We Were On a Break

by Lindsey Kelk

  She wrinkled her shoulders and her nose at the same time, tapping short, shiny fingernails on her mug. ‘Me and Jim both did marketing at uni,’ she replied, ‘and I always worked behind the bar in the union. Most people don’t believe me, but it was honestly my favourite bit, and when I graduated I got into this grad scheme at a big marketing company and hated every second of it. Jim went and worked at a summer camp in America for a couple of years and he was the one who came up with the idea of doing the camp-themed bar. Once we’d come up with the concept, it was really hard to think about anything else.’

  ‘Totally understand,’ I said. It was almost too much. How could one woman be so cool and so gorgeous at the same time? ‘I went through something a bit similar. The hardest bit was making the decision.’

  ‘Ha, if only! The hardest bit for us was finding the money,’ she laughed. One of her front teeth was very slightly chipped and even though her skin was a lot more tanned than Liv’s there was one tiny fifty-pence-shaped freckle on her left cheekbone. I wanted to lick it. ‘But we’ve both always been savers and Jim managed to rustle up a couple of investors from the marketing place he used to work at.’

  As she shifted in her seat, I saw the merest suggestion of black lace underneath her checked shirt and immediately felt the merest suggestion of a boner underneath my filthy jeans.

  ‘You couldn’t find investors at your old job?’ I asked, my voice pitching up at the end. ‘No Mr Moneybags running around the office?’

  ‘I’m surprised I kept my job as long as I did.’ Jane pressed her hands over her face, hiding an embarrassed smile. ‘I was shit. And I was bartending a couple of nights a week to pay off my student loans faster. It’s fair to say I was more committed to one job than the other.’

  I was trying not to stare but it wasn’t easy. Boners came and went but something else was going on. I understood everything she was saying, it was exactly how I had felt about the law. This wasn’t the same as casually wondering what kind of underwear a woman was wearing when you were sat opposite her on the bus, this was deep. I wasn’t thinking exclusively with my penis and I didn’t know how to feel.

  ‘Yeah, I should have quit and done the bar full-time really,’ she said. ‘But everyone had an opinion, you know? As though it was beneath me to want to work in a bar when I had a degree. It’s so stupid, you love what you love.’

  I picked up a teaspoon and turned it in my hands to distract myself. Teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon. If I said it enough times, the word lost all meaning.

  ‘Has anyone ever told you, you’re very wise?’ I asked, recovering myself.

  ‘They have not,’ she confirmed. ‘When I left my job, my mum and dad told me I was a waster and my boyfriend broke up with me. So, yeah. Not that great.’

  ‘You are very wise,’ I assured her.

  Teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon.

  For a moment, we smiled at each other across my kitchen and the air felt heavy and thick, and when I looked at her I could see sunshine and rainbows and the two of us gambolling around in freshly mown meadows. Wait, that could have been the Febreze.

  ‘I’m glad I found you.’ Jane pulled the cuffs of her shirt down over her hands to accidentally expose a half-inch of her bra and there weren’t enough teaspoons on earth to help me in that moment. This was totally unfair. I was nice to animals, I helped old ladies carry their shopping, and I’d never so much as nicked a packet of Monster Munch. Why was the universe testing me?

  ‘For the bar, I mean,’ she added. ‘I’m glad we found you to work on the bar. I’m glad you submitted a proposal. The designs look great.’

  ‘I’m glad too,’ I replied, picking up a teaspoon and tapping it against the side of my mug. ‘I’ve had some truly shit jobs of late. It’s nice to have something where I can flex a bit of creative muscle.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ There was that curved lip again. ‘I imagine the building process involves more than creative muscle.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I echoed, pumping up a bicep. ‘Here’s your ticket to the gun show.’

  ‘Very impressive,’ she said, laughing again. It felt nice to make someone laugh. With this beautiful woman who thought I was funny in front of me, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made Liv so much as smile. My mind was a blank. ‘And I’d stay for the encore but I really ought to be going.’

  ‘OK.’ I stood up as soon as she did, adjusting the front of my trousers while she pulled on her leather jacket and messed around with her hair. I wondered what it smelled like. I wondered what she smelled like. I closed my eyes and imagined what the nape of her neck smelled like first thing in the morning before she’d had a shower.

  Teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon, teaspoon.

  ‘I’ll walk you out,’ I offered, dumping our mugs in the sink and quickly running my hands under cold water. ‘You want to get on the road before rush hour.’

  ‘I do,’ she nodded. ‘I’ll be home by four thirty-ish if the traffic gods are willing.’

  ‘I’ll pray for you.’ I opened the door and held it open, my eyes wandering down to her backside as she walked by. Unnecessary.

  ‘You’re such a giver,’ she replied, fishing in her pocket for the keys to the Mini Cooper parked in front of my house. ‘I’m coming up this way again tomorrow if you’re around? I’d love to stop in and see where we’re at.’

  ‘I’m not likely to be that much further by tomorrow,’ I said, anticipating my progress in my head. ‘I’ll go to the timber yard in the morning, put the order in for the wood. If they’ve got it in, I suppose I could make a start straight away but there won’t be much for you to see.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared for a moment before pulling the huge sunglasses that were perched on her head down over her eyes. Her car beeped at me twice as she unlocked the driver’s side. ‘OK.’

  ‘I mean, you’re welcome to stop in for a cup of tea,’ I blurted out as she walked away. ‘You should come anyway.’

  Jane paused by the car, pushed the sunglasses back up onto the top of her head and gave me her biggest, most dazzling smile. I returned a small, uncomfortable version while my brain and my boner argued as to which one of them was making my decisions.

  ‘Then I’ll see you later.’ She walked back towards me and pressed her full lips against my cheek, holding them there just long enough for her breath to tickle my ear. ‘For that cup of tea.’

  Shit. Her hair smelled amazing.

  ‘I’ll get the kettle on.’ I took two small steps backwards and held up my hand in something that looked more like I was threatening her with the Vulcan death grip than waving goodbye.

  I watched as she pulled away and drove off down the drive, memorizing her number plate and filing it away, along with her black lace bra, her chipped front tooth and the thought of her long legs wrapped around my waist. My hand drifted down to my crotch to cover any activity on little Adam’s part as I stared at the space where her car had been. There was no doubt about it, my brain was no longer in control of the SS Adam Floyd.

  15

  I sat outside Adam’s house in my car, faffing with my hair in the rear-view mirror. It was too big, too curly. I’d told them to blow dry it straight but they couldn’t help themselves, they just had to do the big, silly curls on the bottom. I looked like veterinary Barbie: all I was missing was my stethoscope. Actually, I really wished I had it. My heart was pounding and I would’ve loved to get a proper listen to my pulse.

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ I assured myself in the rear-view mirror. ‘We’re just going to have a nice casual chat.’

  A nice casual chat where I told him everything: how Cassie had spilled the beans about the engagement, how I’d been so stressed out waiting for him to propose, how I was freaking out about taking over the surgery, how I felt completely out of control of my own life and was afraid I was going to wake up to find out I was eighty, alone and incontinent with no idea how to use the latest smartphone. And how I’d missed him every day si
nce we’d got back from holiday and needed his support more than anything else right now. A good shag, too, but mostly him having my back with everything else going to shit. Then maybe we could start fresh and I could resolve at least half the nonsense going on in my tiny mind.

  I opened the door and stepped outside, my legs more wobbly than I would have liked. There was a car in Adam’s driveway, a dark green Mini Cooper that I didn’t recognize. Before I could spy through the windows, Adam and a tall brunette walked out of the house and I dashed back to the car, pressing myself up against next-door’s hedge. If this was a client, I didn’t want to bother him. We had serious things to discuss and then serious make-up sex to get down to, and both of those things were going to need a clear mind and some concentration.

  Hmm. He looked awfully happy for a man taking a client meeting. I squinted, trying to get my three-day-old daily contact lenses to focus. Funny, he hadn’t mentioned anything about scoring a job for a Victoria’s Secret model. I looked back to Adam and scowled at the goofy grin on his face.

  ‘It’s just a meeting,’ I reassured myself. ‘He has meetings all the time.’

  They carried on chatting in front of the green Mini while I picked at the carefully coiffed ends of my hair. No matter how many tutorials I watched, I’d never been able to pull off that sexy, messy hair look. If I tried to do curls with my straighteners, it looked like Sweeney Todd had been at me with a crimper. When I tried it with tongs, I just looked like a knob. Her hair was perfect. Her arse was perfect. Her legs were perfect. I couldn’t see her boobs or her face properly but even if they were slightly below average, she was still the best-looking woman I’d ever seen with my own eyes. I had squeezed myself into my skinniest skinny jeans because I knew Adam liked them, but her jeans were so tight they were practically a second skin. They must have been riding right up her chuff, and then, as she raised her arms to wave goodbye, I saw a thong peeking up over the waistband.

  The complete and utter slag.

  I breathed out slowly as she walked towards her car door, beep-beeping the lock.

  ‘Yeah, it’s time for you to leave,’ I muttered. Getting a better look at her from the front did not make me feel any better. Combing my hair behind my ears, I shook my handbag as quietly as possible, searching for a lip gloss. I was holding the wand up to my face as she stopped, turned back to Adam, curled her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I whispered as my hair wrapped itself around my sticky lip gloss. ‘Fuck right royally off.’

  After what felt like forever, Adam’s mystery woman pulled away and got in the car while he stood there, swiping at his eyebrows and waving goodbye. And then she was gone. For a moment he stayed where he was. Stuck to the spot and holding the front of his trousers as though he was about to have an accident. Or perhaps he already had.

  It wasn’t like they said it was in films. My knees didn’t buckle and my legs didn’t turn to jelly, they just stopped working. One minute I was standing upright, the next I was folding in on myself and sitting on the cold, dirty ground. His neighbour’s well-trimmed hedge poked me sharply in the back of my curly head as I dug my phone out of my bag.

  What was that? Who was that? It was only two days since he’d stood on my doorstep and begged me to call off the break. Two days.

  ‘Hello, what’s up?’

  Abi answered on the first ring.

  ‘I just saw Adam kissing another woman outside his house and now I’m hiding behind a hedge and I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘No, really,’ she replied. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’m at Adam’s house,’ I said, replaying the scene over and over in my head. ‘And I just watched him walk some eight-foot-tall Angelina Jolie lookalike underwear model out to her car with his hands all over her – and before she left, she kissed him.’

  ‘OK, before I start, what are you looking for here?’ Abi asked. ‘Do you want me to be outraged, threaten to tear off his knob and sew it to his forehead like a unicock, or would you rather I question the accuracy of what you saw?’

  ‘I saw it!’ I rocked back and forth, catching my hair in the scratchy twigs. ‘With my actual eyes! Also, ten points for unicock.’

  ‘Liv, whoever it was, she wasn’t eight feet tall for a start and I very much doubt there was an underwear model randomly knocking around his house at three in the afternoon,’ she replied. ‘Taking that into account, do you want to calm down and tell me exactly what you saw?’

  ‘I hate you sometimes,’ I told her, wiggling my toes and rapping my knuckles against my useless knees.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me because I’m logical,’ Abi said. ‘If you wanted histrionics, you would have called Cass.’

  ‘You’re so helpful.’ I snapped tiny twigs off the hedge and broke them up into a dozen little pieces. ‘But she really was gorgeous and she really did kiss him. Maybe not tongue down his throat – but, god, Abs, you should have seen his face after she left.’

  And that was what hurt. It wasn’t really the hot girl or the kiss or the handsy nature of their goodbye, it was the look on Adam’s face, as though he’d won the lottery on his birthday and James Bond was coming round to deliver the money in the car from Knight Rider. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at me.

  ‘Liv, I’m going to suggest something really controversial now,’ she said. ‘Go and talk to him.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ I scoffed. ‘I’ll just go and talk to him, we’ll have a grown-up conversation that will make everything better.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re taking the piss?’ she asked with a ready tut. ‘Go and bloody well talk to him.’

  ‘“Excuse me Adam, I know I said I needed a couple of weeks to sort my head out but you said it first so you can’t be mad at me and just out of interest, who was that absolute stunner you were necking at the end of the drive a minute ago? I’d love to ask her where she gets her hair done?”’

  ‘Did she have nice hair?’ Abi asked. ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘Yes of course she did!’ I yelled. ‘She was perfect. Even I fancied her. And jeans. Really, really tight jeans.’

  She sighed into her phone, the gentle sound blowing up in my ear.

  ‘Liv, go and talk to him,’ she said again. ‘You’re still there, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, glancing down either end of the street. ‘But I don’t know if I can. I’m freaking out.’

  ‘Stop freaking out; go and talk to him and then call me back. I’m in the lab but I’ve got my phone and I’ll call you back as soon as I can if I don’t answer.’

  Carrie Bradshaw never had this problem, I thought to myself. Her friends always answered on the first ring. Which was a bit odd when you thought about it; they all had pretty intense jobs, so why were they always picking up the phone? Yep, another tick in the plus column for ditching Long Harrington and starting over as a sex columnist in New York.

  ‘OK,’ I said, bouncing my palm up and down on the pavement. I could do this. It was going to be fine. It was Adam, for god’s sake, there was clearly an explanation. ‘I’m going now. I’ll call you back in a bit. What are you working on now?’

  ‘The effects of melamine on humoral immunity with or without cyanuric acid,’ she replied. ‘Go get ’em, tiger.’

  All I had to do was stand up, walk to Adam’s door, and have a conversation with him. We’d been having conversations almost every day for three years, why was this one so much harder than any of the others? Two weeks ago I would have marched up to his door, made non-specific threats on her life and already made myself a cup of tea.

  Checking myself for stray dog shit, I straightened my shoulders and set off up Adam’s driveway. There were tyre tracks on the muddy grass from her Mini. I’d always fancied a Mini. Cow. I fancied a Mini and she fancied my boyfriend, we had so much in common – apart from she had dark hair and mine was blonde, she was nearly six foot and I was only five foot four and I didn’t generally wear black lace thongs on y
our average Tuesday. But then, maybe she didn’t either; maybe she only wore them when she knew she was going to get lucky.

  I stood in front of the door, one hand ready to knock, my keys in the other. Did I knock or did I let myself in? Did I ask him about her or did I pretend I hadn’t seen it? I blinked, my lenses drying out again. I had spares upstairs. I could get my spares after we’d had our talk. I wondered what her eyesight was like. She probably had perfect vision and had flushed all my contacts down the loo, cackling maniacally while smothering my Advanced Night Repair all over her body.

  What was worse? Being jealous or crazy? There was no way I could sit down and talk to him until I’d calmed down. As I had already established earlier in this mess, I was not Beyoncé. I could not lose my shit at him then apologize and write an amazing album about it. I turned around, ran back to my car and sat there, shaking. Breathing out slowly, I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and closed my eyes but all I could see was the kiss. Adam kissing another woman. He wasn’t supposed to be kissing anyone but me. We had specifically said, ‘no seeing other people’, and kissing was even worse than seeing.

  Go for a drive, a little voice said, pushing the image of the two of them out of my head and replacing it with a vision of open country roads and clearish blue skies. Driving calmed me down, it always had. Nodding to myself, I turned the key in the ignition and flipped on the stereo. A Ford Fiesta honked its horn behind me as I pulled out and I swerved around a parked Mondeo, barely missing its wing mirror, but I really couldn’t have cared less. Adele blared out of my speakers as I turned onto the main road, flying past the post office, assuring me that she alone in the universe understood what I was going through.

  And then I remembered she was a millionaire who had a kid and a man who loved her and everything she was singing was complete and utter bollocks. I tore at my iPod cable and tossed the whole thing out my open window, watching as it disappeared into a bank of tall grass.