‘Mmm-hmm,’ I squeaked.
‘I’ll get a condom.’ He climbed out of bed, disappeared to his clothes, which were still in the kitchen.
If I told him that in the wooden ‘jewellery’ box on my bedside table were twelve condoms that I bought on Sunday, he’d think I’d expected this to happen again. And I hadn’t. Not really. I simply wanted to be prepared. Friday night I didn’t have any condoms and the ones we’d used were Greg’s.
What are you doing? I asked myself sternly. Why are you going to have sex with Greg? Again.
I really and truly had never thought of him in that way. If I had, I wouldn’t have let him see me with sleep in my eye, dribble on my face or uncombed hair as I had done since the first time he’d stayed over at my place. I didn’t think of him that way until he kissed me. And even then, it wasn’t because it was him who’d kissed me but because it was a man who’d kissed me and I’d been so celibate for so long that at that point I’d probably have leapt on any man if he’d made a move. I wasn’t sure if I felt that way about Greg now. I could be so indifferent to his maleness one minute, then gagging to rip his clothes off and use his body the next.
Take last night for example. In my kitchen (in my kitchen!) he wasn’t only going to kiss me, as it turned out. He was also going to lift my dress, tug down my knickers, lift me up to rest on the edge of the worktop so I was the right height. And I was going to respond by undoing his belt and trousers, ferociously kissing him back. We’d done it in a scary, frantic manner that was reminiscent of Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
We’d stood there for a long time afterwards, holding each other, kissing, brushing hair out of each other’s eyes, giggling at how we’d been hardly talking not fifteen minutes earlier and then we were ravishing each other. After the smirking and giggling, we’d stripped off and done it again on the kitchen floor. Madness. Couldn’t work out how I felt completely. I wasn’t into this. I liked the physical bit, but didn’t like the waking up afterwards and finding I was lying next to Greg part. Why? Because I didn’t fancy him? I must do to sleep with him. Or was it because he’s good at it? This was complicated. Confusing. Chaotic. All the things I’d become expert at avoiding in my life.
I worked hard to confine my neurosis to my work, to my viewing habits, to my inner mind. I’d heard this line on a TV programme that said the secret to creating a good relationship was ‘all about hiding the crazy’. And, for the most part, I was good at that, skilled at hiding the crazy. Not letting on how neurotic and insecure and dramatic I could be. Now I was slap bang in the middle of a place called Neurosis Central that made Leeds City Centre seem like a ghost town. There were so many different threads of emotion running through me and I couldn’t find one to follow from start to finish. Couldn’t seem to decipher how I felt completely.
I slapped my hand against my forehead, trying to knock sense into it. Stop this. Stop it now.
Greg reappeared at that moment, paused in the doorway, staring at me. Not because I was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, but because I was trying to bash my head in. I stopped, lowered my hand as unsuspiciously as possible. Smiled at him in an innocent manner. My eyes ran over the length of his body: pale gold skin, practically hairless chest, his slight paunch, a crop of dark hair that started just below his abdomen, the most amazing male member. Look at him. Should I turn him away because I want to be internally neurotic? Hell, not even I’m that sensible.
‘What do you think about Matt and Jen moving in together?’ Greg asked a couple of hours later. I’d been out on a milk and paper run earlier. He in turn had to go out on a breakfast run because he’d needed a bacon sandwich and all I could offer towards it was the tomato ketchup.
‘I’m pleased, of course,’ I said, turning a page in the paper and a channel on the telly. ‘It’s what they want. Marriage won’t be far behind.’
‘You think?’ Greg replied.
The slight squeak in his voice stopped me flipping pages of the paper and made me concentrate on him. He was a human island in a sea of newspapers on my floor. ‘Why do you say that?’
Greg pushed his hand through his hair. ‘I’ve known Matt since forever, and the only thing he’s committed to for longer than three years is getting taller and even that stopped when he hit nineteen.’
‘You reckon Matt’s commitmentphobic?’
Greg nodded.
‘Hello there, Mr Pot, I really hope you’re not calling Mr Kettle black.’
‘I know I give the impression of being – ’ow you say? – a Casanova [no, actually, he gave me the impression of being a whore, but that’s between you, me and the garden post], but,’ he went serious, ‘I’ve had a long-term relationship. One that lasted nearly six years.’
NEWSFLASH! How come that had slipped through the net of things I knew about him? He was meant to be my best friend and now he was telling me this. That was like Jen suddenly telling me she’d been married before she came to college. Had to question him about it at some point.
‘Matt’s not had a settled relationship anywhere near that long.’
‘Maybe Jen’s The One.’ I thought about what I’d just said then laughed gaily. ‘What am I saying? Of course she’s The One. Because if he hurts her, I’ll be separating him and those kneecaps of his.’
Greg laughed. Realised I wasn’t joking and stopped. ‘The whole thing seems so sudden. She hardly knows the man.’
‘Three years is sudden? What’s really going on, Greg?’
‘Nothing, I guess. I suppose I’m having trouble adjusting to the idea of Matt not being there. I’ve lived with him nigh on twelve years.’
‘It’ll be reet,’ I said.
It must be hard for him, giving up his relationship with Matt. It was easier for me – Jen and I had stopped living together when she finished college. Her course was four years, so I’d temped and lived with her until she graduated. Then she’d moved in with a boyfriend for what turned out to be six months and, in that time, I moved back to London for nine months and lived with my parents. By the time I came back to Leeds Jen had bought her flat in Allerton, and a few months later I found my flat in Horsforth. With all of this, I had none of the separation anxiety Greg was going through. It was probably a good thing for me – I’d see more of Jen because she wouldn’t be spending time she could spend with me, with him. She’d have Matt at home. The same went for Greg and Matt. I explained that to him.
‘I suppose,’ he conceded. ‘And anyway, I might’ve met someone myself.’
You just couldn’t leave it, could you? I thought. You had to go and spoil it by bringing up the sex thing, didn’t you? I focused on the paper in front of me. The harder I concentrated, the faster the newsprint crawled across the sheet, desperate not to be read.
‘Have I?’ Greg asked.
‘Have you what?’ I started playing with the soft, rubbery buttons on the remote control. At least they weren’t dancing in front of my eyes.
He snatched the remote out of my hand and flicked off the TV, then grabbed the newspaper from in front of me and slung it aside. When he’d finished ridding me of distractions, he sat cross-legged in front of me. ‘Have I met someone? As in someone I could start dating and then, hopefully, at some point call my girlfriend?’
I went to speak but he added, ‘And don’t you dare say, “I don’t know, have you?”’
I closed my mouth.
‘Amber, I know you’ve got half the men in Leeds after you b—’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ I cut in.
Greg frowned. ‘About what?’ he asked, mystified.
He was serious. He genuinely thought I was pursued by scores of men. Or he was the best actor on earth (and as we all discovered last night, that wasn’t the case).
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Carry on.’
‘We’re going to have to be grown-up about this. We’re going to have to decide if this is going somewhere now because we’re not casual acquaintances, we see each other all the
time with Matt and Jen. We need to sort it out. What’s going on with us?’
Well I didn’t bloody know, did I?
I’d made the decision to be single and celibate eighteen months ago and had stuck to my decision so far. Did I really need this man, this Greg, to keep dragging me away from the path of righteousness? To keep luring me into bed (or kitchen floor) with the kind of sex I’d only imagined was possible? To keep weaving threads of confusion through my emotions?
‘I see,’ he was saying to my elongated silence. ‘And, in the words of the Fast Show, I’ll get my coat. Save you any further embarrassment.’
‘I like you. A lot,’ I blurted out, desperate to stop him leaving, ‘but . . .’
‘You think I’m a slag and that I’ll give you the runaround the second you start to trust me.’
Nicely put, even if you do say so yourself. ‘Something like that.’
‘Amber, since I realised how deeply I felt about you I’ve not been with anyone else.’
I raised an incredulous, disbelieving eyebrow. Had he forgotten who he was talking to? Had he forgotten that I’d once stared down a psycho woman and her equally psycho boyfriend in a pub because he’d started to flirt with her rather than get a round in as he’d been sent to do?
‘She didn’t count because she was insane, she thought I was going to marry her after two days and I learnt my lesson in a big way. That’s it.’
I hitched up my other, incredulous and disbelieving eyebrow.
‘I tried to make a go of it with her,’ he protested, ‘because I thought I just wanted a relationship, but I didn’t, I wanted a relationship with you. But that really is it.’
Had I another eyebrow, I would have hitched it up too. I settled for sticking my tongue in my cheek at him.
‘OK, but she didn’t count. She’d been coming on to me for ages and I felt obliged. It was a mercy shag.’
‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘How many other mercy shags are there going to be, Greg?’
‘None, if I’m with you.’
‘I believe you. I believe you mean that and that you wouldn’t intentionally cheat on me, but what if someone comes on to you? What if we have a row? What if you get drunk? There are too many what ifs when it comes to you and sex. I don’t want to deal with that.’
Greg sagged in shame as he squinted at the ground. Silence, not too dissimilar to the shroud we’d eaten in the previous night, slipped its folds around us. Eventually he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small book. ‘What if I gave you sole custody of this?’
He never had a proper little black book.
‘You get to keep it until we split up. If we make it to, say, six months, you get to burn it.’
Greg placed the leather-bound book on my lap, then sat back watching me with his bright, keen eyes, waiting for my reaction to his placing his whole sexual past, present and future in my hands.
My first instinct was to flick through it, see if I recognised any of the names. My second instinct was to flick through it, gauge how many names there were in it, see how many women had trodden the path I had. My third instinct was to ask: ‘Am I in there?’
Greg shook his head. ‘Even before I fell for you, you were too special for that book.’
‘In other words you knew I wouldn’t shag you so you didn’t waste your time putting me in there.’
Greg flopped his arms up and down. ‘I’ve just given you my former sex life and you’re bitching about if you’re in there.’
Fair point. I turned the small black rectangle over in my hands, caressed the soft leather. It was warm and bent slightly from the curve of his bum, the pages well worn from overuse. ‘I can’t believe you own a little black book,’ I said.
‘I don’t any more, you do.’
‘I don’t know if I want this responsibility.’
‘It’s the only way I can think to prove to you that I’m serious about this. I don’t want any of the people in that book, I want you.’
‘What about the numbers in your mobile?’
In an instant the colour leached out of Greg’s skin. There was clearly a pecking order of people he’d shagged or wanted to shag. If he liked her, she went into his black book; if he reeeaally liked her, she went into his mobile.
I held out the book to him. ‘Let’s forget it. We can still be friends.’
I was trembling slightly as I handed him back his sexual freedom. And, what was this? What was stirring itself in my chest? A swirl of emotions I couldn’t quite pin down. Probably mostly jealousy and sadness. Jealousy, pretty self-explanatory. Sadness, because if he took the book back, our friendship would be based on me knowing that he didn’t care enough for me to give up shagging around; and him knowing that I was too petty to let him keep a few other women’s numbers.
‘OK,’ Greg said, but didn’t move to take the book from me. ‘I’ll write down all the relevant numbers from my mobile on a piece of paper, slip the paper into the black book and get them back if we split up.’ (The faith he had in me was astounding. If we split up, did he honestly think I’d give him back his sex life? I’d burn it. No messing.)
Not exactly, ‘I’ll delete them all’, but it wasn’t, ‘Oh, forget it’, either. So, the ball was back in my court. I had to decide if we were going to give it a go or not.
I couldn’t think under these conditions. I didn’t have any distracting TV noise, no chocolate in my hand . . . the last time I tried to work under pressure without these tools I ended up offering to call Greg a cab. ‘Don’t move. I’ll be right back. Just don’t move or leave, sit right there,’ I said to Greg.
He nodded as I unfolded my legs from under me, stood up and then exited the room. In the kitchen I went straight for the fridge, tugged open the door, pulled out the giant bar of chocolate Renée had bought me from Copenhagen a few weeks earlier. It was the good-quality stuff I’d been saving for when company came round – not the everyday chocolate I usually ate. I pulled open the thick, waxy yellow wrapper, did the same with the thick gold foil inside. I lifted the bar to my nose, inhaled deeply. The bitter smell of cocoa, tempered with sugar and milk powder and emulsifier, filled my senses. Oh, yes, that’s better. I took another two deep hits. Then I pushed the pieces between my fingers until a jagged, diagonal piece snapped off. I slipped it between my lips and bit down. Oh, oh, oh, yes. My whole body relaxed as the taste filled my mouth. Now, I could think. Really think.
Greg.
Greg and me. And possibly giving it a go.
It wasn’t a simple case of me not being interested. I was, a little. Only a little, though. Certainly not enough for me to risk everything. But, if I told him no now, he’d take it literally. I wouldn’t see Greg again, not in that sense. I’d become like Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and a Funeral, hanging around someone who went off with other women while I played the dutiful mate.
I crammed another piece of chocolate in my already full mouth.
Did I want that? Did I want Greg moaning another woman’s name as if it was the most delicious thing ever to enter his mouth?
The thought dawned slowly but clearly: no. Not at all.
Much as I might not want him right now, much as I might not want him at all, I didn’t want him going near anyone else. Also, it’s not every day you get the biggest tart in Yorkshire offering you him. Exclusivity. That’d be like a chocolate manufacturer making chocolate, only for me. Amber Nectar Chocolate. Just for me . . . OK, stop right there or you’ll implode with excitement. Get back to the matter in hand.
Greg. Exclusivity. I ate another few pieces of chocolate to be on the safe side.
I returned to the living room. Greg had done as I’d instructed: he hadn’t moved. Not a millimetre. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? He was already doing exactly as I told him. Get him to comply with the little things, and complicity with the big things – like not shagging anyone else – was sure to follow, no? I returned to my place on the sofa and crossed my legs under me again. ‘Go on then, put your
numbers where your mouth is.’
Ten minutes later, Greg was left with fifteen (fifteen out of ninety-five) numbers on his mobile – I took great pleasure in watching him wince as he deleted each one – and I had three sheets of women’s names and numbers to slip into the book and destroy at my earliest convenience. ‘So . . .?’ Greg asked.
‘So, let’s take it really, really, really slowly, OK?’
A grin spread across his face, catching light in his Minstrelcoloured eyes.
‘And we mustn’t tell the other two until we’re sure we’re going to be together for a while. I went out with one of Jen’s boyfriend’s friends once and when it ended it was a total nightmare. It nearly split up Jen and her man, not to mention the trouble it caused between Jen and me. I don’t want us messing up what they’ve got. So, let’s agree, we say nothing about us for six months. At least six months.’
‘Six months,’ Greg agreed, and crawled across the floor towards me. As he did so, fingers of terror curled around my heart.
chapter seven
champagne buddy
‘OK, total honesty. What do you really think about me and Matt moving in together?’ Jen said, settling back on my sofa with a huge glass of wine. She could, it was half-term so she didn’t have to get up early in the morning for work.
Greg had left when the evening episode of Neighbours started. I could tell he was angling for an invitation to stay by the way he kept going on about how knackered he was. I’d told him it was Tuesday night, which was Jen night, so I’d handed him his jacket and bag and said I’d see him at the weekend.
Seven years ago I hit upon the idea to start over in London and lived with my mum and stepdad for nine months while I got myself together. It was perfect . . . for reminding me that I needed at least 200 miles between me and my family, so I returned to Leeds for good. Since then, Jen and I made sure we met up at least once a week on Tuesday nights for dinner. On alternate weeks we’d go to each other’s flat – one of us would cook dinner and the visitor would provide the wine and dessert. Often we’d stay over if we were up late talking.
The Chocolate Run Page 6