Oh, no, there is one more thing that I’d like to show you from that night, just so you can understand what happened after. It’s quite quick, and then we can move on.
Let’s go back to the moment after the four claps. I’m smiling on the sofa, watching him walk over and sit down next to me. He touches the collar of his shirt (it’s on me, remember) then runs his fingers down towards the top button. It’s not done up, of course – no point wearing a man’s shirt if you look like you’re going to the office in it – and he pushes the fabric apart with his fingertips. Naturally the second, third and fourth buttons aren’t done up either, so the material slips back on my shoulders. I’m leaning back now and that blissful expression is back, look. I’ve closed my eyes in anticipation and then he says, ‘Give over, Rachel, I’m trying to get my shirt back.’
My eyes fly open. Not a good look, even from here. I think we’ll just gloss over this bit – it’s embarrassing. Suffice to say that I gave him his shirt back and put a tight T-shirt on instead, which is almost as good as the shirt.
A very few minutes later, Nick’s standing fully clothed in the hall and I’m leaning sexily against the open door. I can do a lot of things sexily. Mum always says that some people have just got it, and I am one of those people. It’s not like I don’t have to try, because I do. It’s just that when I try, it’s really easy for me to do it well. I’m not being big-headed or anything, it’s just how it is. Sometimes I do it without really meaning to, like when I’m out with just girls. They get a bit annoyed with me, but it’s worse when their husbands/fiancés/boyfriends are there. I can’t help it, it’s like a kind of habit.
Anyway, from here you can see that Nick is also really good at doing things sexily. He’s got the top four buttons of his shirt open so there’s a good deal of chest showing, and his jacket slung casually over his shoulder, like a model in a Freeman’s catalogue. This is the last chance you’ll get to see his flesh for a while so drink it in while you can. His hair, still slightly damp from his post-coital shower, is floppy now and charmingly unstyled, and he has a hint of a five o’clock shadow, even though it’s only one a.m. He’s so close I can smell Lynx, mixed with shower gel, sweat and sex.
He’s moving nearer now, bringing me inside the circle of his own heat. The warm scent of him is damp and intoxicating. He leans in further and puts his mouth to my ear. His sandpaper face gently scratches mine, making me shudder slightly. The feel of a stubbly face grazing lightly against my own overwhelms my senses; then his hot breath on my cheek and earlobe brings me out in goosebumps all over. You’d be able to see that if I turned round.
He holds this pose – his mouth against my ear, gently breathing – for three, four, five seconds, then very lightly, excruciatingly lightly, just touches his lips on to my ear. Well, not my ear exactly. It’s the little lumpy bit that juts out of your cheek into your ear and holds your earphones in. It definitely classes as more cheek than ear, whatever Chrissie may have thought. What would she know anyway? She’s never likely to get a kiss like that from anyone. She’s probably still a virgin.
Sorry about that. It was a bit catty. I didn’t mean it, particularly the bit about her being a virgin: she definitely isn’t one. She just really really annoyed me when I told her about that kiss.
‘On the ear, you say?’
‘Technically, I think it counts as chee—’
‘Well, fuck me, I’ve never heard of being kissed goodnight on the ear before. What the hell do you think made him do that? Didn’t like the look of your face after all? Maybe you had repugnant black eye-bogeys that made him want to gag every time he looked at you?’
Classy, isn’t she? Eye-bogeys, for goodness’ sake. In Chrissie’s world, eye-bogeys are the gelatinous blobs of mascara that coagulate in the corners of your eyes when you are out late. Chrissie gets them a lot and I think she assumes that because she gets them, everyone does. Well, I don’t. It all comes down to the brand of mascara you use. Personally I prefer to spend a bit more than £3.99 on my products. Anyway, I have my eyelashes dyed and starched every three months so mascara is a thing of the past.
I was a bit puzzled by Chrissie’s smug outburst. After all, she was the one who had suggested Nick to me in the first place and practically forced me to meet him. Why would she be so delighted in thinking she had found a flaw in our breathtaking encounter? Mum says that Chrissie is jealous of me, which is why she says this kind of thing. It wasn’t a flaw anyway. If you have ever been kissed like that, you’d know what I mean.
Back to the hall. You’ll notice that the whole time he’s pressed up against me, breathing in my ear and kissing my cheek, he has the car keys in one hand by his side, and the other hand holding the loop of his jacket, up by his shoulder. He doesn’t touch me with anything other than the very tips of his lips, if there is such a thing. I mean he doesn’t press down with his mouth or squash his lips on to me; and he doesn’t wrap his arms round me and try to squeeze the life out of me or stuff his tongue down my throat. It’s a sweetly intense moment that crackles with the promise of things to come.
Look, there he goes. Gone. And look at me now, closing the door really softly, then bounding off around the apartment like a hyperactive boy with a pogo stick on Christmas morning, when he’s forgotten his medication and had loads of really highly coloured sweets and coke before breakfast.
You can meet my brother later. He’s ten.
So here we are, back to me lying in bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Actually, that’s no good at all, not if I’m expecting to see Nick again tomorrow. My eyes will be all red-rimmed and bloodshot. I won’t need eye-bogeys to make him gag.
I close my eyes. Yes, that is definitely a good idea. So I’m still not sleeping but at least my eyeballs will keep moistened.
Well, seeing as how I’m not going to be getting any sleep anyway, I’ll explain to you how we came to be writhing like eels on my carpet after I’d told Chrissie I wouldn’t go out with him.
You’ll remember that I had agreed to take a look at him? OK. Well, I expected this to be on my terms because it usually is, but Nick Maxwell beat me to it and took me completely by surprise.
Earlier that day, I had been let down by Martin and Mike, the two friends of inconclusive sexuality I mentioned earlier. They bring me a coffee from the machine by the lifts around two o’clock every afternoon – it’s a ritual that’s gone on for the past two or three years. They go right past the vending machines every day on their way back from Data Processing, so it’s not exactly a hardship for them to stop and pick me up a light mochaccino as they pass. And it saves me walking all the way over there myself when I could be on the phones, making sales. After all, as Jean’s always saying, Sales are the pillars that hold up the cathedral of Horizon Holidays. Without Sales, there would be no After Sales, no Data to process, no Personnel to manage, no product to Market. So if those boys in Marketing start to think they’re big and clever, or those pale-faced nerds in DP throw a tantrum about some figures that don’t add up first time, they need to remember just where their jobs start: where ours ends. Sales is like oxygen for Horizon.
Martin and Mike collect the morning’s stats until twelve, then stop for their lunch. They never vary that, always a twelve o’clock break. They’re back from lunch by twelve forty-five, and start collating the stats they collected in the morning. When they’ve finished, they take them down to the light-deprived bods in DP in the basement. The whole trip takes about forty minutes, including the extra couple of minutes it takes for them to get my coffee, so they arrive back at my desk, steaming cup in hand, at two o’clock.
Only this day, 28 July, the day I first laid eyes on Nick Maxwell, the day I accidentally set in motion the cataclysmic chain of events that would change my life utterly and irrevocably, they didn’t. By 2.05 I was getting worried. Well, perhaps worried is a bit strong – I know it’s a long way down to the basement from the third floor but they were grown men and they were together. But I was mystified. They
had never been so much as a minute late before – not for work, for lunch, for meetings, training, coffee. Whatever. They had synchronized their wristwatches with the wall clocks to ensure this. I glanced at the clock repeatedly, checked my own watch, checked the time on my computer screen. They all said different times, but each one was definitely showing after two.
In the end, I switched my turret to ‘B’ for busy, unplugged my headset and stood up. Val who works next to me saw me get up and automatically checked the time, then looked at the door, expecting the punctual pair to appear, but still they didn’t. I could see her looking expectantly at me and I had the strong feeling that she had worked out, by M and M’s non-appearance, where I was off to, and was going to ask me to get her something from the machine while I was there. Her eyebrows were raised meaningfully as she snagged her handbag with her foot and dragged it across the floor towards her, but she couldn’t speak to me directly because she was on a call. I heard her say suddenly, ‘Oh, could you hold the line a moment, my screen’s just gone down’, but by the time she’d looked round, I was out the door. As I entered the corridor from the sales room, I could just hear her voice saying sadly, ‘Oh, no, it’s all right, it’s come back up again.’
I know, I could easily have got her a drink; I’m not lazy or thoughtless. The truth is that she always has hot chocolate, which takes about forty seconds longer to come out of the machine than tea, coffee or soup and those forty seconds are precious to me. It’s all about the sales.
So I’m off up the corridor like Kelly Holmes in a kitten heel, expecting to see M and M heading towards me at any moment, but they’re not in the corridor. They’re not even in the lift that arrives with a ping as I girl-run past it. I stop and wait by the doors for a second, thinking it might still be them arriving, but it’s just a tall man in a dark suit. ‘Good afternoon, then,’ he said to me, smiling broadly and inclining his head slightly towards me. I glanced at him just long enough to know that he didn’t interest me, then hustled on.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ this same guy is saying genially. I ignore him and continue on up the corridor – I’ve had to learn to do that. It doesn’t come naturally to be rude, but quite frankly I haven’t got the time or the brain cells to indulge everyone who wants to talk to me. It’s just self-preservation.
‘See you again!’ he was calling to me as I walked away. Well, he might see me, but I wouldn’t notice.
When I got to the drinks machine, there was a man standing there. He had his back to me, white shirt, sleeves rolled up. Even from a small distance away, and from the rear, I could see he was the sort of man that I did notice. I slowed down my approach – you can’t be sexy while walking fast – and wet my lips as a kind of impromptu lip-gloss. I didn’t have a chance to do much more as he turned suddenly so that I almost walked straight into his chest.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I said, feeling a bit flustered, which is totally unlike me, but I had just caught my first glimpse of those breathtaking baby-blue eyes, and I was floundering. These are the clearest, lightest blue eyes I had ever – have ever – seen, framed with really long, really thick, black eyelashes, and now staring at me intently. I felt penetrated by them. He smiled at me and the edges of his eyes crinkled up slightly.
‘Hello there,’ he says, smiling down on me like the sun.
‘Hi,’ is all I can squeeze out. My mind is a wasteland. Not that I’m renowned for my pithy intellect and witty repartee, but I can usually manage a sexy innuendo on a first encounter.
‘I’m Nick,’ he says, putting out a hand, and all I can think about is what that hand will feel like on my skin.
‘Of course you are,’ I say as my small hand is encircled and engulfed by his. It’s cool but not damp. Strong but not insistent. He doesn’t let go straight away, just presses my fingers gently with his own.
‘What do you mean by that?’ he says, almost laughing. I’ve got completely lost in this conversation and have no recollection at all of what I’ve just said, so can’t even think about explaining it. Come on, brain, get with it. A lone dog barks in there somewhere.
I shrug instead. He buys it. ‘And you’re Rachel Covington,’ he says smoothly.
‘Yes.’ It doesn’t even occur to me to ask him how, or why, he knows that.
‘You work in Sales, don’t you?’ he asks, still pressing my hand in his.
‘Yes, Sales. That’s right.’ Tumbleweed skitters past in the barren desert of my intellect.
‘And you always get a cup of coffee at two o’clock.’
‘Yes.’ I’m standing there like a child looking at Father Christmas. I’m not even concentrating on my posture. At the back of my mind, like someone else’s mobile phone ringing in the distance, is the thought that he seems to know a lot about me, where I work, what time I have coffee. But of course if he was waiting by the vending machine at two o’clock today to meet me, he just got lucky because I wouldn’t usually go down there. Any other day, he would have been standing here holding hands with Mike or Martin.
‘Well, Rachel Covington from Sales, I have been told that I should meet you, and now I have. I’m very glad that I have. Everyone was right about you, what they said.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘Except I couldn’t have imagined you would look like this.’ He looks me up and down blatantly and shakes his head, apparently in wonderment. ‘You’re totally gorgeous.’
I nod and his eyebrows rise. Well, I think false modesty is really unattractive. If I went around saying, ‘Hello, I’m very ugly, nobody look at me,’ people would just assume I was fishing for compliments, or that I was as mad as a bag of curlers.
‘So. They say that Rachel Covington and Nick Maxwell ought to get together.’
‘Do they?’ It came out as a bit of a croak as my voice had totally shut down in order to send vital fluids to other areas.
‘They do. They say that Nick and Rachel could be the Brad and Angelina of Horizon Holidays.’
‘Ah.’
‘Personally, I think they’ve got a very good point and it shouldn’t be ignored.’
‘Plus they’re expecting something now.’ Finally! I’ve found my voice. Nick inclines his head with a smile in a gesture of admiration.
‘You’re so right. We can’t let them down, can we?’
I shake my head. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. They’ve got their hopes built up. We owe it to them.’
‘I agree. Out of consideration for them, I will invite you out after work.’
‘And because I am such a caring, thoughtful person, I will accept.’
I went back to my desk without the coffee. That’s how much he had affected me.
So here I am, the morning after. For the first time ever, I feel like I got lucky last night. Usually, if I decide I like the look of a bloke, it’s all over bar the pouting. No challenge, no sport. For me, anyway. But this Saturday morning, I am floating around my flat with my feet two inches off the floor. Forget cloud nine: I am on cloud nine million.
Oh, look, that’s my cat, Cosmo. Isn’t that a great name? I named him after a magazine. Mum thinks it’s really clever, because it does actually sound like it’s a real name. I’ve had him since he was a little kitten. Cute, isn’t he? I love cats. They don’t need much looking after and they’re so much sexier than guinea pigs. Nothing that has the word ‘pig’ in its name could ever be considered sexy.
This particular morning, I am not feeling all that good physically, not having had much sleep. My mental high is more than making up for that though. Look at my face, grinning away like a loon even while I’m prising those pungent, shiny jellified lumps out of the cat food tin into Cos’s bowl. They stink out the whole flat so I’m opening the French doors.
See that bit of garden through there? It’s mine. That is, it belongs to this flat, so I get exclusive use of it. Cosmo comes and goes through those doors, as you can see. He’s quite familiar with the garden and all its hidden delights. Actually, most of the delights out there have been hidde
n by him, so I tend to stick to the paved area by the doors.
My dilemma on this gorgeous sunny day is this: shall I shower and get dressed straight away, or shall I wait in case Nick phones? It’s warm in here, even with the double doors open and all the glorious sounds and smells of the garden flooding in – glorious except that one, Cos, thanks – so if I get showered and dressed and then he phones, I’ll have to shower and do my hair again, which is a pain. Especially if my hair goes really right first time, and then I have to wash it and start all over.
What I could do is loll around in my PJs for an hour or two, just until he phones, then I’ll get dressed. But what if the postman knocks with a parcel? Am I expecting any parcels? No.
So I make some breakfast and bring it into the living room with a magazine – Elle this morning. This room, the living room, is my favourite room of this whole flat. Well, there’s not much more to it, to be honest: just the bedroom, which you’ve seen; a little shower room, which you don’t need to see; and the kitchen up the back there, which you can see on the other side of the counter. Mum says it’s perfect for a single girl, and I agree. She wasn’t too happy when I told her I was moving out, but she helped in the end. All the walls are quite plain, aren’t they, and I do prefer a bit of colour, but it’s in my tenancy that I can’t paint without the go-ahead from the landlord and I’m not bothered enough by cream everywhere to find out from him if he would approve of my choice in colour. He’s quite attentive, but a bit creepy sometimes, you know? I do wonder whether that’s because of, you know, me being so attractive.
Mum’s pretty good at picking out bright stuff to cheer up a room. I found that old standard lamp in a second-hand shop – I know, you can’t tell, can you? – and Mum bought the red shade to go on it. She says it’s chic. It’s certainly less plain in here with that on. It looked like the red-light district last night, especially with two naked bodies twisting on the floor. Can you see the expression on my face as I’m looking at the bit of carpet where it happened? Looks like my insides are melting over a low flame.
Thanks For Nothing, Nick Maxwell Page 2
