The only good thing about a comfortable old relationship was comfortable old clothes. Otherwise it was boring. It was like having cheese for the rest of your life–there would come a moment when you simply had to have something else.
Katie liked it when men held the door open for you and gave you flowers and gifts and wanted to kiss you all the time. She loved the electricity that flowed as your lips were about to touch. She could have lived on it for ever. She was a romantic who, deep down, was holding on to the hope that if she found the ‘right’ man, she would stop feeling like that. Was Adam the right man? He was bloody handsome. Funny. Intelligent. Good taste in music. Fit as a robber’s dog. Ticks in all the right boxes…but was he Mr Right? Her soul-mate? Her sole mate for the rest of her life? God, that was scary. For the rest of her life.
She went over to the CD player to put on some loud music to stop the voices in her head. Muse. Black Holes and Revelations. She sang along to the words she could remember.
Excellent. She went back to the underwear drawer. Brown silk with a turquoise ribbon threaded through, and Wolford hold-up stockings. So much easier to decide when death and destruction were coursing out of the speakers.
Katie did a mental bit of air guitar, and then, with her head bobbing in rhythm to ‘Starlight’, she picked out a sheer petticoat to iron out the bumps. She checked in the mirror. Dress. Boots. Gold earrings. Perfect. Or as perfect as it was going to get, she thought, peering at herself again. Getting older was a nightmare. Every day another crow’s foot. There must be no crows left with feet. Stop it, she remonstrated. Like there’s an alternative to getting older. She gave herself an imaginary shake, tied her hair back loosely (to make it easier to loosen later), turned Muse off and set out.
She would have been gratified to know that Adam had been unable to concentrate fully on his meeting because he was thinking about her. Katie was unlike any of his previous girlfriends. He had always gone for women who were high maintenance. He hadn’t known they were high maintenance until it was too late. They had seemed normal. Then they had half moved in with clothes, toothbrush and bags, and he had discovered that they took absolutely hours to get ready, that there was a drama if the manicurist couldn’t fit them in, that one wrong word brought on a crisis. It was exhausting.
Katie was refreshing. She was beautiful, made him laugh, and was sexy–in fact, sexier because there were no tantrums. There was none of the rowing that had marred his other relationships. She had joie de vivre in spades. And the peachiest of bottoms. Just thinking about her was making him hot.
He dragged his mind back to the meeting–Nick was staring at him. Was he supposed to have said something? He brought his attention fully into the room.
‘Would you agree to that?’ asked the man from BBC Factual.
Adam thought quickly. ‘What do you think, Nick?’
Nick slightly raised his eyebrows. They were talking about an antiques project Adam had masterminded so it was basically up to him to sign it off. ‘It sounds fine to me,’ he said.
‘Good. Then that’s what we’ll do,’ Adam said, and looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, I have to go now. Any odds and ends, we can discuss on the phone, yes?’
As they left, Nick asked mildly, ‘What were you thinking about when you were supposed to be making the deal?’
‘Suddenly remembered there was some stuff I’d got on the computer, and I’d forgotten to save it. Debating about whether I should go back to the office and sort it.’
‘Cool,’ said Nick, who clearly didn’t believe him. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’
Much, much later, between cotton sheets, the decision was made. Adam and Katie lay tangled together. She was snuggled down, with barely the tip of her nose showing, while he had most of his torso and one leg on top of the duvet.
‘How can you bear to have so much flesh exposed to the elements?’ she muffled.
‘I think you’ll find it’s tolerably warm out here. We have this new-fangled contraption called a boiler, which is linked to something we modern-day humans call central heating.’
‘It’s freezing.’
‘There’s something wrong with your thermostat.’
Katie giggled.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘When I was growing up, we had a really dodgy boiler,’ she replied.
‘Called your grandmother,’ he interrupted.
‘Cheeky No she was not. We had this really dodgy boiler–’
‘Can’t believe you call your mother that.’
‘Stop it. If you’ll let me finish…We used to have this really dodgy boiler.’ She lifted her head and gave him a hard look, as if she was daring him to speak again. ‘And periodically it would have to be riddled. When I look back at the winters at home, they were punctuated by shouts of “Has anybody riddled the boiler?,” which is just ripe for comedy. But either we weren’t as crude, rude and disgusting as we generally are now, or that expression was not in our lexicon.’
‘It was a more innocent time.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, you only have to look at children’s television programmes then and now,’ he said. ‘They’re more knowing today’
‘Teletubbies wasn’t knowing.’
‘SpongeBob SquarePants? It’s filth. Pure, unadulterated filth.’
‘SpongeBob SquarePants?’ She laughed. ‘Or are you talking in the cleaning sense?’
‘I was watching it last night. It’s sheer pornography. This bloke Bob sponging down a woman with square pants on.’
She chortled and put her nose below the duvet.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, with a throaty growl.
‘Warming my nose up,’ she muttered, through the feathers. ‘I think you’re the one with a dodgy thermostat.’
‘How the hell would you cope in the cold weather in Norway if you decided to do Celebrity X-Treme?’
‘Good point. I assume there’ll be central heating,’ she said, hopefully.
‘What? The Norwegians have mastered the art of centrally heating their countryside?’
‘It’s called global warming. We’re all helping,’ she responded, wriggling onto her front and propping her head on her hands. ‘You are awfully handsome,’ she said, gazing at his chin from close range.
Adam smiled down at her and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘You’re rather scrumptious yourself. But, really, on a purely basic level, are you up for Celebrity X-Treme in terms of the chilliness of the environment? If you find this cold, how on earth are you going to cope with minus thirty, or whatever it could be?’
‘I’m sure they’d provide me with adequate clothing. They wouldn’t have us freezing to death. ’Elf
