Dog Handling

by Clare Naylor

  “Livvy, where’s the Big Bird outfit?” Alex bounded over and kissed Liv’s cheeks, making her relieved on two counts: the first being that she did actually exist and the other that she hadn’t bought that bloody skirt. Could she have borne it if she were subjected to Sesame Street and Orville jokes all night by irreverent Aussies? However, judging by the lack of interest she was inspiring among the men here, at least it would have meant she had her bottom stroked an ego-boosting number of times.

  “I tried to bring Laura, but she fled just as we got to the door. You read loads of books; what do you think her problem is?” Liv asked as Alex pressed a glass of champagne into her hand.

  “God knows. I keep meaning to ask Charlie what happened. Anyway, look who’s here. . . .” Alex turned around and grabbed a well-muscled arm. “Ben Parker, this is my best mate, Liv Elliot.”

  Liv gawped openmouthed. Thanks for the warning, Alex. Oh my god, this was the moment she’d been meant to get slim for and imagined on and off for the last nine years and now here it was about to turn around and face her. And Liv’s eye chose this moment to develop a twitch. Of course.

  “Liv Elliot. Not . . .” Ben turned and looked puzzled for a second; then a broad smile spread across his face. “Holy shit, not the Liv Elliot. Bloody hell . . . you look . . . well, you look completely different. Really great, though. What on earth are you doing here?” He clasped her hand and seemed genuinely thrilled and surprised to see her. Liv had scrambled head on toast. A man who wasn’t too cool for school. This was a first.

  “Liv’s staying with me down at Bronte. Isn’t that amazing?” said Alex before slinking off to play hostess.

  “Yeah. God, isn’t it a small world? And what are you doing in Sydney?” He turned the full force of his sincerity on her and Liv nearly turned into a puddle of goo. God, he was practically steaming off the wallpaper with that voice and Liv hated him for it. Then, just as she was about to start preening and enjoying herself under Ben’s watchful, beautiful, interested gaze, her eye began to twitch again and she suddenly noticed a familiar bulk helping itself to a margarita at the other side of the room. The bulk that’d been kissing her neck about this time last week. It was Will and any second now he was about to look over in her direction and see her. Hell, that’s the last thing I need, Liv thought as she forgot all about dog-handling Will back into submission and decided to play the terrified deer and run in the other direction. She just could not face him.

  “Oh, listen, Ben, I’m sorry, but we’ll have to catch up some other time.” Liv put on a polite smile for Ben but knew that it was embarrassingly fake. She just had to get the hell out of this room. And she flicked her little deer tail in the wind and fled for the kitchen.

  “Alex, thank god you’re here. You didn’t tell me Weasely Will was coming,” Liv stammered, and began to stuff garlic bread in her mouth to steady her nerves. If in doubt eat.

  “Oh, but he’s a really good mate of Charlie’s. Sorry, Liv. Anyway, he’s the one who should be embarrassed, not you. Don’t worry.”

  “But what if he ignores me? God, even worse, what if he’s nice and sympathetic to me? Ugh.” Liv panicked as she munched her way through the better half of a baguette. “ ‘Sorry I didn’t call you, but you’re just not my type.’ I’d have to kill myself.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Look, he’s talking to Marcie. He probably won’t even notice you’re here,” Alex said absentmindedly. Honestly, for Liv’s best friend she’d been pretty bloody insensitive, Liv thought. “Now have you seen Robbie? I promised him the first bite of my pavlova.” Alex was not the person to look to for sympathy, thought Liv as she slunk off to find the phone. In the absence of a single other friend at the party she might as well get James to swing by and pick her up on his way out. At least if she went out with the boys she wasn’t in any danger of being fucked and chucked again.

  “Liv, there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” She felt a hand on her shoulder. She swung around ready to clobber Will or even castrate him in a dog-handling fashion, but it was Ben, his perfectly white T-shirt just skimming his broad chest as he raked his hand nervously through his hair. “It really is great to see you, you know.”

  Liv looked at him and doubted whether she could remain standing in his presence for long, especially if his T-shirt strained any more at his completely perfect arms. “I was about to go outside, actually; it’s pretty hot in here,” she said by way of an excuse. “I’m sure we can catch up another time.”

  “Maybe I could join you?” he asked.

  “Sure. Whatever,” Liv said with one eye on the Will situation. Two ex-lovers in one room was not something she’d ever experienced before, and though somewhere it made her feel a bit modern and proud, right now she didn’t want a head-on collision.

  “Shall I get us some drinks?” Ben asked as Liv picked up her cardigan and headed for the door.

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  Ben accosted a guest with a tray and picked up two strawberry daiquiris. He was about to follow Liv outside when Amelia caught sight of him.

  “Ben honey, is one of those for me?” She took a glass from his hand and clinked his. “Cheers, darling.” Then she looked closely at Liv as though she were something on the bottom of her shoe she’d just trodden in.

  Liv braced herself for a scene. Clearly the drinks were for Liv and Ben and clearly they were going outside to drink them on the beach, because Liv was casting off her shoes as Amelia gave her the once-over.

  “Oh, you’re Alex’s friend, aren’t you?”

  “Liv and I met ten years ago on holiday in the South of France. Can you believe she’s actually living at Charlie’s mum’s place down at Bronte?” Ben shook his head in disbelief and smiled.

  “So what do you do, Liv?” Amelia was still appraising this blast from Ben’s past when she picked up another strawberry daiquiri and handed it to Liv. “I always think you can judge a person by what they do.”

  “I’m an accountant,” Liv said, and took the drink. Thinking she may take to the drink as well.

  “Never mind. You guys go run along and you can tell Ben all the gossip. Guess there’s a lot to catch up on, eh?” Amelia had a voice as sweet and brittle as a sugared almond, and despite her intimidating dreadfulness she was utterly irresistible—even to Liv. The vision of womanhood that men would sell their souls, Ferraris, and golf clubs to possess, and that women can’t take their eyes off because somehow, mistakenly, they think that if they stare hard enough and pick up just one of her mannerisms, they will somehow be as gorgeous and magnetic as her. Some hopes, Amelia’s sweet smile seemed to say to Liv as she looked up into her “as seen in Vogue” face. Not someone anyone was going to not telephone after sex.

  Amelia kissed Ben on the mouth slurpily and made her way over to a group of men in the corner who watched her lasciviously as she approached. Run along? Liv pondered the insult. How many girls would positively encourage their boyfriends to take a girl onto a moonlit beach and catch up with her over a couple of cocktails? Well, they wouldn’t mind at all if the girl was a bit of a dog who stood about as much chance of attracting the said man as Liv had of giving up chocolate for Lent. Liv began to button up her cardigan. Hell, she didn’t even want to be on the beach with Ben Parker. She couldn’t even manage Tiny Tim and Weasely Will; how would she ever be able to deal with a major-league lover like Ben Parker?

  She decided that the best thing to do was just ignore Ben, not even enter into his rather spectacular orbit.

  “I better go and have a word with Alex,” Liv said. “I’m a bit concerned that I bought the wrong-size socks for Charlie.”

  But Ben took hold of her arm. “Liv, are you trying to avoid me?” he asked, looking concerned.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Liv tripped up the step and into the garden. “I just don’t really know that I have that much gossip to fill you in on. Not that you’d be interested in anyway.”

  “It’s not the gossip I’m interested in.” He tou
ched her arm and smiled. “And anyway, I need your professional input.”

  Liv was a bit baffled. “You want me to balance your books or fiddle your tax?”

  “No, actually, I want to exchange all the lingerie I bought today, if that’s possible.” He smiled. “Amelia didn’t appreciate being Large.”

  He had a gleam in his eye that wasn’t mean, just playful, but Liv was mortified. Oh, for a beach of quicksand. He bloody well knew. He’d known who she was when he bought the underwear from the market stall. Why had he waited this long to humiliate her? Prize arsehole. Biggest, fattest, hairiest bum in the entire competition. (Liv was not feeling very tolerant of any man right now and call it defensive, but her nerves weren’t up to all this roller-coaster stuff.)

  “I’m sure she didn’t.” The idea of Amelia being Large was pretty hysterical, but Liv was too stressed to snigger along with him. Instead, she smarted and wondered whether she should have kept up the Aussie accent just to stop her looking such a complete moron, who’d not only lied about not having met him before but also come over all faint at the sight of him. She looked at the crowd in the garden for somebody else she knew who might provide her with an excuse to escape, but she didn’t know a soul and the party seemed to be standing on its own two feet very well without her.

  So instead she allowed herself to follow him down the garden and out onto the deserted darkness of the beach.

  “I would have said something, but your Aussie accent was so convincing that I thought you might just have a doppelgänger,” Ben said, and Liv turned and looked at him.

  “Sorry, it was probably really rude of me, but well . . .”

  The tide was headed out and the sand was still damp and hard. Ben sat down and threw down his jacket for her to sit on. Liv couldn’t decide whether to wander moodily along the beach to give her time to make up an excuse or sit down and hope the blood flowed back to her brain. Unfortunately, her body couldn’t quite interpret her indecision, so instead of performing either the sitting action or the heading-off-to-the-sunset-with-the-grace-of-Audrey-Hepburn one, she sort of did both. “Shit!” she squealed in an un-Audrey-like fashion as she catapulted bumlong onto the sand with her sunset-bound leg twisted spastically under her. “I’ve broken my leg.” Breaking her leg was the only justification she could come up with for the decibel-crunching thud with which she’d landed. Certainly a lighter girl would not have caused quite the earthquake she did.

  “Okay. Just let me see.”

  Liv looked up to see Ben Parker crouched beside her, his face pale with concern (or was that the moonlight?). Either way, she couldn’t bear the embarrassment of the scenario that might follow if she didn’t revise her condition pretty swiftly. The last thing she needed was Ben helping her across the beach.

  “Actually, it’s completely fine,” she moaned. Which it wasn’t. It completely hurt. She just could not face the idea of being trussed up like the proverbial beached whale—a couple of towropes round her ankles and one of those tarpaulin harnesses around her middle. A tractor would be hired to lug her to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile it would be dawn and the tourists would think she was stranded wildlife and snap away. Justin the surf instructor would tell her that he’d seen it coming; it was rare you came across a human being with so little sense of balance, agility, and natural grace.

  “Actually, your ankle’s all big and swollen.” Ben was horrified as he gently straightened the offending leg out.

  Liv screwed her eyes up in shame. “It’s okay. I’ve never been known for the slenderness of my ankles. I’m sure it’s fine,” Liv apologised, thinking it understandable that anyone used to Amelia’s pin-thin legs might fairly deem her own hideously swollen by comparison. Liv opened her eyes to assess the damage. Actually, she was disfigured beyond belief. Her ankle looked like a milk bottle, and clutched around it, softly lifting it onto his rolled-up shirt, was Ben’s hand. As Liv looked down at the hand around her ankle, every second between the warmth of the summer in France and this moment seemed to evaporate. The hand she’d remembered so often undoing her bra, raising his Ricard in a toast to “us,” and finally clutching her favourite diamonte crucifix, which she’d given to him as a parting gift to remember her by. The hand that was now, nine years later, taking out an ice cube from a strawberry daiquiri and rubbing it slowly against her swelling ankle.

  “Any better?” he asked. God, he was so compassionate and so bloody sexy, Liv marvelled. He wasn’t at all smooth and superconfident like Will, or as cocky as someone who was Perfect Amelia’s chosen mate could be. He was just sweet and perhaps a bit shy. Which was a surprise to Liv, who had imagined him only as unapproachable and intimidating. While the ice cooled to water and trickled down her foot he lifted his glass to her lips, “Here, better have a swig. It’ll numb the pain.”

  But Liv wasn’t thinking pain. Only pleasure. She thought about saying, “Sod my ankle and put your ice cube to better use.” But she’d never been like that, worst luck. “That feels good,” was what she managed instead, but she did string out the vowels in gooooood to make it sound as though she were simply coming apart at the seams with hormones.

  “I once came to a party in Bristol to look for you,” Ben said. As if her “gooooood” had never happened.

  “You did?” Liv spat out, not being even slightly casual. God, if she’d known. The nights she’d listened to George Michael’s “A Different Corner” in bed and willed Ben to get in touch. And it turns out he’d tried. God, he’d come all the way from Australia to find her, probably to suggest he transfer his final year to be near her, as all the girls in Sydney weren’t a patch on his summer strumpet.

  “Yeah, I was over on a summer exchange in England and I went to this club called Lakota and even got someone to go into the ladies’ loos to see if you were in there.” He smiled and his ice rubbing slowed down. Liv caught her breath. He’d felt the same way. If this wasn’t destiny hurling them together on some beach on the other side of the world with barely a swollen ankle and melting ice cube between them, then Liv didn’t know what destiny was. “Then I took three tabs of E by mistake and kind of lost the plot. Anyway, I ended up going out with some girl I met there for the next two years. King of long-distance love thing. Funny, eh?” “Bloody hilarious!” Liv wanted to yell.

  “So what do you do now?” Liv asked, trying to detonate the romance bomb that was in danger of exploding in her face any second. And which she knew would leave her in pieces as usual.

  “I’m an archaeologist—mostly I deal with Aboriginal artefacts.”

  “Wow, interesting choice after a degree in modern languages. Do you like your job?” Liv felt like an interviewer.

  “Yeah, I love it, but it’s a bit of a slacker’s job. Guess I’ll have to do something grown-up soon. Maybe even an office.” He raised his eyebrows in mock horror and smiled.

  “So you and Amelia. You’ll probably get married, won’t you?” Liv forced him to admit the grisly (for her, anyway) truth, which was that even though he was stroking her ankle as though it were a delicate ancient artefact that he was hugely interested in, he was still going out with God’s Gift to Men.

  “I’ve got a few other things on my mind at the moment.” He let the ice cube slither onto the sand and began to trace his finger around Liv’s anklebone and up her calf to her knee.

  Liv would have liked to rasp some throaty reply like, “Tell me exactly what’s on your mind, Mr. Parker.” But once again she didn’t, because this wasn’t a secretary–boss situation in a B movie. Instead, a puttering noise rose in her throat and found its way out through her nose. Then he leaned in even closer to her and moved his hand toward her face. Liv recognised the vital signs now. That pause in conversation, the lips looming towards hers. Only this time they were a hell of a lot more beautiful than any lips that had loomed at her in a long, long time. Perhaps, ooohh . . . nine years or so. But as he ran a finger over her own petrified mouth, she suddenly remembered that she’d not only had an entire onion
pasty this afternoon on the market but she’d just gobbled down half a baguette of garlic bread. In short, she probably ponged to high heaven. Which absolutely would not do if she were going to kiss someone else’s boyfriend.

  “Ooooh.” Liv gulped. “I think maybe not, hey?” But still he hovered in front of her with an expectant look on his face. Any second now she’d have to breathe on him and he’d just die of garlic. Instead, she held her finger to his lips and shook her head slowly until he retreated, almost a broken man, she hoped happily.

  “For the best, I think,” she added to make him feel better. But the poor little pup, she almost felt sorry for him.

  Liv hobbled back along the sand towards the house and was grateful for the limp because it meant he didn’t notice that the rest of her body was also shaking like a leaf. If only she hadn’t eaten that bloody garlic bread, she thought. She could be kissing him now. But it really did have to be perfect. There was no way she could bear to have Ben Parker, who seemed to almost be quite keen on her right now, suddenly change his mind and avoid her for the rest of his life like every other man she’d ever kissed.

  “Hey, Liv?” he called as he sat on the sand watching her stumble along. “I’m having a drinks thing tomorrow night. You’ll come, won’t you?”