You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me

Sweet, bookish Neve Slater always plays by the rules.

And the rule is that good-natured fat girls like her don’t get guys like gorgeous William, heir to Neve’s heart since university. But William’s been in LA for three years, and Neve’s been slimming down and reinventing herself so that when he returns, he’ll fall head over heels in love with the new her.

So she’s not that interested in other men. Until her sister points out that if Neve wants William to think she’s an experienced love-goddess and not the awkward girl he left behind, then she’d better get some, well, experience.

What Neve needs is someone to show her the ropes, someone like Celia’s colleague Max. Wicked, shallow, sexy Max. And since he’s such a man-slut, and so not Neve’s type, she certainly won’t fall for him. Because William is the man for her … right?

Sarra Manning
is an author and journalist. She started her career on the music paper
Melody Maker
, then spent five years working on the legendary UK teen mag
J17
, as Entertainment Editor. Sarra was also editor of
Ellegirl
and
What To Wear
.

Sarra now writes for
ELLE, Grazia, Red, InStyle
, the
Guardian
, the
Mail on Sunday
’s
You
magazine,
Harper’s Bazaar, Stylist
and the
Sunday Telegraph
’s
Stella
. Her teen novels, which include
Guitar Girl, Let’s Get Lost, The Diary Of A Crush
trilogy and
The Fashionistas
series, have been translated into numerous languages, and in 2008 and 2010 she was shortlisted for the Book People’s Queen of Teen award. Sarra’s first grown-up novel,
Unsticky
, was published in 2009, and her latest teen novel,
Nobody’s Girl
, was published in 2010.

Sarra lives in north London.

To the girl I used to be who had the good sense and the
determination to go on a diet and stick with it.

As always, thanks to Gordon and Joanne Shaw, Kate Hodges, Sarah Bailey and Lesley Lawson for loyal, long-suffering support. Fittingly I should also thank the staff of the Manor Health and Leisure Club in Fortis Green where I’ve whittled down my body, like Neve, and mended most of my plotholes while swimming lengths and going hell for leather on the cross-trainer.

Finally I’d like to thank my agent, Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, for her wise counsel and supreme unflappability, and Catherine Cobain at Transworld for being my biggest cheerleader and silk-pursing my prose style.

http://twitter.com/sarramanning

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
.

Virginia Woolf

Neve could feel her knickers and tights make a bid for freedom as soon as she sat down.

She shuffled to the edge of her seat so she could plant her feet firmly on the floor, straighten her back and yank in her abdominal muscles. It didn’t work. Her doubly reinforced waistband suddenly gave way and she could feel her tummy gleefully push against the seams of the vintage dress that she’d told her younger sister, Celia, she couldn’t get into without the aid of Spanx and bodyshaper tights.

As usual, Celia had refused to take no for an answer, in the same way that she’d refused to listen to Neve’s pleas to be allowed to stay at home with a pot of tea and a good book. That was why Neve was perched uncomfortably on a neon-pink chaise longue in a hot stuffy club in Soho surrounded on all sides by hordes of fashionably dressed people who were all shrieking at each other to make themselves heard over the reverberating bass-heavy music.

‘I hate you,’ she hissed as her sister plopped down next to her.

‘No, you don’t, you love me,’ Celia replied implacably. ‘Here’s your drink. There was no way I was asking for a spritzer, so you’ll have to drink your white wine neat.’

Neve took an unenthusiastic sip as she tried to suck in her gut. ‘When can I go home, Seels?’

‘I’m going to pretend that you didn’t even say that,’ Celia said, eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. ‘Now, anyone here take your fancy?’ She nudged Neve. ‘I love that we’re going out on the pull together now. It’s so much fun.’

Going out on the pull was not at all fun. And anyway … ‘I am not out on the pull,’ Neve said primly. ‘I said I wanted to try talking to single, straight men and maybe work up to a little light flirtation. I’m not at the pulling stage yet. Not for ages.’

‘We’ll see,’ Celia said. ‘What do you think of Martyn from the subs desk?’

Neve looked at the man Celia was gesturing towards. He didn’t look as aggressively trendy as the other men present, but he was still out of Neve’s league. But then, even the
Big Issue
seller they’d passed outside Leicester Square tube station seemed out of Neve’s league when she had as much experience of men as an eighteen-year-old, convent-educated Victorian girl attending her first regimental ball.

Celia insisted that putting down her books and actually going to places where single men were likely to congregate was all it took. ‘You just smile a little, make eye-contact, think of something to say about the music or how crap the bar staff are and you’re golden,’ she’d proclaimed blithely. ‘But mostly you need to get out of the house.’

So, here she was, out of the house at Celia’s office Christmas party. In Neve’s experience, office parties usually involved a few tired paper streamers, stale crisps in plastic bowls and one of the secretaries weeping in the Ladies. Except Celia worked on a fashion magazine called
Skirt
so there were tempura rolls, light installations and a bevy of beautiful girls wearing the kind of cutting-edge fashion Neve had seen in magazines but didn’t think anyone wore in real life. Also, it was the end of January but apparently the
Skirt
staff were too busy attending other people’s Christmas soirées in December to have one of their own.

‘Oh, Celia, please don’t,’ Neve begged as she realised that her sister was frantically waving at the infamous Martyn from the subs desk, who detached himself from the throng with an eager look and hurried over.

His eagerness turned to rapture when Celia threw her arm round him. ‘Martyn, this is my older sister, Neve. She’s super-smart and knows tons of long words, you two have
so
much in common.’

Martyn from the subs desk looked at Neve, then back to Celia, with disbelief. They didn’t even remotely resemble sisters. Neve was good Yorkshire peasant stock from their father’s side of the family, while Celia had soaked up every single one of their mother’s Celtic genes and was all angles and gawky limbs – and even though her face had a pinched, sharp look, that didn’t matter when she always wore an easy grin that was echoed in the sparkle of her green eyes. Her legs wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Vegas showgirl, and her long curly hair was so fiery and red, no one ever had the nerve to call her a ginge.

Neve, on the other hand, was sturdy, that was a given. But she was soft too. Sometimes Neve felt as if everything about her was vague and indistinct, from the way she looked to the way she could always be talked out of what she thought were deeply held opinions. Celia and her mother insisted that Neve’s navy-blue eyes and straight, thick, dark-brown hair were her best features, and she had a good complexion but everything below the neck still needed a lot of work. Young men were never going to catch their breath as Neve walked past; she could deal with that, but she wished Martyn from the subs desk didn’t look quite so dismayed at the prospect of being stuck with her as Celia muttered something about going to the bar and disappeared.

‘It’s nice to meet you,’ Neve said, holding out her hand. She knew she should stand up instead of receiving him like an elderly monarch but she didn’t want her tights sliding down to her knees. Of course, Martyn could always sit down but he stayed towering over her. ‘So, um, do you like being a sub-editor?’

Martyn shrugged. ‘It pays the mortgage,’ he said. ‘I get free grooming products. That’s about as good as it gets.’

‘Terrible queue at the bar,’ Neve continued doggedly. She hoped that Martyn wouldn’t think she was angling for a drink, but he just nodded and continued to look everywhere but at her.

Neve knew that her flirting skills were so non-existent that they were invisible to the naked eye, but she was beginning to get rather irritated with Martyn from the subs desk. OK, she wasn’t Celia, but if he ever wanted to get inside Celia’s electric-blue jumpsuit, it might be an idea to get her elder sister on side first.

Still, he’d do to practise on, Neve decided. ‘What’s your favourite word, then? I think mine’s carbuncle. Or maybe bus-station. I can’t decide. Also, is bus-station all one word or should it be hyphenated?’

Now she had Martyn from the subs desk’s full attention. ‘Seriously?’

‘I just wondered,’ Neve said, and knew it would be bugging her for the rest of the evening until she could go home and check the
Oxford English Dictionary
. ‘Are you enjoying the party?’

‘Look, Eve …’ Martyn was looking at her now with a rueful smile, his hands spread wide. Neve might not know much about flirting but she knew when her number was up.

‘It’s Neve,’ she corrected him gently. ‘And it’s OK. You only came over because when Celia waved, you thought she wanted to talk to you and instead you got stuck with me.’

‘No, no. It’s not like that,’ Martyn protested. ‘I’m sure you’re really nice. You
are
really nice but I left my friend getting a round and he probably needs a hand. Nothing personal.’

Neve nodded understandingly. ‘You should get back to him.’

‘It was really nice talking to you, Eve,’ Martyn said, already backing away. ‘Maybe I’ll see you later.’

‘Sure.’ But Neve was already talking to Martyn’s back. Now that she knew she was boring and physically repulsive, even to a man who did spellchecking for a living, there was no harm in standing up and giving her tights and knickers a really good yank. Then she gingerly lowered herself back on to the sofa and stared at the toes of her black patent Mary-Janes until Celia and Yuri, her sister’s flatmate, sat down on either side of her.

‘How did it go with Martyn?’ Celia asked eagerly, replacing Neve’s glass, which she didn’t remember draining, with a full one.

‘It didn’t. Can I please go home now?’

‘I told Celia that it would never work with you and that sub-editor,’ Yuri said conspiratorially. Douglas, Neve and Celia’s elder brother, insisted that Yuri was the most terrifying woman in the world, which was ironic considering who he’d married. If Neve hadn’t seen Yuri in her pyjamas practically every morning as she came up the stairs to borrow teabags, milk and occasionally a clean teaspoon, she would have been terrified of her too. Neve had never met a Japanese person with an afro before, or one who sounded like Carmela Soprano, courtesy of the language school in New Jersey where Yuri had learned English. If Celia hadn’t come back from New York a year ago with Yuri in tow and Neve wasn’t Celia’s older sister, which according to Yuri automatically gave her ‘eleventy billion cool points’, Neve wasn’t sure that Yuri would ever have acknowledged her existence. Or happily list all the reasons why Martyn from the subs desk wasn’t the right man for Neve.

‘He drinks shandy and he sweats a lot,’ she finished scathingly. ‘Hey, Celia, Neve can do
so
much better.’

‘I just wanted to ease her in gently.’ Celia made her thinking face. ‘What about a male model? They’re not as out of reach as people think. Like, they’re dead insecure about their looks so the bar isn’t that high.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Neve said, wriggling her shoulders in annoyance. ‘Look, it was sweet of you to ask me along but I don’t fit in here. Everyone’s beautiful and cool and I feel like a dowdy maiden aunt.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Celia gasped. ‘You’re rocking the little black vintage dress.’

‘Not so much of the little,’ Neve reminded her. ‘I don’t feel comfortable here and that man standing by the bar has been staring and smirking at us for the past five minutes.’

As Yuri and Celia looked over, he raised his glass in acknowledgement and didn’t seem perturbed that the three of them were talking about him.