interesting to say anyway.’ She pointed at me, making stabbing motions with her lit cigarette on every word. ‘You. Are. Going. To. Milan. On. Sunday.’
‘I can’t go for three months,’ I replied, my head full of Charlie’s morning erection and Perito’s spicy chicken. Not together though, eww. ‘I can’t.’
With a loud, fragrant sigh, Veronica leaned back in her chair and fixed me with a narrow-eyed stare as her assistant shuffled through the door and placed two cups of tea on the desk with a barely smothered cough.
‘You know you’re not supposed to smoke in the workplace, don’t you?’ I asked, chugging my tea so there would be one less hot thing for her to throw at me.
‘I eat here, I sleep here, I shit, shower and shag here.’ Veronica ground the half-smoked cig into her ashtray, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the desk with her blood-red talons. ‘Can’t imagine anyone’s going to tell me to put my fag out. Unless it’s bothering you?’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I find it quite comforting.’
‘Your parents smoke?’
‘No,’ I replied, feeling the fear of God in my gut. ‘Just, you don’t see it enough these days, do you?’
She sat back again, reaching behind her and shoving the window open. It wasn’t until I heard the amplified buzz of traffic outside that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Sweet Baby Jesus in the manger.
‘So you don’t want to go to Italy for three months?’ she asked, clicking her mouse a couple of times and looking over at the screen of her Mac.
Thank God, we were back to business.
‘Three months is so long. A lot can happen in three months,’ I said.
‘Oh, are you expecting some other fashion icon to appear from the heavens and offer you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?’ she asked, her hands clasped together in prayer.
‘I don’t want to agree to three months,’ I replied, as staunchly as possible. Playing hardball had never been my thing. Actually, playing any kind of ball had never been my thing, euphemistically or otherwise.
‘I’ll tell them you’ll go for a week, do a recce and then make a decision,’ she said. ‘And if that decision is anything other than “thanks for giving me this opportunity, Mr Bennett, now may I kiss your arse?” I’ll have you fucking killed.’
A week. I felt relief roll off my shoulders. I could do a week. I’d know how I felt in a week. Probably.
‘Thank you,’ I said, visions of Roman Holiday and big plates of pasta suddenly rushing through my head. Everything I’d held at bay until now crashed over me on one big Italiano-gasm. I was going to Milan.
‘That would be amazing. It’s just that I’ve got other stuff, maybe. I don’t want to commit to something I might not be able to do.’
Veronica’s head snapped round towards me so quickly, her hair almost moved. ‘You know I’m your agent? You can’t book a job without me because then I’d have to fucking kill you and I hate having to sort that out. Right pain in the tits.’
‘It’s not a photography job, it’s advertising,’ I said quickly, preparing for a slap. ‘Like I was doing before.’
‘Can you see me right now, Tess Brookes?’ Veronica pushed her massive leather chair over to the wall behind her and began knocking her head against the wallpaper harder than I could imagine was comfortable. ‘This is me, banging my head against a brick wall. And why do you think I’m doing that?’
‘Is it because I’m a fucking idiot?’
I thought it was worth a guess.
‘Ding ding ding!’ She waved her arms above her head like Kermit the Frog and thankfully stopped bashing her head against the wall. ‘You’re a fucking idiot. This is a chance that will never come around again. You are a twenty-eight-year-old untested, unproven, rookie photographer. You ought to be spending the next five years trekking around shit weddings in Bracknell, taking pictures over dinner because the main photographer can’t be arsed.’
It was a fair point.
‘At best, you’d be looking the other way while some big-shit fashion photographer got a blow job from some underage model while you changed the flash and spent so long holding up reflectors that you had a right bicep bigger than a world champion wanker.’
Again, not untrue.
‘Am I getting through to you? Shall we just go over what exactly is on the fucking table here?’
I didn’t feel like we especially needed to but I didn’t think it would be in my best interests to tell her no and so I went with a noncommittal half-shrug and made an awkward mewing noise in the back of my throat. Veronica sat forward and held out her hand, ticking off each of her points with so much force, I was worried she was going to break off her own fingers.
‘One first-class fucking trip to Italy, a base in Bertie-cocking-Bennett’s private apartments in Milan, a job working personally with Bennett himself that a million other photographers would happily bum a goat to get, and a proposed fee that is twice what I would have even attempted to get for you – and I, Tess Brookes, am a fucking ballbreaker when it comes to fees. So what, pray tell, is your opportunity? Because if it’s anything other than Jesus-fucking-Christ asking you to rebrand his bell-end, I’m afraid I’m not going to understand.’
I bit my lip and pulled my handbag closer to my chest.
‘Do you know Perito’s Portuguese Chicken?’
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_6bdcee52-57de-592e-b138-5e6079bcaae3)
According to a hastily scribbled note on the back of a Domino’s Pizza napkin, Amy was out at a job interview when I got back to the house and where her other five flatmates were, I didn’t care to know. Seizing my chance, I grabbed a semi-clean towel from Amy’s radiator and ran into the bathroom, locking the door. Sharing a bathroom with six other people, even temporarily, was enough to do terrible things to your sanity.
‘What am I going to do about Charlie?’ I asked my liberated rubber duck, who had insisted on accompanying me into the shower as I turned on the blessed hot water. ‘I do want to go to Milan but I really want to try for the pitch too.’
‘Can’t have it all,’ he replied with a silent quack. ‘But shouldn’t you try to clear your messes up here before you go gallivanting off to Italy? Are you moving in with Charlie? Why haven’t you called your mum? And how long has it been since you shaved your legs?’
‘I don’t think me or Charlie are ready to move in,’ I said, wondering whether or not that was actually true. It was only now that I realized how long it had been since I’d shaved my legs and he hadn’t complained about them once. ‘And my mum hasn’t called me, has she?’
It was fair to say my mother and I hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms the last time I’d been to visit.
‘You need to call her and you know it,’ the duck said.
Annoyingly, he was right. She might be a passive-aggressive pain in the arse but she was my passive-aggressive pain in the arse and the fact that we hadn’t spoken since our argument was starting to weigh on me.
‘And of course,’ Rubber Ducky wasn’t finished with his truth bombs, ‘you’re still thinking about Nick. Even though he hasn’t called you back.’
‘I am not!’ I snapped before realizing I was lying, not only to a rubber duck but also to myself. ‘But so what if I am? He told me to call and now he won’t speak to me. What if something has happened to him?’
‘Is that what you’re telling yourself now?’ he asked.
‘Fuck off.’
The ‘he must have died or he would have called’ rationale. Keeping single women delusional since the invention of the telephone.
‘I just don’t understand why he would ask me to call him and then not call me back.’
‘Could always move in here,’ Rubber Ducky suggested, changing the subject. ‘There’ll be a free room at the end of the month.’
‘I can’t live here.’ I shuddered at the thought as the water began to cool without me touching the thermostat. With still unshaven legs, I conceded defeat and turned off the shower. ‘No one should have to live here. Amy should have moved out years ago.’
‘I’m not arguing with that,’ he said. ‘This bathroom is disgusting. You’re going to have to make a decision about something and soon. I’m not showering in here again.’
Wrapped in my not-really-big-enough towel, I opened the bathroom door, trying to keep my vagina covered, and gave the rubber duck my best side eye.
‘Duly noted,’ I replied. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Hello?’
Somewhere on Parsons Green high street, en route to meet Paige on a shoot, I found the courage to call my mother. But my mother didn’t answer. Even though their voices were almost identical, I knew at once it was my younger sister, the eternally put-upon middle child, Mel.
‘All right,’ I said with a cough. ‘It’s Tess.’
‘Well.’
The ability to put that much weight behind that one word was a skill she had learned from our mother. I only got the boobs and the hair; Mel had inherited the whole passive-aggressive package.
‘Is Mum there?’ I was trying to keep my voice light in the hope that they had all forgotten me storming out of the house two weeks ago. Of course, it would have made more sense to hope I would bear witness to the second coming of Jesus but still, it was nice to be an optimist.
‘She is.’ She quickly switched to a yell that was entirely unnecessary given the size of my mother’s house. ‘Mum! It’s Tess!’
‘And what does Tess want?’ I heard Mum yell back.
‘She wants to know what you want,’ Mel relayed faithfully.
‘Can I just speak to her, please?’ I asked. My tolerance levels were dropping with every passing second. ‘It’ll be quicker.’
‘I’m very well, thanks for asking,’ she said. I had not caught my favourite sister in a good mood. ‘She says she wants to speak to you!’
‘Maybe I don’t want to speak to her,’ Mum replied, sounding very pleased with herself. ‘I haven’t forgotten what she said when she walked out of this house.’
‘She says—’
‘I heard what she bloody said.’ I cut Mel off before she could finish, wondering whether it wouldn’t be easier to just throw myself off the Westway and hope a passing bus was there to finish me off. ‘And I haven’t forgotten. I’m sorry for losing my temper and I shouldn’t have walked out without explaining what was going on but I was upset.’
‘She says she’s really sorry and she shouldn’t have walked out.’
‘That’s not exactly what I said, is it? Put her on the bloody phone, Mel.’
‘Don’t swear at your sister,’ my mum said, finally on the line without an interpreter. ‘You’re not in the position to be calling my house and being all high and mighty.’
I closed my eyes and rubbed the spot in the middle of my forehead that felt a tiny bit like it might actually explode. Still, better an aneurysm than an apology – that was the Brookes motto. Or at least it should be.
‘I wasn’t swearing at my sister—’
‘Yes, you were. I’ve got ears, you know.’
Breathe, Tess, breathe.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I corrected myself. ‘How are you?’
‘As if you’re bothered,’ Mum huffed audibly down the phone. ‘After that scene you caused.’
The scene she was referring to wasn’t so much ‘a scene I had caused’ as a scene caused by my sisters hanging me out to dry by telling my mother I had lost my job at Donovan & Dunning, at which point she had chucked a glass of red wine across the room and got into a screaming row with Amy. In the middle of a christening. Amy had of course diffused the situation by climbing onto a table and holding the baby aloft while singing The Circle of Life. Amy was wonderful.
‘And you’re the one who walked out and said you were never coming back.’
It was good to know she’d run everything through her own filter and come up with her own version of events. History was written by the winner. The winners and their mums.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as calmly as possible. There was no point in getting into another row; the only thing that would work here was blanket apologies. ‘I didn’t mean it. I was being stupid.’
‘Yes, you were.’ Clearly not enough apologies yet. ‘You sounded like you were off your head. Charlie says you’re not doing the heroin, though.’
And if Charlie said so, it must be true. The only person who had had a bigger crush on Charlie for the last decade was my mum. Mostly, it only manifested itself in overly maternal smothering when he went with me to visit, but I always felt a bit bad for my stepdad whenever she started pawing my best friend. Poor, lovely Brian. Patience of a saint, that man has.
‘I’m not doing heroin, I was just made redundant,’ I explained, the words still sticking in my throat. Me. Redundant. Bleurgh. ‘And it wasn’t only me, the whole company went under, so it wasn’t anything I did.’
‘There’s no need to be defensive,’ Mum sniffed. ‘No one said it was your fault.’
Another historical revision: that was exactly what she had said. Loudly, while throwing wine glasses around at a christening.
‘Hang on, if the company has gone under, what is Charlie doing?’
Deep, cleansing breaths.
‘Charlie is fine, Mum,’ I said. She was practically hyperventilating on the end of the line. ‘He’s setting up his own agency. We’re actually talking about doing it together.’
‘Oh, Tess!’ And just like that, her tone of voice altered completely. ‘Your own business? With Charlie? Well, that sounds like a very good idea. Would he be your boss, then?’
‘No, Mum, we’d be partners,’ I said as calmly as possible. Why had I called her again? Was I worried that my inevitable stroke wasn’t coming on quick enough? ‘He would run the client side and I would do the creative.’
‘I’m sure Charlie knows what he’s doing,’ she said, entirely turned around. ‘Mel, have you heard this? Charlie is starting his own advertising agency and giving Tess a job. She’s going to be the head of his creative.’
I heard some approving, disinterested noises in the background and decided it was time to wrap things up while I was, relatively speaking, ahead.
‘OK, that’s really all I called for,’ I started. ‘To say sorry and—’
‘You should both come for Sunday dinner,’ Mum declared, cutting me off mid-escape. ‘You should drive up and tell me all about it.’
‘I can’t Sunday.’ Oh, there was that throbbing in the forehead again. I stopped short on the edge of the pavement to let the number 85 bus go by.
‘And why not?’ she asked.
‘I won’t be here,’ I said, wondering whether or not throwing myself under the number 85 bus might not have been a bit easier than having this conversation.
‘Not here? What does that mean?’
Don’t tell her about Milan, don’t tell her about Milan, don’t tell her about Milan …
‘I’m going to Milan.’
Oh, fuck me.
‘What are you going to Milan for?’ Mum shrieked so loudly that even the nice old lady coming out of Costa could hear her. ‘You haven’t got time to be gallivanting around on holiday when Charlie’s trying to start a business.’
‘I’m actually going for work,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to work out how to phrase this. ‘I’m taking some photos for someone.’
‘What have I told you about this photography nonsense, Tess?’ she said after one too many moments of silence. ‘You don’t let a hobby get in the way of a career. We had this conversation a long time ago.’
In truth, there had never really been much of a conversation. I had loved taking pictures when I was growing up – it was one of the few things I had shared with my dad before he left us to have another go at starting a family – and I’d begged my mum to buy me a camera of my own when I turned eighteen. But whenever she found me poring over photography books, or looking at my pictures, she would pop up with a snide comment or a stark reminder of how hard it was to make it in a creative field, that a proper job was much more secure and the right thing to do. I’d believed her, of course, and put my camera to one side to concentrate on my marketing degree, but the passion had always been there. Maybe it was buried deep under PowerPoint presentations and the desire for a company pension, but it was there.
‘And they’re paying you to take photos, are they?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, hoping for another number 85 bus.
‘With what, magic beans?’
‘Honestly, Mum, it’s a long story.’ At least she couldn’t accuse me of lying on that one. ‘And I really have to go now but I’ll call you later and tell you all about it, yeah?’
As if it was going to be that easy.
‘I’ve got to say, I think you’re making a very big mistake. Charlie’s offering you a job on a plate and you want to fanny off to Italy and take photos. Italy!’
She applied the same emphasis to ‘take photos’ as someone else’s mum might to ‘sacrifice virgins’.
‘But if you want to waste your time on silly adventures, you go ahead and do it,’ she said with a cluck, apparently done with the conversation. ‘Give my love to Charlie.’
As if it was going to be that easy.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_73c825cd-21fa-5820-b21b-a8dfd0b59bff)
‘I’m glad you’ve been keeping busy,’ Paige said, completely ignoring the four half-naked men to her left, after I brought her up to speed on my current predicament. ‘You can’t help but get into trouble, can you?’
‘You know me,’ I replied, staring at the four half-naked men to Paige’s left. ‘I like to keep myself occupied.’
‘What was it like, getting arrested?’ she asked. ‘Did you have to wear an orange onesie? Orange would look terrible on you.’
I nodded, not entirely sure what I was agreeing about while four of the most handsome men I had ever seen, all wearing black eye masks and very little else, hoisted one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen high above their heads. I gazed at the photographer’s big, beautiful Nikon camera with so much envy, I thought that it might fly up into the air and land in my hands. It didn’t.
‘You know, this is incredibly distracting,’ I said, turning fully in my chair to peer over the mezzanine onto the set below. We were in a very fancy studio on a very fancy street in a very fancy area and I was terrified of touching anything.‘How do you ever get any work done?’
‘This, my love, is work,’ Paige said, curving her scarlet lips into a very happy smile. ‘I’m the art director. I’m directing the art.’
I nodded, resting my chin on the balcony and trying not to gawp. Paige worked for Gloss magazine, coming up with the ideas for photoshoots and executing the creative. We had met in Hawaii and, after a few teething problems, she had come to my rescue more than once and, as everyone knows, a friendship forged in the fires of adversity is as strong as one that has weathered the test of time. Or something. One of the models caught me staring and flexed his pecs while flashing me a grin. This was the best reason I had come up with to get into fashion photography so far.
‘What are they doing exactly?’
‘It’s a lingerie shoot for the October issue,’ she explained. ‘Halloween vibe – hence the masks. But given that most women will never look like that girl in just their knickers, I thought it might soften the blow to chuck in something easy on the eye.’
‘Or four somethings,’ I clarified. ‘Are they their actual abs? They’re not drawn on or anything?’
‘You know, sometimes the photographer casts the models,’ she said. ‘And that photographer could be you.’
I gulped.
‘Look, only you know what you really want to do,’ Paige said, slapping me gently on the arm. ‘I really haven’t known you that long and I’ve only seen you as a photographer so I can only comment on that; and my comment is, you’ve got a raw talent not many people have. If it’s something you really want to pursue, now is the time. There won’t be many more opportunities like this. Make the most of it.’
I tried to make myself look away from the orgy of muscles and hair gel below and concentrate, my heart thrumming at the words ‘raw talent’.
‘I know it looks obvious from the outside,’ I said, playing with the hem of my stripy T-shirt. ‘But I really do love advertising. Maybe it doesn’t sound as sexy and exciting as being a photographer, but it is to me. It’s not like I was looking for something to save me from the dark, depressing days of a real job. Starting my own agency was something I used to dream about and let’s be real, it’s a more sensible option than starting out as a photographer at twenty-eight; it’s definitely more secure.’
Paige nodded slowly. ‘Starting out in the business isn’t easy,’ she admitted. ‘I’d hire you though.’
’Thanks,’ I said with a smile.
‘You’d be cheap,’ she added.
‘Thanks,’ I said without a smile.
‘So, only you can answer the question.’ Paige shrugged her shoulders, sending her long curtain of blonde hair cascading down her back. I made a mental note to ask her which conditioner she used before I left. And then to scalp her. ‘Is it going to be photography or advertising?’
‘That’s not really the question though, is it?’ Amy barrelled up the stairs behind me and blew into Paige with a hug so aggressive, anyone would have been forgiven for thinking she hadn’t seen her in ten years. It had been three days. And that was the first time they had ever met. Five seconds later, she dropped Paige in a heap and hurled herself across the sofa to treat me to the same hello.
‘You got my text then?’ I choked when she finally let me go. Amy nodded, her black hair glossy under the studio lights and her polka-dot shorts riding up dangerously high as she leapt up and threw herself towards the mezzanine railings.
‘Fuck me,’ She spun around to face us and pointed down at the shoot below. ‘I’ll take the blond. Or the brunette.’
‘Which one?’ Paige asked.
‘I don’t care,’ Amy replied. ‘This is amazing.’
‘Didn’t you have a job interview today?’ I asked. ‘How did it go?’
‘Shit,’ she said, pinching the tight skin above her exposed belly button. ‘It was for TopShop. They wanted me to work weekends. And they kept asking me whether or not I thought I was reliable and professional.’
‘Well, yeah, I think most Topshops are open on the weekend.’ I didn’t bother to ask if that was what she had worn to the interview because I already knew that it was. But what did I know? Maybe nothing said ‘please give me a job in fashion retail’ more than denim polka-dot shorts and a cropped pink T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘It’s not me, it’s you’. I think you’re reliable and professional.’
It was a lie. I thought she was reliable when it came to turning up on my doorstep with a bag full of Galaxy and three bottles of wine, but I thought she was horribly unreliable and, if possible, even more unprofessional when it came to keeping a job. And mostly I thought that because it was true. In and out of retail jobs, a brief flirtation with teacher training and a puppy love infatuation with the idea of becoming a twenty-first century Avon lady, Amy had a commitment problem when it came to work. And men. And everything else on earth.
However, that didn’t seem like a helpful opinion in that moment so I kept my mouth shut and smiled. Amy gave me a cheerful grin in return and slipped her arm through mine. Ours was a long-term love affair. We’d been friends since before we could talk and some days I wished we could go back to those times. Like now.
‘That is very good to know,’ she said with a big grin. ‘Because I’ve been thinking. You clearly can’t work out whether to shit or wind your watch without help so I’m coming to Milan with you.’
‘No you aren’t,’ I said, stunned.
‘I am,’ she corrected. ‘I’m going to be your assistant. Like that lady down there.’
I peered over the balcony and saw an exhausted, harangued-looking girl rubbing oil into one of the model’s chests.
‘You might actually need an assistant,’ Paige said, shrugging. ‘And god knows, you do need a life coach. Like, all the time.’
‘And that’s what I’m here for.’ Amy spread out her arms with a flourish. ‘I can fetch, carry and make sure you don’t ruin your life, all at the same time.’
‘Amy, I—’
‘I’m a great multitasker,’ she added, nodding at Paige.
I sat and stared at my best friend, clicking the tips of my bitten-down fingernails together.
‘Tess …’ Amy reached across the sofa and took both my hands in hers. ‘It’s going to be awesome.’
Why did her words sound more like a threat than a promise?
‘I’ll have to clear it with my agent,’ I muttered, accepting defeat far too easily. I’d never been able to say no to Amy. It was like denying a pitbull puppy a treat. So little and cute, you couldn’t bear to turn it down and you kind of knew that if you did, it would rip your hand off and take it anyway.
‘Now, are we still pretending to talk about work? Is this yours?’ she asked me, letting go of my hands and reaching over to grab a full-to-the-brim glass of white wine from the coffee table. ‘Amazing, thank you.’
‘What else would we be talking about?’ Paige asked, straightening her pink silk top and grabbing her own wine to get it out of Amy’s reach. It was nice to see the new friends had at least one thing in common: getting hammered in the middle of a work day.
‘Nothing,’ I replied as fast as I could, quietly glad that Amy had taken away my wine. I was not a good drinker. ‘One hundred per cent work talk only.’
‘If you really want to go for the advertising job as much as you say you do, maybe you should go for it.’ Paige casually glanced over at the shirtless men, flickered an eyebrow and shook her head. ‘Photography won’t be the easy option.’
‘Yeah, and maybe you could even go from working six days a week to the full seven?’ Amy replied. ‘I’m sure it would only freak you out to have to spend your birthday with your friends instead of in the office. Or Christmas. Or New Year.’
‘You work over Christmas?’ Paige looked horrified. Then took a drink. Then looked horrified again.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Amy said, waving her hands and her wine around in the air. ‘Tess isn’t normal. Tess is a martyr. She’s happiest when she’s miserable.’
Paige nodded. ‘That explains why she went for Nick.’
‘I’m happiest when I’m busy,’ I said before Amy could pounce on the mention of his name. ‘There’s a difference.’
For the want of a better plan, I picked up an empty glass and poured in a couple of slugs of wine. I was not a big drinker for good reason. More than three drinks and I could not be held responsible for my actions. More than four and I couldn’t remember them anyway. But this definitely felt like a legitimate wine-to-the-rescue moment. Amy took hold of my wrist, raising the glass to my mouth, and I drank obediently, disappointed in my appalling lack of willpower.
‘How do you feel right now?’ Paige asked. ‘If you had to make the decision right now, pick one and never do the other ever again, which would it be?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing I didn’t see Nick and Charlie in my head when she asked that question. ‘I had a plan, you know? I knew where I was going and I knew what I wanted. And now it’s like, boom! decision time. But if I make the wrong decision, what happens then? I’m buggered. Completely buggered and miserable and I die alone with seventeen cats all called Steve. It’s too hard.’
‘Have I missed something? How does picking the wrong job leave you as a crazy cat lady?’ Paige looked swiftly from me to Amy and back again. ‘Were you drinking before you got here?’
‘She’s not drunk,’ Amy said, patting my hand as though I was a deranged nana. ‘She’s just not really thinking about the jobs, are you?’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ Paige rolled her eyes. ‘And we were doing so well at avoiding the subject of cock. OK. Hang on a sec, I just need to set up this last shot and then we can get trashed and talk about this properly.’
Trashed? I looked at my watch. It was barely even three o’clock.
Amy looked at me with a ‘well?’ expression, an already empty wine glass in her hand. I genuinely didn’t know where she put it; the woman was miniscule and drank more than Lindsay Lohan on the average Thursday.
‘What?’ I picked up my glass and gave my wine one more sip. ‘Spit it out.’
‘Have you explained it all to Charlie?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Have you heard from the other one?’
‘No.’
Just then, my text message alert sounded loudly in the bottom of my handbag and every internal organ jumped. Even my spleen wanted to know who was it was from. It was Charlie.
One by one, my organs settled back into their usual positions, consoling each other on their way down. I didn’t know why I was surprised. Nick wasn’t going to call. Nick wasn’t going to call. Nick wasn’t going to call. And no matter how many times I told myself that, it did not feel any better.
‘Speak of the devil,’ I said, my voice unexpectedly scratchy. ‘Charlie wants to know where we are.’
‘Tell him to fuck the fuck off, we’re talking about him, not to him,’ Amy replied. ‘You thought it was Nick, didn’t you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said for the millionth time, tapping out a quick message to Charlie. ‘Everything is fine.’
‘So,’ Paige reappeared at the top of the stairs with her hands on her annoyingly slim hips, ‘can we please get to the bottom of this?’
‘Yes please.’ Amy cocked her head to one side and squinted at me. ‘But we’ve been going too easy on her. Tess, quick-fire decision time: Charlie or Nick?’
‘There is no decision to make.’ I could hear my voice rising along with my blood pressure as I spoke every syllable. ‘You know we’re not talking about him.’
‘The name Nick is verboten,’ Amy explained to Paige. ‘I’m not allowed to mention him, even though she’s been checking her phone to see if he’s called every other second since Monday night.’
‘Well, I haven’t agreed to that,’ Paige replied. ‘So she’s going to have to talk about it, isn’t she?’
‘Can I have another drink, please?’ I asked, holding out my suddenly empty glass.
‘What do you want?’ She reached over to the small fridge beside her. ‘Wine, champagne, beer, Pimm’s in a can – ick – or I think there’s some vodka in the freezer? I bet one of the models is holding, if you want anything else.’
‘Holding what?’ I asked.
‘Bless her, she’s very naïve,’ Amy said, rolling off the settee and crawling into the fridge to grab the other bottle of white. ‘So, Nick or Charlie? If you had to marry one and throw the other off the side of a boat?’
‘Why are we having this conversation when there is no Nick in the equation?’ I asked. I hated myself for it but even saying his name out loud made me want to do a little cry. The sharp ‘k’ sound at the end of his name seemed to hang in the air forever and I felt like I’d been punched. ‘There is only Charlie.’
‘And if this was three weeks ago, you would be jumping up and down and picking out Tiffany engagement rings by now,’ Amy replied. ‘So how come you’re sitting here, drinking Paige’s wine with a face like an arse instead of at Charlie’s, drinking his wine and throwing out all his porn?’
All four of the male models looked up at us with their blank, handsome faces. The female model didn’t even blink.
I blinked. I refilled my glass. I sighed. My daydreams of being in love with Charlie and Charlie being in love with me rarely got as far as domesticity and I felt like a dog that had been chasing a car – I finally had what I’d always wanted and now what was I supposed to do with it?
‘I know I should be stashing my pink toothbrush next to Charlie’s toothbrush and doing a happy dance,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with me.’
‘You’re such a liar.’ Was it just me or did Paige look a little bit annoyed? ‘Just admit it.’
‘I need time to think about things.’ I was not going to say it. ‘Charlie was totally cool about it.’
‘Good for Charlie,’ she replied. ‘I don’t want to be biased or anything, but I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t see any competition. I know Nick is hot and everything but Tess, he’s such a twat.’
‘I know,’ I nodded. There was that sick feeling again. Why did I want to defend him? She was right, after all.
‘And Charlie fucked up, he did, but he’s only a man,’ she went on. ‘Vanessa is hot and we’ve only got to look at Angelina Jolie to know that men have no control over themselves when it comes to hot women. Brad cheated on Jen because of a hot woman. On Jen, Tess, Rachel from Friends. Do you see what I’m saying?’
‘Sort of …’ I frowned.
‘You weren’t together when it happened, you know. You can’t hold this against him forever.’
‘I bet I could,’ Amy said. ‘Charlie’s not good enough for you.’
‘And what’s not good enough?’ I asked, coming over all spikey and defensive on Charlie’s behalf. I was giving myself emotional whiplash. ‘The fact that he’s sweet and caring and funny? That he’s always been there for you and me whenever we’ve really needed him? That he comes home with me so I don’t have to deal with my mum on my own? Shit, the fact that he’s met my mum and still wants to be with me should be reason enough to put a bloody ring on it.’
‘Fine, I’m convinced,’ she replied. ‘After ten years of you giving him the puppy dog eyes, Charlie Wilder is the world’s most amazing man, apart from when he’s being a thoughtless shithead, and has finally woken up and realized that you are the absolute dog’s bollocks and that he wants to make an honest woman out of you, conveniently at the exact time you’re looking elsewhere. He wants what he suddenly might not be able to have. Awesome.’
‘It’s not like that,’ I said, wondering whether or not it might not be a little bit like that.
But Amy wasn’t finished. ‘And regardless of how you feel about Charlie and regardless of how many phone calls or emails you have not received, you cannot sit there and tell me you don’t have feelings for Nick which, at the very least, says something about your feelings for Charlie.’
It was altogether too close to home.
‘What have I told you about using the “N” word?’ I pulled my feet up underneath me, burrowing into the settee.
‘And you can’t keep referring to him as “the N word”,’ she said. ‘People really aren’t going to be OK with that.’
‘What’s happening with him anyway? You called him and he hasn’t called you back?’ Paige was trying to look supportive but I knew it was a strain. After all, she had history with Nick and much more of a history than I did, even if it was a history of rejection.
‘Pretty much.’ I shook my head. ‘But what’s the point anyway? It was a holiday fling. He didn’t even know my real name, for God’s sake. This is real life: Charlie and the agency and chicken cook-in sauces. Maybe that doesn’t seem as glamorous and exciting to everyone as Milan and photoshoots, but it’s exciting to me. And the Charlie thing … It’s throwing me because I’ve wanted this for so long and now maybe I have it. How would that not be confusing? To anyone?’
‘That’s how I felt when I got my first Chanel 2.55 bag,’ Paige nodded with genuine sympathy this time. ‘It was like “can I actually take this out? Can I actually use this?” It’s hard.’
‘You’re both fucking mental.’ Amy was not big on Chanel bags or metaphors. ‘And Tess, I know how long you’ve been in love with that cockwomble, but you’re not the kind of girl who only wants what she can’t have. I should know, because I am. So if you’re not champing at the bit to shack up with Mr Wonderful, there’s a good reason for it and I don’t believe it’s just nerves. I think you’ve got real feelings for Nick and I don’t think you can ignore that.’
‘How can I have real feelings for him?’ I asked, burning up. ‘I only knew him for a week. And he didn’t really know me at all.’
It was a question I’d been asking myself a lot, only Amy and Paige didn’t realize it was rhetorical. I did have feelings for him – big, scary feelings that I didn’t understand and, in all honesty, did not want to. I’d always been so safe and secure in my feelings for Charlie but every time I thought about Nick, my stomach clenched and my hands made tiny fists and I wanted to hit something. Preferably him. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up with nothing but my über-crush on Charlie back the way it was. Everything would be so much simpler.
‘To be fair, you did lie to the man about your entire existence while merrily shagging him senseless,’ Amy said. ‘Even after he bared his soul to you. I might take a few days to call you back for a chat, to be fair.’
‘He bared his soul?’ Paige looked less than impressed. ‘You mean, he pulled out some of his cheesy old lines?’
‘There were cheesy lines in the beginning,’ I admitted, not wanting to come to his defence but entirely incapable of stopping myself, ‘but there was a certain degree of soul-baring after a bit. Maybe not baring, maybe it was more like soul-flashing.’
‘What a knob,’ she breathed, taking a big deep drink of her wine. ‘Him, not you.’
‘It’s starting to feel like it never happened.’ I flipped to the sent messages in my phone and saw his name over and over. I wondered what would give out first, his refusal to reply or my dignity. ‘Every morning when I wake up, it feels more and more like I was never in Hawaii, like he never existed.’
‘Don’t upset yourself over it,’ Paige said, shifting in her seat. ‘I’m sure it was all bullshit. I don’t know if that man is capable of anything other than trying to get into a woman’s pants.’
Paige had known Nick a lot longer than I had and I was fully aware that she had tried very hard to get into his pants, and not the other way around. And that didn’t make this conversation awkward at all.
‘Bottom line is,’ Amy shrugged and emptied her second glass of wine, ‘something is stopping you from moving on with Charlie. Something’s got you stuck. That something is Nick.’
‘Paige, can you come and check these shots?’ the photographer bellowed from the set below. With a very grumpy look on her face, Paige dutifully stood up and marched down the stairs.
‘Shout if the models need oiling. The male models,’ Amy yelled as she went before turning her attention back to me. ‘I know I haven’t been entirely Team Charlie when it comes to you two being together-together but if you tell me this is what you really, really want, I will shut my mouth, buy you a shit housewarming present and never say the “N” word again. But you have to be entirely honest before you get yourself into something you might regret.’
‘You really have got to stop calling him that,’ I sighed.
There it was again. What did I want? ‘I don’t want to ruin everything because of a holiday romance hangover.
‘Life isn’t a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, Amy,’ I said. ‘If I cock this up, I can’t just go back to the end of the last chapter and try something else.’
‘Oh, Tess,’ She smiled and hugged me, squeezing my shoulders tightly. ‘That’s exactly what life is: nothing is set in stone, nothing has already been decided. That’s where you’ve been going wrong all these years.’
‘Am I interrupting something beautiful?’ Charlie’s voice broke through our Kodak moment, making Amy jump and spill my wine before I could drink it. Which was probably best. ‘Don’t let me stop you, I always knew there was something going on with you two.’
‘Didn’t I tell you not to tell him where we were?’ Amy jumped to her feet, kissed him on the cheek and bounced off downstairs to the set. ‘Just because she’d rather be in bed with me than you. No need to be jealous, Wilder.’
‘Amy,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Always a pleasure.’
He clambered onto the settee, all arms and legs and coppery curls, looking like a sexy hipster Bambi man.
‘I see she’s taking this well?’ he said, pulling the strap of his man-bag over his head and setting it carefully on the cushion between us. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ I nodded with too much enthusiasm, not sure what to do. Normally we’d have hugged by now or I’d have taken the piss out of him for his jeans being too skinny or unfastened the second button of his T-shirt because one wasn’t enough and three would be too many. Instead, I put my wine glass down and sat on my hands. ‘You had a busy day?’
‘I played football manager for about three hours and then I remembered outside existed so I went out and got you this.’ He pulled a blue carrier bag out of his messenger bag and handed it to me with a flourish. ‘Sorry it’s not wrapped.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. I bloody loved presents. Surprises not so much, but presents? Yes, please.
‘Open it,’ he said, his smile almost bigger than mine. ‘I hope it’s right.’
Inside the bag was a box and inside that box, was a camera.
‘Oh, Charlie, you didn’t!’ I tore away the packaging as carefully as I could and pulled out a brand-new Canon camera. It was almost identical to my old one, lighter and shinier and with fewer bumps and bruises on the body, but the buttons were all in the same places and she fell into my hands as though I’d known her forever. ‘You can’t have!’
He inched over on the sofa and squeezed my knee, his huge hand covering half my thigh in the process. ‘I can and I did,’ he said in a low voice that made every inch of my skin prickle. ‘And you’re going to go to Milan and take amazing photos of Mr – I forget his first name – Bennett and his clothes and whatever else you want to take amazing photos of and you’re going to be amazing at it.’
‘But the pitch?’ I looked up at him and then at my camera, my beautiful camera; beautiful, beautiful Charlie. ‘It’s only a week away.’
‘Yes it is,’ he said as I reached out to unfasten his second button; I couldn’t look at it for a moment longer. Charlie covered my hand with his and I felt a warmth wash over my entire body. ‘But I don’t want to wake up next to you every morning, not knowing whether or not you’re wondering “what if?” because I know you’d never say anything. So I’m not giving you the chance to regret this. OK?’
Just when you thought you knew everything about someone, they had to go one better.
‘This is amazing,’ I said, cradling the camera in my lap and leaning over to give Charlie the biggest hug I could muster. ‘You’re amazing.’
‘I’m all right,’ he replied. ‘And let’s be honest, I’m just trying to warm you up for later.’
I looked away so he wouldn’t see me blush. We’d always flirted with each other but now I knew I was going to have to follow through, I couldn’t seem to keep the colour out of my cheeks.
‘I talked to my mate at Perito’s this morning,’ he said, squeezing my knee. ‘He’s going over to Portugal with his team on Monday and he asked if we wanted to go along, meet the founders of the company and all that.’
‘But Milan?’ I held my camera tightly. ‘And you hate flying?’
‘I told him you were already otherwise engaged,’ he said, fiddling with his newly opened button. ‘But I said I’d go. Double scotch and some positive thinking and I’ll be OK. It’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s an amazing sign,’ I agreed, a twinge of jealousy in my chest that I wouldn’t get to go along. Not that I didn’t have an adventure of my own to worry about. ‘I’m really excited.’
Admittedly, I didn’t sound that excited but I was somewhat distracted by what was happening below us in the studio.
‘Is there any point in asking what’s going on down there?’ Charlie asked, nodding at the set downstairs.
Amy had done a fine job of making herself useful. I watched as she merrily rubbed moisturizer into the chest of one of the male models, bouncing from foot to foot, while Paige was on all fours on the bed, demonstrating a particularly uncomfortable-looking pose for the female model, who still looked bored. Gorgeous, but bored.
‘There is not,’ I replied, turning my back on it all and looking back down at my lovely camera again. ‘This really is amazing, you know.’
‘Doesn’t really feel like the right time to get all heavy …’ He gestured over to where Amy was now rubbing lotion into the chests of two men at once with her eyes closed. ‘But I wanted you to know I’m serious about this. And that I’m going to do whatever I can do to make you happy. It’s all I can think about, that we should be together. You’re what I care about.’
I still couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. ‘More than Arsenal?’ I asked, doubtful.
‘Let’s not go completely crazy.’ He ran his hand through his already messy hair and grinned. It was so fucking adorable, my heart almost exploded. ‘But getting there, at the very least. So, can we go?’
‘Go?’
‘Home?’ he said, taking the camera out of my hands and slipping it back inside the box. I fought the urge to slap his hands away – given that he had paid for it in the first place I supposed he was allowed to touch it. ‘I’ve cleared out two entire drawers. For you.’
Oh yeah, he’d asked me to move in. And while I hadn’t said no, I hadn’t said yes, either. In fact, if I recalled correctly, I’d said I needed time to think. I rested my hand on the camera box and breathed out slowly, confused by the thought that it might not be a lovely, thoughtful gift but a very expensive pat on the head. Had he just assumed I was going to move in? That I was going to say yes to joining the agency?
‘I said I’d stay with Amy tonight,’ I said. ‘She had a job interview today and it didn’t go very well and she’s stressing out so …’
‘She doesn’t look that stressed,’ Charlie said, disappointment all over his face. ‘Are you sure? I was going to cook for you.’
‘Now I’m definitely sure!’ I took the camera, safely back in its plastic bag, and gripped the handles tightly. My precious camera. My precious, emotionally loaded, symbolic camera. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken. I know I can’t cook for shit,’ he said with a shrug. ‘To be honest, I was hoping you’d take over halfway through anyway.’
‘Because I’m such a domestic goddess?’ I stood when he stood, leaning into a kiss that still felt strange. Lovely, but strange. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Will you though?’ Charlie pulled his Oyster card out of his bag and stuck it in his back pocket. ‘Because I’ve heard that one before.’
‘Odds are good,’ I confirmed. ‘I’d say better than fifty per cent.’
‘OK. Tess?’ He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked back up at me, all pale skin and big eyes and wide, happy mouth.
‘Charlie?’ I sat back down on the settee, happily stroking my camera. I was probably overreacting. He wasn’t trying to force me into a decision I wasn’t ready to make. That wasn’t Charlie at all. He wouldn’t do something like that.
‘I love you.’
My eyebrows shot up so high I assumed they were forever lost in orbit around the earth.
It was hardly the first time the ‘L’ word had left Charlie’s lips and found my ears but this was different. This wasn’t the same as when I brought him an Egg McMuffin because he had a hangover or called him an Addison Lee because he was too lazy to get the night bus from mine. This was a legitimate ‘I Love You’. This was my first ever ‘I Love You’. I had no idea what to do.
‘OK,’ I replied, nodding and trying not to be sick. ‘That’s brilliant.’
Charlie scratched his head and I knew he was waiting for me to say something else but my mind was completely blank. Charlie Wilder had told me he loved me and I had no words. None of them.
‘OK,’ I said again.
And then it was happening again. I felt myself leaving my body and floating up into the corner of the room, watching as I stared blankly at the first man to tell me he loved me.
This is where you’re meant to say ‘I love you too,’ my brain whispered.
And I knew that. I’d been waiting for this moment forever. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I smiled brightly and gave him a double thumbs up.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he echoed, staring at me from the top of the stairs. ‘Brilliant.’
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b0cfd1b2-1e12-5611-9d3f-1518e106ab56)
‘I cannot believe you gave him a thumbs up!’
Out of everything I’d ever done, nothing had tickled Amy quite like this.
‘Double thumbs up,’ I corrected. ‘It was a double thumbs up.’
‘I’d take that if it were me,’ she said, heaving her first enormous suitcase off the luggage carousel at Malpensa airport, barely blinking at the fact it weighed almost as much as she did. Agent Veronica had assented to my bringing her to Milan as my assistant with only four ‘fuck you’s’ and one use of the ‘c’ word. It was as though she was starting to like me. ‘Charlie Wilder finally drops the L bomb and you give him the double thumbs up and say thank you. Thank you!’
‘I didn’t say “thank you”,’ I said, looking for my own sad little bag. A hasty patch-up job with duct tape meant it was very, very recognisable. ‘I said, “brilliant” and I haven’t heard from him since. Now, can we agree to never speak of it again?’
‘What did you expect him to do?’ she asked as she pulled up the suitcase handle and leaned forward, using it as a chin rest. ‘Propose? “Oh, I just told a girl I love her and she said ‘Brilliant’ so I should totes put a ring on it?”’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘And you gave him a double thumbs up,’ Amy stretched her arms over her head and smiled. ‘Good job on getting the camera out of him first.’ The camera. He gave me a camera, told me loved me and I gave him the thumbs up. What a knobhead. ‘You can’t really be surprised that he’s pissed off, can you?’
I shrugged, eyeing my case as it rattled along the conveyor belt towards me. Half the size and a third the weight of Amy’s case; I couldn’t even begin to work out what she had brought with her.
‘No,’ I protested, grabbing my case and wrenching my still-sore shoulder as I pulled it from the belt. ‘Of course not. But I didn’t think he’d be so flippant about the whole thing.’
‘He isn’t being flippant.’ She pushed her hair out of her face and sighed. ‘He’s being hurt. This is what hurt looks like. Isn’t it obvious?’
Honestly, my hurting Charlie was an entirely new concept. I’d spent so long nursing my unrequited crush that the thought that I could actually damage his feelings was a bit of a mind-blower. But she was right.
We’d spoken on Saturday night when I called, determined to make things right between us before I left for Italy. Unlike a certain other man I would not name, Charlie answered his phone when I called it. But similarly to Mr Unmentionable, he wasn’t best pleased with me. I was met with a variety of one-word responses to my every question, and when I finally suggested we get together for dinner as I was leaving for Milan in the morning, he declined, citing prior plans for his mate’s birthday. Since I had been his social secretary forever, I knew it really was Robbo’s birthday, but I also knew when Charlie was pissed off. And above all else, I knew a man would never put the thirty-second birthday of a passing acquaintance above the opportunity for a shag. Not that I was planning to shag him, but clearly my track record of declining a sleepover wasn’t fantastic in these situations. After blowing me off, he switched to the pitch, telling me he was leaving for Portugal on Monday morning and that I should email him my stuff for the pitch so he could work everything up for Friday, then hung up. No ‘have fun’, no mention of us living together, no mention of his declaration of love, no mention of my appalling response to said declaration. He was all business.
As was quite obvious to everyone alive, I was not an expert in men but I was an expert in Charlie. He was clearly furious. The only time he’d been this cold to me in the last decade was when I accidentally washed a pair of his jeans that had tickets to the FA Cup final in the back pocket. That resulted in almost a week of stony silence but he soon came round when he needed help picking a birthday present for his then girlfriend. Suffering the indignity of trying on lingerie that was going to be worn by a woman who was sleeping with the man I believed was the only possible father to my future children felt like more than enough punishment for denying Charlie the opportunity to see Arsenal lose on penalties in extra time.
But knowing he was perfectly justified in his huff didn’t help me. It still felt overwhelming – starting a business, moving in together, the first ‘I Love You’ and a chicken cook-in sauce? Who did he think I was, Beyoncé? I was an organized person who liked a plan, and in my head I had always imagined these things happening in a timely, organized fashion. I’d waited ten years – why did they all have to appear at once?
‘This is good timing,’ I said, wiping away an errant tear that had crept out of nowhere before Amy saw. Stupid eyes. ‘This slows things down. We’ll both be so busy this week, we won’t have time to stew on stuff. And when I get back, it’ll all be OK.’
‘Totally healthy reaction,’ Amy said, shoving her passport in the back pocket of her hot-pink jeans. ‘You’re so on top of this.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ I replied, pulling her passport out of her back pocket without her even noticing and placing it safely into my travel wallet with my passport. ‘I can make my own decisions.’
My suitcase was light to the point of embarrassment, compared to Amy’s gargantuan twosome. All I had packed were comfy jeans, a few T-shirts and shirts and a couple of jumpers in case it got cold at night, even though I had been soundly assured by Agent Veronica that Milan in July would be ‘fucking roasting red hot like the seventh circle of hell’ and that she would rather hang herself by her own ovaries than ‘spend a second in that shithole’. It wasn’t all boring though; I had been to M&S and bought two new packs of pants especially for the trip. It hardly mattered what I wore on my nether regions, since Amy was the only person who was likely to see them and, given my natural tendency to be a never-nude, that tended to be unplanned and against my will anyway.
‘So,’ Amy waved at a driver holding a board showing my name and waited for me to find my feet, ‘what would you do if you turned around and Charlie was stood on one side of the airport and Nick was on the other?’
‘Turn back around and keep walking?’ I said, still breathless. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, they’re not are they?’ I hardly dared move.
‘Well, Charlie isn’t,’ she shrugged. ‘And since you apparently managed to spend a week in playing photographer without taking a single bloody shot of Mr Miller, I don’t know what he looks like, do I?’
‘If you’re going to tell me you haven’t googled him,’ I nodded at the driver as we trotted towards him, overly excited to see my own name badly written in wonky black marker, ‘I’m going to call you a liar.’
‘Do you have any idea how many Nick Millers there are in the world?’ Amy said. ‘Not including a character in a very popular sitcom?’
‘A few?’
Secretly, I was pleased that she’d had a hard time finding him. If Amy had got so much as a peek at Nick, we wouldn’t be in Milan right now. We’d be wherever in the world he might be so she could hunt him down and force us down the aisle with a shotgun.
‘You’re a pain in my arse, Brookes,’ she muttered. ‘I never tell you a story without visual aids.’
‘Yeah, and if you could stop texting me pictures of your one-night stands while they’re sleeping, that would be brilliant,’ I replied.
With a big wide smile, Amy turned and gave me a double thumbs up.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s brilliant.’
‘Remind me again why I brought you with me?’ I asked my alleged best friend, fighting the urge to punch her in the face.
‘Because you love me,’ she said, weaving her arm through mine, as our driver piled our bags onto a trolley. ‘And you couldn’t possibly survive another adventure without me.’
‘Totally should have brought Paige,’ I mumbled to myself as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport into a heat that almost made me crumble to my denim-clad knees. So this was the seventh circle of ovary-hanging hell Veronica had talked about.
‘Warm out,’ Amy said, sliding on her sunglasses. ‘This is going to be fun.’
‘It’s going to be something,’ I replied, looking for my own sunglasses in my handbag and having a sudden flashback to leaving them on top of Amy’s dresser in the rush to get her out and into the taxi that had been waiting for us for twenty minutes. ‘It’s definitely going to be something.’
‘Oh my God!’
Amy hadn’t stopped talking since customs so it was a testament to just how impressive Bertie Bennett’s Italian home was that it had managed to shut her up so successfully. Even when I had explained that the clouds that looked so much like mountains were, in fact, mountains, she hadn’t stopped for breath so the look of dazed amazement that had come over her now was wonderful to behold for many reasons. From a best-friend perspective, I was happy to see her look so happy. From a human-being perspective, I could have cried with joy at the first moment of silence in over an hour.
As the car pulled off the road and a pair of huge iron gates swung open to allow us inside, I pressed my fingertips against the window of the car. When I’d arrived at Bertie Bennett’s house in Hawaii, I thought I had accidentally wandered into heaven. The wonderful modernist architecture, the sea, the sand, the way the air smelled so sweet and welcoming. But this was something else; this was like something I had only seen in fairytales. One moment we were on a perfectly normal-looking city street while Amy regaled the driver with tales of her latest urinary tract infection and the next we were sitting in complete silence and rolling into the courtyard of the most beautiful, stately building I had ever seen.
When I was sixteen, my entire class had gone on a school trip to London and I distinctly remembered being more than a little bit disappointed by Buckingham Palace. Not that it wasn’t impressive; but my imagination had been ruined by too many Disney movies, so it had too many corners and not enough turrets for my liking. But this place? Al’s Milan pied-à-terre made Buck House look like a two-up, two-down council house.
It wasn’t that it was enormous or sprawling or set in acres of artfully landscaped grounds, it was just impossibly beautiful. The house was elegant and simple with so many big, sparkling windows I couldn’t even count them all. Everything was symmetrical, which brought out the ecstatic OCD in me and I kept looking up to the top floor, expecting to see a princess combing out her hair on one of the balconies. Passing through the gate, the car came to a halt in the courtyard, a stone fountain bubbling away in the centre, more archways leading off to small but perfectly formed manicured lawns, decorated with trees and plants. Gorgeous to look at, but just like his super-modern home in Hawaii, entirely inviting. Nothing about this storybook palace said ‘do not touch’; it was far more ‘feel free to take off your shoes and run around barefoot and would you like a bottle of wine and a straw while you’re doing that?’
A white-glove-wearing footman opened the passenger door and I climbed out of the car, eyes still skyward, taking in each of the three levels of Al’s second home. Unlike Hawaii, there was endless activity behind each of the arched windows. I could see people rushing around from one room to the next, curtains pulled back and windows thrown open. Clearly, someone was in a rush to get ready for something.
‘Tess?’ Amy peered at me over the top of the car, wavering on her tiptoes. ‘Are we in the right place?’
‘I don’t know about you,’ I replied, watching the huge wooden double door creak open to reveal a familiar face. ‘But I’m pretty bloody sure that I am.’
‘My darling!’ A short, handsome man with coffee-coloured skin and impeccably parted jet-black hair rushed across the courtyard, barrelling past assorted staff members who were trying to go about their business, and scooped me up in an impressive hug. Mostly impressive because I was at least five inches taller than him. ‘Aloha!’
‘Kekipi!’ I hoped he wouldn’t find the fact I still had my feet on the ground as awkward as I did. ‘Aloha.’
Nestling his head into my boobs, he looked up at me and grinned. Apparently he did not find it awkward at all. ‘Now are we Tess or Vanessa today?’
‘Tess,’ I said quickly. ‘Today, tomorrow and until the end of the world.’
‘That could be tomorrow if things don’t calm down in there.’ He gestured back towards the house before turning his attention to Amy.
My bestie was vibrating with barely restrained giddiness and not for the first time since I’d invited her along on this trip, I wondered whether introducing the two of them was, in fact, an incredibly bad idea.
‘You must be Amy the Assistant.’ He decided to forego the formalities of introductions and planted two big kisses on Amy’s cheeks. ‘I like you already, you make me look tall.’
The first time I met Kekipi, it had been in an entirely official capacity and even though the pretence of professionalism fell by the wayside relatively quickly, something was definitely different this time. Gone was the black uniform he had sported as the estate manager of Bertie Bennett’s Hawaiian hideout, and in its place was a bright aqua-blue trousers and hot-pink shirt combo. In fact, Kekipi’s shirt coordinated with Amy’s jeans so well, you would have been forgiven for thinking they had planned their outfits together. Which I imagined would be happening daily from tomorrow morning.
‘We’re so glad you decided to come,’ Kekipi said, waving for two men in light grey trousers and white shirts, apparently the official ensembles of the Milanese Bennett household, to whisk our suitcases out of sight. ‘It’s been a very dramatic week. Senior and Junior have not been getting along at all and Senior is having what can only be described as one of his “artistic” moments.’
‘Is that good?’ I asked, following him into the entranceway of the house. Kekipi pursed his lips and shook his head.
I’d met Al’s son, Artie, in Hawaii and he was a curious man to say the least. There was a lot of tension between them, and while I loved Al with a fierce and fiery passion reserved for the very best grandpa substitutes the world had to offer, clearly something was up between father and son. Plus, Artie had a handlebar moustache, and given that he did not work at a circus, that made me immediately suspicious.
‘While I am pleased to see him so active after such a long time,’ he replied with an arched eyebrow, ‘he needs to calm down a little. He isn’t as young as he used to be and Mr Bennett the younger isn’t nearly as tolerant of his father’s whims as we might all like.’
‘Where is Al?’ I asked, trying not to trip over my feet as I tiptoed across the beautiful, intricately tiled floors, my shoulders unrolling as the air conditioning washed over me. ‘Is he here?’
‘We arrived yesterday,’ Kekipi confirmed. ‘He’s in his room, working, working, working. He’ll be at dinner later.’
When I finally forced my eyes off the floor, I saw that there were flowers everywhere. Every surface held vases upon vases of beautiful, freshly cut blooms, all of them in shades of white and peach.
‘Are these for me?’ Amy asked, plucking a white rose from a vase and placing it behind her ear. Reaching out to grab the banister of an elaborate, twisting staircase, I fought off a flashback. Nick, a single flower, the waterfall … ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t,’ Kekipi said with unmistakable disdain. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I know the value of a good floral arrangement but this is all Domenico’s doing.’
‘Domenico?’ I asked.
‘Miss Brookes.’
A tall, slender man descended the staircase in the requisite grey trousers, a matching jacket and added slim black tie. How he was wearing a suit and tie in this weather was beyond me – I was sweating so much I looked as though I had entered a wet T-shirt competition. But while he looked every inch the perfect butler, his stiff demeanour felt at odds with the make-yourself-at-home atmosphere of Al’s palazzo.
‘Domenico,’ Kekipi said with a flourish. ‘The estate manager here in Milan.’
‘He’s the Italian you?’ I asked, wiping my hand on the back of my jeans and achieving nothing more than making a sticky situation stickier.
‘Please,’ Kekipi sniffed. ‘I’ve never been so offended.’
‘Miss Brookes.’ The tall man greeted me with three air kisses, very carefully avoiding touching any part of my actual being. Not that I blamed him but it did make things feel ever so slightly awkward. ‘I am Domenico, Mr Bennett’s number two here at the Palazzo Della Stelline; we are so pleased that you have arrived.’
He turned to Amy and gave her a small bow, no kisses.
‘And you are Miss Brooke’s assistant?’
She looked at me, looked back at him and shrugged. ‘I suppose I am.’
Uh-oh. Clearly not impressed.
‘Excellent. I have rooms prepared for both of you in Mr Bennett’s most beautiful guest apartments. I would be very happy to show them to you if you would be so kind as to follow me.’ Domenico gestured up the stairs with an elaborate flourish of his arm and a far-too-wide smile. I’d seen waxworks show more authenticity.
‘I’ll take the ladies to their rooms,’ Kekipi said, knocking Domenico’s hand to his side and sweeping his hair from his forehead. ‘What time is dinner?’
‘Mr Bennett has suggested the ladies dine with him in the grand salon at seven,’ he replied, bowing his head graciously. ‘If you require anything at all before that time, please do let me know. Pressing 1 on the phone in your room will connect you directly to housekeeping and they will be happy to help you with whatever you might need.’
Kekipi stood on the first step of the staircase behind his Italian counterpart and clutched the wooden banister, eyes narrowed, knuckles white. He was seething.
‘And we will dine downstairs.’ Domenico turned to give Kekipi the full weight of his stare. Even though he was standing on the stairs, Kekipi was still the shorter of the two but height difference wasn’t going to be enough to win this battle. ‘Afterwards.’
‘OK, Mr Downton,’ he said, hand on hip. ‘Maybe Artie likes to keep things upstairs downstairs but I’ll be eating with Mr Bennett and the ladies in the dining room at seven. And I’m lactose intolerant, so keep that in mind while you’re preparing your feast. Ladies.’ He snapped his fingers and pointed up the stairs. ‘Follow me.’
‘Tess, he’s fabulous,’ Amy whispered. ‘He’s the most best gay man I’ve ever met. And I’ve met all the gay men, fabulous or otherwise.’
‘I think he might actually be the best man, gay or otherwise,’ I replied. ‘Just wait until you get him to do karaoke. He’s a God.’
‘Thank you so much, Domenico,’ I said, repeatedly dipping in mini bows as we scooted around him and up the stairs after Kekipi. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. But thank you. And for dinner. Thanks.’
‘Stop thanking him,’ Kekipi yelled without looking back. ‘It’s his job.’
‘Thank you,’ I mouthed.
‘Prego,’ Domenico said with a small smile. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘So what was that all about?’ Amy asked as she and Kekipi bounced up a second staircase and along the hallway on the third floor. ‘You two don’t get on, I take it?’
‘I’ve been with Al for a very long time,’ Kekipi explained, linking arms with Amy as they trotted on in front of me. I dawdled behind, running my fingertips along the heavy patterned silk that lined the walls.
‘When the Bennetts purchased this palazzo in the late seventies, it was Jane, Mrs Bennett’s, passion project. She renovated the entire place, designed the gardens, the colour schemes. She spent years pulling together the furniture …’ His voice grew soft with recollection as we turned a corner into an identical hallway. It was like being lost in a beautiful hall of mirrors.
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Lindsey Kelk
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: A new bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkBeing arrested in your own bedroom is never a good start to the day. Tess Brookes really needs to sort out her back-stabbing flatmate – and her life.Should she gamble all on the new photography job she’s landed, or snap up the offer from long-time crush and best friend Charlie to start up on their own – in more ways than one? There’s just one small thing she hasn’t mentioned. Or rather, one tall thing. He’s handsome, infuriating and called Nick…For the first time, Tess has to choose between the life she always dreamed of and a future she never imagined possible. From London to Milan, with high fashion and low behaviour thrown in, she’s going to have to make up her mind what a girl really wants…