Читать книгу What a Girl Wants - Lindsey Kelk - Страница 10

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 sober.

‘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 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 mincing 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?’

‘I didn’t mean move in as a roommate,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t want you in the spare room.’

I stood up slowly, clutching the grubby kitchen towel. His floors needed cleaning. ‘What?’

‘How’s your tea?’ he asked.

Leaning against his kitchen cabinets, resplendent in a creased-to-buggery boy’s T-shirt, with bird’s nest hair and a handful of dirty paper towel, I searched for the right words. Charlie crossed his legs, leaning against the fridge in an impressively casual display.

‘Did you just ask me to move in with you, in a non-roommate capacity?’ I asked, scrunching the paper towel into a tiny ball in my fist. ‘Seriously?’

‘I’d say “I know it seems a bit quick” but it doesn’t.’ He put his tea down and took the paper towel out of my hand before throwing it at the bin. And missing. ‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this and it was two weeks too many. I know how I feel about you. You’re my best mate and I reckon last night proved the amazing sex wasn’t just a one off, so why mess about?’

‘I can think of a few reasons,’ I replied. Actually, I couldn’t. I could only think of one but this really didn’t seem like the time to tell him I’d been shagging someone else the whole time I was in Hawaii, especially since he’d apparently been sitting on his arse in London, doing some pretty epic soul-searching. ‘It … it is a bit quick, Charlie. I feel a bit bleurgh about everything.’

‘Bleurgh?’ He looked understandably deflated.

‘Overwhelmed,’ I clarified. ‘Confused.’

‘So this wouldn’t be the right time to tell you I’ve accepted a pitch for our agency, then?’ he asked, wincing.

‘But we haven’t got an agency?’ I said. ‘What have you done?’

‘Don’t be mad at me.’ He held his hands out to defend himself against whatever puny attack he thought I might launch and grabbed a sneakily hidden copy of Marketing Week from the top of the microwave. ‘But I saw Perito’s were looking for a new agency and one of the blokes in their marketing department is on my football team and I knew you’d come up with an amazing campaign, so I asked him if we could pitch. And he said yes, because he totally loves your work.’

‘He loves my work?’ my ego asked on my behalf.

‘He was totally obsessed with you,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Knew loads of your campaigns.’

‘So just like that? We’ve got a pitch?’ I wondered if there was any wine left. Tea clearly was not strong enough for this conversation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But …’

‘But?’

‘He needs to see the pitch by next Friday because they’re seeing agencies the following Monday. And we’re going to be one of those agencies.’

‘That’s not even a week!’ I loved stating the obvious. ‘We would have to come up with an entire marketing campaign, just me and you, by next week?’

‘Yeah, but Tess, Perito’s Chicken as our first account? Our own agency?’ Charlie looked so excited. I recognized the enthusiasm; I used to share it. ‘How amazing would that be?’

Worryingly, if anyone had asked me that question two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to describe how amazing it would be. I’d have been like a pig in peri peri sauce.

Charlie Wilder was asking me to move in with him. Charlie Wilder was asking me to pitch an advertising campaign for a Portuguese chicken cook-in sauce. Charlie Wilder was asking me to start a brand new advertising agency with him. But no, I had to go off to Hawaii on a voyage of pissing self-discovery and meet a tosspot of a man who would be rolling around on the floor, sides positively splitting, at the sound of any of this.

‘And it isn’t just Perito’s.’ Charlie was still talking, still trying to win me round. ‘I talked to some of our old accounts and they’re interested. Squiggles’ Kitchen Towels wants to come with us.’

At least that explained why he had so much kitchen towel.

‘And there’s Brookes & Bryan, the jewellers we just signed; they’re up for it too. And I reckon I can totally get Noodle Pots. You’re the best creative director there is, Tess, and I can’t do this without you. They all want you, not some knobhead account manager. I need you.’

Charlie took a step towards me and reached out to run a hand through my hair.

‘Tell me you’re not just the littlest bit interested?’ he said, his hand getting stuck somewhere around my ear.

I shivered, trying to separate out my feelings of professional pride and sexual desire. I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. It was a bit disconcerting.

‘I’ve got to go to my meeting,’ I said in a weak voice. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

Sensing defeat, Charlie stopped. Part of me was so disappointed that he hadn’t grabbed hold of my hair, bent me over the oven and shagged me senseless until I agreed to all of his demands; but the part of me that got up at seven every morning, got dressed and went about her daily business in a sensible fashion, respected him for giving me the time and space to make a considered decision. After all, this was sweet, loving Charlie we were talking about, not filthy, tosspot Nick.

Not that I was thinking about Nick.

‘Tess-motherfucking-Brookes!’

Agent Veronica stood up, put out her fag and grabbed me for a stale, non-optional hug as soon as I set foot in her office.

‘Sit your arse down. Cup of tea? Cup of tea.’ She strode over to the door and coughed delicately. ‘Two cups of fucking tea when you’re ready, if it’s not too much fucking trouble?’

Slamming the door behind her, she shook her head and sat back down behind her desk. ‘Can’t get the staff,’ she lamented. ‘Now, do I need to slap some sense into you or have you just come to confirm your flights?’

Veronica, it was fair to say, was something of an imposing woman. Very blonde with very red lipstick and an ever-present fug of cigarette smoke that tended to knock the breath out of your lungs before you had a chance to get a word in edgeways. Not that you ever really had a chance to get a word in edgeways. She stubbed out a crimson-ringed dog-end with matching pointy nails and sat back in her seat. Perched on the edge of my chair, my bag safely on my knee, I waited for her to say something. It never hurt to put a potential weapon between Veronica and your vital organs.

Given that she hadn’t spoken in four seconds, I took it that I was safe to begin.

‘Well—’

‘I don’t want to hear “well”!’ she shouted, slapping her desk with her hand and grabbing a fresh pack of Silk Cut out of her drawer. ‘I want to hear, “sorry I’ve been such an ungrateful shithead all week, Veronica. You’re amazing, Veronica. When does my flight to Milan leave, Veronica?”’

‘I’ve had a lot of thinking to do,’ I protested as she savaged the plastic film around the cigarettes.

‘Wandering around in the rain? Staring out over the river and wondering “What if?”’ she asked. ‘Fuck that. You’re leaving on Sunday.’

‘It hasn’t rained this week …’ I muttered, confused. Then realized what she had said. ‘What?’

‘Sunday, you leave on Sunday.’ Veronica took care to enunciate each word very carefully, as though I were simple or slow. I was fairly certain she believed I was both. ‘You start work on Monday, so it seemed like a good idea to get you on a flight on Sunday. You comprende?’

‘I can’t leave on Sunday,’ I said, holding my bag closer into my body. ‘That’s in two days. I’m not ready.’

‘So what are you doing sat there like a bastard lemon then?’ she asked. ‘Go home, wash your fucking hair, pack a fucking bag, find your fucking passport. You’re going.’

‘Veronica …’ I started, reaching a hand up to touch my hair. ‘I can’t just up and leave on Sunday for three months.’

‘Why? You haven’t got a job, have you? You haven’t got anywhere to live …’ She paused to light up again, either oblivious or unconcerned by the laws about smoking in the workplace. I assumed the latter. ‘From what I’ve heard, you’re lucky you’re not having this conversation with me in a fetching orange onesie. Thank God they didn’t send you down, girl. Some butch bitch’d be wearing you like a glove puppet inside half an hour.’

‘Who told you …? You know what, never mind.’ I blinked, trying to erase the terrifying image she had just planted indelibly in my mind. ‘It’s still a lot. To go off to Italy for three months in two days. I can’t even speak Italian.’

‘They all speak English,’ she said, dismissing my fears with a sweep of her ignited arm.

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘Well, no, but if they don’t speak it, I doubt very much that they’ve got anything fucking interesting to say anyway.’ She pointed at me, making stabbing motions with her lit cigarette on every word. ‘You. Are. Going. To. Milan. On. Sunday.’

‘I can’t go for three months,’ I replied, my head full of Charlie’s morning erection and Perito’s spicy chicken. Not together though, eww. ‘I can’t.’

With a loud, fragrant sigh, Veronica leaned back in her chair and fixed me with a narrow-eyed stare as her assistant shuffled through the door and placed two cups of tea on the desk with a barely smothered cough.

‘You know you’re not supposed to smoke in the workplace, don’t you?’ I asked, chugging my tea so there would be one less hot thing for her to throw at me.

‘I eat here, I sleep here, I shit, shower and shag here.’ Veronica ground the half-smoked cig into her ashtray, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the desk with her blood-red talons. ‘Can’t imagine anyone’s going to tell me to put my fag out. Unless it’s bothering you?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I find it quite comforting.’

‘Your parents smoke?’

‘No,’ I replied, feeling the fear of God in my gut. ‘Just, you don’t see it enough these days, do you?’

She sat back again, reaching behind her and shoving the window open. It wasn’t until I heard the amplified buzz of traffic outside that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Sweet Baby Jesus in the manger.

‘So you don’t want to go to Italy for three months?’ she asked, clicking her mouse a couple of times and looking over at the screen of her Mac.

Thank God, we were back to business.

‘Three months is so long. A lot can happen in three months,’ I said.

‘Oh, are you expecting some other fashion icon to appear from the heavens and offer you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?’ she asked, her hands clasped together in prayer.

‘I don’t want to agree to three months,’ I replied, as staunchly as possible. Playing hardball had never been my thing. Actually, playing any kind of ball had never been my thing, euphemistically or otherwise.

‘I’ll tell them you’ll go for a week, do a recce and then make a decision,’ she said. ‘And if that decision is anything other than “thanks for giving me this opportunity, Mr Bennett, now may I kiss your arse?” I’ll have you fucking killed.’

A week. I felt relief roll off my shoulders. I could do a week. I’d know how I felt in a week. Probably.

‘Thank you,’ I said, visions of Roman Holiday and big plates of pasta suddenly rushing through my head. Everything I’d held at bay until now crashed over me on one big Italiano-gasm. I was going to Milan.

‘That would be amazing. It’s just that I’ve got other stuff, maybe. I don’t want to commit to something I might not be able to do.’

Veronica’s head snapped round towards me so quickly, her hair almost moved. ‘You know I’m your agent? You can’t book a job without me because then I’d have to fucking kill you and I hate having to sort that out. Right pain in the tits.’

‘It’s not a photography job, it’s advertising,’ I said quickly, preparing for a slap. ‘Like I was doing before.’

‘Can you see me right now, Tess Brookes?’ Veronica pushed her massive leather chair over to the wall behind her and began knocking her head against the wallpaper harder than I could imagine was comfortable. ‘This is me, banging my head against a brick wall. And why do you think I’m doing that?’

‘Is it because I’m a fucking idiot?’

I thought it was worth a guess.

‘Ding ding ding!’ She waved her arms above her head like Kermit the Frog and thankfully stopped bashing her head against the wall. ‘You’re a fucking idiot. This is a chance that will never come around again. You are a twenty-eight-year-old untested, unproven, rookie photographer. You ought to be spending the next five years trekking around shit weddings in Bracknell, taking pictures over dinner because the main photographer can’t be arsed.’

It was a fair point.

‘At best, you’d be looking the other way while some big-shit fashion photographer got a blow job from some underage model while you changed the flash and spent so long holding up reflectors that you had a right bicep bigger than a world champion wanker.’

Again, not untrue.

‘Am I getting through to you? Shall we just go over what exactly is on the fucking table here?’

I didn’t feel like we especially needed to but I didn’t think it would be in my best interests to tell her no and so I went with a noncommittal half-shrug and made an awkward mewing noise in the back of my throat. Veronica sat forward and held out her hand, ticking off each of her points with so much force, I was worried she was going to break off her own fingers.

‘One first-class fucking trip to Italy, a base in Bertie-cocking-Bennett’s private apartments in Milan, a job working personally with Bennett himself that a million other photographers would happily bum a goat to get, and a proposed fee that is twice what I would have even attempted to get for you – and I, Tess Brookes, am a fucking ballbreaker when it comes to fees. So what, pray tell, is your opportunity? Because if it’s anything other than Jesus-fucking-Christ asking you to rebrand his bell-end, I’m afraid I’m not going to understand.’

I bit my lip and pulled my handbag closer to my chest.

‘Do you know Perito’s Portuguese Chicken?’