Читать книгу Lindsey Kelk Girl Collection: About a Girl, What a Girl Wants - Lindsey Kelk - Страница 20

It took another forty-five minutes of primping before Paige could be persuaded to leave for the luau. I had traded my heels for my brown leather flip-flops but kept my jeans and T-shirt. The night air had cooled slightly, but I was still really too warm. I was also incredibly conscious of the swathes of black eyeliner Paige had insisted I wear. To be fair to her, she didn’t do a horrible job, but it was just too hot for so much make-up and I wasn’t used to looking like a sexy panda. If there was such a thing. There was a reason pandas didn’t do it all that often, and I strongly suspected it had something to do with their amateur smokey-eye look in the Chinese humidity. Eventually, with Paige in her expensive toddleresque ensemble and me in my stolen clothes and borrowed make-up, we found Kekipi’s luau. And it was full of gays.

‘You came!’ Kekipi dashed up to me with a coconut that was not full of coconut water and gave me a huge hug. ‘I told missy to bring you. It’s not a real luau, just a bit of a boys’ get-together, but we do have tiki torches, dancing and a disgusting amount of pig.’

‘You had me at pig,’ I promised.

Kekipi laughed and clapped. He was my favourite. ‘Since Mr Bennett stopped giving his parties, we’ve made it a tradition to invite fabulous women to our own whenever there are fabulous women to invite.’

‘I believe Paige definitely falls into the fabulous category,’ I said, accepting a coconut cocktail of my own as well as a hot-pink lei made of delicious-smelling flowers. Across the way, Paige was trying to negotiate with a half-naked man for a baby-blue garland as the pink was ‘too matchy matchy’ for her outfit. ‘I think I’m just filler.’

‘Fabulous filler.’ Kekipi slipped his arm through mine and walked me over to an empty table. ‘So I have to ask you, have you seen Mr Twenty Questions today?’

‘I have,’ I confirmed and swiftly changed the subject. ‘But I have to ask you, what’s going on with Bertie Bennett? How come he keeps cancelling things?’

‘Oh, don’t,’ Kekipi said, waving his hand in my face. ‘I haven’t seen him in days. I don’t know where he’s hiding. I just find notes dotted around the house. It’s family business issues – don’t concern yourself with it.’

‘Not the best time to invite journalists over, then.’ I found the straw in my cocktail and took a sip. It was so wonderful, I feared I might never drink any other type of drink as long as I lived. ‘Interesting.’

‘Hmm.’ Kekipi clearly didn’t want to talk about it. ‘But it does seem a little silly to invite a group of people over to interview you and take pictures then decide that’s the week you want to do a Dietrich.’

‘It does a bit,’ I agreed, finding the bottom of my drink far too quickly. Maybe it had only been half full. Maybe I was a complete lush. ‘These are really good.’

‘They are almost as delicious as Mr Miller.’ He took my empty coconut from me and set it on a table. ‘I’m not refilling until you tell me what he said to you today. Was it saucers of milk at table two? Did you scratch each other’s eyes out?’

‘Not exactly.’ I really wanted that coconut back. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘Oh, amazing.’ Kekipi clapped and an obscenely fit young man with long black curtains of hair parted in the centre appeared with two more drinks. I imagined that being in charge of hiring and firing had its perks when you were Bertie Bennett’s estate manager. ‘Did you hate-fuck him? You hate-fucked him, didn’t you?’

‘No!’ I tried to look scandalized. I had awkward issues with people using the eff-word to mean, well, effing. I failed. ‘I absolutely didn’t.’

‘But you wanted to.’ He pushed my new drink across the table towards me. ‘Don’t worry, I get it. He’s hot, he’s an asshole, you’re in Hawaii. It happens.’

I forced a stray strand of hair back into the kirby grips at the back of my head and gave one firm, decisive nod. ‘Maybe so, but it’s not going to happen to me.’

‘I guess we’ll find out about that later, won’t we?’ Kekipi stood up and backed away, wiggling his eyebrows at me.

I sat alone at my table, happily watching Paige and what I assumed to be the rest of Bennett’s staff dancing to the sounds of someone’s iPod under several strings of perfectly hung fairy lights. Tiki torches marked out the dance floor and someone had wrapped spare leis around the palm trees. It looked like we were in an all-gay, Hawaii-based remake of Dirty Dancing. If I tuned out the music, which was always difficult when someone was playing Beyoncé at full blast, I could hear the sea lapping against the shore and everything smelled sweet. Not least my delicious cocktail. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. I should have started making stupid decisions years ago. I really wished Amy was here. Not Charlie, though. Because I wasn’t thinking about Charlie.

I continued to not think about Charlie for two more drinks and almost an hour of the Beyoncé, Rihanna and Robyn megamix. I’d almost got to my feet for that ‘Call Me Maybe’ song, but Kekipi dashed over to stop me, declaring the song ‘so last year’, apologizing for its inclusion and refreshing my drink. I knew putting away so many cocktails on a school night was a bad idea, but since all my bad ideas had been going so well, I figured I might as well keep up the good work. Plus it made the music so much more bearable. After a rousing group rendition of ‘Single Ladies’, Paige wandered over, zigzagging across the sand, and sat down in the chair beside me with a sloppy smile.

‘I think I’m jet-lagged,’ she sighed, head tilted up towards the stars. ‘I feel a bit weird.’

‘Do you want to go back?’ I asked, not really wanting to head home, but Tess the Martyr was always lurking in the subconscious background. ‘We can go back.’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’ She patted my hand and leaned over to my straw to take a sip of my drink. ‘That helps.’

‘I don’t think it does,’ I said, passing her a skewer of barbecued chicken and a can of Diet Coke.

She held up her hand and made a pukey face which I took to mean she didn’t want them. Just as well, because I really did.

‘Shouldn’t we talk about the photo shoot?’ I asked, watching her mouth the words to whatever Lady Gaga song was playing with a glazed expression. ‘Like, what you want me to actually do.’

‘I have it all planned.’ Paige closed her eyes and piled her hair up on top of her head and then let it fall down her back. ‘It’s just an amazing concept. The portrait we’re going to do at the house, and then, for the fashion shoot, we’re going to Iolani Palace. It’s this amazing old palace where the kings of Hawaii used to live, so we’re going to shoot the dresses there with Bennett on a throne, like the king of fashion. It’s going to be major.’

Major? It was going to be major? I nibbled on a chicken skewer and nodded as confidently as I could.

‘I have one question for you, though.’ Paige opened her eyes and turned to face me fully, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘Why are you pretending to be Vanessa Kittler?’

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 life 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, standing 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.

It was an unnecessary concern. Making love to my soulmate might have scared me senseless, but when it came to a filthy throwdown with a near stranger, it seemed I was a natural. I kicked and stamped my way out of my skintight denim, all the while pushing and pulling and bucking against my lover, lips already raw, cheeks chafed from his stubble and the taste of him in my mouth. My brain had long since switched itself off, leaving a previously unknown dirty girl autopilot in charge. There were no thoughts, no arguments, no concerns. All I knew was that I wanted this man inside me as soon as humanly possible, and there was nothing else. I heard the rustle of denim, the clank of his belt hitting the floor and felt the burn of Nick’s fingers on my thigh, lingering at the edge of my underwear. He paused, pulled away and looked at me, our noses almost touching, both of us breathing so hard I could hardly bear it. His eyes were deep and dark, and, panting back at him the way I was, I knew I must look feral. But messy hair and worn-away make-up didn’t matter any more. He kissed me again, crushing his lips against mine. His hand slipped around my waist and grabbed my hips, lifting me up, locking me in. I curled myself around his waist and buried my face in his neck. He smelled warm and dark and delicious. I could already smell his sweat on my skin.

We only made it as far as the sofa before he threw me down, tore off his shirt and knelt down between my legs. Everything was hot and hard and wet and humid, and the last thing I remembered before losing myself completely was the soft sound of his laugh, the flicker of his fingers and the whirr of the ceiling fan. For the first time in my life, being in control seemed overrated.