by Emma Grey
It’s all he can do to force himself to go to bed instead of sitting opposite her in the armchair with a pen and paper, writing hardcore lyrics about the girl you won’t hit it off with. The one you’re never going to fall for. The one you want to run away from, whose life insists on entwining itself with yours although neither of you want that, and never will. Contrary to the band’s discography, there’s more to music than love songs.
At least that’s something, he guesses. There has to be a solo breakaway hit song in Tilly Maguire.
Chapter 11
It’s late the next morning when Tilly finally stirs, and she has no idea where she is or how she got here. She’d been having the most torturous, embarrassing dreams about all her teeth falling out. What did that mean? Something about saying something you shouldn’t, from memory . . . Oh!
She sits upright opposite the embers of a dying fire and shivers. No wonder. Still in her shambles of a dress from last night, except her walk of shame has nothing to do with fleeing the ball with a pop star she’d barely met and everything to do with her complete lack of professionalism and her social-media ineptitude.
Speaking of which, her phone is dead, with no charger. Probably a good thing. She shouldn’t have a licence to operate one. Still, she’d like to FaceTime Caitlin and let her mum know she’s alive. Her mum worries if she’s not home from a party at midnight. What would she make of her disappearing completely with a pop star, last implicated – by her, admittedly – as being engaged to a princess? She supposed her mum need only scan any news outlet in the world to discover her daughter not only alive, but kicking ruthlessly through the English monarchy, all guns blazing . . .
‘Morning,’ Reuben says from the doorway, and all thoughts of her mother evaporate. He looks unrecognisably low key in grey track pants and a long-sleeved black tee, blond hair devoid of a stylist’s attention, like all he’s done is shower and run his fingers through it. Tilly shivers, and wraps the blanket around her shoulders more tightly. He holds a steaming mug of coffee in one hand.
‘Mmm. I want that,’ she says softly. ‘COFFEE, obviously. Not . . . everything else.’ She waves her hand like she’s referring to the rest of him. Can she not have one conversation with a boy that doesn’t involve her immediately setting off tripwires of embarrassment?
He walks towards the couch and she scoots over as he sits beside her. She notices a label sticking out of his T-shirt and reaches for it, before she can stop herself, tucking it in and brushing the skin of his neck like she’s his long-term girlfriend and it’s totally normal for her to groom him like this.
‘Sorry’ she says, removing her hand so quickly the blanket slips from her shoulder.
He takes a slow sip of coffee. ‘That’s all right, Maguire.’
Seriously, in what universe are they sitting here on this couch while she barges across what should be unambiguous social boundaries because, for a big part of her teen years she actually was Reuben Vaughan’s girlfriend, at least in her imagination? Also, she really wants a shower, mainly to warm up but also because she doesn’t know how to be with him without embarrassing herself.
‘Speaking of clothes . . .’ she says.
He nods. ‘Upstairs. Second bedroom on the right. Borrow anything you want.’
Minutes later, the bathroom mirror doesn’t lie, unfortunately. She looks like a graduate from a special effects makeup project gone wrong. ‘You look atrocious,’ he’d said last night – at least, that’s what she’d imagined she heard him saying before she passed out in the car on the way here. Wherever here is.
The water, at least, is piping hot. The shower is filled with expensive gels and a range of shampoos and conditioners hairdressers always try to sell her at the end of a haircut, which she can never afford. She washes her hair. Twice. And uses the sandalwood soap she recognises from the scent inside Reuben’s jacket, pondering how on earth it is that she comes to be here, in a pop star’s shower, using his luxury toiletries.
A high-end stainless-steel razor lies on the vanity unit and she really needs to shave her legs. But does she dare? Don’t guys freak out when girls use their razors? She reaches out of the shower, dripping water on the floor and grabs it, uses it, and becomes obsessive about cleaning the blades. Tilly Maguire will not leave random leg hairs for Reuben Vaughan to discover while shaving!
At least they don’t have to share a toothbrush. There’s a new one, unopened on a shelf. How forward-thinking of the Unrequited boys to carry spares, she thinks. This whole place is probably a lair for seducing unsuspecting girls.
She pads into the bedroom and into a large walk-in robe, which is clearly part of extensive renovations to what otherwise feels like a Jane Austen country house. Hmm. The clothing selection is all a little ‘off-duty boy band’ for her taste.
She sifts through a rack of designer jeans and shirts, and finds a pair of black track pants with a drawstring at the waist. Hopefully they’ll stay up. But what to wear underneath them? Two choices: boy-leg Calvin Kleins or . . . nothing. Which is worse? She’s braless as it is from the strapless situation last night. And precisely why does any of this matter? It’s not like he’s looking at her as anything other than an unexpected burden, and nor does she want him to.
She grabs a T-shirt, a huge flannelette shirt and thick socks from the drawers, plus a giant pair of Uggs which her feet swim in, so she adds another pair of socks. Then she finds a floppy navy-blue beanie which she plonks over wet, bedraggled auburn curls, because the one thing they don’t seem to have is a hairdryer, which is odd given all five of them appear to style their hair with the totally OTT attention taken by boy-band singers since the beginning of time.
Schlepping downstairs and through the hall, she finds the kitchen, and Reuben, who is sitting at the table with his now empty coffee mug. He’s flicking through a stack of morning newspapers, which he throws into the massive fireplace as soon as she appears in the doorway.
‘That bad?’ she asks, watching the tabloids scorch to a cinder, along with any trace of her public relations career and her dignity.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he answers, his eyes sweeping critically over her outfit. ‘No one will recognise you. Coffee?’
‘Yes please!’
‘Machine’s on the bench,’ he says, picking up his phone.
Charming. So hospitable!
She shuffles towards the monster of a machine which takes up one entire bench in the kitchen and wishes she’d taken that barista course in Year 12. So many buttons and settings and handles and spouts and receptacles for water and coffee beans and filters. Maybe she’ll start with something simple. Like searching for a cup. She starts opening and shutting cabinet doors. Never the right ones, of course – how much stuff did this empty house need? Just as she goes to open and slam the seventh door in a row, she feels his hand on hers, stopping her.
‘Let me. Please,’ he says, reaching across her body to the cupboard on her far right for a cup, and somehow spinning her around in the process so that she’s backed against the bench and facing him, with a close-up view of his neck. There’s that scent again, she thinks. STOP it! You’re acting like a sniffer dog on high alert!
She looks at the coffee machine again, and at him. ‘I’m not very good in the kitchen,’ she admits.
He laughs, flicks the machine on and takes over. ‘Not very good in the kitchen. Not very good at PR. Not very good at dancing.’
‘Not at all good at dancing,’ she clarifies, just so he’ll be soundly informed.
He froths the milk like he spent all his teen years working in a cafe, instead of creating multi-platinum albums. ‘What are you good at?’ he asks.
Reuben Vaughan is exactly as arrogant as Tilly had dreaded a successful pop star might be. If not worse. Her younger self is so disappointed in how this is turning out.
‘Well,’ she begins, clutching for ideas. ‘I can write?’ Her voice is small.
‘Is that a question, Maguire?’
He has qu
ite the penetrating stare, Tilly discovers, while she squirms beneath it. It should be easy enough: she’s either a writer or she isn’t. She loves writing. Always has. But she loves playing netball too, in the bottom team.
Reuben pours hot coffee into her cup while she thinks. There’s her pretty much completely satirical Instagram account – the irony of which appears to have bypassed Roche PR’s intern selection process. There’s her blog, and the short story she wrote that somehow won the prize in that magazine competition. Other people notice something in Tilly’s words that she’s still convinced is a fluke.
But she loves writing. She’s been making up stories for as long as she can remember, but she’s not a real writer. There are hundreds of thousands of words, obviously, amassed on weekends all through high school. Normal teenagers were experimenting with Vodka Cruisers and pushing social boundaries at free houses, while Tilly was experimenting with the Merriam-Webster thesaurus and stretching grammatical conventions in her pyjamas, which is something she’s never shared with anyone. The words, that is, not the extent of her well-known nerdiness. And she won’t ever, because the words are heinous!
What was the question again?
Reuben glances at the clock on the kitchen wall. They’d be able to hear it ticking, except the machine is crushing more coffee beans on the bench.
Apologies for the delay! Tilly thinks hotly. It’s not her fault she’s never been game enough to voice that she’s a writer, out loud. Not to anyone. Except Jack Guthrie, obviously, and that doesn’t count. She wasn’t in her right mind at the ball. Just like she isn’t in her right mind now, which Reuben must surely deduce, as he waits for her to answer his simple question.
‘You know what I think?’ he says, having probably given up. He leans his hip against the bench beside her and folds his arms across his chest. ‘I think you imagine being a writer. I’ll bet you’ve got dozens of notebooks of ideas and have fantasies of becoming the next J.K. Rowling. I’ll bet there is a heap of half-started novels on your computer and you always quit and start a new one when the writing gets hard.’
Tilly glares at him. How does he know? She actually hates Reuben a little bit, right now. How dare he reach into her soul, extract her secret self-doubt and put it on the kitchen bench between them in plain sight? Up until now she’s been harbouring this dream utterly in private, where it’s in no danger of being shattered by reality.
‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ she says, lying.
He shrugs. ‘Just trying to help.’
By making her feel even less confident? Why would he do that?
‘Someone said the same thing to me once, about writing music. If I hadn’t listened, I’d still be playing half-written songs in my bedroom with the door shut.’
It’s hard to imagine an alternate reality in which Reuben Vaughan isn’t glitteringly famous with music awards coming out of his ears . . . although, if anyone is up to the task of scrambling together a mental picture on this topic, it’s Tilly. In no time at all, she has him parked on his single bed, in a cramped bedroom, strumming his guitar and noting down interesting chord progressions while his dad yells at him from downstairs to set the dinner table.
Except, hang on, there’s never any mention of his father in the celebrity gossip magazines. Everyone knows he was raised by a single mum, and only went to one of England’s top schools on an academic scholarship. The other four band members all have parents with public social-media profiles followed by millions of Unrequited’s fans. Reuben’s mum was probably way too busy for that.
‘You have to push through the hard part,’ he is saying, when her brain ambles back to their conversation. She’s a little embarrassed about having mentally fallen down the rabbit hole of Reuben’s private family background. It’s one thing obsessing over every personal detail as part of a loyal, if slightly bonkers, fandom. It’s another when that person is here, brewing you a hot beverage, mansplaining your creative block.
‘Take a risk and get someone to read it,’ he says, wildly misjudging her self-confidence. ‘Stop imagining who you want to be, and just be that person. Ready or not.’
Mansplaining, trying to be helpful, whatever – the fact is he is deluded. She’s not showing her writing to anyone. Not till it’s perfect. She couldn’t bear someone tearing it apart. If she just keeps it totally under wraps, there’s still every chance it might be okay . . .
Reuben is so annoying. She watches as he pours the perfect amount of froth on top of steaming hot coffee in the cup, which he passes to her, carefully, only for her to spill the froth over the edge because his inquisition has made her so nervous. Or angry. Or both.
Then he walks out of the room as if this one conversation hasn’t shifted something fundamental. He has dragged her out of the shadows and left her somewhere she can’t hide.
Chapter 12
‘Tilly isn’t answering any of my calls!’ Henrietta blares at Reuben, her voice so shrill he has to hold the phone out from his ear.
‘Her phone’s dead.’
‘And you don’t have a charger?’
‘Of course I have a charger. She hasn’t asked for it, and I don’t think she should be exposed to the internet right now, anyway. Do you?’
There’s a heavy sigh at the other end. ‘Reuben, this is no time for your trademark chivalry. She caused this mess and she’s going to extricate us all from it. Word around the palace is that Isabelle is going through some sort of major identity crisis. Perhaps it’s about Olivia. Who knows? The media are circling, digging up anything they can get on her. It’s ruthless!’
Worse than usual? The media attention had always been brutal, but that was before Reuben knew Belle’s secret. If there’s anything that needs to be delicately managed in that family, surely it’s coming out as gay.
‘She really doesn’t need to be embroiled in a fake fairy tale with you right now, Reuben.’
He can think of things he’d rather be doing himself.
‘The palace employed us. Anything Roche PR can do to repair the damage Tilly caused, the better. But this is not about us, or you, or Tilly. It’s about Belle. Reuben, there are rumours floating around of a late-night visit from the princess’s psychologist. Something serious is going on. Whatever you can do as her friend to deflect attention from her will help, at least a little. Besides, it means nothing to you – all this attention and speculation about your love-life. Situation normal!’
He’s worried about Belle. Has something else happened since their conversation? He gets how huge this is for her, and how easy it would be to bungle. People agonise about coming out all the time. Ordinary people, who don’t have every second camera in the world stuck in their faces.
‘. . . So we need a sickening display of togetherness between you and Tilly to slam the rumours about Isabelle and throw the media off the scent. Tilly’s perfect,’ Henrietta is plotting. ‘Completely unknown. No public background to speak of. No embarrassing secrets. Safe. Compliant . . .’
He snorts.
‘This is not amusing, Reuben. They are not amused.’
He’s not amused either. This is excruciating. He moves to the picture window in the study and notices Tilly parading furiously around the grounds, muttering to herself. She’s like the diametric opposite of a Jane Austen heroine, stomping around in his flannelette shirt and Ugg boots, beanie rammed over wild hair, face flushed in the cold air, or in anger. So not like the girls he’s used to. Even if he could convince her to go through with this ruse, would the media buy it?
‘Look. I get it,’ Henrietta is saying. ‘She’s different.’
‘How?’ Reuben asks, intrigued by Henrietta’s take.
‘Come on. Look at your romantic history. Every one with a “lineage” of some sort. Girls who know how to dress and behave and look like they’ve just stepped out of a Swiss finishing school.’
Outside, Tilly screams gutturally. The sound reverberates off the sandstone bricks.
‘W
hat is that horrible noise?’ Henrietta asks.
‘I might have upset her.’
‘Well, stop it! Just for once in your life, do what we want you to do and win the girl over. Do it for Isabelle! She’s in agony, and wants this whole thing over with as soon as possible. Right?’
Right. He has about as much chance of winning Tilly over as Tilly has of scoring a publishing contract. Which is zero, unless a whole lot starts to change.
‘What do you normally do to reel a girl in?’ Henrietta presses.
‘They’re not fish.’
‘I suppose you don’t have to do anything, do you? You’re a magnet.’
‘Fish. Magnets. You PR types forget you’re dealing with real people!’
‘Can’t you just, I don’t know . . . buy her something. Jewellery? . . . Too soon . . . Flowers?’
Reuben glances out the window just in time to see Tilly kick a perfectly innocent ornamental hedge. ‘She’s not really into flowers.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Reuben. You’re a big boy. Think of something. I’ll tip off the paparazzi mid-afternoon and I want you and your so-called muse loved up and strolling the streets of Wallingford tonight like you never saw it coming. Got it?’
Henrietta ends the call before he has a chance to argue. Tilly is storming back towards the house, looking the very opposite of ‘loved up’. The front door is wrenched open. Slammed. She doesn’t even look in his direction and takes the stairs two at a time, until another door is attacked upstairs. The crystal light fitting above his head shakes from the impact.
That’s it. He’ll call her song, ‘Shaken’.
Chapter 13
A few hours of full-blown angst later, the knock at her bedroom door is tentative. ‘Can I come in?’ Reuben asks.
Is he kidding? She still feels exposed from their earlier conversation. Any more of his truth bombs and she’ll be entirely naked. Figuratively, that is.
‘There’s a package here for you.’
How? Nobody knows where she is!