About a Girl

  I dropped my chicken onto the sand.

  ‘Why am I what now?’ I hoped she was drunk enough that a grammatically awkward question might flummox her.

  ‘Why are you pretending to be Vanessa Kittler?’ she repeated with careful and precise enunciation. ‘Because you’re not her.’

  ‘I am,’ I replied, forcing a laugh. ‘Of course I am. Who else would I be?’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’ Paige shrugged and leaned forward, arms across the table. ‘But you’re not that bitch Kittler. So I’ll ask you again and hopefully you’ll have an answer that won’t involve the police or the need for me to call them. Why are you pretending that you are?’

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  ‘Oh God, I should have known this wouldn’t work,’ I said, giving up on trying to think of a good excuse and hoping she was feeling charitable. ‘But the quick version is, Vanessa is my flatmate, she was out of town, I’d had the worst week on record, then I took the call from her agent about the job and this all seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘What, flying to Hawaii, lying to a bunch of people and pretending to be Vanessa?’ Paige asked. ‘Not to mention an evil, slaggy bitch no one in the industry can stand?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She waved at Kekipi’s drink-delivery buddy and waited for him to bring over a fresh coconut before she said anything else.

  ‘Vanessa Kittler shagged my ex-fiancé about two years ago.’ She started slowly and I could tell she was trying very hard to remain calm. ‘He wasn’t my ex at the time. He was my fiancé.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’ I didn’t want to say too much. There was still too much opportunity for this to go horribly wrong. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘When the picture desk told me they’d got her for this job, I went mental. I’m sure they’d tell you that would be putting it politely. But it was all so last-minute. I was away last week and no one else was free. Allegedly.’

  She stopped to neck almost half her drink in a oner.

  ‘Obviously I tried to get her taken off the job. Because, you know, it’s not just that I hate her, she’s a shit photographer. Yeah, OK, she took, like, four really good photos once upon a time, but that’s it. People only book her now because they want to shag her. It’s pathetic.’

  ‘Again, all sounds about right,’ I replied. ‘Apart from the four good photos bit.’

  ‘Years ago.’ Paige flapped her hands around. ‘They’re, like, legendary. In that they’re absolutely beautiful and everything else she’s ever done has been shite. Not that I’ve actually seen them because I won’t work with her. Which is handy, given that you’re not her.’

  ‘So what now?’ I stared through the wooden slats of the table at my toes, a crushing feeling weighing heavy in my stomach. ‘Are you sending me home?’

  ‘How can I?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have another photographer. I can’t take the pictures. Unless one of these beautiful, beautiful men happen to be a proficient photographer, I would be even more fucked than I am now, wouldn’t I? Do you have any idea how hard it was to get this interview organized?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I admitted. ‘I know this is insane. Or at least I am.’

  Paige rubbed invisible worry lines away from her forehead and stared at me.

  ‘I didn’t say anything earlier because I was trying to work out what was going on. I thought maybe there were two Vanessa Kittlers, or that maybe you’d just dyed your hair and, I don’t know, had a complete personality makeover. Like, maybe you’d had a stroke or something. I tried to find her on Facebook, but of course she’s not on Facebook because she’s too fucking cool. But wow, this is actually happening. You are not Vanessa Kittler. But you are pretending to be Vanessa Kittler. In Hawaii, on a photo shoot, even though you’re not actually a photographer.’

  ‘That would be it in a nutshell, yeah.’ It was hard to have such a serious conversation with One Direction as a backing track, but somehow we managed.

  ‘Are you at least a good photographer?’ she asked. ‘Jesus, you are actually a photographer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Let’s just go with yes.’ I winced at Paige’s hopeful expression. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know what else to say.’

  ‘Say that that you’re going to take some fucking brilliant pictures of Bertie Bennett, that I’m not going to get fired, and that come Monday, when we land in London, this is all going to seem like it was a very strange dream.’ She looked as serious as it was possible to look for someone who had been drinking bootleg Malibu out of hollowed-out coconuts for two hours.

  ‘I’m going to take some fucking amazing pictures of Bertie Bennett, you’re not going to get fired, and come Monday, I really hope we find out this has been a dream, otherwise I’ve got a really difficult week coming up,’ I replied. ‘And if it helps, Vanessa isn’t not on Facebook because she’s too cool; she deleted her profile because people kept leaving really, really horrible comments on her wall and she hated having to untag unflattering pictures.’

  ‘How do you live with her?’ Paige asked. ‘Why do you live with her? Aside from this psychotic episode, you seem like a relatively normal, nice person. Do you hate yourself or something?’

  ‘Or something,’ I confirmed. ‘Definitely or something. And maybe I’m not that keen on myself.’

  ‘Right then ? glad we’ve got that out of the way, Vanessa.’ She raised her drink in the air. ‘Can you please just tell me what your actual name is? Even if it’s probably best if we don’t tell anyone else about this.’

  ‘It’s Tess.’ I clunked my coconut against hers, so relieved to have told someone, anyone, the truth. ‘Tess Brookes.’

  ‘Cheers, Tess,’ Paige toasted. ‘God, it’s going to grate me calling you Vanessa in front of the others.’

  ‘Just call me bitch,’ I suggested. ‘We’ll pretend we’re in RuPaul’s Drag Race.’

  ‘I like your thinking,’ she said, straw wedged in her mouth. ‘Let’s just hope I like your photos too. Thank God I’m an amazing art director.’

  ‘Thank God,’ I agreed.

  ‘Oh, you have to dance with me! I love this one.’ Paige pushed her chair away from the table too quickly and it tipped backwards into the sand. ‘If another one of those blokes grinds on me again, I’m going to trip and fall on his penis.’

  ‘I’m fairly certain they’re all gay.’ I let her lead me onto the smoothed-out sand of the dance floor while Maroon 5 blasted me from all angles. ‘All of them.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Paige shouted back. ‘Gay men love me.’

  It was good to know where she drew the line.

  They say time flies when you’re having fun, but when you’re having fun drinking and dancing with Hawaii’s most fabulous, it vanishes into a black hole and comes out again shaking maracas and dancing a cha-cha. It was almost one when I looked at my watch and refused my first drink of the night. Paige had long since decided it was time to take a nap face down on one of the tables. I’d tried to take her to bed, Kekipi had tried to take her to bed, assorted half-naked men had tried to take her to bed. She had declined any and all invitations, claiming each and every time that she was ‘waiting’. We just didn’t know for what.

  I was deep in a vintage Madonna groove when I noticed we had a gatecrasher. Nick was standing at the edge of the party, half hidden by a palm tree, wearing his standard self-satisfied expression. The first thing I remembered was how annoyed I had been with him the night before. The second thing I remembered was kissing him outside his cottage that afternoon. He cocked his head back, gesturing for me to come over. Silently I declined by turning my back to him and trying to commit to the song. Yes, Madonna, life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone. But Nick did not call my name, he just stood there looking smug, so I continued to dance my arse off.

  ‘Nick!’

  By the sounds of it, someone else at the party was not nearly as committed to playing hard to get as I was. After being completely catatonic for nigh on an hour, Paige sprang to lif
e and sprinted across the sand, throwing herself into Nick’s unwelcoming arms. I couldn’t quite hear her over the music, but I did manage to dance around Kekipi and my other new GBFs, Makani and Aikane, to get myself within hearing distance. Paige had her arms slung round Nick’s neck and seemed to be trying to lure him onto the dance floor with some very dodgy moves. It was painful to watch. Thankfully, even full of cocktails and surrounded by hot twinks, Kekipi never forgot his job.

  ‘Ms Sullivan. Paige, darling.’ He cut in on the world’s most awkward dance party and scooped Paige up in his arms. Although he didn’t look big enough to manhandle a grown woman, this was clearly not his first time. ‘You’re Cinderella, it’s almost midnight, there’s a coach outside that’s threatening to turn into a pumpkin. Prince Charming comes to you, remember? You don’t go to him.’

  ‘Nick has to dance!’ she yelped, pointing somewhere in the vicinty of Nick. ‘He needs to do dancing!’

  ‘I’ll make sure he dances,’ Kekipi promised, carrying her away from the lights. ‘Third rule of dance club ? if it’s your first time at dance club, you have to dance.’

  ‘What are the other two rules?’ I asked Makani.

  ‘First rule of dance club is never talk about dance club,’ he replied.

  ‘And the second rule is never talk about dance club?’

  ‘No, the second rule is drink until you can’t remember dance club.’ He spun me round suddenly and I was so glad not to be wearing my heels. ‘That way you can’t talk about it, even if you wanted to.’

  ‘You’ve thought of everything,’ I yelled over the music before I felt a pair of hands on my waist pulling me away from my dance circle. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Nothing nearly as inappropriate as what you did earlier,’ Nick said, pressing his lips into my hair. ‘Take these clips out. I want your hair down.’

  ‘I want never gets,’ I said, pushing him away, but he just grabbed my wrists and pulled me back. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk to me?’ he asked. ‘No more questions?’

  ‘I’m all out,’ I said, trying to ignore the growing burning sensation that was not caused by the fact that my jeans were too tight and I needed a wee. Even though they were and I did. ‘I think I know everything I need to know.’

  ‘I agree.’ He let go of one wrist but spun me round with the other and trapped me against him. ‘We should just go back to yours.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ I looked down at my chest. So that was what a heaving bosom looked like. ‘After you walked out on me last night.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you do that?’ he asked. ‘After you kissed me this afternoon?’

  ‘I don’t know you, Nick.’ I noticed the rest of the partygoers had formed a subtle circle around us and were keeping a close eye on proceedings. Fantastic ? now I was the official entertainment at a gay, Gaga-soundtracked luau. Truly this was a week of firsts. ‘I don’t know why I did what I did earlier. Maybe I’d had too much sun.’

  ‘Vanessa.’ He stopped dancing and gripped me tightly around the waist. ‘I don’t do games.’

  ‘Good job I didn’t challenge you to a round of Boggle, then.’

  Bothered and bewildered, I slapped his hands off me. I seemed to be breathing awfully heavily.

  ‘Come on, it’s my first night at dance club,’ he said, smiling and holding out his hand. I hated that smile. Definitely more of a smirk. ‘I have to dance.’

  ‘I’m sure there are plenty of takers.’ I knocked his hands away and walked off, leaving him to the mercy of Kekipi’s friends.

  The tricksy combination of racing hormones and too much rum left me burning with a furious temper that wasn’t even slightly cooled by the giant glass of water I downed the second I stepped through the door. Bathed in the half-light of the fridge, I stood and chugged, really wanting to swap the crystal-clear goodness for another cocktail, but more than anything I didn’t want to wake up with a hangover. I wanted to wake up with a beautiful man and some intimate chafing, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  A quiet knock on the door disturbed my filthy thoughts, and, half hoping it would be Nick, I set down the water, pinched my cheeks and opened up. It was Kekipi. What a waste of a pinch.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you were home safely,’ he said, calm and professional. Even at a party, business Kekipi was never far away. Although business Kekipi smelled a little bit of sick and I had to assume that had something to do with his new, more sombre attitude. ‘I saw your light from Miss Sullivan’s cottage. Can I get you anything at all?’

  My vagina was so sad that it was him and not Nick at my door but there was really nothing he could do about that. ‘No, I’m just going to go to bed. Aren’t you going to go back to the party? It felt like it was just getting started.’

  ‘It was and I am,’ Kekipi confirmed, the glint back in his eye. ‘Those boys are animals. You won’t join me?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s bedtime for me.’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘With or without Mr Miller?’

  I wanted to look shocked, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I just laughed as if the very idea were ridiculous. ‘I’m not that kind of girl,’ I assured him. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Kekipi shrugged. ‘He’s very attractive, he clearly thinks you’re very attractive, there’s some chemistry there. Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Because I’m not a gay man?’ I suggested.

  ‘And that’s what’s wrong with the world,’ he said, starting back down the path but leaving my door wide open. ‘Man, woman, straight, gay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting someone. We’re all adults.’

  My immediate reaction was that while Kekipi and I might be adults, Nick was a petulant man-child who needed a good slap, but every other part of my body was screaming something else. Every other part of my body was reminding me that Nick was a very attractive, solid slab of man who invoked the kind of animal lust in a girl that made me want to climb him like a tree. I clutched the door handle, fully intending to shut it, lock it and go to bed. Instead, I just stood there, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Why shouldn’t I go back? Kekipi was right. Why was it such a big deal for me to admit I wanted to eff the hell out of this man?

  ‘Because good girls don’t do that,’ I whispered, arguing with myself. ‘Because you don’t.’

  OK, so I barely knew him, and admittedly what I did know I didn’t necessarily love, but it wasn’t like sleeping with someone I’d been smitten with for ten years had worked out entirely according to plan, so, really, what was the point in a plan? It wasn’t as if overintellectualizing my decisions had got me anywhere. Kekipi was right. I had only five more days in Hawaii, and after that I never had to see Nick again. God knows I wanted him, and against all laws of God and man, he seemed to want me too. I should do it. But still ? I took one more breath in and fluffed out my hair ? if I was going to do this, there had to be some ground rules for myself. No emotions, no sobbing the morning after. I would go in, get laid and then go back home to bed. All business. All I had to do was screw my courage to the sticking place. Or stick my courage in the screwing place. Or something.

  As if by dirty, dirty magic, when I opened my eyes I saw Nick sitting two feet away in one of the white wooden chairs by my cottage and jumped out of my skin. If my heart hadn’t been racing before, it was now.

  ‘I really need to know what you were thinking about,’ he said, resting his elbows on his denim-clad legs and looking up at me from underneath his messy, beachy hair. ‘That’s quite the expression on your face.’

  I held still for a moment, concentrating on breathing and not falling over. Falling over wasn’t sexy. Nick, however, was sexy. Even in the delicately lit darkness of the bay, there was no way around the fact that he was a very handsome man. And he was looking at me that way again. No one looked at me that way.

  ‘I was thinking about coming to see you,’ I said, standi
ng as still as possible. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I moved. There was every chance I would run and lock myself in the bathroom. Again. ‘About this afternoon.’

  ‘To apologize?’ he asked, rising from the chair, his forearms flexing against the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. I really was a mug for those forearms.

  ‘No.’ I managed to get the word out before he was in front of me. It was just as well. Once he was only inches away, I seemed to lose the power of speech. Nick was not my type. He was barely taller than me. His eyes were too blue and he had too much of a tan. He was blond. He was arrogant. I didn’t know him, I didn’t love him, I didn’t like him. He wasn’t Charlie. And I had never wanted to have sex with anyone so badly in my entire life. ‘I’m not going to apologize.’

  ‘Good,’ he replied, pushing me back against the door, knocking my head against the wood and kissing me deep and hard without asking permission, without pausing to see if I was OK. I was more than OK. My body lit up under his touch, excited to be doing something, or someone, so new, and started to explore the man pressing against me. Nick didn’t waste time with his kisses, moving from my lips to my throat and all the way down to the neckline of my T-shirt before I could even blink, and somehow, with eyes closed, I concentrated on the sensation of his fingertips tracing patterns all over my body and tried to remember to breathe. His hands coiled themselves up in my hair and pulled my head back sharply, making me gasp. I heard him laugh. He did not stop. Instead, his hands slid down my back, feeling out the fastest route into the waistband of my jeans and slipping inside. This was not his first time. Gasping for air, I wrapped my arms around his neck and hung on for dear life as he pulled me away from the door, pushed me into the cottage and kicked it closed before tearing at my button fly.

  ‘These are in the way,’ he whispered.

  He was right, but they weren’t in the way for long. With no chance of turning back, I wriggled around, my back against the closed door, and helped him remove my extraneous clothing while reaching for his belt buckle. Two could play at this game. I just hoped he wouldn’t notice my amateur status when he was quite clearly a pro.