‘We can’t have that, can we?’
As he motioned to the bartender I noticed that he had his initials embossed on his cardholder, a surefire hint in my own judgement that he was a vain, slightly arrogant City boy, but no, he wasn’t that easy to dismiss. He was nice, actually.
‘Going to need some help getting through this,’ he said with an awkward smile. He handed me a bottle of champagne and two glasses, an indulgence I had previously thought was usually reserved for special occasions and New Year’s Eve but for him, apparently, just a regular Friday night.
I looked up at him and into his eyes as they stared across the room. His face, with ‘bad idea’ written all over it. I felt like the secondary school newcomer eye-flirting with the popular sixth-former. This wasn’t me. I knew he probably used this line on every single girl he met but I also knew that at this point, I didn’t care. As he stepped closer I stayed composed. I knew we shouldn’t. I knew that girls who slept with guys on a first meeting rarely saw them again. But did I even want to? I felt his hand skim the small of my back. I could have protested but I didn’t. I didn’t.
I felt him bite down hard on my bottom lip in the back of the taxi as we came to an abrupt halt outside his building. A harsh handbrake manoeuvre made by the taxi driver so we’d get the hell out of his car and continue this elsewhere. We stumbled out onto the pavement and as we reached the bottom of the glass-fronted building I knew that beyond this point was no man’s land. If I wanted to back out, now would be the time to speak up.
As he slammed me into the wall of the lift I momentarily forgot who we were. I could feel his heart beating – or was that mine? I was trying to be sensible. I was the girl trying to get back on her feet, the feet that were now wrapped around his waist as he lifted me into the air. I could smell the remnants of aftershave on his neck, his forehead balmy and sweaty as I kissed it. We didn’t make it to his apartment. Instead we gave in to ourselves and fell together in an entwined heap on the carpeted floor of the corridor. And even if it was just for tonight, he was mine. As he pulled me to my feet and led me to his doorway I picked up my underwear and forgave myself. Start again tomorrow. Like sampling an indulgent chocolate cake in the midst of a diet plan, just start again tomorrow.
Six hours later, the sun had risen, and I lay in his bed wide-awake. Carefully and calmly, I made a slight gesture to move: beating him to the punch, avoiding the vacuous apologies from both of us, of a busy day ahead filled with lots of things to do.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, smiling as he pulled me back into his warm body.
‘I need to…’
‘What?’ He smiled. ‘What do you need to do that’s so important?’
‘I need to phone someone,’ I said.
‘Who?’ he quizzed with his eyes still closed, the curly tuffs of dark hair on his chest rising and falling as he spoke.
‘My… dentist,’ I said, beginning to smile.
He wrapped his arms around me, cocooning me in the smell of the night before. By now, the sun was streaming across the bed and we were drenched in it. It wasn’t love. It was two people not wanting love, which somehow seemed even more perfect.
Effect…
Present day. Using clues from the past to plot a strategy for the future. It was a balmy afternoon and as I looked out onto the rainy London street, I could feel the dryness in my eyes from my tears that morning. A dull, fuzzy headache served as a mental reminder of the sharp pain I felt inside, deep within the concave cavity that had once carried my heart. I noticed people on the pavement below unaffectedly going about their day – doing their best to ignore the torrent of water around them. The British are quite fearless when it comes to rain; things just seem to carry on as normal. I looked at my watch. Still no sign of the van but I could now feel the vibration of my phone in my back pocket and assumed that it was the removal men offering an explanation.
It was Amber. I let it ring out. I waited for the ping. I could handle a message, but I wasn’t yet prepared for a conversation. The text read:
Dinner with Sean and me?? We are DYING to see you
On this busy street, on this particular afternoon, I was waiting for a transit van to drop my things off at the flat I was moving back into with Amber after a brief spell of living in heaven with Charlie. They were supposed to be here at 4.30 p.m. and as there was still no sign at 6 p.m, I decided to put the phone back into my jeans pocket and hopped my way up the stairs to our flat. I looked around at my new yet familiar home. The home I had shared with Amber and had to move out of, in, shall we say, a rather immediate manner: full of smiles, giggles and promises. Instead of once being our girls’ world that we used as a hideaway from the rest of the universe, it was now the flat I had once left to move in with him. The one I had left in the hope of building a life with someone I now felt I no longer knew.
I opened my phone, still at that stage of expecting to see a text from him, for which I hated myself, and instead texted Amber:
Yes, definitely! Can’t wait – I’ll meet you there.
My thoughts were basically that if I filled the text with enough hearts and dancing girl emojis I would perhaps deflect the scent of how devastated I was to be moving back here. I walked into my empty room that was once filled with all the objects of my life and sat down on the edge of the bed, the bare beige walls almost consuming me. The fact that nobody else had moved in yet showed just how quick the decision was made to leave – and how even more quickly it was made to return. It was all too quick. I had it coming to me.
After two cups of tea and a sort through my piles of mail I plucked up the courage to start opening a few boxes that I had managed to squeeze into the back of the taxi: just work things, thank God, it seemed that all the sentimental stuff was still in the van. I pulled out a large, leather portfolio of black and white photographs, the ones I’d taken in the second year of my law degree and had been so excited to put together and hawk across the city. I laid out my portfolio and fingered the plastic covering. It was bubbly now and the dog-eared corners were ageing… nothing at all like I remembered. Along with forgetting who I was for a short time, it seemed I had also forgotten what I wanted to be.
This would be my priority now: my only option of survival. I reminded myself about the one golden nugget that I’d learned since all this had unravelled: something that nobody had told me at the start. There will be sacrifices. I call it spinning plates. It’s a balancing act that usually consists of the metaphorical weighing scales whereby your love life succeeds and your career goes down the pan, or your career booms while your love life’s shot to shit. Or in my case right now, both, crumbling in my hands at the exact same moment. I smiled at the irony.
And wasn’t it funny that the moment when I knew I had to end it was the exact moment I’d never wanted to stay more.
As I poured a glass of water and pulled myself up to sit on the kitchen worktop – an annoying trait which Charlie didn’t mind but Amber always hated – I could see one good thing about being on my own: I could finally do as I pleased. Prove to myself that I could. Prove to my parents that they were wrong. The continual back and forth motion with Charlie – the euphoric highs and desperate lows – were now over. It was time to create space for myself and for the new, to give myself the opportunity to get it all wrong. Fuck things up to the nth degree. Barefooted and barefaced amongst the boxes, I was willing to risk all that was certain in my life for the very possibility of wanting something more.
The restaurant was heaving.
