Sweet, bookish Neve Slater always plays by the rules.
And the rule is that good-natured fat girls like her don’t get guys like gorgeous William, heir to Neve’s heart since university. But William’s been in LA for three years, and Neve’s been slimming down and reinventing herself so that when he returns, he’ll fall head over heels in love with the new her.
So she’s not that interested in other men. Until her sister points out that if Neve wants William to think she’s an experienced love-goddess and not the awkward girl he left behind, then she’d better get some, well, experience.
What Neve needs is someone to show her the ropes, someone like Celia’s colleague Max. Wicked, shallow, sexy Max. And since he’s such a man-slut, and so not Neve’s type, she certainly won’t fall for him. Because William is the man for her … right?
Sarra Manning started her writing career on the music paper, Melody Maker, than spent five years working on the legendary UK teen mag, J17, first as a writer, then as Entertainment Editor. Subsequently she edited teen fashion bible Ellegirl UK and the BBC’s What To Wear magazine.
Sarra now writes for ELLE, Grazia, Red, InStyle, Guardian, Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Stylist and the Sunday Telegraph’s Stella. Her YA novels, which include Guitar Girl, Let’s Get Lost, the Diary Of A Crush trilogy and Nobody’s Girl have been translated into numerous languages. Her first grown-up novel, Unsticky, was published in 2009.
Sarra lives in north London.
Also by Sarra Manning
UNSTICKY
Grace is stuck in a grind where everyone’s getting ahead apart from her, when older, sexy and above all, wealthy art-dealer Vaughn appears. Could she handle being a sugar daddy’s arm-candy? Where’s the line between trophy girlfriend and selling yourself for money? And, more importantly, whatever happened to love?
NINE USES FOR AN EX-BOYFRIEND
Hope knew that Jack was The One ever since their first kiss after the Youth Club Disco and thirteen years later, they’re still totally in love. Totally. They’re even officially pre-engaged. But then Hope catches Jack kissing her best friend Susie…
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Simultaneously published in Australia and New Zealand in 2011 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Sarra Manning 2011
Sarra Manning has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
Virginia Woolf quote used by kind permission from the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446438961
ISBN: 9780552163293 (tpb)
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
To the girl I used to be who had the good sense and the
determination to go on a diet and stick with it.
As always, thanks to Gordon and Joanne Shaw, Kate Hodges, Sarah Bailey and Lesley Lawson for loyal, long-suffering support. Fittingly I should also thank the staff of the Manor Health and Leisure Club in Fortis Green where I’ve whittled down my body, like Neve, and mended most of my plotholes while swimming lengths and going hell for leather on the cross-trainer.
Finally I’d like to thank my agent, Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, for her wise counsel and supreme unflappability, and Catherine Cobain at Transworld for being my biggest cheerleader and silk-pursing my prose style.
http://twitter.com/sarramanning
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Part One: Wishin’ And Hopin’
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: Little By Little
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part Three: Some Of Your Lovin’
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Part Four: I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Part Five: I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten
Chapter Forty-two
About the Author
Also by Sarra Manning
Copyright
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
Neve could feel her knickers and tights make a bid for freedom as soon as she sat down.
She shuffled to the edge of her seat so she could plant her feet firmly on the floor, straighten her back and yank in her abdominal muscles. It didn’t work. Her doubly reinforced waistband suddenly gave way and she could feel her tummy gleefully push against the seams of the vintage dress that she’d told her younger sister, Celia, she couldn’t get into without the aid of Spanx and bodyshaper tights.
As usual, Celia had refused to take no for an answer, in the same way that she’d refused to listen to Neve’s pleas to be allowed to stay at home with a pot of tea and a good book. That was why Neve was perched uncomfortably on a neon-pink chaise longue in a hot stuffy club in Soho surrounded on all sides by hordes of fashionably dressed people who were all shrieking at each other to make themselves heard over the reverberating bass-heavy music.
‘I hate you,’ she hissed as her sister plopped down next to her.
‘No, you don’t, you love me,’ Celia replied implacably. ‘Here’s your drink. There was no way I was asking for a spritzer, so you’ll have to drink your white wine neat.’
Neve took an unenthusiastic sip as she tried to suck in her gut. ‘When can I go home, Seels?’
‘I’m going to pretend that you didn’t even say that,’ Celia said, eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. ‘Now, anyone here take your fancy?’ She nudged Neve. ‘I love that we’re going out on the pull together now. It’s so much fun.’
Going out on the pull was not at all fun. And anyway … ‘I am not out on the pull,’ Neve said primly. ‘I said I wanted to try talking to single, straight men and maybe work up to a little light flirtation. I’m not at the pulling stage yet. Not for ages.’
‘We’ll see,’ Celia said. ‘What do you think of Martyn from the subs desk?’
Neve looked at the man Celia was gesturing towards. He didn’t look as aggressively trendy as the other men present, but he was still out of Neve’s league. But then, even the Big Issue seller they’d passed outside Leicester Square tube station seemed out of Neve’s league when she had as much experience of men as an eighteen-year-old, convent-educated Victorian girl attending her first regimental ball.
Celia insisted that putting down her books and actually going to places where single men were likely to congregate was all it took. ‘You just smile a little, make eye-contact, think of something to say about the music or how crap the bar staff are and you’re golden,’ she’d proclaimed blithely. ‘But mostly you need to get out of the house.’
So, here she was, out of the house at Celia’s office Christmas party. In Neve’s experience, office parties usually involved a few tired paper streamers, stale crisps in plastic bowls and one of the secretaries weeping in the Ladies. Except Celia worked on a fashion magazine called Skirt so there were tempura rolls, light installations and a bevy of beautiful girls wearing the kind of cutting-edge fashion Neve had seen in magazines but didn’t think anyone wore in real life. Also, it was the end of January but apparently the Skirt staff were too busy attending other people’s Christmas soirées in December to have one of their own.
‘Oh, Celia, please don’t,’ Neve begged as she realised that her sister was frantically waving at the infamous Martyn from the subs desk, who detached himself from the throng with an eager look and hurried over.
His eagerness turned to rapture when Celia threw her arm round him. ‘Martyn, this is my older sister, Neve. She’s super-smart and knows tons of long words, you two have so much in common.’
Martyn from the subs desk looked at Neve, then back to Celia, with disbelief. They didn’t even remotely resemble sisters. Neve was good Yorkshire peasant stock from their father’s side of the family, while Celia had soaked up every single one of their mother’s Celtic genes and was all angles and gawky limbs – and even though her face had a pinched, sharp look, that didn’t matter when she always wore an easy grin that was echoed in the sparkle of her green eyes. Her legs wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Vegas showgirl, and her long curly hair was so fiery and red, no one ever had the nerve to call her a ginge.
Neve, on the other hand, was sturdy, that was a given. But she was soft too. Sometimes Neve felt as if everything about her was vague and indistinct, from the way she looked to the way she could always be talked out of what she thought were deeply held opinions. Celia and her mother insisted that Neve’s navy-blue eyes and straight, thick, dark-brown hair were her best features, and she had a good complexion but everything below the neck still needed a lot of work. Young men were never going to catch their breath as Neve walked past; she could deal with that, but she wished Martyn from the subs desk didn’t look quite so dismayed at the prospect of being stuck with her as Celia muttered something about going to the bar and disappeared.
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ Neve said, holding out her hand. She knew she should stand up instead of receiving him like an elderly monarch but she didn’t want her tights sliding down to her knees. Of course, Martyn could always sit down but he stayed towering over her. ‘So, um, do you like being a sub-editor?’
Martyn shrugged. ‘It pays the mortgage,’ he said. ‘I get free grooming products. That’s about as good as it gets.’
‘Terrible queue at the bar,’ Neve continued doggedly. She hoped that Martyn wouldn’t think she was angling for a drink, but he just nodded and continued to look everywhere but at her.
Neve knew that her flirting skills were so non-existent that they were invisible to the naked eye, but she was beginning to get rather irritated with Martyn from the subs desk. OK, she wasn’t Celia, but if he ever wanted to get inside Celia’s electric-blue jumpsuit, it might be an idea to get her elder sister on side first.
Still, he’d do to practise on, Neve decided. ‘What’s your favourite word, then? I think mine’s carbuncle. Or maybe bus-station. I can’t decide. Also, is bus-station all one word or should it be hyphenated?’
Now she had Martyn from the subs desk’s full attention. ‘Seriously?’
‘I just wondered,’ Neve said, and knew it would be bugging her for the rest of the evening until she could go home and check the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Are you enjoying the party?’
‘Look, Eve …’ Martyn was looking at her now with a rueful smile, his hands spread wide. Neve might not know much about flirting but she knew when her number was up.
‘It’s Neve,’ she corrected him gently. ‘And it’s OK. You only came over because when Celia waved, you thought she wanted to talk to you and instead you got stuck with me.’
‘No, no. It’s not like that,’ Martyn protested. ‘I’m sure you’re really nice. You are really nice but I left my friend getting a round and he probably needs a hand. Nothing personal.’
Neve nodded understandingly. ‘You should get back to him.’
‘It was really nice talking to you, Eve,’ Martyn said, already backing away. ‘Maybe I’ll see you later.’
‘Sure.’ But Neve was already talking to Martyn’s back. Now that she knew she was boring and physically repulsive, even to a man who did spellchecking for a living, there was no harm in standing up and giving her tights and knickers a really good yank. Then she gingerly lowered herself back on to the sofa and stared at the toes of her black patent Mary-Janes until Celia and Yuri, her sister’s flatmate, sat down on either side of her.
‘How did it go with Martyn?’ Celia asked eagerly, replacing Neve’s glass, which she didn’t remember draining, with a full one.
‘It didn’t. Can I please go home now?’
‘I told Celia that it would never work with you and that sub-editor,’ Yuri said conspiratorially. Douglas, Neve and Celia’s elder brother, insisted that Yuri was the most terrifying woman in the world, which was ironic considering who he’d married. If Neve hadn’t seen Yuri in her pyjamas practically every morning as she came up the stairs to borrow teabags, milk and occasionally a clean teaspoon, she would have been terrified of her too. Neve had never met a Japanese person with an afro before, or one who sounded like Carmela Soprano, courtesy of the language school in New Jersey where Yuri had learned English. If Celia hadn’t come back from New York a year ago with Yuri in tow and Neve wasn’t Celia’s older sister, which according to Yuri automatically gave her ‘eleventy billion cool points’, Neve wasn’t sure that Yuri would ever have acknowledged her existence. Or happily list all the reasons why Martyn from the subs desk wasn’t the right man for Neve.
‘He drinks shandy and he sweats a lot,’ she finished scathingly. ‘Hey, Celia, Neve can do so much better.’
‘I just wanted to ease her in gently.’ Celia made her thinking face. ‘What about a male model? They’re not as out of reach as people think. Like, they’re dead insecure about their looks so the bar isn’t that high.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Neve said, wriggling her shoulders in annoyance. ‘Look, it was sweet of you to ask me along but I don’t fit in here. Everyone’s beautiful and cool and I feel like a dowdy maiden aunt.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Celia gasped. ‘You’re rocking the little black vintage dress.’
‘Not so much of the little,’ Neve reminded her. ‘I don’t feel comfortable here and that man standing by the bar has been staring and smirking at us for the past five minutes.’
As Yuri and Celia looked over, he raised his glass in acknowledgement and didn’t seem perturbed that the three of them were talking about him.
‘He’s not smirking at us, he’s eye-fucking us,’ Yuri informed Neve.
‘What does that even mean?’
‘Max eye-fucks everyone,’ Celia said nonchalantly. ‘He’s our Editor-at-Large, he’s a complete slut and he is not, repeat not, the kind of man to practise your light flirtation skills on, Neevy. He’ll eat you up for breakfast and still have room for a full English afterwards.’
Although she’d been trying to ignore him, Neve squinted through the dry ice and the strobe lights to get a better look at this fashion magazine Lothario, but he was now eye-fucking two pretty blonde girls instead.
‘I think he was probably just eye-f— looking at you two, not me, and even if he was, I can take care of myself,’ Neve insisted, patting her sister’s hand because all of a sudden Celia was looking very hot and flustered. Though that could have been because her vintage jumpsuit was made of Crimplene.
‘You can’t take care of yourself,’ Celia insisted shrilly. ‘You have zero experience of men like that. You’ve led such a sheltered life.’
‘You do give off a virgin vibe,’ Yuri mused. ‘You’ve had sex, right?’
Neve choked on a mouthful of wine. ‘Of course I have! Well, I think I have. I started to, but it hurt a lot and it was just horrible … God, I am not having this conversation.’ She folded her arms and fixed Celia with a stern look. Celia was the only person who ever got her stern look. ‘I’m older than you by three years, so stop trying to pull rank on me.’
‘Just warning you off the big bad wolf.’
‘Well, there’s no need,’ Neve started to say as she glanced over to the bar again to get a third look at Skirt’s infamous Editor-at-Large, who now had an arm looped round each of the blonde girls’ shoulders. ‘I’ve never seen a genuine cad in the flesh before. He should have a pencil moustache really, shouldn’t he?’
Celia looked at her sister with fond exasperation. ‘He’s not a cad like they have in those mouldy old books of yours, Neevy,’ she said witheringly. ‘He’s a twenty-first-century manwhore, bless him.’
‘Yeah, he’s a tart with a heart of gold,’ Yuri added.
Celia dug Neve in the ribs. ‘Anyway, enough about Max. You’re not going to meet any men stuck here in the corner.’
‘But wouldn’t you say that just leaving the house and being in the corner of a club is progress? Baby steps … Please, Celia, stop manhandling me!’
Celia had one hand wedged into Neve’s armpit and with Yuri’s help she hauled her sister to her feet. ‘We’re going to mingle. It will be fun,’ she said with grim determination.
It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t even a little bit fun. Neve switched to spritzers and stayed glued to Celia’s side, apart from the times when she held her bag while Celia was throwing energetic shapes on the dancefloor or wheeling over a steady stream of men who all looked the same with their skinny jeans and skinny tees and hedge-trimmer haircuts. Like Martyn from the subs desk, they were all monumentally uninterested in Neve but were vague and polite because she might put in a good word with Celia.
One more spritzer, then I’m definitely going home, Neve vowed to herself as Celia dragged her over to the bar. ‘Now, standing at the bar is a great way to meet a man,’ Celia told her. ‘Especially if there’s a queue,’ she added, using her elbows to negotiate her way through the crowd waiting to be served. ‘You look around and make sure you catch a fit bloke’s eye so you can share a smile about how long you’ve had to wait. Then you’ll get served first, because hello, you’re a girl, then you offer to get his drinks and because he thinks he has a chance, he’ll pay for yours and you’re in there.’
‘I’ll be sure to remember that,’ Neve muttered, but Celia was already commiserating with the man standing next to her about how long he’d been waiting to be served.
‘Oh, poor Neevy, you look so miserable,’ she cooed, when they were finally clutching a free drink each, courtesy of Celia’s superior flirting skills. ‘Tell you what, we’ll sit down for five minutes, before we start Operation Manhunt again.’
‘I’m not calling it that. I’m calling it Operation Light Flirtation,’ Neve insisted, as she followed Celia over to a shadowy alcove where there were a couple of sofas and a pair of easy chairs arranged around a low table.
‘Whatever. We’ll just scooch in here.’ Celia was already clambering over people’s legs to get to a patch of unoccupied sofa. She sat down and patted the three inches of seat next to her. ‘Come on. Plonk your arse down.’
Neve didn’t clamber over people’s legs so much as trip over them and apologise profusely, which was nothing compared to how profusely she apologised to the girl who scowled and got up rather than be squashed against Neve and the arm of the sofa.
Celia checked her phone for messages as Neve tried to surreptitiously yank at her tights and knickers, which were at half-mast again.
‘Are you sure neither of you are models?’
Neve and Celia grinned at each other, Celia’s nagging and Neve’s moaning instantly forgiven as they shared an eye-roll, then looked over at the corner where the infamous Max was living up to his reputation.
Neve had imagined Lotharios to look a lot more suave. Max was handsome enough, with wide-spaced dark eyes framed by outrageously long boy-lashes, pronounced cheekbones and a pillowy, pouty bottom lip, but his face was saved from being too pretty by his nose, which was slightly hooked and bent as if it had been broken by someone’s boyfriend, and the hair that he kept pushing off his face looked like it could do with a good wash. He was wearing a crumpled black shirt, a pair of herringbone tweed trousers with frayed hems and a bashed-up pair of Converses.
It took Neve less than five seconds to give Max the once-over and decide that he wasn’t her type. And she certainly wasn’t his, judging by the two blonde girls he’d been talking to earlier who were now perched on his lap and giggling wildly as he tried out another line on them. ‘Well, at least tell me that you’re twins, then? I’ve had triplets before but never twins.’
Celia snorted with mirth. ‘Hysterical, isn’t he?’
Neve could think of a few other words to describe him but she’d only got as far as ‘popinjay’ when she felt something cold, hard and wet hit her squarely on the chest. She squealed in shock as the ice cube slid down her cleavage and into her dress. ‘What … you … how dare …’
‘Hey, dickwad, did you just chuck something at my sister?’ Celia snapped at Max. Neve tried to fish the cube out of her tight bodice but it melted fast against her hot fingers and all she got for her trouble was an icy trickle of water that only stopped trickling when it reached the insurmountable barrier of her firm-control tights. ‘What is wrong with you?’
Max glanced at Neve, then his gaze skittered away as if she wasn’t even worth looking at for more than a second. ‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ he said breezily, turning to Celia and flashing her a smile that seemed to come with its own lighting rig. ‘Was meant for you, Brat. Don’t suppose you speak Russian or Polish or something like that. Not sure these girls speak the mother tongue.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Celia made a big show of trying to wipe Neve down, even as Neve wriggled to get away from her because, really, this was humiliating enough without Celia treating her like a messy toddler who’d just had an accident with a ketchup bottle. ‘This is my sister, Neve, whom you just assaulted with an airborne missile.’
‘Shut up,’ Neve hissed out of the side of her mouth, her every molecule throbbing with mortification. Not that Max noticed; he was giving Celia his rapt attention, even as he nuzzled the neck of one of the giggling, not-English girls on his lap. ‘You’re making everything worse.’
‘I said I was sorry. Look, is there an app for the iPhone that one of them can giggle into that will tell me what language they speak?’ Max asked earnestly. ‘And then I need an app that will translate what I’m saying into that language, because I’m wasting my best lines here.’
He was absolutely poisonous, Neve thought as Celia joined in with the giggling. Obnoxious. Shallow. A nasty piece of work who wouldn’t even acknowledge the presence of a woman who didn’t measure up to his clichéd standards of female pulchritude.
‘Celia, I’m going home now,’ Neve said in her iciest voice, but Celia was now happily consorting with the enemy and wittering on about how she wished there was an iPhone app that would tell her if she was about to purchase an item of clothing that one of her friends already owned. ‘Celia!’
‘OK, OK, keep your hair on,’ Celia grumbled, getting to her feet. ‘There’s only half an hour before we get kicked out, might as well stay to the end. See you later, Max.’
Max didn’t even deign to reply because he was neck-nuzzling again, so he just waved one languid hand in their direction.
‘What a horrible, horrible man,’ Neve said when they were free from the sofas. ‘It was like being back at Oxford and having bread rolls lobbed at me by vile posh boys.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Max is much nicer when there aren’t scantily clad blonde women about.’
‘Well, it isn’t.’ Neve sighed, then stuck out her lower lip.
‘I’m off. I don’t want to miss the last tube.’
‘OK, but will you hold my bag for a second – just want to have one more dance,’ Celia said, not waiting for Neve to reply but shoving her clutch at her sister.
It wasn’t until they stepped out on to the street half an hour later and the cold January night threw a hundred icy daggers at her face and she gave a comedy stagger that Neve realised she wasn’t exactly sober. Not drunk either. But somewhere in between. She stood outside the club shivering in her winter coat and fretting about catching the last Piccadilly line train while she and Celia waited for Yuri to get her skateboard out of the cloakroom. Yuri never went anywhere without it, though Neve had never actually seen her ride it.
‘Come on, we’re going to Soho House for an after-party,’ Celia said, tucking her arm into Neve’s. ‘Grace is going to sign us in.’
Grace was more important than Celia in the Skirt fashion food chain; she was also the sulkiest-looking girl that Neve had ever seen, although she did manage a wan smile in their direction.
‘I’m going home,’ Neve said firmly, disentangling herself from Celia. ‘I’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.’
‘You’ve barely had any excitement,’ Celia said, pouting. ‘It will be fun.’
‘I’ve exceeded my fun quota for the month,’ Neve told her. ‘Now before I go, can we make sure that you or Yuri have your keys, because I don’t want you ringing my doorbell at three in the morning.’
‘That only happened once …’
‘I think you mean once this month. Show me your keys.’
The keys were finally produced after a frantic search of Celia’s two bags, her coat pockets and her third bag, which Yuri gave her when she finally emerged from the club with her skateboard tucked under her arm.
As Neve was insisting that she wasn’t drunk and actually she had gone home on the tube after dark by herself on many occasions, she could hear a commotion behind her. She turned to see Max surrounded by a gaggle of Skirt girls, as he mournfully proclaimed, ‘Well, I wasn’t sure if they were legal, and neither of them spoke English so I had to make my excuses. Pity, they looked very bendy.’
There was a chorus of ‘Poor Max’ from the cheap seats as Neve turned back to Celia and Yuri. He really was absolutely odious. ‘Don’t stay out too late,’ she reminded Celia. ‘You said you had an early shoot tomorrow.’
Celia pulled a face. ‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Anyway, which one of you lovely ladies is coming home with me?’ Max demanded behind them. ‘Gracie, don’t you think you owe it to yourself to slip between my sheets just once? I’ll even make you breakfast and walk you to the bus stop in the morning.’
‘Hmmm, tempting offer, Max, but I’ve given up shagging manwhores for Lent,’ came the tart reply.
Neve rolled her eyes, as she checked the side pocket of her bag for Oyster card and rape alarm. ‘Right – well, I’m off,’ she said briskly.
‘Celia? Skate Girl?’ He was still trying to drum up business as Neve kissed Celia on the cheek, and she was just about to turn round and head off to the tube when she felt a hand land squarely on her bottom. ‘Or what about you? You’ve got plenty of cushion for the pushing. I like that in a woman.’
Neve let out a furious gasp, her eyes blinking rapidly as tears welled up. ‘Right, I’m going,’ she choked out, as Celia gazed at her in horror. ‘See you.’
‘I take it that’s a no, then?’ Max shouted after her, as Neve scurried to the safety of the other side of Dean Street and scrubbed one gloved hand furiously at her watering eyes. Max wasn’t a cad. A cad would never treat a woman quite so badly. Max was, quite simply, the lowest of the low. Exactly the same as those well-bred, boorish boys at Oxford who’d only ever noticed Neve when they wanted to have a cheap laugh at her expense.
She paused for a second, to take a deep breath and gather herself. She still felt ungathered as she started to walk again, but at least Neve didn’t feel as if she might burst into tears. Not all men were like Max, she knew that for a fact, and she shouldn’t let that … that manwhore get to her, even if he had drawn everyone’s attention to the size of her bum and physically assaulted her.
Though it was a bitterly cold night, Neve had to side-step throngs of people smoking outside pubs and bars. It was well after midnight and she wished she was snuggled in bed under her winter-weight duvet with her feet resting on a hot-water bottle. Just the thought of it made Neve quicken her pace, especially when she realised that someone had fallen into step beside her. She was just working up the courage to say, ‘No, I don’t want to get into your unlicensed minicab, thank you very much,’ when she saw that it was Max.
‘God, you walk fast,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you since Wardour Street.’
‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Neve ground out, as she came to a halt so she could stand there with her hands on her hips and glare at him.
In the glow of the streetlamps and the glare of neon signs, Neve could see that his hair wasn’t dirty but a glossy dark brown, and his skin had an olive tinge that suggested he’d tan at the first sight of the sun. Which wasn’t important right then. It didn’t matter how pretty he was when he had such an ugly soul.
Max spread his hands wide. ‘Look, I’m sorry I slapped your arse. It was inexcusable and it’s been pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that most women don’t have the same relaxed attitude to inappropriate touching as the girls in the office do.’
It was a really poor excuse for an apology. ‘You implied … you said …’
‘To be honest, I don’t know how cushiony your bum is, it was just a line. I really didn’t mean to upset you.’ Max sounded sincere and he was looking at her with a furrowed brow.
‘Fine,’ Neve said, though it was a very huffy kind of ‘fine’. ‘Apology accepted, I suppose.’
She started walking again. So did Max. Walking alongside her, as if they were friends.
‘So, where are you heading?’
‘I’m going to the tube,’ Neve said, because she didn’t have the guts to pointedly ignore him.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked casually.
If by some bizarre twist of fate, Max had decided that she’d do for the night, then he was going to be sorely disappointed. ‘Finsbury Park,’ Neve said tersely.
‘I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’
Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’
‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’
‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’
‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped her arse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”’
Neve could feel her mouth doing something very strange. It felt as if she was smiling, and when Max smiled back at her she could understand why the Skirt girls forgave him for being such an obnoxious flirt. It was a suggestive smile that stopped just short of being a leer, and when it was aimed in Neve’s direction, it made her feel as if she was sexy and desirable and worthy of it. In fact, it was such a good smile that Neve was powerless to resist its potent charm. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to miss the last tube.’
Threading their way through the bustle of Old Compton Street meant that they didn’t have to talk, and soon they entered the welcome warmth of the station. Neve always walked down the escalators (and up them too) so she didn’t even think to see if Max was following but lurched down the stairs, the strumming of a busker playing ‘Hey Jude’ getting louder and louder, until she stepped off with a shaky dismount. Max was right behind her, not quite touching her, but close enough to steer her in the right direction when she got confused between the northbound and southbound Piccadilly line platforms.
‘It’s so crowded,’ Neve complained as they stepped on to the packed platform. ‘It’s as bad as rush hour.’
Max cupped her elbow. ‘Let’s walk down to the end – more chance of getting a seat.’
As they reached the end of the platform, the train screeched into the station. Max had been right; there were plenty of empty seats. Neve plopped down and pulled off her woolly hat. ‘You should never get in the first or last carriage,’ she said. ‘If we had a collision with another train, we’d bear the full force of the impact.’
‘Well, I’m willing to risk it if it means I can get a seat,’ Max said, sitting down next to her and stretching out his long legs. He gave Neve a sideways look from eyes framed with those outrageously long lashes. ‘So, here we are.’
‘You didn’t want to go to Soho House with the others?’
‘Fancied an early night for a change,’ Max said with a smile that definitely verged on lecherous this time. ‘Normally I’m the last to leave but I have a breakfast meeting at the Wolseley with my agent. The man’s a sadist, always forcing me out of bed at some ungodly hour.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Neve said feelingly. Not about breakfast meetings with agents at very fancy London restaurants, but five days a week her alarm chirped insistently at six. She looked at her watch in dismay. ‘I’ve got to be up in five and a half hours.’
‘Not really much point in going to bed, is there?’ Max shifted in his seat so his arm and leg were pressed against Neve’s. ‘I’m sure we could find something else to do to pass the time.’
He said it lightly and with that cheeky little smirk so Neve decided not to take offence. She smiled instead, secure in the knowledge that there was every point in going to bed, alone, to sleep for a solid five hours. ‘So, why do you have an agent?’ she asked, mostly to change the subject. ‘Do all Editors-at-Large have one?’
‘Only those who write best-selling novels,’ Max revealed with just the slightest edge, like he couldn’t believe that Neve needed any clarification. ‘Well, technically I ghost-write them, but between you and me, Mandy isn’t going to give Iris Murdoch any sleepless nights.’
‘Well, Iris Murdoch has been dead for quite a few years,’ Neve murmured. However, Max was still looking at her expectantly, as if his bestselling novels merited more of a reaction. ‘I’m sorry. Who’s Mandy?’
Max stopped lolling in his seat and sat up straight. ‘Mandy,’ he repeated impatiently.
‘I can’t quite place the name,’ Neve said. ‘Is she one of those very famous people who don’t need to have a surname?’
He made a tiny scoffing noise. ‘Yeah, right. Mandy McIntyre. She’s only the most famous WAG in Britain.’
‘Hmmm – what does WAG stand for again?’ Neve asked. ‘I always forget but I know it’s something that doesn’t make sense.’
‘You don’t know what a WAG is? For real?’ Max asked incredulously. ‘Wives and girlfriends. Footballers’ wives and girlfriends.’
‘Oh! See, that’s the bit that I don’t understand. If they’re footballers’ wives and girlfriends, then really they should be called FWAGs. Though it doesn’t really roll off the tongue that easily.’ Neve mouthed the unwieldy acronym to herself a couple more times as Max stared at her. ‘No, it really doesn’t work. Anyway, I’ve never heard of her but I don’t watch much TV. So she writes novels, does she? Or you write them for her?’
Neve was trying not to sound too disapproving that some girlfriend of a footballer could get a book deal, when she knew of at least three would-be novelists with good degrees from good universities who were working for minimum wage and couldn’t even get a short story published. She guessed that she’d managed to keep her outrage to herself because a faint smile was tugging at the corners of Max’s mouth.
‘Well, Mandy and I go way back,’ he said. ‘I interviewed her for Skirt and we really hit it off so she asked me to ghost her memoirs.’
‘Oh, she must be quite old if she’s already had a memoir published.’
‘She’s twenty-two,’ Max said. ‘Then, after Mand’s autobiography, we wrote a Style Guide and now I’m working on her fourth novel.’
‘But I thought you said that you wrote them together?’ It was all very confusing, especially when you’d had too many white-wine spritzers.
‘The publisher came up with an idea about a young girl who’s working in a supermarket when she starts dating a footballer, then Mandy and I brainstormed some scenarios, I fleshed it out and three novels later, we’ve sold over a million books. The series has been translated into twenty-three different languages and it’s in development with a film production company,’ Max said proudly. ‘You must have read one of them. Every woman I know has secretly read at least one of them.’
‘Look, I don’t read that kind of novel,’ Neve said – and immediately realised how snotty she sounded, if the curl of Max’s top lip was a good indicator. She frantically tried to backtrack. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very fair; I mean, you do all the work and she gets all the credit and the royalties.’
‘Not all the royalties,’ Max demurred. He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you know who she is? Have you just come out from under a large rock?’
‘The truth is, I’m not really that interested in celebrities,’ Neve explained carefully. ‘It just all seems rather superficial, and anyway, I have to do a lot of serious reading for my job, so—’
‘What is your job?’ Max demanded rather belligerently. ‘I suppose it’s something completely worthy and unsuperficial, like finding a cure for cancer or solving world hunger.’
She hadn’t said that he was superficial so there was no need for Max to be quite so snippy. ‘I work at a literary archive,’ Neve informed him coldly. ‘I’m the senior archivist.’
‘What? Like a library or something?’
‘It’s not the least bit like a library,’ Neve snapped. ‘And safeguarding literary papers for future generations is actually a very worthwhile and rewarding job.’
‘If you say so,’ Max said dismissively. ‘Sounds kinda boring to me.’
Neve was saved from having to tell Max she didn’t appreciate his philistine views on her choice of career by the train pulling into Finsbury Park station.
As soon as the train came to a halt she was out of her seat and through the doors before they’d even finished opening. She then lurched up the stairs in shoes which had now officially become Instruments of Torture, and would have tried to run down the long tunnel that led to the street if she wasn’t stuck behind a man wheeling a large suitcase behind him.
It wasn’t long before Max caught up with her, though Neve couldn’t imagine why. If their positions were reversed, she’d have skulked on the platform for several minutes until she was sure he’d gone.
‘Is this going to be the pattern for our relationship?’ he asked, body-blocking the Oyster card reader so Neve had to yank him away before somebody intent on swiping their ticket hit him. ‘I say something mildly controversial, you storm off in a huff and then I’m forced to chase after you so I can say I’m sorry?’
‘We’re not in a relationship,’ Neve reminded him. She was resolved that this time, she wouldn’t smile or let herself by swayed by Max’s effortless but considerable charm, but God help her, she found herself smiling.
‘Fine. You’ve apologised. Again. Isn’t that your bus?’
They both watched the W7 sail around the corner. ‘Of course, instead of apologising, we could kiss and make up instead?’ Max suggested lightly.
They were standing in front of the London Underground map, hands shoved into respective pockets. Neve looked up at Max to see if he was joking, because, quite frankly, he had to be joking. Men who looked like Max and had glamorous jobs and were on first-name terms with WAGs didn’t kiss girls like her. ‘You want to kiss me?’ she asked tremulously.
‘Well, it will be a nice ending when I tell little Tommy the story of how we first met,’ Max said, and Neve wasn’t just smiling, she was giggling, even though, as a rule, she didn’t giggle. ‘The question is, do I kiss you here or at your front door after I’ve walked you home and just before you invite me in for a coffee?’
Neve frowned. This whole situation was running away from her. She was just starting to get the hang of light flirtation and now Max had raced ahead to kissing and … ‘For a coffee?’
‘Are we really doing this?’ Max sounded exasperated. ‘Not for a coffee. For this.’
His hands were out of his pockets and around her waist before Neve had time to blink or pull in her tummy. All she could do was watch Max’s face get nearer and nearer. The kiss was inevitable but she still thought she was imagining it when Max’s lips brushed against hers.
Neve didn’t pull away, but she didn’t move closer; she just stayed absolutely statue-still to see where this was going to lead.
‘I love your red lipstick,’ Max murmured, as if they were already alone in her flat and not standing outside a tube station with the wind whistling around them and discarded take-away containers and fag ends at their feet. ‘It’s so sexy.’
Neve knew it was just a line to get into her knickers, though if Max could see the firm-control reality of them, then he’d have wished he hadn’t bothered, she thought sadly. She opened her mouth to say something, to tell Max the red lipstick was just false advertising, supplied by Celia, but her words got lost when Max lifted his thumb to her mouth and slowly and deliberately wiped it away.
‘What did you do that for?’ Neve touched her fingers to her lips, which were tingling as if he’d been kissing her for hours.
‘Because I want to kiss you again and I don’t think red’s my colour. I usually go for the pinker shades,’ Max said, and Neve wondered how many girls he’d practised on before the right words came tumbling out of his mouth without him even having to think about it. He’d undoubtedly kissed a lot of women, really knew what he was doing, so why not treat this whole confusing encounter as an educational experience?
‘Well, go on then,’ she said in what she hoped was a challenging tone. ‘Kiss me if you want to.’
This time Neve was ready, tilting her head back as Max cupped her cheek and slowly kissed her. Just his lips on her lips, nothing more than friction, but it sent a thousand sparks shooting down her arms and legs so Neve was flexing her fingers and trying to curl her toes in her too-tight shoes. It was only her third ever kiss. There’d been an horrific collision with her second cousin’s tongue at a wedding where she’d also got drunk for the first time, and there’d been the dreadlocked Philosophy student who may or may not have taken her virginity, and that was after she’d consumed a huge number of fudge brownies, which she’d later discovered had been heavily laced with marijuana. They barely counted. Whereas this was stellar kissing, the kind of kissing that she’d only read about in the lurid bodice-rippers she’d sneaked from her grandmother’s bookshelves.
Neve did what any self-respecting Regency heroine would do and wound her arms around Max’s neck with a rapturous little sigh so the kisses could get deeper, more heated, and they only stopped when someone across the street bellowed, ‘Get a fucking room!’
Her hat had fallen off in all the excitement. Max crouched down to pick it up, as Neve tried to get her breathing under control. She really had to try to be more blasé about this.
‘So, what do you think?’ Max asked as he placed the hat back on Neve’s head, pulling it over her eyes and grinning when she scowled and adjusted it. ‘Back to yours or am I catching the last bus home?’
Neve was never very good at making split-second decisions. Even choosing a DVD from Blockbuster could be a fraught experience and she needed at least a week to debate this question, but Max was tapping his foot impatiently.
‘Well, I … I don’t … I think you’ve already missed the last bus,’ she choked out, staring at the top button on Max’s black wool coat because she’d lose her nerve if she had to look at his face. She’d give him coffee and have another half-hour of those dark velvet kisses, then she’d kick him out. ‘I suppose that would be all right.’
Max nodded. ‘Cool.’ He paused. ‘By the way, I don’t think I ever caught your name.’
Finsbury Park was an area of London that was meant to be up-and-coming but still hadn’t quite up and come. If you turned right when you came out of the tube station and walked under the bridge, it was a soulless morass of minicab offices, fast-food joints and gangs of hoodies.
But Neve always turned left and walked past the little supermarkets, their stalls displaying exotic fruit and vegetables, the Afro-Caribbean beauty store that had row after row of be-wigged mannequin heads in the window, the fishmonger’s and up to the Old Dairy, which was now a gastro pub. When Neve’s parents had first got married and moved into a maisonette a couple of streets away from her grandmother’s pub on the Stroud Green Road, the area was a grimy collection of betting shops, off-licences and crumbling terraces converted into poky flats; the sort of place where one didn’t linger too late after dark. In the last ten years though, the streets of solidly built Victorian terraced houses, the huge park and the ten-minute trip on the Victoria line to Oxford Circus had reeled in the middle classes.
Neve could never imagine living anywhere else. She’d spent three years at Oxford, but the dreaming spires, medieval churches and punts bobbing on the river had completely lacked the poetry of the roar of the crowds spilling out of the station when Arsenal played a home game or the sun falling in dappled shadows on the Parkland Walk. Besides, who’d want to live anywhere where you couldn’t get a can of Coke and a bag of chips after midnight within two minutes of opening your front door?
It was, however, the first time Neve had walked these familiar streets with a man who wasn’t a member of her immediate family or gay. Neve wasn’t sure what a suitable topic of conversation would be for an almost stranger that you were taking back to your house solely for kissing and possibly some of the other things that went hand-in-hand with the kissing. But then Max started talking about the tramp who could usually be seen under the railway bridge swigging from a bottle of cider and, ‘Have you ever been in that charity shop? It smells like the bowels of hell.’
All too soon they came to her gate. Max paused for a moment as if he was giving her time to back out, but Neve simply unlatched the gate and hurried up the path to the house that had once been her grandmother’s. When she’d died, her son, Neve’s father, had converted the property into three flats and divvied them up between his three children. Celia was still seething that she’d been in New York when the conversion was completed and so she’d got stuck with the ground-floor flat.
Celia was currently pickling her liver somewhere in Soho and the house was dark and silent, but Neve didn’t turn on the hall light, and as soon as Max stepped through the door he crashed into her bike, which was propped against the wall.
Neve’s heart shuddered. She looked fearfully upwards, expecting the landing light to snap on and a shrill voice to start screaming. When nothing happened, except Max swearing under his breath, she sagged in relief.
‘Um, can you take your shoes off?’ she whispered.
‘Why?’ Max asked in his normal voice, which sounded loud enough to wake the dead.
‘You have to keep your voice down,’ Neve hissed. ‘My brother and my sister-in-law own the first-floor flat and she’s … an evil psycho bitch … very noise sensitive. Please, Max.’
It was too dark to see anything, but Neve was sure she could hear