What a Girl Wants (18 page)

‘You don’t have to stay,’ I said, striding over to the table as confidently as my untested new heels would allow. At least I was bloody well wearing shoes. ‘I’m not forcing you.’

Nick watched as I reached for the white wine, moving extra slowly so as not to knock anything over, break anything or somehow manage to set myself on fire. I suspected Amy had had a hand in the table design: there were candles everywhere and she was a little firebug. Swirling the wine in his glass, he didn’t say anything, just sat and watched while I poured out an inelegant quantity of Pinot Grigio and took a massive swig. Placing the glass back on the table and out of easy reach, I crossed my legs and folded my arms, wishing I hadn’t put my hair up. It would have been nice to have something to hide behind while he continued his famous silent treatment.

‘So you’re going to sit there and stare at me all night, are you? Fine.’ I refused to be drawn into his mind games again. ‘I’ll just entertain myself.’

Happily, the table was loaded with enough bread, cheese, meats and salads to cater every one of Kim Kardashian’s weddings and all of it looked divine. At least I had something to distract me while I was busy ignoring him.

Halfway through my attempt to saw a particularly tasty looking loaf in half, Nick gave a loud, violent sigh before knocking back his entire glass of red and slamming down his glass. It wobbled for a moment as he stood up and stared at me across the table while I stared back at him, one paw full of cheese and the other full of bread. Without so much as another grunt, he stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind him.

His glass wobbled again, before falling over and rolling off the table, shattering the instant it struck the courtyard floor.

‘Fucking hell,’ I whispered, breathing out for the first time in what felt like forever. As quickly as it had closed, the door flew open again, Nick striding back over to the table, his forehead all creased and his jaw heavy and tense.

‘What I want to know,’ he said, noisily pulling out his seat amongst the shards of broken glass, grabbing the bottle of red and starting the process all over again. ‘Is where you get off, being angry with me.’

‘What?’ I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

‘You’re the one who lied about your name, your job, who you are. You’re the one who lied about everything to everyone and now you’re angry with me because I didn’t return your fucking phone call?’ he said, his voice getting louder as he went on. ‘Well, I’m very sorry, Tess or Vanessa or whatever your name is, but I’m not an eccentric old man who did so many drugs in the Sixties that he’s confusing giving someone a chance with letting someone take advantage of him. I don’t let people take advantage of me. And I don’t like liars. And you’re a liar.’

Well, that was me told.

I placed my bread and cheese on my plate, making a silent promise to come back to them and picked up my wine glass with a shaky hand. I wanted to come back with something really snappy, something searing and brutal and personal and vicious. But it was hard to get up on my high horse when at least half of what he had said was true. Or that was to say, factually accurate.

‘You didn’t seem to mind me last night,’ I said, as calmly as possible, after I had drained the last drop of wine in my glass. ‘Or do you have an evil twin I should know about?’

Nick ran a hand over his face then reached around to rub the back of his neck. I watched his white T-shirt strain against his bicep and felt nothing other than the desire to pull the T-shirt off his body and strangle him with it. Enough was enough. The prickle of anger was enough to remind me why I
was
mad at him.

‘And more to the point, how could I explain if you wouldn’t let me?’ I asked, folding my arms over my perfectly positioned bosom. This dress was incredible. ‘I tried to talk to you. I tried in Hawaii and I tried to call you. I emailed you, I sent you texts.’

Still, he said nothing, his grey-blue eyes empty.

‘You told me to call you and then you didn’t call back. And then last night …’ I spoke slowly, not sure what my voice was going to do. Balanced and even might have been the goal but I was only ever seconds away from incredibly shrill or desperate sobbing whenever I spoke to him and neither of those had ever done a woman any good in an argument. ‘And then last night happened. And I woke up and you weren’t there. What do you want me to say? To do? You’re going to have to tell me because I really don’t know.’

I heard the last word fade off and was proud of myself for getting it out without losing it. This was progress. Old Tess would have dissolved into an emotional puddle shortly after showing him an incredible PowerPoint presentation that explained, in ten slides or fewer, why he was the most offensive dickhead on the market for English women aged twenty-eight and over.

Without anything else to add, I turned my attention back to the cheese and hoped there would never come a day when dairy turned on me too.

‘I emailed you because I needed an explanation,’ Nick said, pushing pieces of crystal around on the floor with his toe. ‘But then when I thought about it, I couldn’t see what use there would be in getting one.’

Wonderful, reliable, noncomplex cheese. I chewed while I worked out what to say, tearing my chunk of bread into tiny little pieces.

‘What now?’ I asked, chasing the cheese with a big gulp of wine – the internationally recognized dietary choice of scorned women. ‘Are you going to keep on punishing me? Keep saying really horrible things to me in public? Because that’s been brilliant so far.’

‘I don’t know you,’ he replied without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I don’t know anything about you. As far as I knew, you were a photographer called Vanessa Kittler who had shagged at least half of London but for some reason, you decided to show another side to me, and then I find out that you’re not Vanessa, that you’ve lied to me the entire time, but I still see that other side to you and that’s got me really confused.’

‘That’s what this is about?’ I felt a little bit sick and it had nothing to do with the cheese or the wine. ‘You thought I was some massive slag and that you were the only super stud who could get through to me? And now what, you’re angry that I’m not actually that slag?’

‘No.’ Nick leaned forwards, resting his arms on the table, shuffling a salami out of the way. His being surrounded by cured meat did nothing to dispel the tension or the queasy feeling in my stomach. ‘I just don’t like being lied to.’

‘That’s funny,’ I replied. ‘Me neither.’

Turning away and shaking his head at something I hadn’t said, Nick sipped his wine and fiddled with the edge of the white tablecloth. Still stunned into pukiness, I waited for him to say something, utterly out of my own words for the moment.

‘I don’t think I need to explain that I had feelings for you,’ he said, eventually settling back into his chair to look at me. ‘And I don’t think it would be difficult for anyone to understand why I might have reacted harshly when I found out you were lying about, well, everything.’

I sucked in my cheeks and forced myself to nod, even though I felt I would definitely like his feelings explained.

‘But we’re here now and we’ve got to work together, sort of.’ He scratched his nose and took a cleansing breath. ‘Maybe we should agree to start over. I can be professional if you can.’

‘Last night was professional, was it?’ I asked. More wine. I needed more wine.

‘Last night was a mistake,’ Nick replied, his voice smooth and deep where mine was thick and uneven. ‘Sorry about that.’

I had managed to get through twenty years feeling approximately seven feelings: love for Charlie, complete adoration for Amy, tolerance for my family, a bedwetting fear of Vanessa, blind ambition, constant peckishness and the desperate need to sleep. I wasn’t sure if peckishness actually counted as a feeling but it had played a big part in my life, so it felt wrong to discount it now, but here, sitting at the table across from Nick, I had never felt so confused in all my life. I was furious with him for being so self-righteous and embarrassed that he was right about so many things. But at the same time, it hurt me that I could have hurt him in this way and, as much as I tried to deny it, there was a sad, angry sinking feeling that was threatening to overwhelm my peckishness. He didn’t want me.

‘I don’t want things to be difficult for everyone else,’ Nick said, finishing off his wine and pouring more. ‘So we’ll start over, and like I said, I don’t know you.’

‘This is so stupid,’ I said, refolding my arms and looking up to the stars that were just starting to prick through the night sky. I thought back to all the time we had spent talking, all the things I had told him that I had never told anyone else. ‘You
do
know me.’

‘Just because I know what you want in bed, doesn’t mean I know anything about you as a person,’ he said. ‘And clearly, that works both ways.’

Ouch. Just ouch.

‘But I’ll give it a go. Let’s see how well I know the real Tess.’ The light was back in his eyes but it wasn’t the playful sparkle I liked so much, it was a dark, angry fire. ‘Are you really a photographer?’

‘Yes.’ I really needed to start believing that myself. ‘But before I got my agent, I worked in advertising.’

‘Makes sense,’ Nick replied, his half-smile blossoming into a full smirk. ‘What with you being such a good liar.’

I felt my toes curl inside my shoes. How much abuse was I supposed to take? ‘And this is starting over and being professional, is it?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve just never liked people in advertising,’ he said with a shrug. ‘They sell lies for a living. You can’t argue with that, can you?’

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ I said, clutching my wine glass and waiting for something inside to break. ‘All I did was tell you a different name. Everything else I said was true. Everything that happened, happened. You know everything about me, Nick. Please don’t do this.’

He looked at me from across the table, his eyes running over every inch of me. I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat. My dress covered me up from neck to knee but when he looked at me, I might as well have been sitting there in my pants. Not even my pants; I felt like I was wearing nothing but one of those awful candy thongs you saw in Ann Summers. It was worse than being naked. I grabbed a thick linen napkin from the table and laid it across my lap and one of the tea lights near me flickered as I remembered to breathe. The flame guttered for a second before going out.

Nick stood up, slowly this time, and walked around the table towards me.

‘Tess.’

He crouched down until he was bouncing on his toes at the side of my chair, his hands gripping the armrest so tightly, I could see his knuckles turning white.

‘It feels so wrong, calling you that.’

I pursed my lips and screwed my napkin up in my hands.

‘You’re right, I do know something about you,’ he said, his lips so close to my ear that I felt his words before I heard them. ‘I know I don’t trust you. And I could never be with someone I don’t trust.’

He stood up and walked away, grabbing a bottle of red wine from the table as he went.

I watched two big smoky tears drop into my lap, veins of mascara creeping along the fabric of the napkin.

Probably not the most successful date in history, I thought, wiping away my tears and picking up a huge chunk of cheese. But at least he hadn’t taken all of the wine with him.

I couldn’t face going back to my room. It was more or less impossible to navigate the hallways and staircases without bumping into someone and I knew that Amy would be waiting for me, either to get the gossip or catch Nick and me in the act. As much as I knew she had meant well with the dinner date set-up, I didn’t want to talk to anyone until I could open my mouth without crying. I felt so cold and heavy and broken.

Hauling myself to my feet, I tipped the bread and cheese from my plate into a napkin that I hadn’t ruined and picked up the bottle of white wine. What I wouldn’t give to be one of those girls who starved herself through upset. One Saturday, a few years ago, Charlie took me to look at engagement rings with him. Afterwards, I had gone straight back to the office, locked myself in the stationary cupboard and eaten an entire birthday cake. Ever since then, when I was having a bad day, I’d wonder whether or not I could make my millions by selling women a plain cake that came with ready-made icing letters so you could write your own message. Like, ‘Sorry the man you love is considering marrying a twenty-two-year-old stripper!’ or ‘Surprise! That bloke you shagged hates you!’

Who wouldn’t buy three of those a week?

My secret garden was all closed up for the night but that was nothing a good shove wouldn’t fix. With my heels and bottle under my bad arm, I gave the door a bash with my good shoulder and stumbled inside when it gave way too easily. I dropped my shoes and tiptoed onto the closest patch of grass, letting my legs sink underneath me. I’d never been much of a crier and now I knew why. It wasn’t a lot of fun. My eyes were sore and my nose felt raw and swollen. Of all the glitches in human design, crying had to be the worst. It served no physical purpose I could think of and I certainly didn’t feel any better for getting it all out, no matter what anyone’s nan might think.

I lay down and stared up at the stars for as long as I could stand to do nothing. The evening was still warm and the grass smelled delicious, sweet against the salty taste of tears in my mouth. Had things taken a different turn, it could have been such a romantic evening. If only Nick hadn’t decided to make it one of the most painful, upsetting experiences of my life, the little scamp, everything would have been great.

That and the fact that Charlie is still waiting to hear from you, the voice in my head reminded me. You know, Charlie? Tall, brown eyes, love of your life?

I groaned out loud, rolling onto my front because it was too hard to drink wine on my back, and pulled my phone out of my tiny black shoulder bag. I jabbed my finger at the screen and brought up Charlie’s last email, about the Perito’s pitch. It was warm and funny and there were kisses at the end of it. Of course, he’d sent that before he gave me a camera, said I should follow my dreams and then told me he loved me. Before I gave him a double thumbs up, said thanks and then ran away to Milan to jump into bed with another man.