Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Past tense Will,” I continued, stubbornly. “Something you need to get off your chest?”

  The back of Will’s neck was turning redder and redder, a sure sign that he was angry, or embarrassed. Perhaps both.

  “Will...”

  “Forget it,” Will said quietly, “just...forget it, Annie.”

  And there it was. By some freak accident of cosmology, numerology and blind luck, Yvonne had actually got something right.

  I had no idea what to do, and, because Will wasn’t looking at me, I had the sudden urge to back out of the kitchen and never return. I could find another job, change my address, throw away my mobile phone and never talk to Will again. My new name would be Anita, and I’d waitress on the Riviera.

  I quashed the impulse to flee. Will was my best friend. That wasn’t about to change because of...whatever this was.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He sighed and slapped down his spatula. “You didn’t want to know.”

  “And how did you divine that, Confucius?”

  Will turned around to look at me. “You were with Stephen, and then you weren’t and you were heartbroken...so, I was waiting.”

  “What were you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know! An opportunity, a bloody sign.”

  “You’ve had five years!”

  “I know, I know...but, I didn’t want you to tell me I had no chance, and then never speak to me again.”

  “I wouldn’t have.”

  There was total silence for a moment.

  “You tell me this now?” Will said exasperatedly.

  I couldn’t suppress a smile.

  “Annie...” Will started.

  “No, Will.”

  He exhaled sharply. “Right, the husband.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m really sorry Annie. I shouldn’t have...”

  “How long?”

  Will’s eyes, which had been locked on the floor, flicked up to mine.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Before the wedding? Before Stephen proposed?”

  “Before Stephen met you.”

  I blinked, taken aback. “What?”

  “Around the third time I saw you, after we moved into halls. You were locked out at midnight, and I came up to the kitchen and found you...”

  “Doing all the word searches on people’s cereal boxes, in my pyjamas,” I smiled as I remembered, “you let me sleep in your bed.”

  “I thought you were hot.”

  “I thought you were a rapist,” I recalled, “I changed my mind when you brought me a cup of tea the next morning...and when I woke up unmolested, obviously.”

  We stood there, looking at each other. Water started to sing along to the God awful music in the headphones. Will shot a death glare in the direction of the sink, which Water didn’t notice.

  “Since then?” I said, finally.

  “Yeah...I think so.”

  “You know, I had a massive crush on you.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No I’ m not. When you got the Mohawk, in what? The second week? I got it bad. You were so sexy, with all your hipster bowling shirts and that pink mini you wore for Halloween.”

  “Urgh, I was such a fresher.”

  “But I loved you anyway,” I said, only it didn’t come out as jokingly as I’d intended.

  “Missed fucking chances, eh?” Will said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Christ.”

  “Will? What about the wedding?”

  “I know, you’re married. I’ll back off. I can keep quiet. Clearly.”

  “No, my wedding to Stephen, when you...”

  “You mean when you kissed me?”

  “When you kissed me back.”

  “It was...a really weird day...I didn’t know if you meant it.”

  “I still don’t know...I felt bad, and you were there, doing that lip thing.”

  “I have a lip thing?”

  I instantly felt embarrassed. “When you lick your top lip really fast.”

  Will frowned. “That’s a thing?”

  “I always thought it was cute. Actually, less cute and more knicker-droppingly sexy.”

  Will looked rather chuffed.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” I said, “I’m married. Married as of last week, more to the point. Why is this coming out now?” I glared at him. “Is that it? You’re jealous of Dorian?”

  “Of course I am,” Will says, looking at me like I was thick for having taken this long to see it. “He’s rich, he lives in New York...and he’s just married the gorgeous, perfect woman I’ve been desperate to ask out for almost eight years.”

  “Don’t say stuff like that,” I warned him, because there’s a fluttery thing under my heart that really likes it when Will says things like that to me. Three weeks before I met Dorian, he’d told me that my fizzy Orangina sponge had a ‘nice crumb’ and I’d carried that compliment around with me like a gold trophy as tall as my waist.

  “I mean it,” Will said softly, taking a step towards me, “I wish...if there was any way I could go back to that morning, hand you that cup of tea and say ‘I think you’re beautiful, let’s go for a drink some time’ I would.”

  “I’d have thought you were lying.”

  Will shook his head. “It’s true. And it’s not just that, you’re funny, you put up with me, and...just, everything. You like CSI more than NCIS. You hate white wine unless you’re drunk, but you love Bucks Fizz AND you love Bucks Fizz, as in the awful band, you always have thirds of apple crumble, and...you’re just...Annie.”

  I have no idea which of us moved first.

  Honestly. Future generations will argue over it, like the age old question of ‘who shot first, Han Solo or Greedo?’ Scholars will meet under concrete cyber trees to debate whether Will kissed me, or whether I reached for him first.

  However it happened, we were kissing, and not like the sweet, electric kiss we’d shared five years ago. This was fast, and desperate and powerful. Will lifted me, and I ended up with my arse on the kitchen counter, the handle of a spatula jammed under my rear, and Will between my legs, pressed against me. I grabbed at his back, which was surprisingly strong (clearly he’d been using the Rachel Stevens workout tape I’d given him for Christmas) and his hands ran over me, never seeming to be able to decide which part of me they wanted to grope the most. Water began to warble Cancer by My Chemical Romance in a weird falsetto, and Will licked into my mouth with a groan.

  I slid my hands down to cup Will’s bum, and he disengaged from my mouth to kiss my neck (which always gives me the shivers, anything neck related and I’m just gone) I realised that I was panting, just as Will pressed more firmly against me and I felt his erection pushing out through his jeans and apron (I was fairly certain from the feel of things that first year me’s imaginings had been spot on).

  Our mouths met again, clumsy and desperate. Water held up a ladle and started humming the intro to Eye of the Tiger.

  I pushed Will away.

  It was as sudden as the kiss had been, but in that moment I remembered Dorian, and the vows that I’d said only a week previously. Vegas vows, but vows all the same.

  Dorian had been put through the ringer by two fiancées already. Was I really going to be the third woman to break his heart?

  I knew then that I couldn’t do it.

  Will stood a foot away from me, his eyes confused, his lips slightly swollen.

  “Annie?”

  “I can’t do this to him.”

  Will looked caught between rejection and anger.

  “Annie, you don’t even know him.”

  “But I married him. I can’t just decide I want...”

  “Me?” Will finished for me. “But you do, don’t you?”

  He looked so unsure, as confused as I felt, and I wanted so badly to touch his face and kiss him, telling him that I’d wanted him for years. I wanted to take him upstairs to his flat
and make made, passionate love to him on his Fuck Off, It’s Early duvet cover.

  But I couldn’t.

  We’d missed our chance. I was married, and we were both going to have to let this go. If we could.

  “Will, this is...”

  “Take the rest of the week off,” Will said, seeing me waver in indecision. “Just, think about it Annie, please?”

  “I will,” I said, suddenly desperate to get away from Will, from his fantastic arse and permanent burnt sugar and toast smell. I needed to get some advice from anything that was not my raging hormones. Time to make my legs stop shaking and be rational again.

  Chapter Nine

  I ducked out of the kitchen and grabbed my bag from under the counter. I was out of the café and onto the street, walking fast in the direction of BHS before I could even decide where I wanted to go.

  Yvonne would be able to advise me. It was her who’d caused this mess by telling me about Will (OK, so I didn’t really believe that, but being angry was better than feeling the world crush around me like a balled up bit of paper).

  The streets were crowded with shoppers, even though it was about four in the afternoon, and a Monday. I felt as if each and every one of them was looking at me, able to see the creases in my shirt, the pinkness of my cheeks, and the plumpness of my lips, and deduce that I was an adulterer.

  I turned the corner by Costa and almost ran into a guy in an apron, handing out free samples. He asked me if I wanted one, then asked again when I brushed past him. I was in emotional distress, why the hell would I want a mocha-chai-carrot cake-latte? Was it magic?

  I headed down the street towards BHS. Yvonne was working, but I knew she always saved a ciggy break for mid afternoon. True to form, once I’d cut through the shop, past the pastel coloured ‘spring jeans’ display and out through the lingerie department to the rear doors, I found Yvonne. She was sitting on the concrete step outside, where there had once been a wooden seat, holding a cigarette. Despite her most recent attempt to quit, Yvonne saw no reason to give up her smoking breaks, so she still went outside to commune with her unlit fag. Next to her was a copy of Heat covered in pastry crumbs.

  “Someone’s nicked the bench. Bastards,” she said, waving the cigarette for emphasis, “and there’s still no news on whether Beiber got that girl pregnant.”

  “I just almost shagged Will,” I blurted.

  “Almost?”

  “We kissed, a lot, and there was groping. Oh my God the groping,” I practically wailed.

  Yvonne looked at me for a second, then chucked her copy of Heat into a nearby bin. “Come and tell Auntie Von all the gossip,” she coaxed, patting the step beside her, “what did he do? Back you up into the pantry and snog you against the sugar-free jams?”

  I sat down with a sigh. “He wanted to buy me a dress, and I told him, no.”

  “So...the face sucking was to cheer him up?”

  “No...we had a fight, and...I don’t know how it happened.”

  Yvonne actually looked impressed. “Angry make-outs are hot.”

  “I can’t hear that right now,” I groaned.

  “Why, you still want to go back and do it under the coffee machine?”

  I shuddered, Will hadn’t cleaned under the coffee machine since it had been installed. The dust had probably unionised. The teaspoons I occasionally lost down the back of the counter were probably being worshipped as the shiny saviours of the dust folk.

  But, yes, provided a clean corner of the floor could be found (and if my legs, bikini line and single, befurred toe could be magically waxed to perfection in the next five seconds) I would gladly run back to Raspberry Bs and present myself as ‘ready for the having of sex’. I had a sudden nanosecond long day dream of me and Will, hard at it on the café table.

  (Daydream-Me had been working out. Or she’d had some cheeky liposuction, it’s not like she couldn’t afford it, she was a famous artist. Daydream-Will had some interesting new tattoos, and both of them looked very-)

  “Annie?”

  I snapped back to reality, the tips of my ears burning. “Yup?”

  “Were you fantasising? About Will, and his...bits?”

  “No,” I said, my ears now feeling like scalding microwave pizzas jammed under my hair.

  “Urg!” Yvonne bellowed, startling a flock of fat pigeons from their perches on The Little Theatre Cinema opposite. They landed near us and set up a throaty hooting, obviously under the impression that we had food.

  “Shut up!” I snapped, at both Yvonne, and the pigeons.

  “No, God, Urg! How could, urg! Oh ick! It’s Will, he’s-” Yvonne clawed at the air and screwed up her face as if fending off an invisible snot-monster with acne and a club foot made of supermarket own-brand ham.

  “What? What’s wrong with him?” I asked hotly.

  “He’s just...weird. With the hair, and the pink mascara, and that little lycra mini...”

  “That was for Halloween! He wears it every year. Besides...he’s got nice legs.”

  “Oh does he now?”

  “Yes as a matter of fact, and his bum’s all firm and...tight. I think he’s been using that tape I got him. Told you it was a good present.”

  “It has kind of been your undoing though hasn’t it? Getting Will’s arse all pretty just so you can gawp at it.”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me.”

  “You’d really do him? Like actually...do it, shag Will?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know! You tell me. Tell me what to do Von please. I’m just messing everything up.”

  “Well...if you want to shag him...shag him.”

  I was starting to think that Yvonne was not the best person to counsel me through this particular crisis.

  “I’m married,” I reminded her.

  “And do you think this Dorian guy is shagworthy?”

  “I have slept with him.”

  “But is he hotter than Will?”

  And wasn’t that the fifty-bazillion-pound question? OK, both Will and Dorian were gorgeous in their own rights, and when I’d slept with Dorian it had been...at least the second best shag of my life (First place went to Daniel Ingress, backstage at a school production of The Wind in the Willows when I was sixteen. I was playing Badger, and he was Weasel Number Four, it added a Romeo and Juliet element to the thing, which was otherwise only a fairly OK fumble against an MDF tree, during which his gingery tail got wrapped around my leg, and I somehow acquired his weasel fangs). Dorian was a nice guy, and he’d treated me really well, and the sex had been good, I was looking forward to a repeat performance, or at least, I had been, until about half an hour ago.

  The thing was, Dorian had given me the Pride and Prejudice treatment (minus all that supposedly enticing and exciting rudeness) and Will had gone straight for Lady Chatterley’s Lover (minus the dodgyness of Sean Bean in his gamekeeper gear). All I’d wanted was to get married and spend the rest of my life taking care of someone, and being taken care of in return. But Will had me wanting to whip off my wedding ring (and my knickers) and throw away what I had started with Dorian.

  Will, and the reaction he’d caused in me were dangerous. I couldn’t risk it infecting me, like summer heat, making me throw caution (and, yes, also my knickers) to the wind. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t do to anyone what Stephen had done to me. I would never break someone’s heart.

  Dorian was older than me, kind, generous and honest. For all that Will was my friend, I knew that this fizzy-stomached, weak-kneed feeling wasn’t something that would end in marriage, or anything resembling an adult, sophisticated relationship. I was too old for a quick shag on Will’s futon, followed by a roll-up and a half can of Fosters.

  We weren’t in university anymore.

  “I’m not going to sleep with Will,” I said.

  Yvonne, who had been consulting the Rorschach splotches of her chipped nail polish, looked up at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”


  “Well then, you can’t go back to the café.”

  “He gave me the week off.”

  “I mean ever,” Yvonne said, “it’d be like getting a gastric band and going to work in a chippy. One bite’ll make you sick, but you’ll do it. Temptation, it’s a bitch.”

  “So I’ll find a new job, Will’ll understand.”

  “When you tell him what?”

  “That I can’t be around him.”

  “He’ll take that really well,” Yvonne said, her voice dripping with so much gooey sarcasm I was worried it would attract a flock of hungry pigeons.

  “What do you suggest then?”

  “Go and live with Dorian.”

  “...what?”

  “When you see him next, tell him that you want to move in with him, start this marriage off properly.”

  “This is great, I come to you for advice once in our entire friendship, and suddenly you want me out of the country. Cheers Von, it’s really been worth it. ”

  “Of course I don’t want you gone, but come on Annie, this is a whole new start for you. Why not try it in a different country? New man, new city.”

  “But...Will’s been my best friend for eight years. I can’t just leave him.”

  “If you stay, you’re both just going to ruin things,” Yvonne said with uncharacteristic empathy, “who knows, maybe in a few months you can start talking to him again, then you’ll meet up and it’ll all be fine. Just, give each other some space to get over this...thing you’ve been harbouring.”

  “That’s...oddly sage advice, coming from you.”

  “Yeah well, I’ve stopped getting my agony aunt tips from Nuts.”

  “Why would you even...”

  “There’s always a copy lying around the break room, and it helps me to suss out what the average nineteen-year-old is looking for in a woman.”

  “Isn’t that just big tits, and a face like a startled mallard’s?”

  “Apparently 2012 is ‘The Year of the Arse’,” Yvonne said with a shrug.

  I pushed that information away before it took up valuable memory space. “So where are you getting your advice from now?”

  “The Mail...it’s not necessarily better, and it makes me angry. But I think my neighbour’s writing in every other week about her hairy back and the fact she’s having it off with the guy at the corner shop, with the glass eye, which is quite amusing.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m five minutes late getting back, Neil’s going to go spare.”