The Rom-Com Collection: The Plus One, Something for the Weekend, A Marriage of Connivance

by Natasha West

  But what about Jordan?

  She wanted desperately to ask Janice if she thought Jordan might fancy her too. But she couldn’t seem to do it. It was too embarrassing. It was like being at school all over again. And then Ellie realised she was actually sitting in a place where children were. And the kids should not be over-hearing any of the insane details of her currently dramatic personal life.

  ‘Can we forget about this now?’

  Janice shrugged and sighed.

  ‘Alright. I guess I should finish ‘Duck Dreams’ anyway. They’ll string me up, otherwise.’

  They both stood up from their tiny chairs and Janice went back to the kids and sat on her adult size seat, picking up the book.

  The kids immediately began to scuttle over. But before Janice could find her place in the book, she had one more question for Ellie.

  ‘Hey! Whose idea was this little scheme, anyway?’ she called across the room.

  Ellie turned from tidying the paint pots.

  ‘Jordan’s’ Ellie said with a shrug.

  Janice’s mouth puckered into a naughty smile.

  ‘Thought so.’

  She turned her attention back to the kids and said ‘And the ducks said ‘You can’t swim with us because you’re a chicken!’

  Ellie was left wondering if Janice had just managed to answer the question she hadn’t dared to ask.

  Jordan was on the common with Suzy, a lazy little black Pug with a perpetual case of constipation that no medication could cure. Jordan liked the dog but it was hard to watch her trying to push through her problem. Right now, she was dopily wandering around a tree, looking for a good spot not to crap in.

  ‘God speed, girl’ Jordan called to her. She never liked to instruct her to go directly. She thought that put too much pressure on her, which only made it more difficult. Instead, she tried to let nature take its course.

  But Suzy was struggling. Her little black wrinkly face looked tired from the effort. Eventually, she simply sat down and began to pant, her pink tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  Jordan wondered if there was any way she could relax her. Maybe if she talked to her in a soft voice, she wouldn’t be so tense. She sat down next to her, underneath the shade of the tree.

  ‘Good girl, Suzy’ she said gently. ‘I know it’s tough with everyone watching you. But you can just take your time. There’s no rush.’

  Suzy looked up at her, her dark little eyes shining with what Jordan hoped was a look of gratitude. She knew what she was saying and she appreciated it, Jordan thought.

  ‘I rushed into something today and it wasn’t such a great idea’ Jordan continued. ‘But that’s always been my problem, Suzy. I’m impetuous. I never learned to take my time. That’s probably why I ended up moving in with someone I knew it wouldn’t last with.’

  Suzy seemed to nod at that and Jordan thought maybe this was working. She appeared to enjoy hearing her.

  ‘But you know how it is, Suzy. You get swept up in someone. You think that you can make it last if you try really hard. You start to imagine you can change a person.’

  Jordan began to run her hand down Suzy’s back, stroking her coarse black fur. She thought the soothing action, added to her gentle tones, might help to loosen things up. But Suzy made no move to stand. She wasn’t ready yet.

  ‘But you can’t do that. Caitlin is who she is. I am who I am. And Ellie is who she is. It’s oil and water, you know what I mean? You can beat them together all you want, but they always end up separating.’

  Suzy climbed onto Jordan’s lap and Jordan rubbed her ears.

  ‘Yes, I’m well aware that Ellie isn’t Caitlin.’ she said to her, as though Suzy had contradicted her. ‘But she’s just not my type. I should never have proposed… Doing that. I’m not like you, Suzy. I can’t just hump anyone I like and then go about my day.’

  Suzy turned around and gave Jordan’s hand a large slurpy lick.

  ‘I like her more than I would have thought but so what? She is kind of cute’ Jordan admitted to Suzy, ‘If you’re into good girls. And I’m not going to pretend she’s not a good kisser. That would be lying to me and you, Suzy, and I wouldn’t do that to either of us.’

  Jordan scratched the place between Suzy’s ears that she favoured.

  ‘So yeah, she’s got something. And maybe I feel good around her. But what does all that add up to? She called it off. She didn’t want to go through with it’ Jordan confessed wretchedly.

  Suzy let out a lethargic yawn.

  ‘You’re right’ Jordan replied. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have put it to her like that. It wasn’t really about revenge. But I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really want to admit to myself that I wanted to do it because... I wanted to do it. This whole thing completely crept up on me.’

  Suzy suddenly hopped off Jordan’s lap and squatted a few feet away. And with a rip roaring fart, she dropped her load. Jordan wanted to cheer for her but she didn’t want to make a big deal of it and undo her success. But she was pleased that she’d managed to ease Suzy’s suffering, even a little.

  The talk had obviously helped her.

  Across the city, somewhere between Jordan and Ellie and their respective revelations, Caitlin was arriving home from yoga, tired. How can stretching for forty-five minutes be so bloody knackering, she wondered.

  She dropped her gym bag on the floor and headed for the bathroom, needing a good shower. The showers at the gym were an advert for athlete’s foot and she’d been fantasising about Zoe’s (‘ours’ she corrected herself) luxurious bathroom, with its rainfall shower.

  Just as she was about to open the bathroom door, she realised she could do with a snack beforehand. Maybe a banana. And a glass of juice wouldn’t hurt either.

  She went into the kitchen and after a few seconds, several moans of extreme annoyance drifted out of the door. And then there was the sound of a freezer door opening, followed quickly by a thud. A second later, the skitter of a plastic container across tile.

  And hot on the heels of those sounds?

  ‘What the fuck?!’

  Chapter Twelve

  Jordan was at home. All the dogs had been walked for the day and she was done. She was sitting on the sofa, watching TV. Half watching it, anyway. The other half of her mind was firmly on Ellie. She was due home any minute.

  Her talk with Suzy had opened some floodgates. But what to do with her new information? All it boiled down to was that she was attracted to Ellie. People-pleasing, spineless Ellie. Who would have foreseen that?

  Except Ellie wasn’t really that anymore. She was a different girl to the one Jordan had once sat across a dinner table from, bored out of her skull.

  Or maybe she wasn’t different. Maybe she’d always been the woman Jordan saw now. Perhaps it was only that she’d never cared to look past the mask of niceness that Ellie wore.

  So many questions. But one thing was clear. Jordan didn’t know Ellie that well. She hadn’t really had a chance to know her outside of some fairly extraordinary circumstances. Who could say what she was like to go on a date with? To sit next to her in a cinema, across from her in a restaurant, who would that person be?

  They had chemistry, this morning had made that pretty clear. But if Caitlin had left Jordan with one dark lesson, if nothing else, it was that sexual attraction doesn’t equal anything real. It had the potential to. But it was no guarantee.

  If anything, chemistry was the enemy. It blinded you to people’s faults. Jordan had been blind for eighteen months, and now she could see again. Did she really want to put those blinders back on with the very next person who showed up? It was a frightening thought.

  Just then, Jordan heard the jingle of keys in the door. She sat bolt upright on the sofa and then slumped quickly back down, trying to assemble a visage of carelessness. It was only Ellie coming home. That’s all. Just the flatmate.

  But when Ellie came in, she was all aflutter.

  ‘I need to ask you a massive favour.’

/>   ‘If it’s taking my bed while I sleep on the sofa, you can forget it’ Jordan said dryly, pleased with how much she sounded like she didn’t give a shit.

  ‘It’s not that but you’re in the ballpark. Remember I hired that guy to pick my stuff up at the weekend? He just called me and cancelled. Something about a herniated disc. But he gave me the number of his friend, Stevey. I just spoke to him and he can do it, but he’s only free right now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yeah. Either that or in three weeks. And I’d really like to sleep in a real bed tonight.’

  ‘What’s the favour part of this?’ Jordan asked suspiciously.

  ‘He works cheap, on the proviso that he doesn’t move everything alone. He wants me to help him get the stuff into his truck and he said he’d knock it down even further if I could bring another pair of hands. So I was wondering if you could help me in exchange for dinner on me, afterward?’ Ellie asked, bracing herself for a hard no.

  But Jordan just shrugged and said ‘Deal.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not? It’s not like I had a big night planned. But I get to pick where we eat.’

  ‘Of course’ Ellie replied.

  It was only then that Jordan realised what she’d just agreed to. It sounded vaguely like a date. Jordan couldn’t believe it. She’d literally just been thinking that she didn’t want to take this step. And then Ellie had walked in and asked her for a favour and somehow there was a request for her company at dinner in there. And Jordan had said yes without a thought. Had she been tricked? Or had she tricked herself?

  ‘What the hell am I doing?’ she asked herself. But the answer was clear. Chemistry was doing what it does. Leading everyone up the garden path.

  Jordan drove them to the storage unit, where they met the famous ‘Stevey’. He was about fifty, which was far too old for such a boyish nickname. Jordan and Ellie took one look at him and knew they’d be doing everything but driving his large Luton van back to the flat. He didn’t look in good health. Ellie in particular worried that if he so much as lifted a stack box, he’d have a heart attack on the spot.

  ‘Alright, girls?’ he enquired as he opened the back. ‘Ready to sweat?’

  Ellie and Jordan shot each other a quick look. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant couple of hours.

  Jordan and Ellie slid the last of Ellie’s stuff into the living room, ready to be unpacked and moved gradually into Ellie’s bedroom. They were both done in. But Jordan was thrilled to see all the furniture again. The yellow chesterfield looked great in the living room. And the roll top bureau desk, now sitting in Jordan’s bedroom, was a true thing of beauty. It had been worth helping with the move just to see it again.

  But now came the second part of the evening, the part that concerned Jordan.

  ‘Hey’ Jordan said to Ellie. ‘If you want to skip the dinner thing, that’s alright with me.’

  ‘Are you too tired?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Are you? Jordan deflected.

  ‘A little bit. I might need a shower but I think I can manage to sit down and eat.’

  Jordan nodded.

  ‘OK, but I’m going to need one too’ Jordan said and then blinked. Did that sound like she’d invited herself into the shower with Ellie? ‘After you, of course’ she added quickly, just to be sure.

  Ellie said ‘Alright then’ and went off to freshen up.

  And Jordan said to herself ‘Well, I did try to get out of this.’

  In the shower, Ellie was feeling quite pleased with herself. She was under no illusions about what she was doing.

  She hadn’t been able to get that kiss this morning out of her mind. It had been thrilling. And if Janice’s intimations were right, might Jordan want to try again?

  When Ellie had spoken to Stevey earlier, she’d been annoyed at first. And then she’d seen the opportunity that was hidden in the problem. This could be a way to test the waters with Jordan. Maybe if they could spend a little time together, Ellie might get a chance to correct her mistake.

  She didn’t feel bad about tricking Jordan. After all, Jordan had tried to pull the same thing this morning, whether she knew it or not.

  Jordan and Ellie were sitting across from each other in what could only be described as the world’s least romantic eatery, courtesy of Jordan. It was a family restaurant called ‘Mic Mac’s’ and it had a laminated menu with cartoon characters all over it.

  ‘It’s kind of loud. But the pizza’s pretty good’ Jordan explained. The restaurant choice had been another symptom of Jordan’s deep conflict about all of this. There was no way she was going the candles and soft music route. Not a chance. She was going to make this as hard for herself, not to mention Ellie, as she possibly could.

  But Ellie didn’t care. She hadn’t expected Jordan to make this easy. That would have been utterly out of character for her. And Ellie had begun to appreciate that.

  Jordan was a jigsaw puzzle. And Ellie wanted to know if she could solve it, to see its sexy picture in full. Currently, she felt like she only had about a third of the pieces needed on the table. But how do you solve a jigsaw puzzle? You start with the corners, the easy bits.

  ‘Hey, I was thinking maybe we could talk about the next step in the plan’ she said.

  Jordan nodded, relieved. It was a safe topic.

  ‘Agreed. I think we’re done with Caitlin for now, probably time to start on Zoe.’

  Ellie nodded.

  ‘I bet you’re looking forward to that.’

  ‘Can’t lie. It’s been keeping me going through all this.’

  ‘You really hate her, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Now I do, yes. But you’ve never liked Zoe.’

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  Ellie sniggered softly in response to such a ridiculous question.

  ‘I guess I never did much to hide it’ Jordan said dryly.

  ‘You never seemed to like me much, either’ Ellie said.

  Jordan paused. This was tricky territory. She didn’t want to outright lie. But she didn’t want to hurt Ellie’s feelings either. She’d had enough hurt lately.

  ‘I didn’t really know you then’ Jordan said as she looked down at her menu.

  ‘How about now?’ Ellie asked apprehensively.

  Jordan looked up in surprise. She hadn’t seen that coming. It was unusually direct for Ellie. But if Jordan wanted to talk about the elephant in the room, now was her chance.

  But she didn’t, she reminded herself. And she wasn’t going to.

  And then she looked into Ellie’s warm, brown, waiting eyes. She found that her mouth was opening, and something on the tip of her tongue, god only knew what, was about to fall out…

  ‘Hi, guys! Can I start you off with some drinks? Maybe some nachos?!’ said a young woman in rainbow coloured suspenders, abruptly jumping into view.

  Jordan blessed the waitress’s timing. Ellie cursed it. She’d thought Jordan was going to say something real. Instead she said ‘I’ll have a beer, whatever’s on tap. Thanks.’

  ‘And for you?’ the waitress asked Ellie.

  ‘Err, diet coke’ Ellie replied quickly. She just wanted the woman to leave.

  ‘And where did we land on those nachos?’

  ‘No, thank you’ Ellie said, a little sharper than she meant to. But the waitress’s cheer was undented.

  ‘Alright then, back in a jiff’ she said and skipped away. Jordan gave Ellie a look.

  ‘Bit short with her, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that’ Ellie sputtered. ‘I guess it’s been a long day.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Just leave a decent tip’ Jordan said as she went back to her menu, dismissing the incident. But it was an odd thing to have happened. Ellie snapping at strangers? Unheard of.

  On the other side of the table, Ellie was mortified. She’d been slightly snippy with a stranger, which was something she never ordinarily did. That was bad enough. But what
was worse was that she’d probably made Jordan think badly of her. Jordan was mean, sure, but somehow Ellie knew she would never speak to wait staff like that. Jordan’s meanness had a consistency to it, Ellie had come to learn. It was only for those who deserved it. And the woman in the rainbow suspenders had not deserved it at all.