by Lindsey Kelk
‘So, Amy.’ She perked up at the mention of her name like a neglected puppy. ‘I’m assuming you haven’t been assisting my favourite photographer for very long. Tell me, what were you doing before she convinced you to run away to Milano?’
‘Me and Tess grew up together and then we went to uni and I was going to be a teacher but I hated it and then I was engaged to this guy Dave who was lovely but it didn’t work out and I probably should have broken it off earlier but you don’t really know until you know, do you?’
Al and Kekipi stared at her, shell-shocked once more. Amy took a deep breath and started again.
‘So we broke up just before the wedding, actually, but he’s fine, he’s engaged again and she’s having a baby and I’ve been working retail mostly but at the moment I’m in between jobs, so Tess said, come to Milan and help, so I thought, why not go to Milan and help! So yeah, that’s it really. Any other questions?’
I sipped my wine and sat back in my chair, smiling at my shoes, while Al and Kekipi stared at my best friend, completely speechless. There were only three things to know when dealing with Amy. One, never wear anything dry-clean only, two, never order anything you weren’t prepared to share and three, never, ever, ask her a question.
Once she got started, she did not stop.
‘Al’s right though,’ Amy said, following me along the hallway, Mary Janes in one hand, a full glass of red wine in the other. I couldn’t bear to look in case she was spilling it on the carpet. I wasn’t her mother; she wasn’t my problem.
Oh God, I thought, fidding around in my pocket for the suite key, she so was.
‘You’re so dead set on doing what you think is the right thing you’ve actually convinced yourself it’s what you want.’
I breathed in through my nose and reminded myself I was only moments away from locking the door to my bedroom, with Amy on the other side of that door.
‘I’m not saying starting an agency wouldn’t be exciting, I’m not saying Charlie isn’t exciting,’ she said with a look that suggested that was exactly what she was saying. ‘I’m only thinking about how excited you were when you got your first camera. You were so happy. I can’t think of anything else you’ve ever loved that much. Apart from me. And The Little Mermaid.’
‘It is a genuinely good film with an important message,’ I replied, unlocking the door to our suite. Someone had been in to straighten up. There was nothing I didn’t love about this place.
‘Yes, I know! It’s about pursuing your passions.’ Amy rapped me on the side of the head. ‘Ariel takes a chance and risks everything to get what she loves.’
‘No it isn’t,’ I said, pushing her away and kicking off my Primark flats. ‘It’s about determination. It’s about knowing what you want and refusing to give up on it.’
Amy glugged her wine and attempted to place the empty glass on a side table and missed. ‘So you’re saying that working eighty hours a week is the same as selling your voice to a sea witch?’
I picked the glass up and placed it down carefully. ‘So you’re saying that trading my voice for legs is the same as turning my back on my career to fanny about trying to be a photographer?’
‘She’s got legs!’ Amy yelled as I turned and walked straight into my bedroom. ‘Human legs! And we’ve only got three days!’
Closing the door behind me, I undid the top button on my jeans before it pinged off across the room and broke something. It would have been great to get some advance warning that there were going to be four courses at dinner before I stuffed my face with half a loaf of bread and hoovered up all the pasta. Not that the steak that followed wasn’t delicious. Or the tiramisu. I just didn’t need to eat again for another week.
‘Tess!’ Amy pounded at my door. So much for peace and quiet.
I opened it an inch, peeping through the crack.
‘Me and Kekipi are going out for a drink, do you want to come?’ Amy stood smiling sweetly with the living room phone in her hand.
I did want to go.
I wanted to ask Kekipi what was going on with Nick. Had I really seen him in the garden earlier or did I need to book myself in for a CAT scan? All though dinner, every time I’d try to raise the subject, Kekipi had moved the conversation on to something else. But now it was late, I was tired, I had more mascara on the back of my hands than on my face and so it was a no.
‘You go,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Don’t take him to a karaoke bar though, I’m warning you.’
‘You’re sure?’ she asked, looking more than a bit sad. ‘Come on, we haven’t had a night out in ages.’
‘I’ve got to be up in the morning,’ I reasoned. Al and I had made breakfast plans to talk business and I didn’t think rolling in, stinking of late night McDonald’s with sick in my hair would be a good way to start. Not that I’d ever done that. Cough. ‘I wouldn’t be a lot of fun. You go and bond with Kekipi, keep him out of trouble.’
She saluted and leaned in to plant a jammy goodnight kiss on my cheek. ‘Understood, so get some sleep. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I said. ‘Have fun.’
I watched as she skipped out the front door and waited to hear it close before shutting my own. She was exhausting but she was still the best. Shimmying out of my jeans, I picked up a hair tie and pulled as much of my hair as I could up behind my head.
‘Tess!’
More pounding on the door.
‘Amy?’
‘Nice pants,’ she commented, glancing downwards when I opened the door. ‘I can’t find my key. Can I borrow yours?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ I picked my room key up from its home on the nightstand and handed it over, knowing I would probably never see it ever again. ‘See you tomorrow.’
More kisses, more love, and Amy and her polka-dot prom dress were gone.
Standing by the door, I played around with the five light switches I had found until I decided on my favourite arrangement: chandeliers off, desk lamp off, lamp on my side on, lamp on the other side off. Pretty lamp in the corner of the room on but dimmed. I wondered if Jane had put all these options in herself. Not for the first time since I’d met Al, I wished I could have met her.
‘Tess!’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I muttered, opening the bedroom door on my best friend. ‘What now?’
‘You haven’t got any cash on you, have you?’ she asked. At least she had the decency to flutter her eyelashes at me. Her unsmudged eyelashes. ‘I’ve got my credit card but I don’t want to be a dick and have to go out to find a cash machine if we end up somewhere that doesn’t take cards.’
I silently stalked over to my handbag and counted out the euros I had picked up at the airport while Amy had been busy trying every perfume in Duty Free.
‘Thank you.’ She took the cash and backed away without going in for a kiss. ‘I’ll bring you a present.’
‘Don’t bring me a present, just don’t lose my key,’ I replied, closing the door behind her with not quite a slam. If the stuff she’d put in my suitcase was anything to go by, I really didn’t want a present.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my knickers, counting slowly and waiting for the next knock. Knowing Amy, there would be at least one more thing. Sure enough, a few moments later there was another knock. I covered my hands with my face and tried not to laugh. This time she was getting a slap. A lovely, well-meaning slap.
I opened the door, ready to impart the slap of love but it wasn’t Amy.
‘Hi,’ I said.
Nick didn’t say anything.
Instead, he took a step forwards, forcing me to back up into my bedroom, and shut the door behind him. I looked up at him; with my bare feet he was just a little taller than me, setting us face to face, only inches apart. But staring into his eyes was too hard. His expression was impossible to read, hard and unsmiling. No one was going to accuse him of being in a good mood. And he still wasn’t saying anything.
I tried to move my feet but I couldn’t, tried to open
my mouth but nothing came out. Instead I stayed where I was, arms glued to my sides and wishing more than anything that I was wearing something other than Amy’s T-shirt dress and my M&S pants. Breathing in sharply, Nick took another step towards me and slowly exhaled, his breath warm on my neck. I realized my breathing wasn’t quite so even, and as he raised a hand up to my waist, I felt it becoming more and more ragged, more uncontrolled. He wasn’t even touching me and I couldn’t hold it together. His hand settled underneath my T-shirt, on my hip and burned through my skin. He always seemed to run a few degrees warmer than me but this time, it felt like he was melting right through me, as though I was turning to liquid where he touched me. I couldn’t walk away but I could stand still. Ish. My toes curled underneath my feet and I padded on the spot, crossing my legs and making incoherent noises as Nick tightened his grip on me and raised his other hand up to my face. He traced his fingertips along my cheekbone and reached around to the back of my head, searching for my hair tie. I stretched up to help him, needing the comfort of my hair to hide in but before I could find it, he pulled away sharply and slapped my arms back down to my sides.
‘No,’ he said, his voice low and dark. ‘Stand still.’
I made a noise, not quite sure what it was, but entirely incapable of controlling it, and pressed my arms against my sides, my fingers digging into my thighs, and waited for him to take out my hair. I felt it before I saw it, because at some point I’d closed my eyes, but it didn’t make it any easier, not being able to see him. I could feel him, I could smell him, that top layer of soapy freshness – shower gel, shampoo, fabric detergent, all tempered with something real and warm and unrelenting underneath it all. He smelled so wholly like himself I would have known it was Nick in front of me if I had been wearing a blindfold.
With my hair loose and arms by my sides, I waited for his next move, but instead, his touch disappeared. Slowing my breathing, I opened my eyes to see him unbuttoning his light blue shirt, slowly and purposefully, looking at me the whole time. I made myself keep my own eyes open and looked up, as boldly as I dared. I took in his hair, ash blond and newly cut, revealing his Hawaii tan line where he was starting to go grey at the temples. His wide mouth was still unsmiling and his jaw firm as he peeled away his shirt and dropped it on the floor behind him. Next came his shoes, his brown leather lace-ups, and as he bent down to remove them, the muscles in his broad back moved underneath his skin. Shirt, shoes, socks, gone. All that was left was his belt, his jeans and whatever was underneath.
Then something inside me snapped. What was I doing? I wasn’t some ridiculous virgin about to be devoured by the big bad man. I was pissed off. I hadn’t heard from him in over a week. I had called and called and left messages and sent emails and he had ignored every one of them. I had chased after him a week ago, asked for one chance to explain and he had walked away from me. And now he thought he could just walk into my room, take off his clothes and – do what, exactly?
His eyes firmly on mine as he unbuckled his belt, it didn’t really seem like he was being terribly coy in his intentions.
‘I called you,’ I said, forcing my lips to make more coherent sounds than a whimper. ‘You didn’t call me back.’
Nick pulled his belt out of its loops with a snap and held it in both hands. Blinking slowly, he looked down at the length of leather in his hands and then back up at me.
‘Do you want me to go?’ he asked, moving closer to me until I felt myself backed up against the bed. ‘Tell me to go.’
I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to never have shown up in the first place. I wanted him in New York, across a sea and an ocean and several time zones away.
But instead of saying all of that, I reached out and took the belt from his hands, throwing it down somewhere behind me. Nick reached out and grabbed the back of my head, pulling me towards him with a handful of hair, and kissed me hard. It was like nothing I’d ever known, the feeling of his skin against mine, one hand caught in my curls, the other wrapped around my throat. I clutched his shoulders, trying to hang on for dear life until he broke away and pushed me backwards onto the bed.
‘I didn’t think so,’ he said, unbuttoning his jeans and dropping them to the floor.
Now he was smiling.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Are you OK?’ Amy asked at breakfast the next morning. She added two sugars to my tea without asking. If you’d asked anyone else on earth, they’d have told you I didn’t take sugar but she knew when I needed it. ‘What’s wrong?’
I fiddled with my teaspoon, tapping it on the table, and offered her a tight, happy smile.
‘Nothing. I’m fine.’
It was the biggest, boldest lie I had ever told.
I took the tea and tried to smile. I really wanted to talk to her but I couldn’t, not in front of Al. He was so excited about our planned trip to visit some amazing pattern cutter that it was difficult to find the right time to mention that Nick had turned up outside my door, shagged me senseless, and then vanished before I woke up.
I was mad at myself for letting him in my room. I was even more mad at myself for letting him in my knickers. And I was positively furious about the activities that had occurred once he was inside said knickers. But nothing had got my goat more than the fact that he had done a Miller Houdini and vanished in the middle of the night.
Of course, Amy wasn’t going to settle for a ‘nothing’. She knew me far too well.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ she whispered when Al turned his attention to one of the waiters. We had a table full of delicious food and he wanted a bowl of Coco Pops. ‘Something’s going on. You haven’t been right since you got here. And why are you wearing that white T-shirt again, you skank? I gave you a suitcase full of perfectly good clothes.’
‘You gave me a suitcase full of perfectly good circus costumes,’ I said, tearing into a croissant with displaced rage. ‘And I can’t talk about it right now. I’ll tell you in a bit, I promise.’
She pouted for a moment and then nodded.
‘Has something happened?’ She stirred my tea on my behalf.
‘I said I’d tell you in a bit,’ I said, shoving so much buttery baked goodness into my mouth, I could barely breathe. The more croissant in my mouth, the less likely I was to start screaming. ‘So, I’ll tell you in a bit.’
‘It’s not Charlie, is it?’ she asked. ‘Did he call you?’
Oh, bugger me. Charlie.
I was officially the worst.
‘Good morning, all.’
Actually, I couldn’t be the worst because the worst had just walked into the room.
Strolling towards the table, Nick showed no signs of having lost any sleep at all. In fact, he looked really quite well. His beautifully tailored white shirt was rolled up to his elbows, showing off his tan and his jeans fitted him in the most irritatingly wonderful fashion. And like the total twat he was, he was barefoot. I wondered how Al would react if I were to get up from the table and punch him. Just once, I told myself, and not that hard. Not hard enough to cause any permanent damage. I had Amy for that. For the first time since we stepped foot on Italian soil, I was so pleased that she was with me. She might be a bundle of bad ideas and ADHD but she was also the person I trusted most in the world when I needed someone in my corner. She wouldn’t be swayed by a pretty face.
‘Fuck me,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t look now but my future ex-husband just walked in.’
Or maybe she would.
‘Mr Bennett, good to see you again.’
The two men went on for the über-hetero handshake-hug combo, clapping one another on the back and laughing heartily. It was like watching Daniel Craig hug it out with Father Christmas, if Father Christmas had been wearing neon-green board shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Daniel Craig, was in fact, the devil. Once they broke away, Nick turned to look at me, hands on hips, smirk on face, begging for a kick in the balls.
‘My stellar photography team,’ Al said, waving to Amy and me. ‘Mi
ss Amy Smith and of course you know Tess.’
‘Actually, we haven’t been properly introduced, have we?’ he said to me, holding out his hand. ‘Nick Miller, nice to meet you.’
‘Fuck. Off!’ Amy shouted at the top of her voice, before clapping her hand across her mouth. ‘Sorry, Al.’
Our host blinked slowly and tried not to smile. I wasn’t having the same problem.
‘Hello,’ I replied through a mouth full of pastry, ignoring the outstretched hand. Partly because I didn’t want to shake his hand and partly because I was afraid that a shake would lead to a slap, that would lead to strangling the life out of him. ‘Tess Brookes.’
‘Right, OK.’ It seemed like he was putting as much effort into not laughing as I was putting into not killing him. ‘And Amy, lovely to meet you too. It is Amy? Just checking; there’s been confusion with names before.’
‘Last time I checked,’ she replied, still utterly awestruck. ‘You’re Nick?’
‘You’ve heard of me?’ he asked, taking a seat beside her while I folded my arms across my chest and crossed my legs, staring at my reflection in the coffee pot on the table. It wasn’t possible for me to look pissed off enough but I was giving it a really good attempt.
‘I’ve heard of a Nick,’ she said, emphasis on the ‘a’. ‘You’re Nick Nick?’
‘I am going to get changed,’ Al announced, springing out of his seat with surprising vigour for a seventysomething-year-old man. It was amazing what an awkward conversation could achieve. ‘Leave you youngsters to get better acquainted, as it were. I’ll meet you out front in half an hour.’
‘So, Tess is it? Tell me about yourself,’ Nick reached for the coffee pot and poured himself a cup, still smiling. ‘What brings you to Milan?’
I picked up my cup of tea and stared straight ahead, ignoring the aching in my inner thighs. Actually, no, don’t ignore it, I told myself; you deserve to be in pain. And Nick deserved to be ignored. And we should both be flogged … unless he enjoyed that kind of thing.
‘Not talking to me?’ He turned his attention and crinkled blue eyes on Amy, who immediately spat out her orange juice. ‘Amy. What about you? Excited to be in Milano?’