What a Girl Wants

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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

  ‘But I’m awake,’ I said, running my fingers lightly through his hair, sliding down the back of his neck and making circles on his strong back. ‘I can’t sleep.’

  ‘You clearly aren’t trying,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll wake you up properly in an hour.’

  ‘I was wondering, have you spoken with Artie at all?’ I asked, making a silent note of his offer. ‘Since we’ve been here this week, I mean?’

  ‘Go back to sleep and don’t get involved,’ he said, turning his head away.

  I stopped my circling and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

  ‘Don’t get involved in what?’

  Nick growled, the muscles in his back moving under his skin as he turned his head again. With one eye open, he looked at me.

  ‘What do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s too early for this.’ Nick dropped his head back into the pillows, face down. ‘I’m a writer. I’m here to tell the story. Never get involved in family business, Tess.’

  ‘So something is going on.’ I scrambled up into a sitting position and kept shoving him until he turned over with a muffled roar. ‘You know something! What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know anything for certain.’ He grabbed hold of my wrists to stop my feeble attack and yawned loudly. ‘But I heard Artie on the phone to a Chinese factory the other night and he certainly wasn’t encouraging them to take his father’s business. And I’ve seen him talking to Warren, the bloke with all the photos of tits on his wall.’

  ‘He’s the pattern cutter,’ I sniffed. ‘But it’s good to know what you took away from that meeting.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I have a penis, there were naked woman.’ He closed his eyes again and pressed his forearms over his face. ‘Can you shut the curtains?’

  ‘I heard someone talking Chinese – was that Artie?’ I said, picking up Nick’s shirt and slipping it on as I went so as not to flash the entire Corso Venezia below. ‘How do you know he was on the phone to China?’

  ‘I speak Cantonese,’ he mumbled, ‘and some Mandarin. But he was speaking Cantonese and as I’m not a mind reader, I don’t know who you heard but it’s likely. He’s running interference on Al. I don’t know why. Yet.’

  ‘Why haven’t you told me about this before?’ I pulled the curtains to, reminding my reproductive organs that we were in the middle a very important conversation and that now wasn’t the time to insist he knock me up with genius, Cantonese-speaking babies, no matter how sexy that was. ‘What did Al say? He acted like he didn’t know any of this when I spoke to him yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t think he does know,’ Nick replied from underneath his arms. ‘It’s fucking tragic. His son is a really nasty piece of work.’

  ‘Wait, what?’ I held on to the heavy curtains. ‘You haven’t told him?’

  He let out an impressively exasperated sigh.

  ‘No, I haven’t told him,’ he said slowly as if he was explaining to a child. ‘One, I don’t know anything for definite yet and two, I’m the journalist. It’s my job to observe and then tell the story. I don’t get in the middle.’

  My hands curled tightly around the curtains.

  ‘But he’s our friend,’ I said, just as slowly. ‘You’ve got to tell him.’

  ‘He’s your boss,’ Nick corrected. ‘And I’m a journalist. This is a story.’

  I stood in between the two curtains at the window, one leg warmed by the early morning sunlight, the other cold in the shade of the bedroom, and stared back at the bed. Nick was already half-asleep again, breathing steadily and all curled up under the covers. I couldn’t quite process what he was saying.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You’re telling me you’re not OK with me working in advertising because that’s whoring my creativity to the man, but you’re totally fine with keeping Al in the dark about his own son trying to sink his new business because it makes a good story?’

  ‘Anything would sound bad when you put it like that,’ he replied without moving.

  ‘No, it sounds bad because it is bad,’ I said. I didn’t want to lose my temper and shout at him because, for once, I was entirely in the right and if he gave me that patronizing ‘calm down, dear’ look, I was very like to strangle him with his own boxer shorts. ‘You have to tell Al what you know.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ Nick emphasized the ‘I’ very carefully.dpka ‘And you need to calm down. I’m working on it.’

  And there went my temper.

  ‘That’s funny,’ I snapped, ‘because it sounds a lot like you’re letting someone I care about, someone who has been nothing but good to both of us, get spectacularly shat on for the sake of a story.’

  ‘Tess …’ Nick dragged himself upright and pushed his hand through his messy bedhead. ‘This could be a big deal, not a bit of a family tiff. Will you please stop being so naïve? You do not get involved in things you do not understand. You’re not Lois Lane, you’re not going to rush in and save the day.’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ I hated being this angry this early. I hated being this angry at him. ‘You’re not going to tell Al anything?’

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I’m going to follow the story and report it.’

  ‘I hope you enjoy your moral high ground,’ I said, scooting around the room and collecting my clothes. ‘I’ll be in my room being naïve and failing to understand how you can look Al in the eye.’

  ‘I really don’t want to have this conversation right now.’ Nick rolled over, showing me his back and his lack of concern, all at the same time. ‘It’s too early for this.’

  ‘I don’t want to have this conversation either,’ I said. ‘In fact, I don’t think I want to have any conversations with you for a bit. I’ll let you sleep.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He didn’t even attempt to stop me from leaving. ‘This is what I do. It’s my job.’

  ‘Well, I happen to think convincing people to try a new kind of Pot Noodle is less morally compromising than shitting on good people.’ I heard the sting in my heart sound out in my voice. ‘So this is what I’m doing.’

  I slammed the door, checked both directions and pulled my knickers on very quickly.

  I stomped down the hall and up the stairs to my room, stewing on how easily he’d admitted to all of it and how little he seemed to care. But I didn’t have time to dwell on potential heartbreak – I had to find a way to help Al. He was right about one thing at least: I wasn’t Lois Lane, intrepid girl reporter. Clearly that was him. I was Superman and I was going to save the day.

  Somehow.

  As if I wasn’t frustrated enough, I couldn’t get hold of anyone when I got back to my room. Neither Al nor Kekipi were answering their phones and Domenico reluctantly informed me that they had all left the house already, Artie too, although obviously not at the same time. I took my rage into the bathroom and fumed in the shower, trying to work out what I was going to say when I did get hold of Al and wondering how much Domenico knew. After all, I had seen him coming out of Artie’s room the other night. Was he involved?

  And as for Nick? I lathered up my hair with previously unknown vigour. How could he be so callous? I was starting to think I had made an epic fuck-up. After all this nonsense, what if the whole Nick or Charlie predicament was pointless? The thought that neither of them was right for me hadn’t even crossed my mind until now. Charlie said he loved me, but the girl I was, the girl I’d been for the last ten years, she wasn’t around any more. All the things he loved about me weren’t real. I didn’t love all the same things as he did, I just said I did so he would hang out with me. Coldplay made my skin crawl and, yes, I enjoyed Star Wars as much as the next girl but did he really need to watch it every other week? There were so many other movies out there.

  But how could anyone choose to be with a man who was so very happy to go bac
k to bed when a good man was about to get shafted so royally? What would happen five, ten years from now? So sorry, darling, can’t make parents’ evening, I’m very busy selling my mother down the river for a byline in The Times. Give whichever child has done well my love and tell the other one I’ll ruin his life when I get home.

  And so it was down to me. Clearly, I couldn’t call the factory in China and have a quick chat with them, and given that my Italian was about as good as my Cantonese, there wasn’t much point in trying to get any information out of the people dealing with the lease on the shop, but there was one person in this mess who did speak English. I could definitely speak to him – as long as he was in his office. And he agreed to see me.

  I tied up my hair in my best shit-kicking ponytail, grabbed my bag and marched on my enemy.

  ‘Buongiorno.’

  The receptionist I had already met twice in the last five days stared at me blandly as though she had never seen my face before in her life.

  ‘Bonjouro?’ I offered. Italian was never going to be my language. ‘Um, hello. I’m here to see Mr Warren.’

  I smiled, hoping there was a direct correlation between the number of teeth I showed her and how quickly she let me in.

  ‘No,’ she replied without even checking her computer screen. ‘No meeting today.’

  ‘I’m working with Bertie Bennett?’ I said, taking my camera out of my bag and waving it around until she cowered behind her monitor. Because threatening her with a heavy object was definitely going to change her mind. ‘It’s very important.’

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘No meeting today. Arrivederci.’

  ‘Right, I know it’s not in the diary,’ I leaned over the desk, attempting to look terribly conspiratorial, ‘because it’s actually a personal meeting. I’m going to be modelling for Mr Warren.’

  The receptionist peered over the desk, looked me up and down and then laughed.

  ‘No, no, no!’ She gave me a shake of the head as she continued to titter. ‘No model.’