No. No! That wasn’t sexy. And it wasn’t even what I meant to say. In my head I was going to say something about getting lucky, or being charming … I’m not sure, now, exactly what, but certainly I wasn’t intending to make a link in Dillon’s mind between me and a small elfin man dressed in green with a jaunty hat.
It’s obviously not what he was expecting either, because he pulls backwards for a moment, gives me a funny look, and says, ‘Yes, Libby. That’s exactly how I think of you. Because obviously nothing turns me on like a nice jaunty leprechaun.’
I open my mouth to say something that will save the moment, but I don’t have time to utter another word before he places his lips gently onto mine and starts to kiss me.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
‘Will you come over to mine again tonight?’ he breathes, in between kisses. ‘I’ll cook. Well, I can’t cook, but I’ll order in. And I’ll open us up a lovely bottle of wine … run us a bath …’
It’s literally the perfect evening, isn’t it?
So I’m not sure what makes me say, instead of yes, yes, a thousand times, yes, ‘Dillon, look, I don’t know …’
‘Please. I want to make it up to you.’
‘That’s nice.’ As is, by the way, the sensation of his hand sliding around my waist, underneath my hopefully-chic-but-possibly-mime-student sweater, to playfully walk his fingers up and down the small of my back. ‘But I’m just not sure if …’
‘Is it because of this … what was his name? Olly?’
Dillon’s fingers have stopped walking.
I blink at him, confused by the question.
‘Is he the reason you don’t want to spend the night with me?’
I would laugh long and loud at this, if he weren’t looking deadly serious.
Christ, he was right about the jealousy thing, wasn’t he?
But before I can explain that Olly is basically like my older brother, that there’s no earthly reason to be jealous, and that I’m only here meeting him so early in the morning because I need to get answers about my haunted sofa (actually, it might be best not to bring that last one up at all), Dillon has leaned down and started to nuzzle my neck with soft butterfly kisses.
‘God, you’re killing me here, Libby Lomax,’ he groans, between kisses.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been more turned on in my life.
And it must be working for him, too, because he’s suddenly moved his lips onto my lips and is kissing me urgently as he presses me backwards against the wall, just like he pressed me up against the retro fridge-freezer in his apartment before all those pool-table shenanigans kicked off the other night.
Except that it isn’t the wall, because walls – unless they’re made of plasterboard and put up by Bogdan Son of Bogdan – don’t give way when you press against them.
Doors, on the other hand, do. Because it isn’t a wall that I’m up against, it’s the internal door through to the warehouse.
I’m not having much luck with doors these days, am I?
Dillon, possibly because he’s a gentleman (or, equally likely, because this sort of thing has happened to him before) somehow twists himself around as we fall through the door so that he ends up toppling backwards, and beneath me, instead of forwards and on top of me. Which means I get a reasonably soft landing instead of being flattened by six foot of solid muscle; it’s extremely considerate of him and – if it were possible – just makes me fancy him all the more.
‘Jesus! Are you all right?’
This isn’t coming from Dillon, though, who’s quite probably too winded by my weight to say anything at all. It’s coming from someone standing amongst the heaps of furniture, just a few feet away.
When I look up from my prone position atop Dillon’s chest, I can see straight away that it’s Olly.
I scramble off Dillon, doing up shirt buttons as I do so that I had no idea he had managed to undo.
‘We weren’t doing anything!’ Nightmarish visions of Le Creuset-wielding mayhem are filling my head; Olly doesn’t walk around with small versions of the pans in his pocket, does he? ‘I mean, we weren’t about to do anything …’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Dillon says. He’s hauling himself to his feet, a little bit the worse for wear, but – thank God – not squashed like Flat Stanley, and still able to stand. ‘Hey, aren’t you the guy from the location catering truck? The one with the excellent bacon sandwiches?’
‘Yes,’ Olly says, brusquely. (Brusque is OK, though. Brusque is better than what I was expecting.) ‘Are you OK, though, Libby? That was quite a fall.’
‘I’m fine.’ I’m trying to give him meaningful God I’m so sorry about this looks, but he’s not meeting my eye. ‘I meant to text you, actually, Olly, to say I’d meet you here instead of at the gates, but …’
‘Ohhhhhh,’ says Dillon. ‘You’re Olly.’
Oh, shit.
Dillon’s eyebrows have arched, dangerously, and he’s suddenly wearing a smile that isn’t reaching his eyes. In fact, all he needs is an evening’s worth of vodkas in him, and he’d look exactly the way he did at Depot the other night, right before he started trying to pick a fight with Cass’s horrible married boyfriend.
‘Actually, Olly must be pretty busy right now.’ I try another of those meaningful looks in Olly’s direction, but he’s still not looking at me, so I take Dillon’s hand and try to pull him in the direction of the door we’ve just tumbled through. ‘We’ll leave you to it for a bit …’
‘Busy?’ Dillon isn’t budging one inch. ‘Isn’t the props warehouse a pretty weird place for the catering guy to be hanging out?’
‘Olly takes old furniture from here when nobody else wants it,’ I gabble at Dillon, before realizing that this makes Olly sound like a weird rag-and-bone man. ‘I mean, to help out his mum and her amateur dramatic society in Watford …’
‘Woking.’
‘Woking, of course, sorry …’
‘Does he now?’ Dillon nods, sagely. ‘Then the amateur dramatists of Berkshire are very lucky to have him.’
‘Woking isn’t in Berkshire,’ says Olly. ‘It’s in Surrey.’
‘Ah, well, you’d know better than me, Olly, old chap. I can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure of making my way down one of your finest English motorways to visit.’
‘I don’t take the motorway.’ Olly’s eyes are fixed on Dillon’s. ‘I take the A3.’
‘Really? Wouldn’t it be faster to take the M4 and the M25?’
‘Out to junction 10?’ Olly snorts. ‘Past the turn-off for Heathrow? I’ll remember your advice the next time I’m stuck in gridlock on the M25, going nowhere.’
‘Hey, if you’re going nowhere, it might not be anything to do with the traffic on the M25 …’
Right, I have to stop this … this … well, this slightly bizarre squaring-up to each other about over-populated motorway junctions.
Dillon is looking ready to start swinging punches and Olly looks as if he’s prepared to risk a broken jaw to defend his staunch position on the optimal route to Woking.
Which is bizarre, because I wouldn’t have thought that Olly (that anyone, come to think of it) could possibly get this worked up about the optimal route to Woking. The right sort of onion marmalade to serve with a tangy Irish Cheddar, yes. The merits of good old English Stilton over poncy French Roquefort, quite likely. Transport options to medium-sized commuter towns, no. I know he might be nursing some lingering anger towards Dillon for leaving me alone in his flat after our one-night stand, but I wouldn’t have thought he could get this pissed off about it.
Anyway, all I know is that, Olly being my oldest friend and Dillon being my … well, whatever the hell he is, it feels like it’s my responsibility to end this peculiar disagreement between them before there are any punches swung or jaws broken.
‘Do you know, I think I just heard someone in the office!’ I fib. ‘Must be Brian!’
‘He’s gone to get his breakfast fry-up in the canteen,’ Olly says, dar
kly. ‘He’ll be ages.’
‘No, no, I’m almost sure I heard him. And it was lovely catching up with you, Olly, but I’m sure you’ve got to be getting on with picking stuff up for the Woking Players …’
‘That’s not what I was doing, actually.’ Olly’s eyes swivel off Dillon’s to meet mine, for the first time since I fell through the door, in flagrante with Dillon, and landed at his feet. ‘I assumed we were meeting here to find you a replacement sofa, so I got here early to start moving stuff out of the way for you to get a proper look.’
‘Oh, Olly, that’s really nice of you. But actually, I don’t want to get rid of the Chesterfield.’
‘Really? But it’s such a monstrosity, taking up most of your flat …’
‘I don’t think Libby needs your advice on what to do with her flat—’ Dillon begins, only to be interrupted by Olly.
‘Yeah, well, I’m just trying to be a good friend and cheer her up a bit,’ he says, in an oddly hard tone of voice I’ve never heard him use before. ‘Look after her. Something you’ve spectacularly failed to do, thanks to all that Twitter crap.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Dillon pulls a face, distracted from needling Olly for a moment. ‘Sorry, darling, I do feel a bit responsible for that. You’re all right about it, though, aren’t you?’
‘All right about what?’ This is sounding – and I’m sure you’ll forgive my paranoia – ever so slightly ominous. ‘What Twitter crap?’
Olly blinks at me. ‘You haven’t seen it?’
‘Haven’t seen what?’
‘Honestly, Libby, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,’ Dillon says, slipping an arm round my shoulders and giving a comforting squeeze. ‘I’m sorry, though. I mean, Rhea only took that video in the first place to get back at you. Because of me, that is.’
At the mention of Rhea’s video, I suddenly feel a horrible, icy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘She … posted it on Twitter?’
‘Rhea? Yeah. I’m really sorry, darling. Obviously she’s just got it in for you because she knows we slept together the other night. Well, she knows we left the party together, so I’m assuming she’s put two and two together and worked out that …’ Dillon’s phone buzzes with a text; he reaches into his pocket, glances at it and pulls a face. ‘Ah, shit. I really do need to get a move on. They’re waiting for me in make-up. But listen, Libby, why don’t I call you later, and we’ll fix up a plan for this evening?’
I just stare at him, mutely.
How can I possibly go and enjoy a night of wine/bath/debauchery with Dillon when I know that … that video of me is splashed all over the internet?
‘OK, OK … well, I’ll call you anyway.’ Dillon leans down and plants a soft, more-than-just-a-little-proprietorial kiss on my lips, before sticking a hand out towards Olly. ‘Good to meet you, mate,’ he says, in a tone that suggests precisely the opposite. ‘I’m sure I’ll see you around.’
Olly just grunts some sort of vaguely affirmative noise, and Dillon turns and leaves the props store via the door we just fell through, out towards Steve the driver in the waiting Lexus.
And as soon as he’s gone, I’m diving for my bag, which fell off my shoulder when we tumbled through the door. But Olly, quicker than I’d have thought, gets to it first and snatches it from my grip before I can reach into it for my phone.
‘I know you want to look at Twitter, Libby. But I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
This is exactly what police officers say to people in detective dramas when they don’t want them to go into the morgue and see their horribly mangled loved one.
‘Oh, God. Is it that bad?’
‘It’s … OK, I’ll be honest, it’s not great …’
‘I need to see it.’
‘Libby, love, again, I really don’t think—’
‘Olly, please. Give me my phone.’
I hold out my hand and, with a sigh, he puts my handbag into it.
It only takes me a few seconds, after fishing out my phone, to find Rhea’s Twitter page. Her most recent tweet, at 16.06 yesterday, is simply the words check out this hilarious vid of my new pal Libby Lomax, guys, a little row of laughing faces like this – – and a link to her Instagram site.
I click on the link and steel myself as the video begins to play.
It’s worse, if anything, than I could possibly have imagined.
The opening five or six seconds is an unflattering establishing shot of me in my tiny towel, gesticulating rather wildly at the bad-tempered receptionist, before Rhea and her camera-phone sidle round for my rear view. Which is when things get really unflattering. Because yep, just as those two women warned me, my towel is tucked up inside the back of the paper thong, exposing my rounded, dimpled, and not-remotely-pert bottom for all the world to see. And as I stare at this in horror, the worst happens: a trail of brown sludge d-r-i-p-s, slowly, from the region of my rounded, dimpled, and not-remotely pert bottom, and runs in a stream down the back of my thigh.
But for maximum Twitter amusement, perhaps the most memorable moment of all is when, immediately after the two women in the video have clearly told me what’s going on in the bottom department, I spin round to face the camera with a look of utter horror on my face. It freezes here, a split second before Cass would have appeared and flung her robe around me.
Then the screen fades to black.
I sit down, heavily, on the nearest piece of furniture, which luckily happens to be a sturdy velvet-upholstered ottoman. (Even more luckily, no spectral figure comes bursting out of it, like a genie from a lamp, as I do so.)
‘I did tell you,’ Olly says, gently, ‘not to look.’
‘How many people have seen it?’ I swallow, hard.
‘Well, I mean, obviously this Rhea herself seems to have …’ He takes my phone from my lifeless hand and directs it back to Rhea’s Twitter page. ‘Er, six hundred thousand followers …’
‘Oh, my God.’ I hide my face in my hands before peering out at him between two fingers. Now I’m the one who can barely meet his eye, because the mere thought that Olly has seen so very much of my bum is just too horrendous to process right now. ‘Are you one of them?’
‘One of who?’
‘Her followers. How did you see the video in the first place?’
‘Oh, um, that’s because it was re-tweeted by someone else I follow.’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t need to know that …’
‘Who?’
‘Just a footballer.’
‘A famous footballer?’
‘Well known, really, is all I’d—’
‘With how many Twitter followers?’
Olly pulls a reluctant face. ‘A couple of million,’ he admits. ‘Ish.’
‘I see.’ I take what’s meant to be a deep, calming breath, but which actually just makes me feel light-headed and slightly sick. ‘So I’ve gone viral.’
‘No, no, not viral, as such …’
‘It stands to reason, really. I mean, if your footballer re-tweets it to a few more of his followers, some of whom will no doubt have a couple of million followers themselves … not to mention all the other celebrities who follow Rhea and who’ll be gaily tweeting it to their millions of followers, too … well, I’m no mathematician, but I think we can safely assume that everybody on the entire planet will have seen it by, what, three o’clock tomorrow afternoon?’
‘Not everybody on the entire planet.’
‘Fair point. There will probably be a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea who can’t watch it because they haven’t got broadband yet.’
‘Come on, Lib. It isn’t as bad as you think. I mean, if it helps at all, some people have been really quite complimentary about you. And have said really quite nice things about … er …’ He’s suddenly staring fixedly at my phone. ‘… About your bottom.’
There’s an extremely awkward silence.
‘Well,’ I manage to say, ‘I suppose it’s better than people saying horrib
le things about my bottom.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ Olly says, finally looking up from the phone. ‘And look! Someone commenting here has said you’re really fit!’
‘Really?’ I take the phone and search the Twitter page for the comment. ‘It doesn’t say fit,’ I say, a moment later, handing him back the phone. ‘It says fat.’
‘Oh. Well, don’t pay any attention to that sort of thing, Libby. You’re not fat. And these people are idiots. I wouldn’t waste a single moment of my life worrying about them. Besides, none of this has made dearest Dillon think any less of you, has it?’
‘Yes, but Dillon only likes me because he thinks I’m responsible for him maybe getting a Martin Scorsese movie. That I’m his lucky charm. Or something.’
‘It didn’t look like that was what he liked about you when you fell through that doorway a few minutes ago,’ Olly says, lightly.
Given that we agreed never to speak of anything Dillon and sex-related, I don’t understand why he’s just brought it all up again.
And clearly Olly remembers this, albeit too late, because he suddenly says, ‘So! What was it you wanted to meet here for, then, Lib? If it wasn’t about finding a different sofa, that is.’
In all the highs and lows of the last few minutes, I’d completely forgotten that I’m meant to be asking Olly to help me bring up the subject of haunted furniture with Uncle Brian. That in fact, in order to do this, I need to bring up the subject of haunted furniture with Olly first, too.
If I wasn’t feeling vulnerable enough about this prospect before Olly (and, let’s face it, probably Uncle Brian too) saw my bum, dripping brown stuff, on Twitter, I certainly do now.
‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s nothing. Let’s forget about it for the time being.’
‘Really? Because your text made it sound pretty important. And Nora …’ He clears his throat. ‘Well, she called me yesterday and told me she’d popped down to see you. That she was worried about you.’
‘Nora!’ I yelp, which is pretty stupid, seeing as she’s all the way up in Glasgow right now, and can’t possibly hear me. ‘You two always told me you never talked about me to each other!’
A Night In With Audrey Hepburn Page 23