It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  It was a bit of shock then when Alex just shook his head and started to look for all intents and purposes as if steam was about to start pouring out of his ears.

  I might, I realised with a sinking heart, have just made the whole situation worse.

  “You are absolutely right, Annie,” he said in a voice that shook with anger and resentment. “It is none of your business. None of your business at all. This is just beyond ridiculous. I can’t believe Fionn has sent you here to tell me off like some naughty schoolboy!”

  Of course my appropriate response would have been to tell him that of course Fionn hadn’t sent me there and had indeed no knowledge whatsoever that I was there but, and here is where I fecked up yet again, I saw red with the naughty-schoolboy comment and let him have it.

  “You’re a fine one to talk about naughty,” I snarled, “with all your talk of Naughty Steps like she has done something wrong! All she wanted was a honeymoon with you and you may well not remember this but I’m pretty sure you wanted that too. But now, somehow, it has turned into a battle of wills with bloody Rebecca!”

  There was a pause during which I glared at Alex who was making visible efforts to control himself.

  “Please don’t ever refer to her as ‘Bloody Rebecca’ again,” he said in an icy fury. “You don’t even know her. Now, you had really better go because I have work to do.” And with that he got up and stalked out.

  I was so shocked, and so embarrassed, that I left straight away and it was only when I was in the car that I remembered, with a nasty sinking feeling, the “Fionn has sent you” bit and realised that, no, I hadn’t corrected him. I had left him, steaming angry, thinking Fionn had sent me over there to give him a verbal dressing-down.

  This was bad. This was very, very bad. This was about as bad as it got – especially at the start of a week.

  I should have gone back in and corrected him. I should have at least phoned if I was too chicken to face him again, but I didn’t. I decided to give him a chance to calm down.

  I drove on to Manna with a heavy heart and, as I parked up close by, I realised that me arriving there to ask Pearse if he was still going to make the wedding cake might just be a bit premature, given that we no longer knew if there was going to be a wedding.

  “It will be fine. It will be fine,” I told myself loudly, as I got out of the car. I would make this better. I wasn’t sure how in the hell I would, but I would. I straightened my skirt, checked my tights for ladders, glanced in the wing-mirror to make sure my lip-gloss was on straight and then I walked into Manna where it was clear all eyes were very much on me.

  Toni, Pearse’s maître d’, was at her usual position by the cash register. She glanced at me – a look on her face akin to that you would give to a child with a stream of green snot sliding down towards their lips.

  “Toni,” I started.

  “Annie,” she started back – and believe me that woman could make you think she was picking on you just by the very way she said your name.

  “Is Pearse in?”

  “Hmmmm, I’ll see if he is available for you,” she said snootily, turned on her perfectly polished court-shoe heel and walked towards the kitchen.

  I looked around and saw a few of the younger waiting staff nudge each other and whisper. One young girl replicated the river-of-snot look perfectly before she too turned on her heel and walked away from me.

  It was as if me, and my fecklessness, were contagious.

  I should have known this was not the best place to have this discussion. I should have remembered that Pearse had been planning to visit me later that week anyway – but since when did good sense have anything to do with my decision-making?

  If I thought the night I shacked up with Ant was perhaps the most ill-thought-out experience of my life, I might just have been wrong. It was clear that that particular Monday morning was going to eclipse that lapse in judgement entirely.

  Everyone loved Pearse. Especially his staff. They thought he was God – even when he was doing his best Gordon Ramsey grumpy-hole impression. I should have known that meeting him here was never going to be a good idea. To be honest, I was lucky not to have been beaten to a pulp by his legion of minions and put through the mincer or something equally macabre.

  Pearse walked out of the kitchen, a look on his face as if I had just kicked his favourite puppy to death, and headed towards me.

  “Annie,” he sighed and I could see the same young waiting staff almost swoon at his vulnerability. It was easily seen that they’d never had to deal with his garlicky advances or obsession with Yankee Candles. There had been times when all I wanted was a moment of raw passion without a lingering stench of cooking by-products or natural-scented candles.

  “Pearse,” I replied. “We need to talk. Can we talk?”

  “Of course, Annie,” he said, that wounded look stepping up a gear. “Let’s go to my office.”

  So we went to his office, where we’d had sex at least three times and all of a sudden those damn pink humping elephants were slap-bang back in my thoughts again.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked. He looked genuinely concerned – so genuinely concerned that I felt a real pang of guilt that I had hurt him. He might have been perhaps the most boring, and possibly the most self-obsessed man on the planet, but he wasn’t a bad person and he didn’t deserve to be hurt.

  It struck me that I was hurting a lot of people at the moment, intentionally or otherwise, and I suddenly just felt unbelievably sad and unbelievably disappointed in myself. And I’m ashamed to say that I cried huge, fat tears all over Pearse and his office.

  13

  Pearse paid for an extra big slice of PR that month. That kept me off the hook with Bob at least. Because I never did make it back to the office.

  The furthest I made it was back to Pearse’s house where, somehow, we managed to end up back in the sack.

  It had started when I broke down. He put his arms around me and I breathed him in. In that moment – in the horrible feeling that I was not, and never would be, good enough for anyone or anything – I let him hold me tight. It felt nice. I knew just exactly where on his chest I could lay my head comfortably. I knew the contours of his strong arms and let them envelop me and when he kissed the top of my head I let him. And it felt nice.

  This wasn’t a booty call. This wasn’t any sort of a game. This was a man who loved me once, letting me know he still cared. And in my loneliness – in my longing to feel as if I could do just one thing right in my life, I lifted my face toward him and brushed my lips against his.

  His intake of breath let me know he was surprised by my gesture but amazingly, given what I had put him through, not horrified. He kissed me back His lips were as soft as they always had been. Soft and full – and his kiss was deliciously tender.

  I should have stopped it. I knew that. But it felt nice to be wanted and to know it was for more than just a quick shag.

  When the kiss grew deeper, I let it. In fact, I kissed him back. Quite hard, if the truth be told. And when he pushed me back onto the desk and pushed my skirt up so that my legs wrapped around him, I didn’t resist. I didn’t resist one little bit. I pulled him closer to me, allowing me to feel the warmth of his body ripple through my own.

  “We can’t do this here . . .” he said breathlessly as his hand crept up inside my blouse, making my skin tingle and my body ache for him.

  My mind was buzzing. I wasn’t in control. I didn’t really know what I was doing any more and all I knew was that even if we could not do it there – in his office with Toni no doubt stood at the door with a glass held against the wood – we had to do it somewhere.

  “Take me home,” I muttered and he groaned in a remarkably sexy way. I hadn’t heard him groan like that in months – perhaps even in years – and it made me feel quite dizzy.

  He stood back, picked up his car keys, took me by the hand and led me to his car. Toni gaped open-mouthed as we passed and even though I was in some sort of a da
ze I had to physically restrain myself from saying “Ha!” in a very childish sort of a way.

  We didn’t talk the whole way home. I’m not sure if it was because we both knew that we could break the spell if we actually spoke to each other or if we were both just so damn horny that we wouldn’t have been able to say anything remotely sensible. Sexy talk was not a strong point for either of us – no matter how in the mood we were. We had tried it a couple of times and it had always been disastrously tragic.

  But what I do know is that we did it in the hallway, against the wall, and that for the first time in a long time, with Pearse, the earth moved. Boy, did it move.

  And twenty minutes later, in his kingsize bed, it moved again. A couple of times. In a row. Not that I’m boasting, or anything.

  We fell asleep then, spooned together, his hand cupping my breast which was, I have to say, a little odd. My boobs should not be used as comfort blankets. And yet it was nice to be there and to feel as if I belonged. It allowed me to forget that I had made a mess of huge, giant proportions and that my life was spiralling so far out of control I couldn’t see it ever getting back on track again.

  I could pretend, in his arms, that I wasn’t just being used for sex (as in, by a hairy Donegal man). I could pretend that I was both good at my job and valued for it. I could pretend that I wasn’t one step away from being marched out of Bob’s office with my P45 and a one-way ticket to the dole queue. I could pretend the last few weeks had all been a bad dream à la Bobby Ewing in the shower, and that my life plan was still intact. I could pretend that I hadn’t neglected to get back to Alex to clear up the little “Fionn has sent you” misunderstanding. I could pretend that Fionn wasn’t going to kill me and that I hadn’t just messed up her life even more spectacularly than I had messed up my own.

  I could pretend a lot of things – not least that it was a good thing I had ended up back in bed with Pearse – a man I had been so utterly sure I had fallen out of love with entirely.

  I woke to Pearse kissing my stomach, moving his tongue in small and delicious circular motions across my abdomen, making every part of my body tingle with anticipation.

  If only he had done this a few weeks ago, I thought wryly, maybe things would be different. As much as my body screamed for me to let him continue on his glorious journey around my lower body, my head had somehow managed to alert me to the fact that it could be a very big mistake. A. Very. Big. Mistake. Indeed.

  This hadn’t sorted anything out. This, while it had been really quite impressive, had probably just made things a lot worse.

  I glanced at the clock beside the bed. It read 4.34 p.m. Knowing that Pearse always set his clock thirty minutes ahead of the actual time, I was able to ascertain it was just gone four and we had been in bed for almost the entire afternoon.

  There was little point in me heading back to work now. I felt vaguely nervous about that but not half as nervous as I felt when I thought of how Fionn would now be absolutely raging with me or how I felt when I thought about what I had just done, four times, with a possibly fifth time on the near horizon.

  As Pearse’s fingers – long and lean – followed the path of his tongue and I felt my body win the battle, I resolved to put all my doubts to one side and think about it again later. One more time wouldn’t hurt. Not at this stage.

  At five thirty Pearse got up and walked to the shower, leaving me to get dressed and check my phone for messages. There were five missed calls from work – which could have been Fionn or Bob or a combination of both. None of them were likely to bear good news. There were two voicemail messages but I didn’t have the guts to listen to them. Needless to say, there was still no word from Ant. Ironic really that just a few weeks ago I had cheated on Pearse with him and now it seemed I had cheated on him with Pearse. That is, if you could cheat on someone who was possibly just using you for sex.

  “Do you need to get back to the restaurant?” I called to Pearse as he walked out of the shower, towelling off his body and then reaching for some facial moisturiser.

  He glanced at the clock, and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t have to. I’m the boss. I can take the night off if you want.”

  My jaw hit the floor. Pearse? Take the night off? It didn’t happen. It never happened. Once again I found myself thinking that if this had happened a few weeks ago, perhaps things would have been different. But it hadn’t happened, and things were how they were.

  Pearse must have noticed the look of shock on my face because he sat beside me, towel dropping to the floor and his wanger hanging limply – as if it were pleading with me.

  He took my hand and looked into my eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, Annie. I’ve missed you. And I know what you did was horrendous and hateful, but it has been so nice to be with you today and I could try – if you wanted me to – I could try and find it in my heart to forgive you.”

  He chatted on for a while but my brain was stuck on “horrendous and hateful”. What I did was wrong, yes, but horrendous? Hateful? No – I was lonely. Things hadn’t been right for a very long time. I had felt as if I was worthless, if the truth be told. He had loved his restaurant more than me. And Ant – for all his equal feckwittedness – had made me feel worth something. No, I hadn’t acted hatefully or horrendously. I had made a mistake – something which I had a real habit of doing these days.

  “Well?”

  I tuned in to Pearse. I could have agreed to what he had said, but I had no idea what it was. I just wanted to go home – and soon.

  “No, Pearse,” I muttered. “There’s no need to take the night off. Manna needs you. My car is parked outside the restaurant and I better pick it up and get home. Thanks anyway.”

  He looked wounded. But hey, what else could he have expected from a “horrendous and hateful” person such as me?

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I nodded, standing up and walking out of the bedroom, leaving him and his wanger to get dressed.

  I felt a headache coming on, so I went to the alphabetised bathroom cabinet and got some paracetamol. The bad (“hateful and horrendous”) part of me then moved the Ibuprofen to where the Zantac should live and the Lynx to the Calvin Klein shelf and smiled to myself that he would be really pissed off when he found out what I’d done.

  I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t know anything any more and when he walked into the room, in fresh chef whites, and kissed me on the cheek, I felt as if I was in some alternative reality.

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes as we drove to Manna, so he would think I was in post-coital slumber, and when we got there I made a convincing show of groggily waking up.

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” he said. “Don’t worry about having the afternoon off work. I’ll sort it with Bob – throw some extra money his way . . .”

  I walked back to my car, feeling very much as if I had just prostituted myself.

  I climbed the stairs to the flat, my body aching from the excesses of the afternoon, and was shocked to find a huge bouquet of Cala Lilies waiting on my doorstep. It was perhaps the biggest bouquet of flowers I had ever seen. It was certainly the biggest bouquet of flowers I had ever received. Pearse had been really damn quick off the mark, I thought, as I struggled to haul it through the door and onto my dining table.

  Flopping down on the sofa I opened the card. But it wasn’t from Pearse. Of course it wasn’t from him. It was from Ant.

  “Thanks for a couple of great nights. Can’t wait to see you again!”

  It was then, and exactly then, that I picked up the phone and called Darcy. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  I had always thought of Darcy as a fixer – but not in an illegal Pulp Fiction kind of a way, you understand. She was just the sensible one. The one who could solve any and all problems with what often appeared to be a cool wink and shake of her magic Filofax. She was a Mary Poppins for the noughties – able to make all of life’s problems seem infinitely more palatable.

>   She wasn’t a walkover, however. No way. She wouldn’t be too happy with the mess I had made of things. She would give me that very-disappointed-in-you look that was usually reserved for our parents and she would in all probability give me a lecture also. But then, when her temper had cooled a little, she would set about helping me put it to rights.

  So, as much as I was dreading the lecture and the disapproving look, I needed her as my go-to person.

  She would, she said, be with me the following day after work. She lived and worked in Dublin – doing something utterly fabulous in the fashion industry which I had never quite understood as I was too jealous of her success to listen properly. She said she had some time off coming up so she would pull a few strings and make it north of the border for teatime. She hadn’t listened to all the details. In fairness she could have listened all she wanted but she was unlikely to be able to decipher much amid the flurry of tears and snotters which shot forth from me down the crackling phone line.

  “You can tell me about it tomorrow,” she said. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine. Life has a way of working out.”

  While her words should have comforted me, I couldn’t help but feel she was talking the biggest load of bollocks known to man.

  I put the flowers in water and sat down on the edge of my bed. The voicemails on my mobile were still unanswered so I guessed now was as good a time as any to listen to them.

  The first was from Fionn. At 2.30 p.m. She sounded surprisingly chipper.

  “Hey, chicken! Wondered when you might make it back to base. I’m dying for a fake fag. Let me know the score.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.