Kitabı oku: «What a Girl Wants»
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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:
‘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
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
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Keep Reading – A Girl’s Best Friend
Acknowledgements
Q&A with Lindsey Kelk
About the Author
Also by Lindsey Kelk
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
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
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
‘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.
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