The Kiss

by Lucy Courtenay

  Maria storms for the glass doors and the outside world. Abandoned on the bar, her wig looks like a deboned Persian cat.

  There is a fresh explosion of applause. Patricia and Eunice’s second encore is over, and the leading lady has left the building.

  ‘We’ll have to go on without her,’ says Sam, his arm tightly wrapped around Tab’s shoulders.

  There is a look on Tabby’s face that I’ve never seen before. I know that if Sam takes his arm away, she will keel on to the carpet face-first without even putting her hands out to save herself.

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Sam says heroically. ‘I will.’

  There’s no point having a run of genius ideas if, when the chips are down, you don’t have the final genius idea that brings everything together.

  ‘Tab, put Maria’s wig on,’ I say. I grab the Persian cat-a-like and thrust it into her hands. ‘Warren, you’re marrying Rich.’

  ‘Goodee,’ says Rich. ‘Don’t worry Tabby poppet, I know your words. If I keep the veil on, no one will know the difference. Everyone always watches Beatrice and Benedick in this scene anyway. Give us your wig, there’s a darling.’

  ‘Tab, do you know the words to Maria’s last song?’ I say.

  Tabby tears her eyes from Sam’s face and manages a nod. She starts slowly putting Maria’s wig on while Ella attempts to repair the kiss damage to her face, stabbing in and out of range like a furious hornet.

  Patricia flies through the stage door with Eunice as the audience roars its appreciation. She hunts wildly through the assembled cast. ‘Where’s that bloody girl? Rich, why are you wearing Hero’s wig?’

  I feel Jem slide his hand into mine. I will allow it just for now. Just until we get through this crisis.

  ‘Delilah has everything under control,’ Jem tells Patricia, rubbing his jaw with his free hand. ‘Tab’s taking Maria’s part. The rest of you are fudging it.’

  ‘We can do that,’ says Gladys.

  ‘You always do that,’ Dorcas observes.

  Judging from the sound of chatter and throat-clearing in the auditorium, the audience is starting to get bored. The band plays on brightly, à la Titanic.

  Patricia squares her suited shoulders. ‘Time to kill this, zombie style. On we go, my little chickens. Quick quick.’

  The lobby feels strangely empty without the cast. The werewolves aren’t singing any more, and the barflies are having a silent moment of contemplation over their beers.

  ‘Guess we’re the only ones left in need of a happy ending,’ Jem says.

  ‘Two Magners and some pork scratchings please,’ pipes up one of the werewolves.

  I prise my eyes from Jem’s molten gaze and my hand from his hand and I walk to the bar. ‘There’s no happy ending,’ I tell him as I find the Magners and the scratchings. ‘You’ve got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Funnily enough,’ he says, following me to the bar, ‘all I can think of right now is you.’

  I push the ciders and scratchings at the werewolves and face him.

  ‘You kissed Maria?’ I demand. ‘You kissed Maria AND you kissed Tabby?’

  ‘Sam’s women apparently find me irresistible,’ Jem says. ‘Tabby kissed me. Maria kissed me too, as you may have gathered. She was pretty insistent. Caught me in the kitchen, out of the way. It would have been rude to refuse. Oh, and my jaw hurts like hell, thanks for asking.’

  ‘When did you kiss Maria?’

  ‘First rehearsal. I just told Sam that.’ He frowns at me. ‘What? This was before you – after you – OK, I guess in

  the middle of you. You’re not thinking of hitting me too, are you?’

  I am thinking about the fizzing lights above Sam and Tabby’s kiss. The scent of pine woods and oregano seems to waft through my nostrils, and I try and fail to put it down to Val’s brand of toilet cleaner.

  Jem attempts to catch me around the waist. ‘Now, all that kissing has got me in the mood and you are looking gloriously gorgeous tonight. Kiss me.’

  I strike at him with my fists. ‘Tell me about your girlfriend first.’

  ‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ he says patiently. ‘Read my lips. Scratch that, kiss my lips.’

  I wriggle away from him and rush into the sanctum of the kitchen. My mind is a wreck.

  ‘Fatima saw her,’ I insist as he follows me in like a really, really annoying dog. ‘Right here in this kitchen.’ I’m not being the other woman again. I’m NOT.

  ‘What does my girlfriend look like?’

  ‘She’s tall,’ I shout.

  I am up against the lockers now, my back flat to the metal doors like I am somehow hoping to melt my way through and escape. Jem leans his arms on the lockers either side of my head and does his stripping look at me.

  ‘I don’t go for tall women,’ he says. ‘I prefer them dinky.’

  ‘Dinky?’ I say, offended.

  A locker door creaks open just beside my ear and Jem’s jacket flops out on to the floor. Stuck to the inside of the locker door is a long, naked back, painted with a silver zipper on a black ribbon. An unfeasibly long neck with just a few dark blond curls on show. The body curves in and out again like a violin.

  ‘Why have you got that picture in your locker?’ I say, shocked.

  ‘Because it’s the most beautiful thing I own. Kev gave me a copy, but only after I begged. Did I cause the chip in your heart or was it the guy in the car?’

  There is a long, long pause.

  ‘Bit of both,’ I whisper.

  ‘I have been having sleepless nights about you for weeks,’ he says, running a finger down my cheek. ‘I haven’t felt this strongly about anyone since I crushed on a Blue Peter presenter.’

  I gaze at the picture. My picture. Me.

  ‘Fatima said she’d seen a tall girl in the kitchen,’ I mumble.

  ‘Did she now.’

  ‘I thought—’

  His lips come down on mine, sweet and soft, cutting me off. My whole body goes whoosh like a firework and I finally – properly – kiss him back.

  He pulls away after five minutes, ten minutes, forever. ‘I’m going to the police about the hit and run in the morning. You’ve given me back my life, Delilah Jones, and I love you for it. I hope you won’t mind having a boyfriend with a criminal record.’

  ‘I’m looking for an accomplice for my next heist anyway,’ I say, utterly breathless. ‘You, me, the Bank of England and a trusty getaway Ford Fiesta.’

  ‘I’m in,’ he says and kisses me again so passionately that I think I might burst into flames on the spot.

  ‘I’d better call Studs,’ he says, coming up for air once more. ‘Just to check the idiot’s OK. And also to let him know he’s coming to the cops too.’

  A roar of thirsty party-seekers floods into the bar on a wave of tumultuous applause from the auditorium. The show is over. All I need to complete the moment is a fly-by. Maybe a couple of cannons.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I say as I curl my fingers wonderingly through his thick dark hair. ‘Do it tomorrow. Now shut up and kiss me again.’

  There’s no moon filling me this time.

  Just the most blazing of sunbeams.

  Lots of people to thank for a book I had way too much fun writing.

  Special thanks to Jasper Mann, handsome and dashing former General Manager for Caper & Berry at the

  Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford. Carolyn and Sheila at getmadeup.com who revealed a tiny part of the amazing world of body art to me. My come-as-a-pair experts Jenny and Paul Brocklehurst: Jenny on banking and Paul on policing. Pamela Belle, from whose beautiful poem ‘The Moon in the Water’ I stole Oz’s philosophy about the importance of having dreams in your life. Thank you all, and apologies wherever I have taken liberties with information supplied.

  Sorry
, Sir Patrick Moore, for messing around with the full-moon calendar to fit my fiendish needs. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, you were the perfect celebrity couple to represent the power of Aphrodite’s Kiss, and I apologize for putting words into your mouths.

  Thanks also to Naomi Greenwood and the Hodder team for believing in The Kiss from the start. Thanks to my husband Will because he’s lovely and I couldn’t write half what I write without him. And finally, I should perhaps thank the French boy who once kissed a teenage me among moonlit Mediterranean sand dunes. It’s only polite.

  For Stephanie Thwaites my agent who, for all her hard work, has never had a printed word of thanks from me. So . . . Thank you!

  Text Copyright © 2015 Lucy Courtenay

  This ebook published in Great Britain in 2015

  by Hodder Children’s Books

  The right of Lucy Courtenay to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  ISBN: 978 1 444 92287 5

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