The Hating Game (8 page)

Ringing
the buzzer for Kyle Cook Recruitment, Nate waited for the door to click open. Entering the reception, he was struck by how different it was to Mattie’s barren lair. Every chair here was filled, and two receptionists were passing around what appeared to be forms for various candidates to fill out. Comfortable-looking sofas lined the far wall, the inviting smell of fresh coffee drifted through the air, and the soft sounds of lounge music came from speakers in the ceiling. It was more like a coffee shop than a recruitment office. No wonder people preferred this to Mattie’s torture chamber.

‘
I’m here to see Kyle?’ Nate said to the receptionis
t. He had to admit he was curious to meet any man who could bear Mattie Johns for more than five minutes. The guy must have balls of steel!

‘
Nate.’ Kyle was out of his office before Nate even had a chance to sit down. They shook hands. ‘Come on through.’

Nate settled into a roomy leather chair and nodded his thanks as Kyle handed him a
glass of water. Tall and blond, he was definitely good-looking, but Nate wouldn’t have pegged him as Mattie’s type. The guy seemed too
nice
.

‘
So you said on the phone you have some kind of business proposition for me?’ Kyle asked.

Nate nodded. He’d decided to use the same pitch he had with Mattie, and he launched into it full force. Kyle listened quietly, his eyebrows flying up as Nate explained the show format.

‘
Mattie agreed to this?’ Kyle asked.

Nate cleared his throat. ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t about to tell Kyle that Mattie didn’t know about the exes.

‘
Hmm. That’s interesting.’ Something like hope flickered across Kyle’s face. ‘I don’t know what she told you, but I never cheated on her, you know. We were going through a sort of difficult patch, yes, but I never cheated.’

Nate stayed silent. A difficult patch?
Nate couldn’t even imagine. He wouldn’t blame Kyle if he
had
cheated on Mattie.

‘
I tried to tell her, but she just wouldn’t listen.’ Kyle looked up at Nate. ‘I know she seems tough, but underneath it all, she’s actually really vulnerable.’

Nate nodded
and tried to keep his poker face. Mattie, vulnerable? Yeah, right. The same way grizzly bears were vulnerable. He’d noticed something in the PI’s report about Mattie’s father taking off, but from what Nate had seen, it hadn’t made her vulnerable. Quite the opposite.

‘
But maybe now
she’ll listen.’ Kyle sighed. ‘If I go on the show, I might just be able to convince her I still care.’

Nate held his breath.

‘
So yeah.
’ Kyle stuck out a hand. ‘Count me in.’

‘
Great.
’ Nate tried to keep the jubilant grin off his face as he took Kyle’s palm. He’d done it! All four were signed up! Thank God. He didn’t even want to think what Silver’s reaction might have been if one of them said no.

Nat pushed the contract towards Kyle. ‘Just sign here.’

*

Back
home in his luxury flat, Adam made a beeline for the safe under his bed. He quickly punched in the code – MATTIE – and drew out his graduation yearbook, turning the pages to Mattie’s photo. He’d fingered it so much that most of the colour had worn off and the paper was tissue thin.

Oh, Mattie. Twelve years had passed, and s
he was the only woman he had ever asked out, the only woman he had dated. And she was still the only woman he wanted.

F
or the one week in Year Ten they were together, Adam was walking on air. He loved fetching Mattie’s books, queuing up for her food at lunch and doing her homework – in short, he loved making her happy.

Then she dumped
him, without warning or reason. He begged her to take him back, saying he loved her. To prove it, he hacked into the school’s computer system so all the screen savers in the IT labs said
Adam loves Mattie,
with a cute Photoshopped picture of Mattie in a bikini. He’d even managed to splice together their photos so it looked like their lips were touching, with a colourful sunset behind them. The height of romance, he thought.

But she
’d just laughed, saying she’d never kiss a boring, spineless blob like him; that she’d only gone out with him to have a servant do her bidding. Adam had run out of the school and hidden behind the skip where . . . He shook his head, still unable to believe he’d actually started howling uncontrollably. Thank God Mattie’s friend Jess was the only person to witness it.

That
last year of secondary school was spent downing Jaffa Cakes. As his weight ballooned, he waited, just waited, for her to notice him again. But she never had.

He
flipped over to his photo. There he was, Adam ‘Stumpy’ Higgins, in all his adolescent glory: raging acne, excess flab and hair that never could achieve the much-coveted bed-head look no matter how hard he tried. No wonder Mattie wouldn’t take him back again.

In the past ten years h
e’d worked hard to be a success, throwing himself into developing video games. People loved the hero he created for his games – a thinner, more handsome version of himself. His hero got the heroine in the end, despite the obstacles.

Funny that the heroine always ended up looking like Mattie. It wasn’t a conscious act, but whatever he did, Mattie was on his mind. Sometimes, he even found himself driving by her flat or hanging out in the off-licence down the street just so he could snap a shot of her.

Adam
hadn’t been able to believe his luck when Nate showed up. He’d had to work hard to wipe every trace of excitement and emotion off his face – to stay cool and in control, just like his video-game characters. Inside, though, his heart was pumping. This was his chance to make Mattie fall in love with him!

But how? His appearance hadn’t radically altered since she had last seen him. The word ‘blobby’ still sent a pang through his heart. Come on, he told himself sternly. You run a multi-million pound business. Losing a bit of weight isn’t beyond you.
Winning Mattie back wasn’t out of the question. After all, he had the money – now he just needed the looks.

Filled with determination, h
e walked over to his kitchen and, taking a deep breath, methodically dumped packet after packet of Jaffa Cakes into the bin. From now until the show began, he’d have nothing but vitamin shakes. And he’d get a personal trainer for twice-daily sessions. That should help him get fit quickly.

He examined his face in the mirror, grimacing at po
ck-mark legacies of the acne that erupted after Mattie dumped him. Racing back to his state-of-the-art laptop, he Googled furiously until he found a solution: a few chemical peels should do the trick. Plus he could smooth the perma-scowl that had developed on his forehead with a bit of Botox while he was at it.

Finally at peace,
Adam smiled. If he played this right, the audience couldn’t help but choose him to spend those two weeks alone with Mattie.

And then
– finally – Mattie would be his.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The average woman spends sixty minutes primping for a date.

The average male, ten.

‘
WATCH IT!’ MATTIE YELPED AS
a dollop of red splashed her cheek. Her head was pounding and the cloying smell of the hair dye wasn’t helping.

She was
so
not in the mood for this. The useless pipsqueak who’d rung her yesterday had neglected to mention that before the photo shoot, she’d be subjected to a torturous makeover by a long-haired Fabio-wannabe with a rather dodgy Italian accent. She’d tried to call Nate several times to complain but the idiot hadn’t answered the phone and before she knew what was happening, Fabio had smeared her dark bob with a foul fire-engine red dye.

‘
Good idea, just blind me so I don’t have to look at this hideous colour,’ Mattie grumbled, wiping the goo from her face.

‘
It’s fab-u-lous! You gonna look great.
’ Mattie stared as Fabio lobbed another lump of colour onto her head. Did she detect a hint of a Liverpool accent? Probably wasn’t even Italian, she snorted. Barely human, in fact.

Just
remember why you’re doing this. Two hundred thousand! Two hundred thousand! It was her mantra now.

‘
N
ow we just letta sit for thirty minuti. I’ll be back to check on youse.’ Fabio disappeared behind a curtain in the back where she could hear – and smell – him eating some kind of fishy sandwich.

Mattie looked around
the small space for something to read but the room was bare. It wasn’t even a real salon – apart from the battered old chair she was perched on, there was just one basin. Surely SiniStar could have plumped for a proper hairdresser, not one who’d trained at the
Sluts R Us
academy. Only prostitutes had the colour she was going to end up with.

‘
How we doing, eh
?’ Fabio finally reappeared, poking and prodding at her hair. His breath reeked and the heavy gold medallions around his neck clunked her in the face as he leaned over.

‘
Great,’ Mattie grunted, following him over to the basin where he doused her hair in cold water, ignoring her protests.

‘
Gorgeous, darlink
. Gorgeous!’

Mattie rolled her eyes.
The accent was morphing into Hungarian. ‘Give me a mirror,’ she demanded as he plonked her back in the chair again.

Fabio
smiled. ‘No, no. No!’ He waggled a playful finger in her face. ‘You’re not done yet. Next – extensions. We givva you gorgeous longa hair. You gonna love it!’

‘
I don’t want long hair,’ Mattie argued. She liked her hair the way it was – short, tidy and no fuss. She hadn’t had long hair since . . . well, ever. Her mother had always kept her hair short, and Mattie had pretty much maintained the same style. Bobs never went out of fashion, anyway.

‘
Sorry
! Production says extensions, we do ex-ten-sions.’ Now he sounded more French than Italian.

‘
I think you got your accents mixed up,
’ Mattie said snarkily, but Fabio had already disappeared. For the next few hours Mattie sat like a concrete block as the minions buzzed around her, braiding revolting-looking clumps of hair to her head. She was going to kill Nate. No, not kill. Torture. Lock him in a closet with no food or drink. Mattie had read somewhere that the combination of starvation and dehydration was the most painful death to endure. And Nate had enough extra flesh to last for days. At least he’d die skinny, she sniggered to herself.

‘
There,
we done-a! Now we just do some-a make-up and you ready for your photo shoot!’

Mattie grimaced. ‘Great. Thanks. Not that I had any say in the matter.’

Fabio
flicked his curls back. ‘Maybe this make you ‘appy.’ He patted her knee, blowing fishy fumes over her. ‘I think this make-a you happy.’

Mattie shrugged his hand off. ‘I am happy, you faux-Italian. I don’t need extensions to make me happy.’

Fabio
held up his hands and backed away, his rings glistening in the light. ‘Yeah, you’re a proper ray of sunshine, innit?’ The Italian accent had disappeared, replaced by a full-on Scouse twang that rang out loudly as he shook his head. ‘Make-up will be out in a second. Good luck to them.’

Idiot. H
ow deluded to think long hair could make you happy. Anyway, she
was
happy, when she wasn’t being transformed into some game show monster. True, she hadn’t been in the best mood lately, but that was understandable with her business going downhill, wasn’t it? Mattie strained to remember when she’d last been happy. With Kyle, yes. And before that?

A
s a Cyndi Lauper lookalike started smearing Mattie’s face with hideous beige foundation, her mind flashed back to a time before her father had left, when she and her parents had visited Brighton. They’d mooched along the pier, gone on the rides, and got some ice cream. The sky had been so bright it had hurt her eyes and her parents hadn’t argued once. Mattie could still remember skipping across the pebbled beach while her parents walked on behind her. It had been the perfect day.

Shame her father had gone and screwed it all up by quitting his job at the bank and trying to start a birdhouse business. Imagine remortgaging your own home to provide houses for birds!

‘
Done!’ Cyndi
twittered. ‘Would you like to see?’

Duh
.
She limited her response to a curt nod.

Cyndi
passed over a mirror and watched eagerly for her response.

Mattie stared at her reflection. Everything inside froze as she took in the long copper hair falling in corkscrews past her shoulders, the sparkly green eye shadow and the false eyelashes. Mattie Johns had disappeared. And in her place was some sort of clown-type creature who looked like a recent escapee from a freak show. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the horror.