by Brigid Coady
He turned back round, the practised smile falling from his lips.
‘This is all your fault, Woodhouse,’ he griped. ‘We’ll be all over social media in about a minute.’
‘Hush,’ she said. Not that she wasn’t used to it.
If she’d told her sixteen-year-old self that Gee Knightley would walk into her tutorial group her first week in university, she would have screamed and flapped in a fan girl panic. As it was, her eighteen-year-old self had gone bright red and tried to remember how to breathe.
They didn’t actually talk until two weeks later, when Gee had leaned over and asked if she knew what the hell the tutor was talking about.
And by the time they’d been made partners for a group project, Emma could just about forget that he had been Gee Knightley, lead singer and bad boy in Status Single, and the star of her teen fantasies. He’d become merely Gee, the annoying mature English and Business student whose main source of fun was making dry and sarcastic asides about their tutor or poking fun at her very carefully thought out plans for the future.
‘Okay, but we are getting out of here as soon as we can. I refuse to stay for the dancing, because they’ll start playing that song,’ Gee whispered.
‘I’ve got to meet with the team to choose which of the pap shots we want released, we can’t go till that is done,’ she replied.
Emma tried to hide her smile, because she knew that the Status Single song he was referring to was on the playlist.
Sometimes you had to get your little jollies where you could, even when you were working. And Gee’s grumpy face when a whole dancefloor did the dance that went with the song was always priceless.
‘I hate you,’ he said as he reached for his phone which was on the table. ‘And yes, I was right. The back of my head is already trending on Twitter.’
He flashed the screen at her. Yes, there was the back of his head and hers.
‘Damn it, Gee, why didn’t you tell me my hair was coming down at the back?’ Her hand went up to fix it.
‘I thought it looked nice, less corporate, more my Emma,’ he said, putting the phone back on the table and slid his sunglasses back on.
He reached a finger up and tickled the back of her neck interfering with her attempts to repair her hair.
She couldn’t help but laugh even as a tingle went down her spine.
‘You aren’t helping, and you are such a drama queen. You’ve had people taking your photo at least once a day since I’ve known you. And I know you aren’t as grumpy about it as you make out to be.’
‘Fine, Woodhouse, but you need to make it up to me, now my privacy has been violated. You have to deal with taking the rubbish and recycling out for the rest of the week for making me come here. Pinky promise?’
He held his pinky finger out, while he stared ahead as Phil was still proclaiming his love for Brooke.
She brought up her hand and let him wrap his finger round hers. Warmth spread through her. Life was always good when she had Gee next to her. Partner in crime, platonic soulmate.
And even if he was always trying to upset her plans and get her to let loose, he’d never leave her. Sometimes she thought he knew her better than anyone else did. Maybe even herself.
There was rustling and movement as everyone got up for the last toast to the bride.
‘And that is my cue,’ he squeezed her finger and under cover of everyone seating themselves again, he managed to slip out of the tent. How he managed to do it when he was over six foot she didn’t know, it was like he had a force field round him that made people part in front of him.
Emma got her bag together. This might be a wedding, but she was working, which is why she’d brought Gee. He kept any single men who thought they would get lucky at bay and he didn’t get the wrong idea. He also knew how to behave at these sorts of things, even if he grumbled. And, he didn’t need entertaining or babysitting. When she had a plan that was this detailed and finely tuned she couldn’t be distracted.
Not that Emma had time for a relationship, working in the publicity and PR department of Mega! Management took way too much time. But she had a timeline for a relationship and marriage and all that, because you couldn’t leave these things to chance.
She shuddered at the thought of not having a plan. If you didn’t plan, anything could go wrong. So she had her checklist for the right sort of bloke she’d end up with. Not that she was due to meet him or date him for another year or so, according to her timeline.
So yeah, Gee was perfect plus one material.
‘Oh, did Gee Knightley leave?’ The girl stopped Emma as she got up to meet the rest of the team in the room they’d taken over as control centre. Otherwise known as the library.
Emma took a deep breath, poor Gee. No matter where he went he could never really hide.
‘Yeah, sorry he had a call from Johnnie that he had to take.’
The girl’s eyes widened and her hand came up to her mouth.
‘Johnnie? But I thought they… are they dating?’ she whispered.
Emma winked and walked off.
That was probably a shitty thing to do and wasn’t completely fair, she thought. Gee had never lied about dating both men and women. If he had lied then Status Single would still be going. But he hated lying about himself, which she thought was very short-sighted. He could make his life so much easier if he lied or even just prevaricated more. But whoever he dated it didn’t matter because over the years the rumours about Gee and Johnnie’s relationship, ‘Genie’, ran rampant. One day they were supposed to hate each other, the next they loved each other, then they couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other. Or, the one that made them laugh the most, was the rumour that they were secretly married. Whichever version it was, everyone believed it was the reason the band broke up.
Really, it was their record company that had thrown their toys out of the pram when they realised that neither one of them was going to play into the heterosexual rock god persona.
Anyway, she shouldn’t be stirring.
But then again Johnnie had been round the house last night with his overly cute pug, Georgie. Between the pair of them they’d eaten the leftovers she had been saving to have for dinner. And Gee had let it happen. And added to that, Georgie had humped her favourite hugging pillow from the sofa.
No, she wasn’t feeling very gracious towards either of them. Well, Georgie got a pass because he was cute, and it wasn’t his fault Johnnie hadn’t had him fixed.
Emma had a flash of guilt when she thought of the way Twitter was about to explode with ‘Genie’ ship conspiracy theories all over again.
They were big boys. They’d deal with it.
She shook her head to get rid of the distraction. She was working.
Bugger these shoes, she thought as she wobbled on the slightly uneven flooring. Why did your feet have to swell in the heat? What she wouldn’t give for some comfy shoes.
Sadly, comfy shoes were fine for everyday wear but for weddings, nope. She needed to look enough like she belonged at the party without standing out.
She was the power behind the throne, she thought, the person behind the curtain pulling the levers. She could hear Gee’s voice saying, ‘the person holding the puppet strings.’
Chapter Three
An hour and a half later the photos, taken by hired paparazzi conveniently hiding in bushes not too far from the marquee, had been picked over and checked for narrative consistency. They were then sent to the tabloids and gossip sites for publication.
Emma stared at one rejected image which had her and Gee in the background, and he was leaning down to talk to her. They looked… happy, like proper wedding guests. She itched to send it to her private email.
No, that wasn’t professional.
‘Okay, Brooke, Phil,’ she said concentrating on the task at hand. ‘As you know Don Warton from the Daily Planet, has the exclusive interview on the wedding. It is as per the usual agreement Mega! has with them. I’ve already draf
ted your quotes which have been signed off by your teams so you don’t actually have to speak to him.’ Emma ticked off the list of things in front of her. ‘But just a quick photo as if he were a close personal friend and that’s why he’s a guest. Yes?’
Emma looked up to see the pair pull almost the same completely unimpressed face. It was the face everyone pulled when Don Warton’s name came up.
He might be the worst kind of snake but he was a Mega! paid snake.
She looked back down at the list.
‘So, other than that, we just need you to do the first dance. We’ve chosen Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud, which gives just the right forever love vibe, followed by I Had The Time Of My Life. Then you change into your going away outfits, before going outside for the photos with the car. And once you’re at the airport we have some paps there as well. We’re leaking the honeymoon destination but only when you’re in the air, then we’ll release it all with a congratulations statement from the management and a plea for privacy.’
‘But we have the beach photos booked in, don’t we?’ Brooke asked quickly. ‘I’m not wasting all that dieting and training if we don’t have shots on the beach.’
‘Babe, that could never be wasted,’ Phil cooed as he kissed her cheek. Brooke giggled.
Emma smiled.
Perfect.
She couldn’t have scripted it better herself.
***
‘The wedding looked amazing,’ Jamie said as he crowded round Emma’s desk on the following Monday morning.
It had been amazing, hadn’t it?
She’d checked the gossip sites all day yesterday, up until Gee had threatened to throw all her electronic equipment out of the flat, telling her that gloating wasn’t an attractive look on her.
‘It was stupendous,’ Emma smiled up at her new assistant. ‘It is a pity we couldn’t get you to be part of the team on such short notice. Next time though. Promise.’
Ever since her coup with Phil and Brooke, the powers that be had taken her skills seriously. Now she had a list of their clients who needed her magic fauxmance matching skills – which meant she needed help.
Jamie had come into the interview a few months ago, all gangly legs and eagerness. He’d been the fifth person she’d interviewed that day. He stood out from the cookie cutter blandness of the previous candidates. He’d tripped over the threshold of the meeting room and floundered in, and she couldn’t help but smile. He was like a puppy who was still growing into his feet.
‘If you had your pick of any artist on Mega!’s books and you were told that you had to make a publicity plan for them who would you pick?’ She’d asked her standard question. Everyone up until then had focused on the company’s highest profile clients, Breach Of The Peace, the famous boyband.
‘I’d work with the Candy Rebels,’ he said, mentioning the girl band who were beginning to make waves. Emma sat up straighter. This was at least different.
‘Why?’ She replied.
Jamie had then proceeded to tell her an amazing but completely implausible and unworkable PR and publicity plan for the four-piece band. It was genius. She could work with someone who had that much creativity. He just needed a bit of common sense and direction. She could give him that.
Before she knew it, she’d been standing up, shaking his hand and asking when he could start. Sometimes you had to go with your gut with plans. She could see Jamie as her right-hand man, taking her plans and making them reality.
And she hadn’t been wrong. It was great having Jamie working for her, no one had fitted into her life as well since Gee.
‘I think what you did was fantastic. Actually, properly, matchmaking people.’ He said
She could feel the pleasure unfurl in her at his praise. She knew she shouldn’t care what people thought but she seemed hardwired to want praise for her organisational skills.
Every time something she planned went well, she could shake off the uncertainty and take a step away from the horrible swooping feeling she’d had all her childhood that things were within a handspan of spinning out of control.
What she wanted was a smooth, clean and successful life.
No bumps, no mess. It was all in the planning.
‘Well, I have to say, Jamie, it wasn’t easy. It isn’t just taking two people and smashing them together, there is some science behind it.’
Science might be stretching it but she had done research and pulled the data and insights from the analytics team. This involved looking at the fan demographic for each of the people in the relationship, working out if they could amplify each other’s reach. It was all about making the media coverage larger, which made them more attractive for sponsorships or jobs. They had to be bigger than the sum of their parts.
‘Well I saw the figures you pulled the other week and I was thinking that we could probably design an app to help do the matches. Automate it, pull in the data – get it to suggest matches maybe? Or at least generate a shortlist,’ Jamie said, his arms waving as he got into it. It wasn’t a bad idea, she thought. They could match so many more people, much quicker. See, this was why it was great working with him, he took her ideas and thought differently.
‘I was talking it over, in a purely hypothetical way, with Rob Martin from Tech Dev, last week.’ Jamie finished. His voice hitched as he mentioned Rob.
Was he blushing?
He was.
So, Jamie had a crush on Rob. Which was sweet, she felt an urge to make Jamie’s life better, to give him a plan, almost as a gift. Everyone needed a life plan. And, okay, so she didn’t think he should be dating at this stage in his career; she couldn’t stop him, but she could make sure he was with someone who would help him.
She racked her brain. Which one was Rob? Was that the one who sat by the door on the next floor down? Well, he wasn’t bad, definite potential, he could be an asset to Jamie’s career. Oh no, she was thinking of Jason and he was definitely straight.
She tried to picture the IT team and… oh, hell no.
Chapter Four
This wouldn’t do.
She looked at Jamie, all eyes and legs. He could do so much better. It wasn’t that Rob was ugly, he was just… just… a blank. He blended into the wall, which was why she was still trying to work out what he looked like. She was sure he was perfectly nice, but he wasn’t the sort of person who Jamie should be with. He seemed to lack drive and you needed someone who met you in terms of career aspirations if you wanted to get ahead. And there was something tickling the back of her brain about him…
Oh, now she remembered, she shuddered. It had been last year, a particularly difficult meeting. There had been screaming, and Rob had stutteringly taken the blame for the loss of a whole batch of social data from the Radio One Music Awards. It hadn’t been pretty. And he’d been a complete doormat because it subsequently came out that it had been his boss who’d done it. Nope, it wouldn’t do. Rob wasn’t going to help Jamie get ahead.
‘That sounds like a really great idea,’ she said with a smile, her mind working feverishly. There was no point in going in too hard at the moment, she thought. You had to ease people into these situations. Make it seem like their idea. If she said too much against Rob at this point it would only make Jamie like him more. People rarely knew what was best for them. What she needed was to find someone more suitable, wave them in front of Jamie’s nose and distract him from Rob…
She really didn’t have time for this but she liked Jamie, and she couldn’t stand by while he made potentially disastrous decisions. She looked round the office. Who…
Max, maybe? No, he’d posted a cute coupley Instagram about moving in with his boyfriend last month.
Who else was gay? She tapped her lip.
Oh, of course, Dan Elton. He’d be perfect. He’d moved from Psyco Records’ publicity department six months ago. He was tall, camp and charming, a little too slick maybe, but he didn’t seem to have a boyfriend. And he was the kind of guy who was going places and would drag
you with him.
Maybe he was a bit too competitive, Emma wasn’t a hundred percent sure he hadn’t deliberately buggered up the blind gossip she’d planted about Will Elliot and Annie Elliot on the Pride and Prejudice shoot. But he had just started the job then, so she could give him the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, Dan Elton would be perfect for Jamie.
Now she had to work out a way to make it happen.
She loved a good plan.
Chapter Five
‘Oi, Ems. Why do I have a calendar alert saying we’re having a party next weekend?’ Gee called from the front door as he walked through, letting it slam shut.
Emma flinched, which was more movement than she wanted to make in this blistering Indian summer heatwave. The fan in the corner moved the sluggish air round.
Surely, she thought, when planning a party, it was better to just do it without telling your anti-social housemate and beg forgiveness afterwards? Leave it as a fait accompli.
‘It is only a tiny party, positively bijou, more of a soiree in fact. Not much for you to worry about. A few work colleagues…’ The heat was making her less than concise.
His head popped round the door to the living room.
‘Work? Really? All those fake arse publicity types who wouldn’t know the truth or proper talent if it leapt up and bit them on the bottom?’
Here we go again, she thought, rolling her eyes to the ceiling – Gee getting on his high horse about the purity of the music, and how music wasn’t a commodity and that the business was ruined by all the lies.
‘It’s bad enough that you work for the dark side, but now you want to bring it home? You know I hate all those fake smiles and schmoozing.’
‘Gee, you work in the music business too. All you do is hang round with the same sort of people.’
‘Hold on, my sort of people are not your sort of people. Mine are the people you make stories up about. When I see them it isn’t fake, they don’t bring their pretend partners out. And no one is trying to be someone they’re not. Or making other people something they’re not.’