This is a Love Story

by Thompson, Jessica

  ‘You guess so? Wouldn’t you just know?’ She flicked some strands of hair away from her mouth and continued to look at my panicked face.

  Oh bollocks, I was being cross-examined. ‘Well, you know. I’ve been in a couple of serious relationships, so yes, I guess so.’ Nice recovery, Nick. Vague and non-committal.

  What I actually wanted to shout out to the whole world was that yes, I had experienced love. Yet the deepest love I had ever felt for anyone was for someone I had never even kissed. I loved her but she didn’t love me. But I was over that now, wasn’t I?

  Strangely enough, the love in question was walking past the pub window with some scruffy-looking guy. I recognised him, but I couldn’t work out where from. She had a broad smile across her face, and her hair was shining in the brilliant sunlight. I nearly choked on my sandwich.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ asked Chloe, turning her head the second Sienna disappeared from view.

  ‘Oh, nothing. So, er, how about you?’ I thumped the tennis ball back her way.

  ‘Yes, definitely, once. I met a guy at uni actually,’ she responded, looking down at two rejected prawns that had fallen out of her sandwich onto the plate and were, for some reason, no longer fit for consumption. I could almost hear them calling out to me from beneath their thick layer of mayo. I wanted to dig my fork in and steal them, but you aren’t supposed to do things like that with people you don’t know so well. I always do that with Sienna, though. I once stole a whole chicken wing from her and she didn’t mind.

  ‘And do you still, you know . . . love him?’ I asked. Please say she doesn’t. Please. It would be just my sodding luck for her to still love him, and I could do without any more messy situations and complications right now.

  ‘Oh no. That was ages ago. But it was definitely love. I just know it.’

  This was very interesting. She just knew it.

  ‘What do you mean, you just knew it?’ I enquired, pretending that I didn’t particularly need the answer when actually I was desperate to know.

  ‘Well . . . I’ll be honest with you here . . . I’d describe it as a wild, almost uncontrollable need to be a part of that person’s life. A passion, really. Yes – in fact, the best way of describing it is if you lost everything – your job, your home, your car – but that person was still by your side, none of it would really matter.’ She finished her description and her eyes continued to bore into mine.

  Shit, what if she was scanning me for bullshit like a human lie detector? I started to sweat. She just couldn’t know how I used to feel for Sienna. She just couldn’t. It was messy and ugly and painful.

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ She gestured towards the bar with a slim arm.

  ‘Yeah, sure, that would be great.’

  I watched her get up and walk towards the crowd of midday drinkers in the dingy but painfully cool pub I had chosen. I noticed a seam up the back of her tights, which went all the way to her . . .

  ‘Oi, mate.’ A dark, gravelly voice interrupted my mental ascent to heaven; it came from a large, hairy animal who was leaning over the wooden table towards me. Here we go.

  ‘Yes, pal, what’s up?’ I asked, puffing my chest out like a cockerel.

  ‘Is that your bird?’ he said, his tanned face setting off a pair of piercing blue eyes. He was pointing towards Chloe, who was just far enough away to be oblivious.

  A thick gold chain hung from his tree trunk of a neck. He was your typical London wide boy, in a sharp suit, smelling of Joop. Men like this irritated me deeply. I would put money on the fact that he had a ‘Mum’ tattoo somewhere underneath the fake Ted Baker.

  ‘My bird? No, no. She’s not my girlfriend,’ I told him.

  ‘Excellent,’ he responded, rubbing his hands together and swaggering towards the bar like it was a hog roast. Well, at least he’d had the decency to ask.

  This could be entertaining. Obviously I didn’t want her to have to fend off this horrible, lecherous creature, but at the same time, she was nowhere near being my girlfriend. Not even a naughty, drunk-dialling on a Friday night kind of girlfriend. I watched as he raised an eyebrow towards his equally horrible mates, who egged him on with a couple of hip thrusts and some jeers.

  Our elegant suitor tapped her on the shoulder. I raised the last drops of my pint to my mouth and watched the car crash. I saw her point over to me in a desperate bid to pretend she was already taken. It didn’t work, unfortunately, and our urban Mr Darcy continued in his attempts to work his magic. The whole display was dire. I felt really sorry for her.

  It was then that she took a chance. One she shouldn’t really have taken, considering I was a senior member of staff at the company she worked for. The company she had only been working at for three weeks. In fact, it was verging on ridiculous. She turned around with the drinks and strutted towards me across the floor of the bar, her hips moving in a way that hypnotised most of the punters. Even the women. Romeo was starting to follow her again, so she did something crazy. She kissed me.

  I don’t know who was more shocked – him or me. But she did it and hell, it was good. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck and pulled my face into hers. For a second the world stopped. In fact, I think my heart stopped. Her beautiful, soft lips melted into mine and she moved her hand from the back of my head and traced her fingers across my stubbly chin.

  It must have been quite a sight as I’m pretty sure I flung both arms out in panic, all outstretched fingers and tense legs. I must have looked like a moth in a spider’s web.

  Then I realised this was just an act to get rid of him, so I slowly let my hands settle on her waist. Surely she would stop this crazy behaviour any second.

  Oh, no, wait . . . She was still kissing me. Still. Kissing. Me. And I was kissing her.

  Shit. This was totally inappropriate. We were only supposed to be going out for a prawn butty, but it was so sexy . . . My stomach felt like it was plunging into the depths of the pub floor.

  And just like that, she pulled away and turned back to him. ‘Sod off,’ she said flatly.

  He looked embarrassed, crestfallen and particularly angry with me. I could just see the headlines now: MAN’S HEAD FOUND PINNED TO PUB DARTBOARD.

  ‘Chloe!’ I whispered into her ear. ‘You’re going to get me beaten up, for God’s sake!’ I was genuinely quite angry about what she’d just done, but also very horny. It was a confusing mixture. And horny was definitely winning in this arm wrestle . . .

  ‘What? I just needed him to think I had a boyfriend,’ she said casually, taking a sip of her fresh Diet Coke like it was no big deal.

  Jesus H. Christ. What a nutter. I quite liked it, though. It might be best not to tell anyone what had just happened, I thought, dropping a carefully placed napkin onto my lap.

  Seven

  I can be anonymous. I can be anyone.

  Sienna

  Tuesday night. Treadmill. 4.5 km. 295 cals. 22 minutes and 40 seconds. Two buckets of sweat.

  I felt like crap.

  The gym is always a bit of a mixed bag. I drag my sorry backside over there after work through rain, hail, sleet – you name it, and I’m in a bad mood the whole way. Yet something keeps me going. Fear, I think it is.

  I left school about five years ago now, and since then a large proportion of my friends, apart from Elouise, have put on weight. And I’m not talking a little bit, either. I’m talking additional chins, new stomachs and bouncier bottoms. It scares the shit out of me. So like a hamster in a trance, I move around on these machines in a stuffy ex-warehouse and wish the time would hurry up so that I can be watching The Apprentice and painting my nails. Surely no one actually likes going to the gym, do they? Do they?

  I’d been here for an hour and I resembled a beetroot left in a plastic container on a sunny day. On the treadmill to my left was a tall, slim young girl with extremely long blonde hair. Not a strand stuck to her face. Not a wedgie in sight. Not even a teeny, tiny bit of VPL. All the while, next to her, I plodded
away on the black band, drops of sweat running into my eyes and rendering me temporarily blind.

  I am mildly entertained by the men in here. It’s all tattoos, bulging guns and dreadlocks. Some of these guys must come here every day, I reckon. And they do this really strange thing where they sit in front of the mirror and stare at themselves pumping iron. Looking at themselves. The last thing I want to see in this place is me.

  I started to think about random things as I went into a running trance, my feet striking the belt, hard. I have a whole pile of ironing to do. We’ve run out of fabric conditioner. Dad needs to go to the hospital on Friday and I haven’t booked the taxis yet. I love my dad. Wow, Elouise’s birthday is coming up really soon. Sugar, what do I get her? I keep forgetting to burn that album for Nick. Oh, and I must ask Chloe out for a drink one night after work, it would be nice to get to know her. But where could we go? And so it went on . . .

  The pleasure of the gym is I am such a mess that no one bothers me. It’s joyous. I can be anonymous. I can be anyone. I don’t have to bump into people and talk to them about the weather, the price of stamps or the antics of inane celebrities. I have deliberately avoided talking to people so I can just be known as that excessively damp and angry-looking girl that everyone stays away from. It suits me perfectly.

  ‘Er, excuse me?’ came a voice barely audible above the thumping music coming through my earphones.

  I ignored it. He was probably talking to Britney Spears next to me.

  ‘Sorry, ahem. Excuse me,’ came the voice again, but louder this time. A man’s chiselled face was right in front of mine. A man I see here regularly because he owns this overpriced and slightly pretentious boutique gym.

  Dear God, he’s talking to me. I yanked one of the plugs from my ear irritably and looked at him.

  ‘Yeah, sorry to disturb you. I just noticed something about your gait,’ he said, a cheeky grin spreading across his face.

  I turned around in confusion, almost slipping off the treadmill in the process. There wasn’t a gate anywhere. ‘My what?’ I said, frantically starting to slow down the machine so I could actually breathe.

  ‘Your gait. G. A. I. T. It’s the way you run. I think you overpronate. I hope you don’t mind . . .’ He looked embarrassed this time.

  ‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I puffed as the black strip ground to a halt. I felt dizzy and annoyed.

  He obviously didn’t pick up on my hostility as he jumped up and started swinging off the side of the treadmill confidently. He was built like Popeye.

  ‘I run this gym. My name’s Ben. Basically yeah, it’s all about the way your feet strike the ground. It’s perfectly normal,’ he tried to reassure me but I was starting to take offence. He was doing that thing where you bring the tone of your voice up at the end of a sentence to imply it’s a question when it isn’t.

  This was annoying. ‘And what’s wrong with the way my feet strike the ground?’ I asked defensively, dabbing my face with a pink fluffy towel. I was horribly aware of how much I sweated compared to, well, anyone. Hell, I could outsweat the men.

  ‘It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s to do with the alignment of your hips and all sorts of things, but it can cause injuries unless you get trainers to accommodate it.’

  He was quite handsome, actually, but it was starting to sound like he was trying to sell me trainers, so he could go take a hike.

  ‘Look. Just come over here, would you?’ he beckoned. I followed, still pissed off. He put his arm on the bottom of my back as we walked and I jumped out of my skin, almost tripping over a girl doing stretches on the floor.

  ‘Hey! Can’t you see I’m a bit hot and bothered here?’ I cried self-consciously.

  ‘That’s a good thing,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘It means you’re actually doing some work, which is more than can be said for some people.’

  Wow. That was a surprise. I thought like most people in here, he would find me a freak of nature and avoid me at all costs.

  He led me to a desk and reached over to pull out a file. I was starting to feel really off now, but I took a couple of deep breaths and soldiered on. The muscles in his arms flexed as he lifted the thick pile of documents onto the surface. OK, he was quite nice. But still. He was criticising my legs. What kind of man starts talking to a woman by criticising her legs?

  He flicked through the pages frantically, a long fringe falling over his face and covering the top of his perfectly straight Roman nose. ‘Ah, here it is,’ he announced, pulling out a sheet of paper covered in diagrams. ‘Now, this is what your legs are doing. Around 30 per cent of runners have this problem, but it can be easily corrected with the right footwear. With the wrong footwear, you can get problems here, here and, er, here,’ he added, pointing out the shins, knees and hips on the drawings.

  OK. So maybe he wasn’t talking utter trash. There were diagrams and everything, and they looked vaguely scientific because they had the names of the muscles on them.

  He looked up at me, a pair of sea-green eyes waiting for a reaction. I felt sick from the exercise; my heart started to thump.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, rushing to his feet and standing in front of me. He had very expensive-looking trainers on and I feared they would soon be covered in my lunch.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ I protested. The room was starting to spin.

  ‘Look, I have a banana in my bag if you want that? You look like your blood sugar might be a bit low . . .’

  But he didn’t get the chance to finish because I ran. And as I ran my legs started to shake, things got whiter and whiter until I found myself lunging in front of the toilet and holding on to it for dear life.

  I was sick. Very sick. There was nothing I could do to hide it, either. Some people make it sound like an inconvenient cough whereas I sound like I’m roaring in anger. Embarrassing.

  The sharp twinges of acid from my stomach were stinging my nose. Gross. I hadn’t thrown up for ages and I’d forgotten how horrible it was. After a couple of minutes there was a gentle knock on the door. My legs were shaking like a frightened animal at the vet and my stomach muscles ached.

  ‘Hi. My name’s Naomi,’ came a concerned female voice. ‘I’m one of the personal trainers here and my colleague Ben asked me to check if you were OK. You haven’t been sick, have you?’ she asked timidly.

  Of course I’ve been bloody sick. The whole of London probably heard me. Most of the women in the changing room had probably run out screaming in their bras and knickers and promptly cancelled their direct debits. I cleared my throat and whispered through tears, still able to deny the obvious, ‘No, no. I’m OK, thanks. Sorry. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘All right. Well, if you need anything I’ll be near the reception desk, OK?’

  I grunted in response. Eventually, when I had composed myself, I found the strength to stand up and peeked my head around the door. Two ladies quickly turned around and fiddled with their lockers.

  After I’d showered away my humiliation and sat on the bench for a while, I realised the only way out of this building was to go past Ben. There was no secret exit for people who threw up and were too humiliated to face the world again. If I ever end up owning a gym I will make sure there is at least one of those emergency exits in the floor plan. They should become a mandatory government requirement.

  I sheepishly darted out of the door and kept my head down all the way past the weights guys, past Britney and the water machine, and out into the humid summer air. It looked like it had been raining, heavily.

  Escape. Maybe I would just never go back. That sounded like a great idea. What a fantastic excuse.

  ‘Hello!’ Suddenly I heard the distant shouting of a familiar male voice. Oh bugger.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’ It was Ben. Why on earth was he bothered enough to follow me out here? It could be some kind of fever-induced vision, but he looked gorgeous.

  ‘Look, I feel really bad about what happened back there. I shouldn’t have just
stopped you like that,’ he said, running his hands awkwardly down his navy tracksuit bottoms. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sienna,’ I answered, wishing I could be someone else. Someone who hadn’t just made an arse out of themselves. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m so embarrassed,’ I added, waving one of my hands in the air and blushing.

  ‘Look, will you please take this?’ he asked. As if from nowhere he pulled a banana from behind his back and flashed me a very convincing guilty look. He didn’t seem at all mortified by this evening’s events, just really understanding.

  ‘Oh no, Ben. I can’t take that. And honestly, I can’t face eating anything right now. It’s very kind, though.’ I yanked my black chunky-knit cardigan around my stomach as if to protect it from any incoming food advances. I glanced down at my baggy jeans and trainers, realising what a mess I looked.

  ‘Well, if you won’t take that, then you must take this.’ He pushed a crumpled piece of paper into my hand, smiled, then ran back to his gym.

  Nice bum, I thought. When he was out of sight I carefully opened up the note. The short but sweet message was penned in blobby blue ink, like the biro had been chewed on and was on the verge of exploding all over some poor person’s mouth. It was a simple sentiment, paired with an eleven-digit phone number: ‘CALL ME’.

  I’ve always been a bit funny about texting a man first and this occasion was no different. In fact, it was worse. It was a situation so difficult that it required dinner and a chat with Elouise. Plus I needed her to take away the pain of the evening’s unfortunate vomiting incident.

  ‘Text him, Si,’ came her playful response from the open-plan kitchen.

  I sank back into the leather of her sofa and sighed. A plastic sword jabbed my ribs so I threw it into the toy box. ‘I . . . I . . . I can’t, really, El,’ I muttered, scrunching up the piece of paper in my fist and shoving it into my bag.

  ‘And why on earth can’t you? He owns a gym, for goodness’ sake – how cool is that?’ she scolded, approaching me with a wooden spoon piled high with the most beautiful-looking paella, a fleshy prawn balanced on top of the orange rice. Now El really knows how to make this dish, but I had thrown up just a few hours earlier so I was feeling more than a little delicate.