by Natasha West
‘How was your break?’ she asked.
‘It was nice. I’m about a stone heavier though’ I said, regretting my words immediately. Sexy stuff, Parker.
‘Tell me about it’ she said, patting her perfectly flat tummy. I suddenly remembered that I had kissed that very stomach at the Christmas party. Kissed it, licked it, nuzzled it.
As if reading my mind, Ashley said, ‘The Christmas party… That was quite a night, wasn’t it?’
I licked my lips. ‘Yeah. It was…’ I didn’t know what else to say so I simply let the sentence die in the air between us. ‘Did you have a good time?’ I asked, trying to keep things general. I realised straight away she could easily misinterpret the question. She probably thought I was asking if she’d had a good time with me. I would never have asked her that in a thousand years. I’d been punching above my weight and I knew what the answer would be.
Or I thought I did.
‘I had a great time’ she said with a slight dip of her head. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a great time again’ she said, catching my eye.
Shit. She wanted to sleep with me again. That’s what she was saying.
‘Would you?’ my mouth asked as my brain tried to play for time.
‘Mmm hhmm’ she said, glancing around furtively, checking for ears. ‘And I can be discreet.’
Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I said, ‘Yes. Right. Discreet. Discretion is… Good.’
It was another one of those moments (and they come all too often) that proved conclusively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I had absolutely no game whatsoever. But bizarrely, it wasn’t standing in my way. Ashley was down.
‘You’ve got my number’ she said.
‘Do I?’
‘Yeah. That’s why I texted you at Christmas. To make sure you had it.’
And I’d thought it was the most generic of texts. How wrong can a woman be? Sometimes it seemed like I’d made it my life’s work to find out the answer to that question.
‘Right. I have your number’ I said, trying to keep eye contact. If I had nothing else, I had that.
And off she swept, glancing over her shoulder, that bare shoulder that I wanted to bite. As she caught my eye, she gave me the lightest grin. But in her eyes was the very devil herself.
Well, well. My mind immediately began to calculate. I’d been trying to stay chaste and it hadn’t worked. But now I was headed for a second go around with Ashley, if I wanted it. Who was I kidding? Of course I wanted it. The woman was sex on a stick and she knew her way around a body, from my dim recollections. But the damn vow!
I hadn’t wanted to start anything up, nothing real, that was all I’d actually meant with my chastity vow. Not to get distracted by any budding romances. But this wasn’t that, clearly. Offers of good times and discretion? I knew the code. I had been made the offer of a fuck buddy situation. And with the hottest women that was currently to be found within a hundred-mile radius. That wouldn’t count as distraction, would it? It was just recreation. It was virtually the same as a visit to the gym.
Speaking of which, I needed to get to the school gym, stat. In the toilets, I’d never really removed any clothing, neither of us had. It had been unzipped trousers, lifted tops. But nothing was completely removed. I’d been safe. But if Ashley was going to see me completely naked in the near future, I needed to shift that holiday weight. Curse Deborah’s incredible cooking.
Abruptly, I thought of Cameron. She’d had her fun with me and that had apparently been enough. I wondered if she’d moved on, if she had her own sexual safety net in place. It wasn’t my right to wonder. But I did.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Oh god, Mike’ cried a French voice down the hall. I wanted to puke. The so called secret house romance was getting a shade less secret lately. No one had said anything, and they still didn’t touch each other in front of me, but the attempt at subtlety was starting to fall off. The worst was the loud sex. It was just plain rude.
As I sat in my room, idly checking Amazon for a cheap pair of noise cancelling headphones, I wondered if I would dare be so brazen with Ashley. Nothing was arranged yet. She’d only made her declaration a few days ago and I was trying not to be too thirsty about the whole situation. And then an email popped up.
The subject heading read, ‘PLAY PROJECT’. I opened nervously. There were scripts attached and a list of who was directing what. I saw my name next to a play called ‘At the Gate’ and I opened the attachment, checking the name of the writer on the front page.
It was Cameron’s play. I’d gotten her again. How was that possible?
The next day, I went to see Kim in her office. The door was open and she looked up as I tapped on her door frame. ‘Allie, what’s up?’ she asked, looking away from her screen, already annoyed at my interruption.
I half thought of leaving but I was just too damn curious. ‘I was wondering…’ I said, still stood in her doorway.
‘Christ, I can’t stand it when students haunt my doorway like that... Come in or go away.’
I nearly chose the latter. But I swallowed my nerves and walked in. ‘I wanted to ask about my play.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why… Err…’ I stopped there. What could I ask? Why would I get the same writer for two projects in a row when it was made clear people were supposed to get mixed up?
‘Allie, would you get to the point?’
‘Why’d I get Cameron again?’
Kim let out a deep sigh through her nose. ‘She requested you. I’m sorry if you don’t like it but-’
‘Wait, what?’ I said, interrupting Kim, a thing I would never normally dream of doing. But I was taken by surprise. Kim didn’t seem to care.
‘The other two directors she’s worked with, it hasn’t gone too well. Or so I’m told’ Kim replied irritably.
I knew she’d had a rough time with Jack Jarvis, but did this also mean that she’d disliked working with Jonny?
‘I don’t know the details’ Kim went on, ‘But Dominic made a special request on her behalf. I guess she likes working with you and we are apparently supposed to creep around the writers’ feelings and give them everything they want. I’m sorry if you feel like you’re getting short changed on it’ she told me, not sorry at all.
But I didn’t feel short changed. Cameron had chosen me, fought to work with me. She wasn’t quite done with me after all, it seemed. It felt good.
‘Anything else?’ Kim asked gruffly.
‘Nope. Thanks, sorry, great, sorry, thanks’ I said, backing out of the room, as though from a lion looking at me like it was considering whether the meal I’d make would be worth the chase.
‘Allie’ she said, as I walked out. ‘While I’ve got you…’
I walked back in.
‘One piece of advice. Don’t say sorry.’
I blinked. ‘To you?’
‘To anyone, ever. Not in this business.’
I was gobsmacked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that I’ve seen another side of you. The way you spoke to me in the lighting class...’
So she hadn’t forgotten that at all. I knew I’d pay the price one day. Today was going to be the day.
‘…I want to see more of that. Because you’re going to have to be that person if you’re going to get anywhere. You’ve got to harden yourself. If you keep apologising for your existence all the time, no one will pay you any heed. Act like you’re no one and you will be.’
I stared at her, blindsided.
‘That’s it, you can go’ she said, making a shoo motion. I walked out.
I wandered down the hall, thinking about what Kim had just said. She wanted me to be aggressive, rude even. What the hell kind of advice was that? Clearly she did things that way, but did that mean I had to?
But I had to admit, getting the mildest approval from Kim, it lifted me a bit. I’d faced her down, just once, and that had apparently been some secret test I didn’t know I was taking. And I’d pa
ssed it. This wasn’t school school. This was film school, where apparently, it was cool to swear at teachers. Who knew?
As I was about to walk into the director’s room to re-read Cameron’s script, I saw the woman herself down the hall, loitering outside the writer’s room. She saw me and waved. I walked over to her. ‘Hi, how was your break?’ she asked, keenly.
‘It was nice. Well, no, that’s a lie. But I did eat a lot, so it wasn’t a total loss’ I explained.
‘Spent it with family then?’ she interpreted.
We laughed together. It felt good.
‘So, I hear you asked for me to direct your play?’ I casually dropped on her.
Her face fell. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Asked’ I shrugged.
‘Why?’
‘I guess I thought it was an odd coincidence that we were working together again. Especially seeing as we weren’t supposed to.’
‘Oh, yeah, I guess I can see how you might have thought that a bit odd.’
I looked at my shoe. ‘I thought after… The incident we don’t talk about that was pretty much it for us working together.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because you didn’t speak to me for weeks.’
‘I told you I was sorry about that. Didn’t you believe me?’
I swallowed, suddenly feeling like the tables had turned here. I’d had Cameron on the ropes a moment ago. Now I was in a headlock.
‘I did, of course I did. I just didn’t know what that meant in terms of the whole working together situation.’
Cameron’s grip tightened on her bag, slung over her shoulder. ‘This is why we should never have done it. It’s made everything weird.’
‘Hey, it doesn’t have to be weird’ I said quickly. But she was right. I was making this weird. Why was I doing that?
‘You don’t think it’s too late?’ she asked.
‘It’ll be fine, I swear. I just wanted to clear some air’ I told her, hoping to pull this whole thing back.
‘I really loved the film you made of my script last term’ Cameron told me. ‘You’re the one director who gets me and that’s why I asked for you.’
I tried not to blush but I failed somewhat. It was the kindest thing that had been said to me since I’d gotten to this school. Cameron was telling me that she believed in my work, that she trusted me with hers. It was a big deal. Way bigger than the drunken sex we’d had.
And now I had to forget that had happened. It wasn’t as though I’d truly lost my shit over Cameron anyway. I’d just gotten tripped up with her and I’d been sprawling ever since. If I kept it up, I was going to ruin a really good thing. A real work partnership. And for what? Because of some weird little voice at the back of my head that had felt a pull to her? It was time to grow up and take the best and only deal on the table.
‘I’m glad to hear that’ I told her. ‘I hope that I can do a good job for you.’
Cameron nodded and touched the back of her neck. I noticed a flush reaching up from her chest. She was such a nervy creature. Part of me wanted to find it cute, did find it cute. But I shut it down. No more of that. I could work with Cameron without being an idiot.
And if I did find myself getting a little hormonal over her, I had a place to let those feelings out now. Ashley Douglas.
‘Oh!’ Cameron cried, looking at her watch. ‘I was supposed to be in class five minutes ago. I’d better go!’ she said, turning around, taking two steps before she turned with an embarrassed grin and said, ‘Wrong way.’ And she fled in the opposite direction.
I watched her run, that little jog, those lean, long legs. That head down. So vulnerable. So cute.
I took out my phone and started to compose a text.
Hey Ashley, you free tonight?
Chapter Fifteen
Oh man, was I shitting it. Because it turned out that Ashley was free tonight. She was working in the studio, constructing a set until eight. And then she wanted to meet me in the basement bar.
Until then, I had some time to kill. So I killed it drinking with Janey. But she saw me checking the time once too often. ‘Hey, am I boring you?’ she asked. She’d been talking about her long-distance boyfriend again, the one with the probably very justified jealousy. Janey never told me she cheated, not explicitly. But I thought she probably was. She was a deeply flirty creature and I saw how she looked at guys. And how they looked at her.
Still I didn’t want to come out and ask her. It didn’t feel like it was my business to confront her on it. She wasn’t my girlfriend. But that meant a lot of listening to her complain about the boyfriend while I secretly wondered if he was in the right. And tonight, I had other things on my mind. It was seven thirty.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, pretending innocence. ‘I’m completely listening.’
‘What was the last thing I said?’ she demanded.
‘You said that you think he would kill himself if you broke up with him’ I answered without hesitation. This was a skill of mine. I could be off somewhere in my mind and part of my brain would always keep a track of what was happening in front of me. It was useful for occasions precisely like this. When I didn’t want to be honest about where my attention was.
‘Yeah, I did say that, but I still think something’s up’ Janey noted.
I was tempted to tell her. I felt like I’d spent the last few months playing my cards close to the chest on the topic of my love life. I really would have loved to talk about it.
But then, Ashley walked in. She was early. My eyes must have widened at the sight of her and I didn’t change my face back down to neutral quickly enough. Janey caught it. She looked from me to Ashley and back again. A sly smile crept onto her lips. ‘Oh, I get it. This is about Christmas.’
‘What?’ I asked in utter shock.
‘Because you got it on with Ashley at the party’ she stated, almost bored.
‘How the hell-’
‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked me. ‘I was watching your six all night, just like you asked. I saw you two go into the lavs together.’
Well, that was that. It was out there.
‘So, are you shagging on the regs now?’ Janey asked me, too loudly.
‘Keep your voice down! And no, not really. I mean, we might, maybe sometime…’
‘Might?’ Janey asked. ‘Your jaw dropped like a cartoon when she walked in. You’re on a promise, I can tell. You’ve been waiting for her to come in the whole time. It’s all starting to add up. I can’t even be pissed off that you’ve only given me half your attention. God speed to you, I say.’
‘Thanks for understanding’ I said, meaning it.
‘So… What’s she like in the sack? Or should I say, in the bogs?’
‘I’m not telling you that’ I told Janey flatly.
‘Come on! She’s like the most desired person in the school. I just want to know if she lives up to the hype.’
I opened my mouth, tempted to spill it. ‘I… No, I’m not saying a word.’
Janey sighed with deepest disappointment. ‘Fine. Then go to her. Go to her!’ she cried dramatically. Several people nearby looked. I shot Janey a glance, but she only winked at me and said, ‘I will get the filthy deets. Mark my words, Allie Parker.’
‘We’ll see’ I said as I turned to the last place I’d seen Ashley, at the bar. She was still there, now with a drink in her hand. She gave me the smallest of looks and I tried not to wet myself. ‘You gonna be alright if I leave?’ I asked Janey, eyes on Ashley.
‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m sure I’ll find some company’ she said, casting her eye about the busy bar, where it landed on the animation student with the man-bun that I’d seen her with before. I suddenly felt less guilty about leaving Janey.
I walked over to Ashley, trying to be casual. ‘How’s tricks?’ I asked.
‘Long day at the office’ she told me, sidling up to me. We were now next to each other but looking at the rest of the bar, talking
to each other without eye contact. It was like a spy meeting. I wanted to say something like, ‘The Black Goose flies at night.’ It had a little more poetry than, ‘You still wanna do it?
‘You get your set finished?’ I asked.
‘Yep, just about. It’s a monster though. Full construction, building it from top to bottom.’
My mind immediately spasmed with doubts. ‘So maybe you’re a bit tired?’