What a Girl Wants (32 page)

‘I panicked when I broke up with Dave,’ she said. ‘Everything was so mapped out and I was so scared that I threw it all out the window. Now I think I’d like to get the map back and just have a quick look and I can’t.’

‘Or,’ I suggested, ‘we could get a new map.’

‘I suppose,’ she replied, her voice a little bit high-pitched but not dolphins-could-hear-her-in-Miami high-pitched. ‘I freak out a little bit sometimes. I’m nearly thirty and I’ve got no idea what I’m doing with my life.’

‘Then this is going to be a pretty bloody exciting adventure, isn’t it?’ I told her. She didn’t need to know about Al’s logistical nightmares; giving her another reason to question her confidence wasn’t going to help anyone. ‘So yeah, you had to take a bit of time out to work out what you wanted to do, but Amy, if this was what the universe had waiting for you, isn’t it worth a few miserable retail jobs?’

‘Yeah …’ She blew a chunk of floating foam away from her face. ‘But don’t you start going on about the universe. I’m the one who reads her horoscope and says things like that, not you.’

‘Maybe we’re not quite as black and white as you think,’ I said, the bubbles in the bath starting to pop quietly. ‘Maybe we’re both a bit brilliant and a bit stupid.’

‘You could be on to something.’ She let out a sigh and stretched her legs, pressing her toes against the base of the toilet. ‘At least about you being a bit stupid.’

‘That’s the spirit.’ I kicked my legs in the mass of foam that still spilled over the bathtub, making the bubbles dance up into the air. ‘But so you know, being the clever sensible one can get really boring.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m still me,’ she said. Now I was paying attention, I saw that her shoulders really were red raw. Ouch. ‘Which already makes me loads cooler than you, so I’m not too worried about that.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ I said, my sympathy waning fast. ‘I’ll leave you to clean all this up then.’

‘Where have you been all day?’ Amy tightened the towel around her boobs and bent forward onto her knees as if to start cleaning and then stopped. ‘How do you tidy up bubbles?’

‘I have no idea.’ I didn’t even attempt to help. ‘I was with Nick. We had The Talk.’

‘And?’

‘And I think we’re sort of giving it a try.’

‘You think?’

‘It’s a really long story.’ That I had no intention of telling her. ‘But the short version is, his ex cheated on him and so he’s a bit gun-shy about relationshps.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What does hmm mean?’ I asked as she attempted to smother the bubbles with a spare bath sheet.

‘I don’t know.’ She pulled up the towel, achieving nothing other than sending a load of bubbles wafting around the bathroom. ‘You’re sure he’s not doing the “I’m telling you I’m an arsehole so when I behave like an arsehole, you can’t be angry at me for it” thing?’

‘Is that a thing?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ she nodded. ‘That’s a
massive
thing.’

‘He wouldn’t do that, would he?’ I said, rubbing my itchy nose. ‘I don’t think he’s doing that.’

At least, I didn’t until she brought it up.

‘I only want you to be careful,’ she said. ‘You’re like a freshly hatched chick or something. Don’t let him get away with bullshit just because he’s got a massive cock and makes Michael Fassbender look like a right dog.’

‘Can we stop talking about his penis?’ I said, struggling to get the last word out loud. ‘Please?’

Amy turned to give me her best ‘are you kidding me?’ face.

‘Fine, I’m going to get dry. And then showered. And then dry again.’ I squeezed out the skirt of my dress and went to leave. ‘Can you sort this out from here?’

‘You can help if you want,’ she called after me as I crawled out of the world’s saddest foam party. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘No, you’re all right,’ I called back. ‘You’ve got it sorted and don’t forget to put some aftersun on that sunburn.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ she shouted.

Even when I was trying not to be the sensible one, I couldn’t bloody help myself.

I knew things were getting out of control when I ran down to the dining room at eight and my empty stomach hadn’t even crossed my mind. In an attempt to avoid any and all potentially dangerous eventualities, I was wearing flat shoes, a black dress and had woven my hair into the best fishtail plait that several YouTube tutorials had to offer. Amy, exhausted from her one-woman Ibiza tribute, was already in bed and Al was still working, which left me, Nick and Kekipi for dinner.

As much as I wanted Nick all to myself, I was excited to be having dinner with someone else now we were almost officially a couple. The last time I had eaten food with a man I was also sleeping with, it was a 2 a.m. Burger King in Leicester Square with the accountant from Wimbledon who had taken me on three dates and I’d paid for my own burger. And my mum had wondered why that one didn’t work out.

‘Looks like we’ve been set up again.’

I opened the door to the outside dining room to find Nick sitting alone at a dinner table laid for five. He was wearing a slim-fitting white shirt and charcoal-grey trousers that pulled over his thighs. If my trousers had been that tight, I’d have wept into a bottomless pit of Ben & Jerry’s for three days and nights but on him, they looked wonderful. And the ideas I had for the black belt that was holding them up … Bad Tess.

‘No Kekipi?’ I asked, holding myself at the door. I’d been so excited to see him and now my feet didn’t know what to do. God, he was pretty.

‘I passed him on my way in but he was running off somewhere with what’s-his-name, Domenico?’ He poured red wine into the empty glass next to his. ‘You’re not planning on staying?’

‘Thinking about it,’ I said. ‘I am quite hungry.’

‘Then come and sit down.’ He patted the table and gave me a grin that hit me right in the womb. ‘Or do I have to come over there and get you?’

Just walk, I told myself, padding towards the table and, more importantly, towards the wine. He stood up and pulled out my chair, confusing the blood that didn’t know whether to rush to my head, my heart or my ovaries.

‘Did you get all your work done?’ I asked, sitting down as carefully as possible and picking up my glass. White wine would have been less dangerous but booze was booze was booze and after Amy’s arsehole comments, I wasn’t going to turn down a tipple.

‘Who wants to talk about work?’ he said, his hand creeping along my thigh. ‘What have you been up to?’

I took a deep drink and then put my glass down. ‘Did you tell me all that stuff this afternoon so that when you act like an arsehole, I can’t complain about it?’

Nick looked a little startled for a moment, took his hand away from mine and then laughed.

‘So that’s what you did this afternoon,’ he said, tearing into a piece of bread. ‘Bitched about me with your friend and then what, spent an hour overthinking everything I said? Maybe we should talk about work.’

‘We didn’t bitch about you,’ I said, not entirely sure if that was true or not. Did our conversation count as bitching? I was fairly certain that it didn’t. ‘We discussed.’

‘Tess …’ Nick rested his elbows on the table and bowed his head. My mother would have been raging. ‘I was honest with you earlier. I didn’t make any promises but no, please tell Amy I’m not planning on banging all the models in Milan and then telling you it’s your fault.’

‘What made you think of models?’ I asked, looking around the empty room for lurking amazons. ‘There are models?’

‘We’re in Milan, there are bloody hundreds of models,’ he replied. ‘Now tell me, did Amy give you any helpful advice or was it all shrill, sub-
Sex and the City,
you go girl finger-clicking?’

‘There wasn’t really any finger clicking,’ I said. ‘And honestly? She probably slagged me off a lot more than she did you. She’s protective.’

Nick nodded with his entire upper body. ‘And of course you told her what a devilish rogue I am, so she’s being extra cautious.’

‘If I told her you referred to yourself as a devilish rogue, she would have made me wear a chastity belt to dinner and she would have removed your balls with a rusty cheese grater,’ I explained. ‘Please never say it again.’

‘Fair enough.’ He sat up straight and put down his bread. ‘I am though, devilish.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ I took another much-needed drink, eager to change the subject. ‘I’m really hungry; are you really hungry?’

He shook his head and shrugged. ‘Not really, I ate a couple of of hours ago.

Bastard. ‘I thought you had to work,’ I said, grabbing a piece of bread from the centre of the table and pulling off what I hoped was a socially acceptable piece and shoving it in my mouth. So, so good. ‘I saw Al earlier; things don’t seem to be going very well. Has he told you anything?’

‘I thought you were taking photos, not taking up investigative journalism?’ he replied, pushing a saucer of olive oil over to me. Clearly, this really was true love. ‘I’d stick to the illustrative side of this if I were you.’

‘You’ve noticed then?’ I sighed, breaking off a slightly bigger piece of bread and dipping it in the oil. ‘I wish there was something I could do.’

Nick said nothing, just drank his wine, resting the glass against his chest in between sips and looking at me across the table.

‘Maybe I could talk to Artie,’ I said. ‘Just pop in to say hello, casually let him know his dad could use his support. Doesn’t seem right that they’re not helping each other out, does it?’

‘You really shouldn’t get involved in family stuff,’ Nick said, tapping his middle finger against the bowl of his glass. ‘How would you like it if someone tried to tell you how to act with your parents? Best advice I can give you is let them work it out on their own.’

‘If you’d met my parents, you’d know there would be no point in trying,’ I said, painfully aware that there was still so much we didn’t know about each other. ‘Artie should think himself lucky to have Al for a dad.’

‘Maybe, but you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors,’ he argued. ‘Never get involved in family stuff. Don’t get involved in this. Do your part, take the best bloody photos you can and, at the end of the day, close the door.’

Even though I knew it was probably good advice and definitely came from experience, I was still irritated. I wasn’t used to being told what to do and I didn’t love it. There was really only one thing to do: more wine, more bread.

‘You’re so cute when you get annoyed.’ Nick stood up, picked up the bottle of red wine and nodded towards the door. ‘And really sexy. Let’s go upstairs.’

‘But …
dinner
?’ I waved at the empty table, shocked, appalled, hungry and horny.

He took my glass out of my hand and put it down on the table. A broken circle of condensation swelled underneath it on the white linen tablecloth.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ he said, his fingers playing with the third button on his white shirt. How many white shirts did that man own? Maybe this relationship was a terrible idea – imagine all the washing and ironing! That he would be doing.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ he repeated, undoing his button before moving on to the next one. My very own
Magic Mike
. Only not. ‘And you’re coming with me.’

‘Am I now?’ I asked, knowing full well that I totally was. My knickers seemed to be removing themselves from my person, even as I spoke.

Maybe he was magic, after all.

In the rush to get into bed, or at least on it, I had not worried about closing Nick’s curtains properly and so Friday morning announced itself far too early; a golden glow lighting up the room came in from both uncovered windows. Nick lay beside me, belly down, face in his pillows, snoring happily like a baby bulldog. As much as I wanted to wake him up, I let him sleep and settled with sniffing him. We’d been awake most of the night, and not just because I couldn’t keep my hands off him. When I had finally found the strength to put him down for more than fifteen minutes at a time, we started talking and it seemed as though he hadn’t stopped.

He told me all about growing up with an American dad, spending summers in New York that sounded so glamorous and exciting to his friends that he routinely got the shit kicked out of him every September but which, in truth, were lonely weeks spent inside a too hot apartment because his dad didn’t trust him to go out in the city alone. I told him about the summers Amy and I spent hiding in the woods at the back of her house, sleeping through the day, because my parents were arguing so much I couldn’t sleep at night and she was spending every evening watching late-night TV, wondering whether or not her dad was going to come home. He never did come back but there wasn’t anything that Amy didn’t know about
Gladiators
and every movie that had been on Channel Four after 11.00 p.m. between 1994 and 1999.

We talked about our favourite foods, the first time we got drunk, bad fashion choices and delicious snacks. He told me how he wanted to visit Alaska and Russia and I told him how I’d always wanted to see New York and Tokyo and Australia and we promised to take each other to those places and more. I couldn’t say when I finally fell asleep or what we were talking about when it happened, only that my voice was sore from talking and Nick was down to a whisper, but I woke up happier than I could remember.

The ceiling in Nick’s room didn’t seem as high as the ceiling in my room. I traced a crisscross pattern across the room and started counting the squares above me, trying to fall back to sleep so I wouldn’t be tired later in the day but I couldn’t. Instead, I was playing our conversations over in my head, reliving every last touch, every time he had taken my hand in his and kissed my fingers and every time he had stroked my hair. I memorized every one of his expressions, how his eyes warmed up whenever he talked about travelling, how they burned when he talked about a particular job that he had loved. The way he stared at me when I was talking, a million sparks lighting up his whole face in a different way, every time. There was so much to learn about him and I wanted to know it all at once.

‘Go back to sleep …’ His voice was still raw from its sleepless night when it echoed out from amongst the pillows. ‘It’s early.’