‘You really have got a way with words.’ Nick took hold of my arm again, his grip tighter this time, and pulled me back towards him. ‘I’ll admit I’m shit at this. That’s why I don’t do it.’
I huffed and relaxed my arm. Fighting him was not easy on my messed-up shoulder and I had visions of him suddenly letting go and me tumbling helplessly over the side of the cathedral.
‘And that’s why you shag girls you meet on assignments and assume you’ll never have to see them again?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Assignments. Holidays. Bars I never intend to frequent again. It’s easier.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.’ I grudgingly let him guide me back down to a very uncomfortable sitting position.
‘And that’s how I know you don’t have a dick,’ he answered. ‘It is fun. For a while. And then one day you wake up with a girl in your bed and you don’t know her name and all you want is for her to leave so you can pretend she was never there in the first place. That’s when it stops being a good time.’
‘You wish you’d never met me?’ I asked, my old friend nausea turning over my stomach again.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I wish I’d never met my ex, Amanda.’
I sank sideways, from my knees onto my bum, skirt blowing in the breeze and revealing my pants to everyone on the roof, saints and sinners alike.
It had a name.
‘Oh,’ I said. I’d used all my words; I was all out. ‘She’s the ex?’
‘I’ve had a lot of exes.’ He stared up at the top of the tallest spire with his hand over his eyes. ‘But yeah, I think she’s the one you mean.’
‘Heartless cow who broke your heart and convinced you all women were untrustworthy bitch faces so you swore that you’d never love again?’
His face cracked into an unwilling smile. ‘You’ve met her then?’
‘Read a lot of books,’ I shrugged. ‘Actually, that’s not true. I’ve watched a lot of telly. There’s loads of Amandas on TV. And I lived with one for a long time, so I know those women exist. They cause a lot of problems for the rest of us.’
‘Really?’ He leaned his head to one side, his hand still covering his face. ‘They cause problems for you?’
‘It becomes a branding issue,’ I said, nodding. ‘It only takes one bad apple to ruin the whole barrel. Or bushel. Or whatever apples come in. You get one shitty woman running around and it gives the rest of us a bad name. When really, the other apples are fine.’
‘You lost me on the apple metaphor,’ Nick said, inching towards me and resting his hand on my ankle, lightly holding me in place, like I might float away. ‘But I think I get what you’re saying.’
‘It wasn’t a very good metaphor,’ I admitted. ‘One shit woman ruins it for the rest of us. Please continue.’
‘It’s not a fun story,’ he said, hesitating for a moment. ‘But I suppose you deserve to hear it. I met her in London, she was from LA – I think I told you that in Hawaii – and it was really intense, right from the beginning.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ I pressed my lips together and reminded myself I’d asked for this. Stupid Amanda, the stupid heartbreaker.
‘She was in London to audition for something she didn’t get and she went back to LA and I couldn’t stop thinking about her.’ He paused and I rearranged my stony face until I looked more like I was listening attentively and not taking down details for the bounty hunter I was planning to hire to hunt her down and kill her. ‘My dad is American, meaning I have dual citizenship, right? So I packed up and followed her to LA and things were amazing for the first year. I loved living in the sun. We had this really amazing flat with a hot tub and you could see the Hollywood sign from our roof deck. It was mental.’
‘Sounds brill,’ I muttered, adding to my notes. Of course she was an actress. Bleurgh.
‘All I wanted was to make her happy.’ Nick let out a half-hearted laugh but he still wasn’t smiling. ‘But things got tough after a bit. She wasn’t getting the roles she wanted and I was getting offered so much work. I turned a lot of stuff down at first but in the end, I had to take jobs so we could pay our rent and that meant quite a bit of travelling. I was back in the UK a lot, out in Australia, in the Far East and she hated it. She wouldn’t come with me in case she got an audition – the only time we went away was when we went to Hawaii – but she said she didn’t trust me when I was travelling.’
‘Why wouldn’t she trust you?’ I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. I could handle a lot of things but me and Rachel from Friends knew there was one absolute truth in this world and that was ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’.
‘That’s the funny thing,’ he said. ‘She didn’t trust me – when really, I shouldn’t have trusted her. Came back early from a trip one day and found her shagging some random bloke in the hot tub. She wasn’t even having an affair. She didn’t even have the decency to go out and fall in love with someone else. She would just go to auditions or to the gym and bring back some random shit and shag him in my house.’
‘Oh.’
There wasn’t a lot else I could think to say.
‘It was my fault, of course, because I kept leaving her.’ His grip around my ankle tightened for a second and then relaxed again. ‘And after that, it was all downhill. I tried to stay home more but she was angry that I didn’t trust her so the more I hung around in LA, the more she would go out and not come home.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ I frowned, trying to work out what he was telling me. ‘You mean, she cheated on you more than once and you didn’t dump her?’
‘No.’ He looked done in. ‘I loved her.’
‘Right.’ I gave him a big, bright sunny smile. ‘Just checking.’
Men.
‘But in the end, she decided she’d had enough.’ He threw his hands up in the air, giving me just enough time to flex my ankle before he grabbed it again. ‘She met some rich old fucker with a palace in the hills and I came home one day and she’d gone. Said she couldn’t live with my mistrust any more.’
‘So you moved to LA to be with her,’ I said out loud, piecing the timeline together for my own sanity. ‘Then she cheated on you and you put up with it and then she moved out because you didn’t trust her?’
He nodded.
‘Why didn’t you dump her when you found out she was shagging around?’ I asked, thinking of all the incredibly feeble reasons my friends and I had been given when being blown off. ‘What made you stay?’
‘I loved her,’ he said again, as though it made everything make sense. ‘That was all there was to it. I couldn’t explain it but I loved her. I’d never felt that way about anyone before. So, you know, there’s a chance that’s why I’m not incredibly keen on rushing into a relationship based on nothing but feelings.’
‘Aren’t all relationships based on feelings?’ I asked, thinking I was fighting a losing battle. ‘Isn’t that what relationships are?’
‘And that’s why I don’t have relationships,’ he replied. ‘Ever.’
‘Then what is this?’ As someone who hadn’t even cried when Bambi’s mother got shot, I had been crying a lot lately but right now, I had nothing. My eyes were so dry and sore from the sun, from staring at him for so long, my tear ducts were exhausted. I was exhausted. ‘Why did you bring me up here and make me tell you how I feel, if feelings don’t matter? If my feelings don’t matter?’
‘I do care about you.’ He moved his hand from my wrist, not holding my hand, but gripping my forearm so tightly I could feel my blood pumping under his fingers. ‘But I’m trying to be honest. I don’t know if this can work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish it could.’
I closed my eyes, only to see a Nick-shaped silhouette staring back at me.
‘Do you even want to try?’ I asked.
‘I do,’ he said. His voice was strong, even if he didn’t sound certain. ‘Sometimes. Most of the time.’
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I opened my eyes and stared at my fee
t, waiting for my eyes to readjust to the sunlight. ‘And the rest of the time?’
‘I don’t know if I trust you.’ He wiped a nonexistent tear from my cheek. ‘And I don’t know if I trust myself. I’ve got really used to my life the way it is and I never expected to want to be with anyone again and then bam, you appear out of nowhere. The thing is, I don’t know if we’d be very good for each other. I don’t know if I’m any use to you.’
As calmly as I could manage, I peeled his hand off my wrist and took it in mine, squeezing it as tightly as I could.
I felt so powerless, it was all happening to me and I hated it. ‘Do I get any say in this?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing I can do?’
He rested his gaze on our hands and squeezed my hand back.
‘I want to try,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to get fucked over again. I really loved her and that wasn’t enough. I don’t know what is.’
Never in my entire life had I hated someone I’d never met quite so much. And I lived in a world where Big Brother was on the telly every year.
‘I’m not her, I wouldn’t do what she did,’ I said, somewhere between desperation and rage. If only I knew which words to use to convince him that I could make him happy. ‘I wouldn’t ever cheat or lie.’
‘But you did lie. You already lied to me.’
Nick let go of my hand and sat cross-legged right in front of me but in that moment, he might as well have been a million miles away. I tried to think of the right thing to say. I wanted to promise that I would take care of him and make him happy and that I would do all the things that he had wanted to do for Amanda but, deep down, I knew he already knew that. He just didn’t believe me. He had already felt the way I felt; he’d been through these exact emotions and had his heart ripped out, torn to pieces, eaten, puked up and then chucked in the wheelie bin for good measure.
Love wasn’t rational but neither was fear. He was afraid and as I knew very well, there weren’t many things that could keep you locked up in your box as well as fear could. But knowing that and accepting it were two different things. Surely there had to be something?
‘Nick.’
I touched the tips of my fingers to the back of his hand and waited. He looked at me for a moment, his eyes too narrow for me to read, his jaw tight and solid. And then he grabbed me, took hold of the back of my head and crashed his lips against mine. I reached out, to hold him, to know it was happening, to make it happen. One hand found a fistful of his shirt, the other was flat against the roof, steadying myself. He kissed me so hard that when he pulled away I could taste blood in my mouth – only I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine. I pressed my hand against my mouth, the pulse in my fingers slower than the pulse in my lips.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked when I found my voice again.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, tracing a thumb across his own lips before clambering up to his feet. He held out his hand to help me up and snaked his arm around my waist, holding me to him. ‘I’m really happy when I’m with you. That’s all I know.’
‘I’m happy when I’m with you.’ I tried to smile and felt a light in my eyes, even though the corners of my mouth didn’t really move. ‘Shall we start there and see where we go?’
‘I’ve heard worse ideas,’ he said, drawing me in for another kiss, something softer and more socially acceptable on the rooftop of a Catholic church. I copped a quick feel of his arse, hoping that Baby Jesus was looking the other way, but still managed to earn a reprimanding stare from a nonna across the way.
It was totally worth it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I’d never really understood what people meant when they said they were deliriously happy. My only experience of delirium was when I was seven and had the mumps and spent a very unpleasant night in my mum’s bed, sweating like there was no tomorrow and waking up every fourteen minutes or so to scream that I was being chased by a giant beach ball. And so, when my friends would describe themselves as delirious, I most often wanted to call a doctor and have them committed – who would want to be in such a state on purpose?
But that afternoon I started to understand. I wasn’t being chased by a giant beach ball, but while Nick and I wandered through the city, not talking, just holding hands and stopping every five feet to kiss or touch each other’s hair, then laugh at absolutely nothing, I certainly felt like I was losing my mind. It was all I could do not to stop strangers in the street to say hello and tell them how much I loved him. That was how I knew I was losing it. I lived in London; I did not approach strangers, even when the label was sticking out the back of their jumper.
The tiniest part of my brain that was still rational sat in a corner, tutting and shaking its head, and I did not care. What did it matter that an hour ago, I had thought my heart was going to break into more pieces than one of those impossible spherical jigsaws that some marketing company would give you a million quid to complete? That didn’t matter! All that mattered was the hand-holding and the kissing and the being in Italy and the laughing uproariously at that tiny dog over there! It was insane and I loved it.
Eventually, we arrived back at his motorbike full of gelato and happiness and I hopped on the back without a care. Who had time to be terrified when you were presented with a fabulous opportunity to snuggle close to your man? Even the palazzo looked more beautiful when we got home. The fountain seemed to be running in slow motion, the water sparkling away like diamonds, and the stone of the building shone golden in the sun.
‘I have to go and do some work,’ Nick said as we strolled up the steps, hand in hand. ‘See you later?’
My face fell like a three-year-old who had just had her favourite toy taken away and I stretched out my arms as far as they would go, trying to keep the very tips of my fingers in contact with him for as long as humanly possible.
‘See you at dinner,’ he promised, jogging up the stairs with a smile on his face. A smile I had put there. It felt really good.
I was too high to go back to my room and so I flip-flopped through the grounds, nodding and smiling to everyone I passed, until I found my secret garden. The whole estate was alive with workers; Al clearly wanted to get the place shipshape before his big party. I was excited for him. I was excited for everyone. Hip checking the door to the garden wide open, I skipped inside, feet floating over the grass until I collapsed in a most attractive heap in the middle of the lawn and stared up at the fluffy white clouds high above me. Being in love was so much easier than deciding what to watch on Sky Plus.
But after a while, I’d done so many internal reruns of Nick and Tess: A Milanese Love Story that even I was starting to get a little tired of it and did what every girl did in times of intense emotional change. I turned to social media.
I’d never been a big fan of posting my life all over Facebook, mostly because I didn’t really have one. Amy, on the other hand, was the queen of social media and had been keeping the internet fully updated on our Italian adventures. There was a shot of her passport at the airport, the driver picking us up in Milan, her first view of the palazzo, me on my hands and knees taking a picture of one of Jane Bennett’s dresses. I frowned, wondering whether or not I could untag it, but then saw that our friend Steven had said I had a nice arse, so I left it alone.
But it wasn’t just Steven that had been commenting on Amy’s pictures. Every single shot since the pic of her passport had a big thumbs up beside it. Charlie Wilder likes this. And just like that, my delirium took a massive blow to the balls.
I flipped to my emails and saw several new messages. A quick one from Paige to let me know she got everything over to Charlie on time, a longer one from Agent Veronica that was not nearly as nice, demanding an update, and a message from Charlie about the pitch.
All right, you,
Portugal was great, flying home tonight. Think they’re totally in love with us. They definitely will be when they see your slides. Maybe I should send you off to Milan more often the pitch is amazing. It’s one hundr
ed per cent in the bag. What would I do without you?
Thank goodness I don’t have to find out.
I love you,
Charlie xx
It had been very easy to forget anything and everything else existed whilst waltzing around the winding streets of Milan, holding hands with a man I wanted to lean over and lick, but when reality crept back in, it did not mess around.
Charlie. Perito’s. London. Today was Thursday; I was supposed to be flying home on Sunday for the pitch on Monday. Bollocks.
Flat on my back, the sun remained up in the sky, refusing to vamoose and make way for some dark grey clouds to reflect my mood. I remembered my English A level, I knew what pathetic fallacy was. Damn the height of the Italian summer; clearly I needed to be up on the Yorkshire moors or something. It was hard to hate yourself when the sun had got his hat on.
There was only one thing for it. I’d been brave that morning; I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for things to happen to me any more. I would call him. I would pick up my phone and dial his number and tell him everything. He would be upset, he would be hurt, but maybe he would understand. Like Amy said, he hadn’t been moping around after me for ten years, it was more like ten minutes. He might even be a bit relieved when he thought about.
And maybe that was a very pretty pig flying past me on its way into the kitchen to become my dinner.
‘Be brave, Tess,’ I told myself. ‘What would Beyoncé do?’
Only, what would Beyoncé do? Beyoncé would never find herself in this position, that’s what Beyoncé would do. She would be at home with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy watching telly and thinking ‘That Tess doesn’t half get herself into some situations.’
Without the guidance of an icon and with some resistance from my broken phone, I pressed Charlie’s name and hoped something distracting might happen before he picked up, like a runaway train crashing through the walls and crushing me to death, or maybe something a little less dramatic like the end of the world.