‘Then I’ll stick with the wine.’ I held out my glass for a refill.
‘Wine and pizza …’ He grabbed the almost empty bottle from the side table and poured. ‘We’re practically Italian.’
I flipped open the lid of the pizza box and ignored him.
‘Hawaiian pizza?’ I asked. ‘I suppose you think you’re funny.’
‘I want to hear about it – Amy wouldn’t tell me anything.’ Charlie handed me a piece of kitchen towel in lieu of a plate and grabbed a huge, gooey slice of pizza before settling back onto the sofa. ‘Actually, she kept saying I was a cockwomble and told me to stop calling her. Was it amazing?’
‘It was amazing.’ I chose my words carefully, focusing on my memories of the sea and the sand and the smell of morning pastries and pretty pink flowers and pineapple that tasted nothing like the pineapple on this pizza. ‘It’s really beautiful.’
‘I still can’t believe you did it, Tess,’ he said. ‘Packed up, flew halfway round the world. It’s so not you.’
I shrugged, picking pieces of sad, tinned pineapple off my pizza. He didn’t know the half of it.
‘Being me wasn’t getting me very far, was it?’ I said, wiping my hands on a paper napkin and wrapping my hair around itself in a bun on the back of my head. ‘And I needed to get away from everything.’
The skinny blonde elephant in the corner of the room coughed delicately and tossed its hair.
‘Everything?’ Charlie repeated.
‘You know, work and everything,’ I said, attempting to clarify without using the V word. If I never heard the V word again as long as I lived, it would be too soon.
Charlie wrapped his huge hand around his delicate wine glass and nodded. ‘Vanessa.’
And we’d managed fifteen seconds. Not bad going.
‘You know …’ He cleared his throat and took a drink. ‘Me and her, it was nothing to do with me and you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, meaning it entirely.
‘It was a thing.’ For some reason, he hadn’t stopped talking. ‘It was not a clever thing, I know, but it was like she was in one box and you were in another and I never even thought about you being in that box because you’re you and she’s her and you were in a more important box anyway. Does that make sense?’
‘None, not even a little bit,’ I replied. ‘I really, really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I never had feelings for her,’ he said, continuing to talk in spite of specific instructions to the contrary. gesticulating wildly and using his pizza as a prop. ‘It was all, well, it was all that it was.’
‘It was just sex,’ I said, my mind wandering over to the last time I’d heard those words.
‘I know I’m an idiot and I know I was dick-led and I know you’ll never forgive me …’ I looked away but heard the clink of the wine bottle on the rim of the glass. ‘But yeah, it was just sex. I’m a bloke. I was drunk and a fit girl came on to me and I am fully aware that it was the worst decision I’ve ever made.’
Sipping my wine, I considered his words for a moment. Two weeks ago, that sort of defence would have made my head explode but now, having made my own bad decisions, with my own fit bloke, I could almost understand. Almost.
‘If I could take it back, I would.’ Charlie climbed off the settee, his long legs kneeling in the lid of the pizza box before he pushed it away and I watched it skate across the room and disappear under an armchair. ‘If I’d known what might happen with you, I would never—’
‘You’re drunk,’ I said, half-hopefully. ‘We don’t have to have this conversation now.’
‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this, Tess,’ he said, taking the wine glass and paper-towel pizza plate out of my hands.
His breath was warm and sharp from the wine but he smelled the way he had smelled since the very first day I had met him. A mixture of Head & Shoulders, the Issey Miyake aftershave he had spritzed on before he left the flat this morning and underneath all that, the same comforting Charlieness that had wrapped itself around me a thousand times.
‘I know I fucked up. And not just by what I did and who I did it with, but by not realizing how amazing you are bloody years ago. You’re my best friend. You make me laugh, you take care of me; you’re the one who is always there. You’re shit at beat-em-ups but I don’t care. There are too many awesome things about you. I can’t believe I didn’t work this out before.’
‘Like what?’ I said, nervous laughter in my voice. ‘What’s so awesome about me?’
‘Everything,’ he said, grinning. ‘We like all the same films, we like all the same TV shows, we like the same music. God, it’s like we were made for each other. You’re basically me and I’m basically you.’
I wanted my wine back. Was that true, really? Did we like all the same things? And did I want to be with someone who liked me because I was exactly like him? I hated to admit it but I had a feeling it would be more true to say I liked the things he liked so we would have more reasons to spend time together. We never, ever did anything I suggested – because I never suggested anything.
‘I need you in my life,’ Charlie said, not put off by my contemplative silence. ‘And not as a mate. I didn’t realize how much I needed you until now. Just don’t tell me it’s too late.’
As it was, he didn’t give me a chance to tell him anything. Instead he took my hands in his and pulled me towards him.
‘Tess,’ he whispered. ‘My Tess.’
It was what I wanted: to be his, to belong.
Softly, slowly he pressed his lips against mine and I was full of wine and butterflies, so I kissed him back. I closed my eyes, let myself drift and kissed Charlie Wilder as though there wasn’t a single other man on the planet.
Only, I knew that wasn’t true.
CHAPTER THREE
It was very early the next morning when I woke up in Charlie’s bed. With Charlie, but without any clothes. The night before, it had seemed like such a good idea, the getting naked thing. I hadn’t had a good day by anyone’s standards and nothing seemed to take my mind off bigger problems like a good seeing-to. It was one of the fun new things I’d learned about myself of late. Unfortunately, for everything I’d learned, I seemed to have forgotten how much trouble dropping my knickers tended to land me in. Twelve hours earlier, the idea of sleeping with Charlie was warm and reassuring and comforting but when I woke up at dawn, the sunlight slicing across his blue-for-a-boy bedroom, there was one thought I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many times I tossed and turned.
Nick Miller.
Here I was, nestled in the nook of the man I’d been achingly in love with for ten long years, and all I could think about was how different it felt to waking up beside Nick. I kept trying to close my eyes but every time I began to drift off, there he was. His ashy blond hair and blue eyes staring right at me, making me shiver from head to toe.
Strangely enough, waking up naked with one man but only being able to think of another was a bit confusing and so, as quietly as I could, I slid out of bed, grabbed my clothes from last night and tiptoed towards the bedroom door. All I needed was ten minutes to make a cup of tea. Or maybe I could go for a quick walk, blow away the cobwebs. Actually, it might be a good idea to pop back to Amy’s. I could leave Charlie a note. Yeah, that was a good idea. As long as I left a note it was OK. Everyone loved a note …
‘Morning.’
I froze in the doorway, pulling my borrowed T-shirt past the hem of my knickers with one hand and trying to push my hair into some sort of shape with the other. Charlie rubbed at his face with the back of his hand and smiled.
‘Hello.’
Well, at least I didn’t have to worry about what to put in the note.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ he asked, stretching his entire body down the length of the bed as I averted my eyes. Even now, even at twenty-eight years old, I still couldn’t make direct eye contact with a penis. At least not in daylight. Definitely not s
ober.
‘Uh, just putting the kettle on,’ I replied, my hair flopping down over one eye. I can pull off sexy, I thought, planting my hand on my waist and dropping my hip. Then immediately standing up straight and feeling like a twat. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Not in the mood for a cup of tea,’ he said, pulling back the covers and patting the mattress. Once the duvet had been removed, it wasn’t hard to see what he was in the mood for. I coloured up from head to toe and averted my eyes. I had been fantasizing about Charlie for a decade and we’d had actual sex twice now, but seeing his actual peen with my actual eyes was still too much.
‘I need a wee,’ I said, the words falling out of my mouth before I could consider how incredibly unsexy they were. Charlie frowned and waved me away. ‘Back in a minute.’
Once the bathroom door was safely locked behind me, I sat down on the loo and pressed both hands against my face. What was wrong with me? Why was this weird?
If only I could stop thinking about Nick.
‘I’m not thinking about him at all,’ I corrected myself and ran the cold water over a dubious-looking flannel. ‘Not at all.’
Why would I be thinking about him? I had just woken up in the arms of a wonderful man who was over six feet tall, had all his own teeth and had bought me pizza. In an online dating world, Charlie was the catch of the century.
‘So I’m not thinking about Nick.’ I slapped myself around the chops with the icy flannel. ‘I am wishing I had never met him, but I am not thinking about him.’
There was nothing to think about anyway. So what if he was so attractive he made Matthew McConaughey look like he’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down? So what if he was intelligent and passionate and fascinating? So what if the sex was intense and so all-consuming that I still have pale yellow traces of his fingerprints on my arms and shoulders and hips and even thinking about our time together made me forget to breathe.
Nick was a fling. I had a fling and now that fling was over. And not just because he sent a heart-stoppingly brief ‘call me’ email a week ago and then failed to pick up his phone or answer anything subsequently, but because I had decided it was over. Hawaii was a fantasy; this was real life. And it wasn’t a bad trade by any stretch of the imagination.
‘Totally over the Nick situation.’ I was resolute underneath the flannel. ‘The fling has been flung.’
Not that I wasn’t a bit pissed off. Yes, he had good reason to be annoyed at me, but when a man sent you an email that said ‘call me’ and then didn’t actually answer your calls, that was enough to slot him firmly into the ‘douchebag’ category.
‘Why tell me to call if he didn’t want to speak to me?’ I asked the flannel.
It didn’t answer. It just smelled damp and sad.
‘Everything all right in there?’ Charlie knocked on the door. ‘You setting up shop or something?’
‘I’m was just, you know,’ I stood up and flushed for the want of a better response, ‘doing stuff.’
‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Oh. Right, uh, I’ll let you get on with that then.’
‘I’m not doing that,’ I shrieked, realizing he had added two and two and got something very unladylike. ‘I was just washing my face.’
I threw the door open and waved the damp flannel around to prove my innocence.
‘You didn’t use that, did you?’ Charlie asked, taking it from me with his thumb and forefinger and sniffing gingerly.
I pressed my fingers to my face. The skin was still all there. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’ He threw it over my shoulder into the bath and wiped his hand on the back of his boxer shorts. ‘Come here.’
Before I could protest, Charlie wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I clasped my hands behind his back and made myself smile, trying to relax into him. I’d always found Charlie hugs reassuring. He was so tall, he even dwarfed me when I wore heels and I was five ten. In bare feet, it was like being cuddled by a considerably cuter Bigfoot. I felt his chin on the top of my head and heard a purr-like noise emanate from his entire being.
‘Let’s go back to bed …’ His hands slid down my back and up underneath my borrowed T-shirt. ‘This is the first time I’ve been happy to not have a job since we got fired.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, writhing out of his reach and grabbing hold of both of his hands before I got carried away. Again. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
Even though I was congratulating myself for listening to my brain instead of my vagina, it was still hard not to fall right into Charlie’s arms and let him carry me back to bed. This was what happened when you didn’t have sex forever and then had all of the sex at once – you lost control of every single sensible impulse in your body.
‘A meeting?’ Charlie casually pushed his erection down like a bad dog. ‘Who have you got a meeting with? At this time in the morning?’
‘It’s an agent,’ I replied, my eyes squarely locked on his. ‘So … I was taking photos in Hawaii. For a magazine.’
‘You were taking photos?’ he asked, finally leaving his penis alone. ‘Like a photographer?’
‘Just like a photographer,’ I nodded and looked at my hands. How did I keep this as brief as possible? ‘I didn’t just decide to go to Hawaii. I went to take pictures of this man for Gloss magazine. He owns a fancy department store in New York and he’s retiring so they were doing a feature.’
‘And you were the photographer?’ Charlie crossed his arms, making his biceps pop. ‘You took the pictures?’
‘I took the pictures,’ I said, not looking at his arms at all. ‘I was the photographer.’
‘But you’re not a photographer,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re a creative director at an ad agency.’
‘Technically, I’m more of a photographer than a creative director right now,’ I replied. ‘You know I was always interested in photography.’
‘Do I?’
‘Anyway, they really like the photos – the magazine, and Al, the guy I was taking the photos of. So now he wants me to go to Milan and take some more photos for a project he’s working on. I guess it’s a career retrospective or something?’
‘Woah.’ Charlie breathed out, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. ‘That’s bloody amazing. Mental but amazing.’
‘I can see how you would get to mental,’ I said, wiggling one big toe and then the other. ‘But I really love taking photos and it turns out I’m good at it.’
‘Are you going to go?’ he asked. ‘To Milan?’
I scrunched up my face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘I want a cup of tea,’ I answered, standing up and walking straight into the kitchen. I knew his flat as well as I knew him and before he had even followed me, I had two cups on the counter, his instant boil kettle bubbling away.
‘You always want a cup of tea,’ Charlie said, opening the fridge and taking out the milk. ‘But do you really want to do it? This photo thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ I couldn’t look at him while I spoke. Why was this so hard? I placed a teabag in each cup and felt my eyes prickle with the tears of an awkward conversation.
‘When do you have to make a decision?’ he asked. This was why he was a great account manager, always on the details. ‘When would you have to go? Do you know how long you’d be away?’
‘Soon,’ I said, splashing my moo juice onto the kitchen top. ‘And I’d be away for a little bit.’
‘And how long is a little bit?’ He put the milk back in the fridge and took his tea. ‘Three days? Four?’
I stirred my tea with a teaspoon that didn’t match any of his other cutlery and watched the milk swirl away into an evenly coloured cuppa.
‘I’m not sure.’
I was lying. I did know. Agent Veronica had sent me several long and detailed emails about the job, each with an increasing degree of foul language. Agent Veronica did not believe in mi
ncing words.
The job would take at least three months, probably more. The rest of July, August, September and some of October. I could easily be away until Christmas. Stood there in Charlie’s kitchen in my pants, holding a hot cup of tea, everything seemed to slow down to a complete standstill and I couldn’t quite seem to find the right words to tell him that. So I didn’t tell him anything. It was a serious problem I appeared to have developed.
‘Sounds like an amazing opportunity,’ Charlie said, heaping mounds of white sugar into his mug. I wasn’t allowed to put sugar in Charlie’s tea, I never added enough. ‘I mean, you never went travelling or anything after uni. It might be fun.’
‘It’s not just as easy as packing a bag and getting on a plane.’ I breathed in and felt the world shift back to a normal speed, rattling off the excuses I’d been telling myself, every time the tiniest buzz of excitement swelled up in my stomach. ‘I don’t have anywhere to live, I don’t have any money, I don’t even have a camera. And yes, the pictures from Hawaii worked out but this is a much bigger deal. It’s not a fun thing, it’s a proper job that a real photographer would kill for. I honestly don’t know if I’m up to it.’
‘You, Tess Brookes, are up to anything you put your mind to,’ Charlie said, his dark brown eyes clear and resolute. ‘You know that. Or at least I know that. How many times do I have to tell you?’
I looked up at him with a half-smile hidden behind my mug. Of course, he had to go and remind me that he wasn’t just a great shag and my lifelong crush, but my best friend as well.
‘A camera is easy enough to get, isn’t it? And you haven’t bloody shown me the pictures from Hawaii yet but I don’t believe you would do anything less than a perfect job. You always do.’
‘You mean because I’m OCD?’ I asked.
‘I mean because you work hard and you’re good at whatever you do,’ he said, splashing his tea around his bare feet. ‘As for the not-having-anywhere-to-live thing – you could always stay here.’
‘I’m not a very good roommate, as I’m sure Amy would tell you,’ I said, tearing off some kitchen towel and wiping up his mess, vaguely impressed in the back of my mind that he actually had kitchen towel. ‘And really, your spare room isn’t big enough to swing a cat. Plus you’ve got a surfboard in it. When was the last time you surfed?’