‘Sorry,’ Greg said, lowering his piece of prawn toast, ‘that was a shock . . . um, a good shock. No, it’s cool. I’m really pleased for you, both of you.’
In stark contrast to my good self, Greg was an appalling actor – he’d be sacked from a ‘Man In The Crowd’ job.
‘When are you, um, going to do the deed?’ Greg asked, his voice flat.
‘This weekend. I’m working in Paris for ten days starting the following week. I’ve told Rocky and he’s cool. He’s even let me off the last month’s rent.’
‘Cool. We’ll have to find a new flatmate,’ Greg said. Again, monotone.
‘Get a girl,’ Matt said. ‘Even if she’s not single, she’s bound to have single mates. It’ll be a gold mine of shagging.’ He accompanied this advice with a brief hitch of his left eyebrow.
My stomach flipped. Greg’s eyes darted to me, I redirected my gaze to my plate. Why don’t you get on the table and say, ‘Actually I shagged Amber over the weekend’? I thought. These were tense times, but even I’d stopped being Cockney Gell.
Nobody spoke. Each of us stared at our plates or the starters in the middle of the table as silence zigzagged about us until it’d woven a shroud of noiselessness around our table. We sat in our sound-free cocoon, shielded from the restaurant’s buzz of other diners, food being served, dishes being removed.
If the silence continued, I’d be obliged to say something stupid to lighten it, I realised. Except, the only thing stupid that came to mind involved me, Greg and my bed. ‘Let’s get some champagne,’ I piped up. ‘Celebrate Jen, the youngest of our quartet, becoming a semi-pensioner too, and this new stage of your relationship.’
Jen grinned; Matt paled. Tight. Not only was he toffee, he was tight toffee. He never knowingly reached into his pocket first. This was most clearly shown in his birthday present to Jen. What’s the cheapest present you could give your partner? Move in with them. That way, you actually get a refund on that pressie when all your bills are halved. But I didn’t think that, all right?
‘Greg and I will pay for it, won’t we?’ I added.
‘Yeah, course,’ he said quickly. ‘Course we will.’ Greg cast me an expression of pure gratitude. He’d obviously pay anything to erase his reaction to their news.
One meal, one bottle of champagne, several bottles of Tiger beer later, we paid the bill, and got ready to leave.
For the first time since Matt and Jen had got together that meal with the four of us had been tense. The whole evening had been fraught and tense. Me and Greg. Greg and Jen and Matt. Only Matt and I had no new issue with each other, although he would if he knew Jen had confided their news to me before he’d told Greg.
Despite the champagne, despite all of us dragging out our funniest stories, which made us all cringingly keen to laugh loudly and brightly, just to prove we were having Fun (with a capital F), Jen’s thirtieth birthday wasn’t perfect. All the way through dinner Matt and Greg communicated silently across the table, having some kind of visual row. Jen didn’t seem to notice. She was odd like that: things that were obvious to most people passed her by. I thought she would’ve guessed about me and Greg but she didn’t even bat an eyelid.
Matt and Jen’s cab arrived first and they left. Once we watched them leave, Greg lowered his head and banged it against the table.
‘Stupid,’ bang, ‘stupid,’ bang, ‘stupid,’ bang.
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ I said sympathetically.
Greg stopped banging his head, scowled at me.
‘ All right, it was that bad. It was horrendous, actually.’
‘I can’t believe I reacted like that,’ he said, pushing his hair off his face.
‘It was the shock factor, we all react differently to shock.’
‘It’s just . . . If I could . . .’ He seemed momentarily bereft, as though he’d lost something very important. ‘Oh, never mind. Let’s go wait outside for our taxi.’ Greg faced me full on. ‘We can talk then, if you still want to.’
Act casual, I thought as I shrugged. ‘OK, I’m easy. At least that’s what it says in the men’s loos.’
The sharp night air hit me like a slap in the kisser. The temperature had dropped since we’d been inside. I tugged my coat around myself, wrapped my arms over it to keep warm . . . and to stop myself throwing Greg over the nearest car and mounting him. Whoa! Guess who shouldn’t have had that last Tiger beer?
‘What did you want to talk about?’ I asked casually, watching him from under the strands of my fringe.
‘What do you think?’ Greg replied. Don’t you get it? his face added silently.
I said nothing, just stared at him. He stepped closer, put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. It was a different kiss from the first time on Friday. Passionate, ardent, exciting. Now familiar, too. My internal organs deliquesced with every kiss.
‘I’ve wanted to do that all night,’ he exhaled, resting his forehead on my forehead.
‘Except when you were freaking out over Matt and Jen.’
‘No, you’ll find I wanted to do it then, it just got a bit marginalised. When you walked in wearing that dress . . .’ Greg kissed me again. He slipped his hand inside my coat and around my waist, pressed my body to his as his kisses became harder, more urgent. He ran his fingers through my hair and lip-kissed my mouth. Then he was kissing my cheeks, my neck, my chin, my eyelids, my forehead, as though he wanted to devour me. All of me. He wanted to consume me with kisses.
I closed my eyes, this was divine. Like eating my favourite chocolate, feeling it disintegrate in my mouth, languishing over my taste buds, sliding inside . . .
‘But you didn’t call.’ Divine or not, he didn’t pass the Forty-Eight-Hour Test.
Greg carried on nuzzling my neck. ‘I wasn’t sure you wanted me to,’ he murmured through kisses. ‘You were so cool the morning after, I thought you wanted to forget it.’
Cool? Since when did ‘You’re a cab’ classify as cool? ‘And you didn’t want to forget it?’ I asked.
Greg abruptly stopped with the kissing, his roaming hand halted its progress over my curves and he found my eyes with his eyes. ‘Why, did you?’
‘I know your MO,’ I said.
‘What?’ he said, taking a step back and robbing me of his body heat.
‘I know your modus operandi; I know how you operate.’
‘I know what MO means, thank you, I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I mean, I know how you work. I’ve seen the carnage you leave behind when you charm a girl, make sure you’re all she thinks about, shag her then lead her a merry dance for a few weeks until you find someone else.’
Greg’s face was a blank canvas, his eyes like glass as he stared at me.
‘I’ve become another notch on the very whittled Greg Walterson bedpost and that’s fine. I simply don’t want it to become something that will ruin our friendship or in any way jeopardise Matt and Jen’s relationship.’ Impressive, I could talk my way out of a shag quicker than anyone I knew.
‘You want to forget it,’ he stated, his voice as lifeless as it had been earlier in the evening.
‘Taxi? Taxi for, erm, Hyde Park and Horsforth? Greg and Amber?’
I turned to the man who was leaning out of a white car with a taxi sign on top of it. ‘That’s us,’ I said, then headed for the back door.
Greg stood staring into the space where I’d been, then slowly went around the front of the car, passed the front door, got in the back. I’d hoped he’d get into the front – we could ignore each other more effectively then.
The taxi driver headed north east out of the city, past tall buildings I’d seen age over time. Age and decay and be torn down and then be rebuilt. It was a gorgeous city. Especially at night. You couldn’t see the grime at night. It was all bright lights, half-lit shapes, faceless people, hidden architecture. Like a kaleidoscope. Twist here, twist there, always the same elements, but never the same pattern.
As we got nearer to Gr
eg’s place, which was the first stop on the way from town, I turned towards him. We’d gone the past few miles in silence. Not the companionable silence of Friday night, nor the uncomfortable silence of earlier on. This was the sulky silence of a man called on his behaviour at the point in the game when women were usually under his spell. No woman challenged Greg on his reputation once she’d slept with him. She accepted his past – then tried to change him.
But, in all fairness, he wasn’t sulking alone. I was miffed because I kept wondering if he shouldn’t have tried a teensy bit harder. I’d known men who were willing to walk through fire to get a flash of cleavage and this man hadn’t even trotted out some tired cliché-cum-lie about me being special to get my kit off. I was sulking because he obviously wasn’t that desperate to sleep with me again.
‘Erm,’ I cleared my throat, but he still showed me the back of his head. ‘What did you say to Matt about us? So I don’t let something slip.’
Greg grudgingly acknowledged me: sneered down his slightly crooked nose as he carefully raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘I told him I’d met someone I really liked but not to say anything to anyone because . . .’ he gave a small, silent laugh, then returned his gaze to the window, ‘because I wasn’t sure how she felt. Yet.’
chapter six
day off
Not going into work today.
Not dragging myself from this bed, leaving this flat and going into that office.
After yesterday, Renée could do with a reminder as to why she employed me. A day answering the phone and dealing with Martha should do that.
Renée had done the decent thing yesterday and cancelled the meeting, then returned an hour after her blow-up and dropped a king-size bag of Maltesers on my desk. She was extra nice to me and even answered her phone without sighing first, which were her ways of saying sorry. She’d never say the words, but with Renée, actions often spoke louder than words. In fact, actions replaced words.
She’d apologised in her own way, but today would serve as a practical reminder of how much I contributed to the office. How non-useless I was. What is wrong with you? I chastised myself. Has a demon possessed your brain? Since Saturday morning you have about five evil thoughts for every normal one.
I tugged the soft, squashy duvet over my head, hiding from the light intruding through the windows. I hadn’t pulled the blue curtains across last night and now the light was combining with the tequila, beer and champagne to swell every blood vessel in my head while shrinking my skull. I needed to neck a gallon of water then go back to sleep within ten minutes, or I’d feel wretched all day.
‘Does it feel as though someone’s used your head for a football?’ Greg asked in a pained voice.
I didn’t mean to, honest to goodness I didn’t. It just happened. (I used to think ‘it just happened’ was a phrase uttered by those who’d got caught out and couldn’t think of a proper excuse, but, seriously, it just happened.) After that near-compliment in the cab and thinking the longer we left it, the harder it’d be to get back on track as friends, I’d said to him, ‘Look, come back to mine and let’s talk. Properly.’
Greg had half-shrugged, half-nodded, a kind of non-verbal ‘whatever’, so I’d told the taxi driver to head straight for Horsforth . . .
I’d let us into my flat and Greg had acted like a first time guest, lurking in my corridor, waiting for me to turn on lights and flick on the radio. He even followed me to the kitchen but stood in the doorway like some kind of double vampire – unable to enter a room without express permission.
‘Coffee?’ I asked.
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled from his place leaning against the door frame.
I made him coffee – white, no sugar – and, when I turned to give it to him, found he was right behind me. I jumped a little because I hadn’t heard him approach, then offered the fat blue cup across the short distance. He took it, set it down on the white worktop.
‘What did you want to talk about?’ he asked. He brushed my nose-length fringe away from my face, then rested his fingers on my cheek. He often did that, claiming he wanted to see my eyes while I was talking to him. Rather than swatting his hand away as I usually did, I took his fingers away from my cheek, then lowered his hand for him. His eyes seemed to register the lust that had bolted through me.
‘Well, we . . .’ I began.
Greg dipped his head and kissed my neck.
I gasped as my body contracted with desire. ‘We shouldn’t really . . .’
He pushed down my dress and bra straps and kissed my shoulder.
‘Really, be doing this.’
He pushed away my hair from the other side, planted his juicy lips on that side of my neck. My body contracted again.
‘We should be talking . . .’
He pushed down the dress and bra straps of that side and planted his lips on that shoulder. ‘Talking about how, er, how, this will affect . . .’
Greg ran his tongue along my collarbone and my knees became mush.
‘Affect, erm, affect Matt and Jen’s relationship.’
Greg’s tongue stopped. He stopped. With a sigh he straightened up. ‘To be honest, Amber, I don’t care how this will affect Matt and Jen’s relationship. I don’t care about Matt and Jen’s relationship, full stop. I care about you.’
‘Really?’ I said.
Astonishment flashed across his face. ‘Yeah, course. Why do you sound so surprised?’
I managed to stop ‘Because you’re a tart’ leaving my mouth and shrugged instead.
‘In the past three years you’ve become my best girl friend. You’ve listened to me, given me advice, taken care of me through some difficult times, even though I’ve done hardly anything for you in return. So, yes, I care about you.
‘Friday night, I was planning on telling you how I felt, then leaving you to decide what to do next. But when I was sat there, I couldn’t think of what to say. I’ve talked to you for over three years but I was struggling to find the right words, so I kissed you instead. And that led to . . . you know. When I woke up the next morning and you were gone, I panicked. I thought I’d screwed it up with you.’
‘And that’s not the alcohol talking?’ I asked. The alcohol and the desire to get your leg over tonight.
‘Yes, it’s a bit to do with being pissed, but it’s also to do with never having chased a woman for eleven months before. I usually give up after two months. Three months if she’s really special.’
‘You’ve been after me for eleven months? Yeah, right,’ I scoffed.
Greg leant back a little, rocking gently on the heels of his brown suede shoes, folded his arms across his chest, amusement danced in his eyes. ‘You know, from anyone else, I’d think they were being coy, from you, I know you’re being serious.’
‘Oi, gitface, that sounds like an insult.’
‘There are only so many “I’m bored, can I come over?” text messages you can send a girl before she either thinks you fancy her or you’re stalking her.’
‘I thought you were being friendly,’ I replied. ‘We are friends.’
‘OK. What about the millions of times I’ve turned up at work to take you to lunch? Or invited myself over for dinner? Didn’t you say on Friday that I practically live here?’
‘I just thought . . .’ My voice faded. All right, when you knew, it was obvious. If a friend had been telling me about his behaviour, I would’ve said, ‘He fancies you!’ but it’s different when it’s you. Different when it’s me and Greg.
‘I practically had to send you an email to tell you I was going to kiss you.’
‘I don’t think like that,’ I offered lamely.
‘I know, and that’s one of the many reasons why I like you.’ He moved closer. ‘Amber, just to let you know, I’m going to kiss you. Right . . . about . . . now.’
In the morning light, I was compelled to cover myself up. I felt . . . naked. I was naked. But this was different naked. Sex was naked naked. Morning after was emotionally naked, bare
and exposed.
Greg knew me, but now he knew more of me. He knew how I moved during sex; he knew what noises I made when I came; how my face contorted. He knew a lot more of me, and I wasn’t sure I liked that.
‘I take it you’re not going to work, either,’ Greg said.
‘Either?’ I replied.
‘I booked today off, I knew it’d be a write-off day.’
‘That was clever.’ That meant he was staying. Possibly all day. It wasn’t that I wanted him to go, I simply wasn’t sure I wanted him to stay, either. ‘I’ll have to wait until ten to call in.’
‘And after that?’ Greg’s peering through the gloom under the duvet tainted everything with expectation.
‘After that, what?’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘Why, do you want to leave?’
‘I could lie here naked with you all day.’
I’ll take that as a no, then.
It was too close under the duvet: stale sweat and alcohol fumes made the air rancid and sickly. I pushed away the duvet to let fresher air in but immediately cringed away from the light. Greg spooned up against me, his body curved around mine like a second skin and plump, Jelly Baby lips planted a kiss on my shoulder. ‘Of course, I could intersperse those naked lying about moments with bouts of intense rogering,’ Greg added.
I said nothing. That wasn’t the kind of thing you said stuff to unless you were well versed in the ritual of the flirt, which I wasn’t.
‘Do you know the best cure for a hangover?’ he ventured after a few minutes of non-flirty silence.
‘Don’t tell me, I know this one . . . could it possibly be intense bouts of rogering?’
‘Correct!’ Greg said.
His hand idly stroked my stomach. Greg. My friend. His hand was stroking my stomach. And, oh, oh, he’s caressing me. The stroke’s turning into a caress. He’s pressing closer to me. He wants to have sex.
‘Are you OK?’ Greg asked, obviously sensing my body tense. ‘Do you want me to stop?’
‘Why would I want you to stop?’ I asked innocently.
‘Sure?’
The Chocolate Run Page 5