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It was true. She was always fine. So I gave her a smile and, ignoring all my Cloverhill classmates, I pushed my way over to the fire escape and escaped.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b0bfc692-c10c-5272-ae99-4caa65fd560a)
Behind the Millhouse was the mill pond, a tiny body of water just big enough to have a good side and a bad side. Naturally, the bad side was where all the cool kids hung out and drank cheap, rank booze, while the good side was where the nanas brought their grandchildren to throw bits of old Hovis at the scabby ducks. I had spent so many hours throwing Hovis at those ducks, with and without my nana. After a slow and steady lap of the pond, I found a bench somewhere in between the two poles, my confused ensemble not really fitting in with either crew. The kids had clearly clocked me as too old to hang out with them and too uncool to buy them more bargain vodka, and the grandparents did not want their precious children talking to a lady dressed as a stripper on her way to work in a call centre. I didn’t care. I didn’t really feel anything. My brain was so full of so much, I couldn’t do anything but sit on the bench, try to ignore the splinters in the backs of my thighs and make occasional squeaking noises. I wondered if there was some terrifying astrological event I didn’t know about, if all Capricorns were going through something equally traumatic, but it just wasn’t possible. Kate Middleton was a Capricorn – there would have been something on the news if her life was turning as all-encompassingly shitty as mine. There would have been a tweet.
Stretching out my fingers, I stared at the backs of my hands as though I had a laptop in front of me and tried to switch into work mode. I was best in work mode. If I were still an employed, functioning member of society and my shambles of a life was a campaign, how would I pitch it?
The biggest problem was the sheer number of problems. I didn’t have a job, I hated my flatmate, my mum hated me, I was in love with my best friend, my best friend was not in love with me, and on top of everything else, even when you peeled away those key issues, I had absolutely no life. Not a single quirky characteristic that could be spun into an adorable side project. As a brand, I was less desirable than Skoda; even I would struggle to spin me. But it wasn’t impossible – I needed rebranding. All the successful companies struggled at some point. Even Apple nearly went bankrupt once. And if someone could make Old Spice cool again, I could certainly save myself.
But what was the Tess Brookes brand?
This was why I’d never had an online dating profile – it was too hard to describe yourself. I was loyal, conscientious, creative and logical. I could always see the solution to a problem; I always knew how to make a client happy. Unless the client was me, apparently. Visually, I didn’t have a signature look unless you counted bad hair and massive boobs. (Hopefully no one did.) There was no one thing that would make someone sit back and go, ‘Oh, that’s so Tess.’ I didn’t have a favourite band, a favourite book; I dipped in and out of whatever was on the TV when I turned it on. I could describe every single demographic out there, I could tell you what made someone buy Coke over Pepsi and then switch back again, but I couldn’t tell you whether or not I preferred polka dots over stripes. I knew too much about everyone else and nothing at all about myself. How could I convince someone to buy me when there was nothing to buy?
‘There you are.’
I looked up to see Charlie striding along the edge of the pond, a frown on his face. His pretty, pretty face.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘To be fair, I didn’t get that far.’ I glanced around. I wasn’t more than five minutes away from the pub. I was sad, but I was also very lazy. ‘You missed an awesome scene.’
‘I know, I heard. I was in the gents.’ He sat down beside me, took off his jumper and draped it round my shoulders. ‘But afterwards you missed Amy grabbing hold of the baby and singing “Circle of Life”, so I think we’re square.’
‘Jesus, I’ve only been out here half an hour,’ I laughed, trying not to be upset that I’d missed what sounded like an incredible Lion King homage. I did love a Disney movie. There! That was something I knew about myself. I was a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed single woman who loved animated movies made for children. If we were at work, I’d be trying to sell me some cat food and a lovely cardigan about now. Maybe I should just change my name and run away – that would be a pretty decent rebrand.
‘Well, I was worried about you,’ he said, nudging me with his shoulder. ‘Been a shit week, Brookes. How are you still sober?’
‘Didn’t bring any booze.’ I waved my empty hands at him. ‘Schoolboy error.’
‘Thankfully’ – Charlie produced a half-bottle of vodka from behind his back – ‘I am not a schoolboy.’
‘Oh, you clever man,’ I said, gratefully accepting the bottle and taking a deep drink. I had never been a very good drinker. I loved a drink, but drinks did not love me. The two mugs of wine I’d enjoyed on Monday, post-sacking, were the first alcoholic drinks I’d had in a month, but while we were rebranding, I had to consider all my options. Maybe the new Tess would be a drinker. Maybe she’d learn how to make elaborate cocktails and have her friends over for parties. Maybe she’d be a whisky drinker and keep a decanter on her desk like Don Draper. Or maybe she’d do a shot of cheap supermarket vodka by the duck pond and retch in her own mouth.
‘Keep it down.’ Charlie rubbed my back and took the bottle from me. ‘Keep it down.’
‘Oh, bugger me, that’s disgusting,’ I coughed, feeling the burn in the back of my throat. Maybe if I was going to be a drinker, I shouldn’t start with four-quid cava and vodka that cost less than a Tube ticket. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ Charlie took a shot without wincing and passed the bottle back. The sun was already setting across the pond, and the bad side was getting considerably more traffic than the good. ‘So, what are we going to do with you?’
‘I have no idea,’ I replied, turning to give him my best attempt at a smile. ‘I was just trying to work that out myself.’
‘Well, if you were a client and I was trying to sort you out, I’d start with what you wanted out of your campaign,’ he reasoned while I took a second shot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rubbing the centre of his left eyebrow. That meant he was thinking. Rubbing his chin meant he was confused. Nodding and scratching the back of his neck meant he was listening but not really paying attention. There wasn’t a thing about this man I didn’t know. ‘What do you want?’
This was why we were soulmates. He was trying to solve my problems in exactly the same way I was trying to solve my problems.
‘My job,’ I replied.
‘You can’t have your job.’ He slapped my bare thigh and I had to remember to be offended and not turned on. ‘As account manager, it’s my role to give you honest feedback and tell you what is and isn’t possible. Your old job, off the table. What else do you want?’
‘I really do just want my job,’ I said, clutching the warm bottle between my knees. ‘If I had my job back, I could just put everything back how it was and carry on. That would be perfect.’
‘If this week has taught us nothing else, it’s that things were not perfect for you,’ Charlie said. He turned on the bench until his knee was pressing against mine. ‘People lose their jobs every day, Tess. They don’t take to their beds for four days and fall apart. They turn to their friends, they go on holiday, they – I don’t fucking know – read the great novels or something. Write a great novel. Start a blog. Tell me what makes you happy, aside from work.’
I tried to think about something other than his knee on mine.
‘You?’ I said as quietly as humanly possible.
‘Me?’
‘You and Amy?’ I wanted to slap myself.
Charlie nodded for a moment and took the bottle back from me without words. The ducks on the pond, full of stale bread, started to make their way over to the rushes looking for their beds.
‘I think the problem is, you’re so used to being in your head and solving the problem that you don’t know how to present it back to the client. That’s my job,’ Charlie took hold of my hand. His were almost as soft as mine, but so much bigger. I turned, flushed with vodka, proximity and my ridiculous outfit, and looked into his big brown eyes. He was adorable. ‘So here’s what I see. You are a beautiful, clever, funny woman. You work too hard, you take on too much, and you’re far too concerned with other people’s expectations. You worry too much about your friends and you live with a mentalist, but aside from that, the basic elements are all there.’
Beautiful. He said I was beautiful.
‘Basic elements for what?’ I asked.
‘A life,’ Charlie replied. ‘You’re amazing, you know?’ He knew me well enough to recognize my near-tears whimper and started talking fast. ‘You have so much drive and ambition; you’re so dedicated to achieving your goals. All you need to do is redirect that energy to a new goal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your job – you should. It’s just that it can’t be the only thing you care about. There can’t only be one thing that makes you happy.’
‘Are you happy?’ I asked him, not letting go of his hand. I was a bit worried I might never let go. ‘In general, I mean, are you happy?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded slowly. ‘I’m happy. I like my job, I’ve got good mates, I like my flat. There are things I’d change, but overall I’m not complaining. Are you happy?’
‘Am I happy?’ I repeated. ‘I don’t think I’m really anything.’
It was hard to say out loud, but as soon as I did, I knew it was true.
‘What would you change?’ I asked him, waiting to start feeling drunk. I really wanted to be drunk. ‘You said there are things you’d change.’
‘Oh, obvious stuff.’ He squeezed my hand and scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dirt under the bench. ‘I’d like my own place. I’d like Arsenal to be doing better in the league. A smoking-hot girlfriend who would do my washing so I didn’t keep running out of socks would be nice.’
‘I am so sick of buying you more socks. What do you do, eat them?’ I asked with the closest thing to a laugh I could muster. Bravely, I rested my head on his shoulder and breathed in. He was wearing the aftershave I’d bought him for Christmas. He smelled cool, spicy and familiar. It made my stomach melt, my fingertips tingle. ‘You’ve got loads going for you. You could get a hot girlfriend if you really wanted one. You’ve got everything.’
‘And so have you.’ He dropped his head on top of mine, our coppery curls meshing together, and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘You just haven’t realized yet.’
‘I’ve got sod all,’ I said, trying to pretend that the teenagers weren’t totally eyeing up the bottle in my hand. ‘As you have quite rightly pointed out.’
‘You’ve got me.’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m all right.’
‘Oh, don’t.’ I laughed out loud. ‘Don’t even.’
This wasn’t the first time Charlie and I had got drunk on a bench. This was not the first time one of us had talked the other through a crisis. But it was the first time he’d looked at me with such dark eyes. The first time I’d felt his thumb gently running back and forth over the back of the hand he was holding. And the first time that I had ever felt his heart beating as fast as mine.
‘I’m all right, aren’t I?’ he asked. ‘Tess?’
I felt goosebumps on my bare legs and twisted round to get a better look at him. His dark, gingerish five o’clock shadow was starting to come through and his dark, dilated eyes were ever so slightly bloodshot from getting up so early, driving so far and drinking so much. He leaned his forehead against mine and repeated himself in a whisper.
‘Tess?’
Words were my thing. Words were my actual job. I used them every day, manipulated them, moulded them, made them dance around in circles, but at that moment there wasn’t a word in the world that would help me. And so instead of trying to say something funny or clever, I took a deep breath and kissed him. For a moment, I couldn’t tell who was more shocked. Neither of us moved – we just sat there, frozen, Tess pressed against Charlie. My cold, vodka-burned lips against his cold, vodka-burned lips.
And then he kissed me back.
It was slow at first and I wasn’t quite sure it was happening but I was too scared to pull away. And then I felt the slightest movement against my face, the tickle of warm breath on my wet lips. For ten years I had wondered what it would feel like to kiss Charlie Wilder on the mouth, and now I knew. It felt spectacular. The arm around my shoulders tightened and his other hand crept up to my face, cradling my cheek in his palm while our lips became better acquainted. I wrapped my arms around his back and ignored the little voice in my head that was shouting, ‘And now we’ll never, ever let go!’ As well as the vodka, I could taste the beer on his breath. I hated beer but I didn’t care. I was kissing Charlie Wilder and Charlie Wilder was kissing me.
‘Wait.’ Unable to stop myself, I pulled away with a pained expression. ‘You’re not kissing me because I’m sad, are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, his voice broken and just short of breath enough to make my heart pound.
‘And you’re not kissing me because you’ve been drinking?’ I just could not stop myself from asking these ridiculous questions. Who gave a shit if he was kissing me because he’d been drinking? I hated myself so much sometimes.
‘Maybe? A little bit,’ he admitted, leaning back in for another kiss. ‘Can you stop overthinking this now, please?’
‘No,’ I replied, pressing a smile against his lips. ‘Have you met me?’
The teenagers across the way started whooping at us approximately four seconds into the second kiss, and although the sun setting across the mill pond was as close as my village ever came to beautiful and romantic, they were very, very off-putting.
‘Back to yours?’ Charlie asked. I took a deep breath and held it in for a moment. He wasn’t just suggesting we go home, he was suggesting we Go Home Together. ‘Tess?’
‘Where else are we going to go?’ I asked lightly, pretending I wasn’t absolutely bricking myself. I hadn’t had sex in almost two years, and while we were being entirely honest, it had not been a good experience. This wasn’t just a casual shag after a rubbish party to check I still knew how to do it. This was Charlie. I was going to have sex with Charlie.
‘There’s always the back seat of my car.’
I pulled away to look at him, not sure whether he was joking or not. Nor sure whether I wanted him to be joking or not.
‘But while I know that would continue the dodgy teenage theme of the evening, I think I’d rather take you to bed,’ he said, his voice was all low and rough. I’d never heard it like that before. ‘If it’s not too weird?’
It was weird. This whole thing was weird. I was sitting on a bench wearing a gold sequinned miniskirt, kissing a boy I’d been dreaming about kissing ever since the first night I’d lain on my plastic-covered mattress in my hall of residence. I should have said it could wait. I should have said no, we couldn’t sneak into my parents’ house and have sex on my bottom bunk. But where was the fun in that? Besides, I’d had a third of a half-bottle of own-brand vodka and Charlie Wilder wanted to have sex with me. I was eighteen again. Whatever happened next, I blamed the sequins.
‘It’s not weird at all,’ I said, practically jumping off the bench and dragging him down the street. ‘Let’s go.’
And just like that, we were together.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_10803b82-e78a-5f2a-a60d-6e0f68e48537)
The next morning, I woke up wrapped in the same pale blue duvet cover I’d left behind when I’d moved to uni and a pair of arms that were brand new. Too scared to move, I tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I was in bed with Charlie. I was in bed with Charlie and neither of us was wearing any clothes. And the reason we weren’t wearing any clothes was because for the last twelve hours we had been at it.
I closed my eyes on my childhood room, my exam certificates hanging on the walls, my favourite photos lining the shelves, and tried to commit as much of the night to memory as possible. It was hard to keep the events straight, not because I’d been drunk but because I was suffering from a distinct case of what Amy always referred to as Boink Brain. Nothing fogged up your memory like a good shag. I was completely overloaded with happiness, and, given how long it was since I’d last had sex, every part of me was aching. Happily, like everyone said, it was just like riding a bike. A really, really fun bike. I remembered sneaking into the dark, empty house, checking for my parents and then kissing in the kitchen, fumbling with buttons and zips, taking far too long to get up the stairs, eventually finding my room. It was strange to know someone so well, to know everything about them, and then find yourself in a situation where you knew nothing. I had never seen Charlie naked. I had no idea what to expect in the trouser department. I had no idea how it would be.
More than once, Amy had tried to counsel me out of my Charlie crush by telling me that he was too nice to be any good in bed, that it would be like shagging my brother. As it was, I didn’t have a brother, but if that was how incest went down, I could see why it was so popular in the Deep South. Amy had been wrong. The sex was wonderful. Beautiful. It was like film sex, all deep and meaningful and very, very nice. I pressed my hand into Charlie’s, smiling lazily as his fingers instinctively curled around mine. Mine. He was mine.
‘Hey.’
I felt him rather than heard him, his words tickling my ear.
‘So.’ He snuggled up closer to me and I silently congratulated myself on having bothered to shave my legs the day before. ‘That happened.’
‘That did happen,’ I replied, too nervous to turn round and face him. Naked in the dark was one thing. Naked the next day with slept-in make-up and morning breath? Quite another. ‘Couple of times, actually.’
We lay quietly and I was glad he couldn’t see my smile. I looked like the cat that had got all of the canaries and quite possibly a parrot. I’d only been awake for a couple of minutes, but already it was like I’d woken in a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. Aladdin and his magic carpet could piss off. I didn’t have a job and I lived with a psycho, but it didn’t matter. I had Charlie. My best friend, and now my – well, whatever he was, he was the best at something else too.
With a quick kiss to my shoulder, he rolled away, leaving my back cold and bereft. Since he was stuck on the wall side of a single lower bunk bed, there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. Awkward.
‘Amy is going to laugh and laugh,’ he said after a moment. ‘And then laugh.’
I pulled the covers up over my boobs, ran a finger under each eye to minimize any mascara fall-out and rolled over to look at my conquest.
‘She is?’ I tried to sound as innocent as possible. ‘You think?’
‘Oh God, yeah.’ Charlie did not look changed. There was no beatific glow about his face. He was not gazing at me with a love so powerful it dared not speak its name. He was pretty much just laughing. Ha ha ha. ‘We will never hear the end of it. I feel like she’s been expecting this for ever.’
‘You do? She has?’
In his defence, I had a lot more evidence to draw on than Charlie did. For the past ten years, Amy had watched me pine and swoon and sulk and had routinely slapped me around the back of the head whenever I’d so much as mentioned the elephant in the room that was Me and Charlie. Or ‘Chess’ as I may or may not have named us. In public, when it was the three of us, it was different. She did make fun of us. She mocked our in-jokes and routinely told us to get a room whenever we indulged in some platonic snuggling. From Charlie’s perspective, Amy had been scoffing at this non-relationship for ever. He had no idea that she was counselling me behind closed doors. He had no idea how I was feeling. Which meant there was a chance he didn’t feel the same. Gulp. Puke. Gulp.
Raking a hand through his beautifully fucked-up hair, Charlie shrugged and yawned.
‘Maybe we just, you know, don’t tell her,’ he said, looking so terribly casual as he went about breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’
‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actually, it would really help if you could clear something up for me. What is “this”?’
There. My life was complete. I had made air quotes in bed with Charlie Wilder. Amy would actually have had a stroke if she could have seen what had just happened.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, easy as anything.
A very big part of me just wanted to nod, smile and shut up. I had Charlie in my bed. We had spent a good part of the night making love – not shagging but definitely, one hundred percent gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, Barry White in the background making love, with an emphasis on the ‘lurve’. That part of me did not like to make waves and was fairly certain that if I just lay there quietly, he would remember he had a penis, that he had put it in me fairly recently and would possibly put it in me again. Everyone knew that was the path to true love. But there was another very tiny part of me that really didn’t like the sound of this ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Maybe we shouldn’t tell your best friend in the entire world that we boned.’
‘You don’t know?’
It just came out. Honestly, I had no control over it.
‘I’m not trying to be a dickhead, Tess.’ Charlie sat up, hit his head on the top bunk and promptly lay back down. ‘I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, but we need to be realistic about this. We’ve been mates for years. We can’t just shag once and go back to being friends like nothing happened. That’ll just get weird.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down, but since I was me, it was hard. ‘I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’
‘Good. Because it was amazing.’ He reached over to stroke my arm and gave me a silly half-smile that I half recognized. ‘We just need to work it all out and I’d rather do that without Amy getting involved. She’ll be marching us down the aisle and getting ordained online or something.’
Wedding jokes. He was making wedding jokes. How to send a girl from bad pukey sick feeling in her stomach to good pukey sick feeling in her stomach in one easy step. And, little did he know, Amy was already ordained online. Handy.
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I threw in a light laugh and a toss of the head for good measure, sort of a cross between a total sex goddess and a smallish pony. ‘I get it.’
‘It’s just tricky, the whole friends with benefits thing,’ he said with a smile, combing his fingers through my hair. Or at least he tried to comb his fingers through my hair. Long curly hair plus an all-night sex session equals many, many tangles. ‘It never seems to work, and you’re my best mate. I don’t want you to get hurt in this.’
Ohhh.
It was amazing how much damage you could do with so few words. Friends with benefits. Best mate. And thank goodness he didn’t want me to get hurt. THANK GOODNESS.
