The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down
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The Truth About
Gemma Grey
SOPHIE RANALD
Copyright © Sophie Ranald 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A NOTE TO MY READERS...
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
Hi everyone!
So this morning I’m going to do a business make-up look. I know, it’s not the most exciting thing ever, is it? But then, job-hunting isn’t either, as you’ll know if you’ve been watching this channel over the past few months. And if you’re here because you’ve got a job interview coming up too, I hope it goes really, really well for you.
The whole corporate thing – well, it’s not that corporate really, because that’s just not me, but it’s kind of low-key. Polished. Professional! That’s it, professional. It’s a look I’ve had to master over the past few months, because I’ve been going to a lot of interviews. A lot. I think today will be, like, the twentieth one. But it’s all good experience, right?
And one thing I’ve learned along the way is that when you’re attending interviews – or any business meeting, really – you need to look the part. What do they say? Dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got. Or, to put it another way, fake it till you make it. And the same goes for make-up. I suppose if you were interviewing to be, I don’t know, a receptionist at a modelling agency or something, you could be a bit more out there with your whole look, but for most jobs, you just want to look like someone they want to employ, and that means keeping things a bit subtle. You want them to go, “That’s the girl with the amazing CV”, not “That’s the girl with the amazing blending skills”. But at the same time, you want your make-up to last. Turning up for an interview with your nose all shiny and your mascara smudged is not a good look. Trust me, I know, because I’ve done it!
But that’s enough waffling from me. I’m literally just going to show you what I do. Hopefully this look is going to work for me – I’m using my lucky Charlotte Tilbury lipstick that Jack bought me for Christmas – so keep your fingers crossed for me. And speaking of fingers, don’t forget to give this video a thumbs up if you like it, and if you work this look for a job interview or an important meeting, let me know how you get on.
So, I’m going to start by applying my foundation…
“I’d like a bottle of Prosecco please,” I said, when I eventually managed to fight my way through the throng around the bar and catch the barman’s eye. “And two glasses.”
It was all I could do not to say, “We’re celebrating! I’ve got a job!” But I managed to stop myself, just like I’d managed to resist telling the guy in Pret when I bought a chicken sandwich, and the carriage full of people jammed in like sardines on the train, and the Big Issue seller when I bought my magazine, like I did every Friday. Although, come to think of it, it was just as well I hadn’t told him. Crowing about my new gainful employment to someone who didn’t even have a home would have been a massive dick move.
I’d told everyone else, though – well, everyone there was. I’d texted Mum. I’d texted Katie, Shivvy, Nancy and Olivia. I would have texted Stanley, only he’s not great with technology, being a teddy bear.
And now it was time to tell Jack.
It was a Friday evening and the bar was packed with groups of office workers pouring pints of beer and glasses of wine down their necks as fast as they could, celebrating the end of the working week. It was the end of the month, too – payday, I guessed, because lots of the women had glossy carrier bags from Oasis and Whistles slung over the backs of their chairs. Soon that would be me, I thought, resisting the urge to skip with excitement.
Where the hell was Jack? I craned my neck, searching for him, glad for once of my height and the additional three inches lent to me by my smartest shoes. Finally, I spotted him at a table in the corner, his back to me, a pint of Guinness in front of him.
I just hurried over, clutching the sweating ice bucket to my chest.
“I got it! I got the job!”
“No way! That’s brilliant, Gem, you must be really proud.”
Jack stood up and hugged me, even though my top was damp from the ice bucket. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him. He tasted of beer and a bit of cheese and onion crisps – the empty packet was on the table next to his glass.
“Have you been waiting ages? My train was cancelled so I had to wait for the next one and then there were no seats. It was grim.”
“Not that long,” Jack said. “So – tell me about the interview. Was this the advertising agency one?”
“No, doofus, that was yesterday.” To be fair to Jack, I’d been for so many job interviews in the past eighteen months I’d almost lost track of them myself. Endless tweaking of my CV and my LinkedIn profile. Endless train journeys to London, expensive and fruitless. Endless emails starting, We regret that on this occasion… But it had all been worth it, because now, finally, I’d been given a chance.
“It’s Clickfrenzy,” I said. “You know – ‘Winning the internet since 2010’? Their stories come up on Facebook all the time. I’m officially a junior writer. I start on the fifteenth. Just wait until you see their office – it’s so incredibly cool. There’s a popcorn machine and a coffee machine and a games room and it’s right off Oxford Street.”
“It sounds amazing,” Jack said, easing the cork out of the bottle of Prosecco and carefully filling a glass for me.
“It is amazing!” I said. “Aren’t you having any?”
“Maybe in a bit,” Jack said, taking another sip of stout. “I’ve still got this. Anyway, cheers. Congratulations.”
“I actually still can’t believe it. My boss – how weird does it feel saying that? – Sarah, she’s the MD, interviewed me, and I thought she’d do the usual thing of being like, ‘We’ll be in touch (not).’ But she offered me the job straight away. She said they’re growing so fast the challenge is getting talented people on board. She thinks I’m talented! I told her about my YouTube channel and made out like I was some social content guru, and I guess she must have believed me. She’s super scary, though. Scary Sarah.”
Jack didn’t laugh. He was lo
oking kind of thoughtful, staring down into his glass.
I said, “Look, I know this is huge. And it’s kind of sudden – I was beginning to think it was never going to happen, and I’d have to carry on living with Mum and working in the bloody pub forever. But now it has – and it changes things for you, too, I guess.”
“Does it?” Jack said.
I said, “Of course! It means I can finally move out of Mum’s, and we can… you know. We can get on with life.”
I didn’t say it, but I knew he knew what I meant. We can move in together. I can stop living out of a bag when I stay over at your flat. We can have a place of our own. We can move our relationship on to the next level, the way it’s supposed to happen.
I said, “I was looking at flats online, on the train home. We couldn’t afford a place of our own, I don’t think. But we could get a room somewhere together, easily. Somewhere with cool bars and shops and stuff. Somewhere like…”
I paused, thinking of the vastness of London. I didn’t really know where. But I could picture it in my head: a sunny bedroom, maybe somewhere high up, with a view of the Thames. Or maybe not – I knew next to nothing about London but I was pretty sure that views over the Thames didn’t fall within our budget. With a balcony, then, where we could have coffee and croissants on weekend mornings, before strolling hand-in-hand through cobbled streets, stopping at market stalls to buy bunches of tulips and cool vintage things, like people did in vlogs on YouTube. And I could film myself doing those things for my own vlog, which might mean I’d get some more viewers, because, as I had discovered, me putting on make-up for unsuccessful job interviews, serving pints in the Mason’s Arms and trying not to have too many rows with my mother didn’t exactly make for compelling content.
And Jack – Jack was surely ready to move on with life, too. To be honest, I’d found it – not frustrating exactly, but almost mystifying that Jack, to whom everything seemed to come so easily, didn’t do more to make things happen. He’d gone straight from university to living in a flat his parents had bought as an investment and working for the software development company his dad owned, where he spent his days doing things to do with C++ and SQL and other stuff that made me glaze over a bit whenever he talked about it. If it was that boring to hear about, I sometimes thought, how boring must it be to actually do? But whenever he complained about it and I suggested that he could make a change, do something he was passionate about, he just said, “Yeah, maybe,” and changed the subject. And because, after all, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire career-wise myself, I hadn’t pushed the issue.
Jack said, “Gemma. I handed in my notice at work today.”
“You did? That’s great. And how incredible that you did it on the same day I got this job! It’s almost like you knew, or fate knew, or something. Now we can really…”
Then I stopped. I knew, right then, that I wasn’t going to like what he was going to say. I wanted him to stop, but I knew I had to hear it.
I took a big gulp of my drink. It had gone a bit warm and flat while we were talking, and it tasted sour and not like a celebration at all.
I said, “Have you found something else, then? Or are you just going to take a break for a bit?”
Jack said, “I guess I’m going to take a break for a bit. If you want to put it like that.”
I said, “A break to do what, exactly?”
Jack said, “I want to go travelling. I want to see a bit of the world, before I settle down.”
Before I settle down, I noticed. Not before we settle down.
“Travelling where?” I said.
“Everywhere,” he said. “I want to go to Dubai and see the tallest building in the world. I want to go to Thailand – I might try and find work in a diving school there. Then maybe India, Australia, Peru – I want to hike the Inca trail. And New Orleans, obviously. And New York.”
“But you never said anything,” I said. My voice sounded a bit wobbly, and even more squeaky than usual. “You must have been thinking about this for ages.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “Obviously. Yeah, I guess I’ve been planning it. But I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to tell you until I was.”
Then I heard my voice say the obvious thing – the stupid, inevitable thing. “But what about us?”
Jack said, “I love you, Gemma, you know I do. But I’m not ready for all the settling-down shit. I can’t go and work every day in some fucking boring job I hate and save for a deposit and then save for a wedding and then have kids. I can’t. I’m twenty-four. I’ve done fuck all with my life and now you want me to do all that and it just feels like more of fuck all.”
I said, “I never asked you to do any of that stuff! I didn’t!”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Jack said. “But I know it’s what you want. Come on, Gemma, I’ve seen your Pinterest boards.”
“What about my Pinterest boards?” I said. “So? I post recipes on them – it’s not like I’m ever going to cook any of them. And pictures of what I’d like my living room to look like if I had a house that cost a million pounds, which is never going to happen, obviously. And I post… What were you doing looking at my Pinterest, anyway?”
“Wedding dresses,” Jack said. “You had it open on your iPad, I couldn’t help seeing them.”
I said, “Look, all girls look at wedding dresses. It’s theoretical. It doesn’t mean anything. Not like buying a flight to the other side of the flipping world means something!”
I glared at him and he glared back. I could feel the row waiting to happen – if it hadn’t already started – and our evening, which had got off to a pretty awful start, being irretrievably ruined. But then, I thought, if it was all over between us, what did it matter anyway?
I said, “How long were you – are you – going to go for, anyway?”
Jack said, “Six months, probably. Maybe a year. I’m not sure. But I’ll come back, Gemma. I want to be with you. I really, really do. I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment just yet.”
It was the straw I needed to clutch at – the promise that, even if he was on the other side of the planet, he’d still be my boyfriend. Call me a mug, but I grasped it.
“Do you really mean that?” I said. “What, like we’ll still be together, even though you aren’t here?”
Jack said, “Of course we will. I’ll FaceTime you every day. It’ll be almost like you’re there. I want you to feel like you’re having this adventure with me. I just wish you could be there in real life.”
For a second, I thought, Maybe I actually could. Maybe I could email Sarah and tell her I couldn’t accept the job after all, or ask her if I could apply again in six months. But then I remembered the long, depressing months of unpaid internships that were meant to teach me valuable skills and actually taught me how to make tea and call endless lists of telephone numbers to check that they were correct. I remembered the triumph and relief I’d felt when Sarah said, “We’d like you to start as soon as possible.” And I remembered that I could barely afford a train ticket to London; I certainly couldn’t afford a round-the-world flight, and Mum couldn’t afford to treat me to one and then pay for places for me to sleep and food for me to eat and everything else I’d need for six whole self-indulgent months. Or maybe a year.
I felt the familiar sense of injustice, of resentment, of there being something horribly unfair about a world where everything was so easy for some people and so difficult for me. Then I remembered the Big Issue seller, and sternly reminded myself, as I did so often (and Mum did even more often), that in the grand scheme of things, I had absolutely nothing to moan about. But still, I couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be to have rich parents like Jack did. Like Olivia did.
Then a horrible idea occurred to me, and as soon as it did, I knew that it was right.
I said, “Won’t it be a bit… a bit shit, travelling on your own? Lonely?”
Jack said, “I’m not going on my own, Gemma. I’m
going with Olivia.”
“Of course you are,” I said. I sounded angry, for the first time since he’d dropped his bombshell, and bitter, but I didn’t care.
From the first day I met Jack, Olivia had been a constant presence. She was even there when I met him, having dinner with him in Lucio’s, where I was working as a waitress during the summer holidays after my second year of uni (I was ignominiously sacked shortly after for throwing a bowl of minestrone soup over the chef when he pinched my bottom one time too many, which was totally worth it).
I assumed they were a couple – of course I did, the handsome, stocky man and the willowy blonde girl chatting and laughing together. So, when Jack lingered after he’d paid the bill and asked for my number, I said, “Fuck off, you’ve got a girlfriend.”
And Jack had said, “That’s not my girlfriend! That’s Olivia.”
And it was true – she wasn’t his girlfriend and never had been. In some ways, it would have been better if she was. Because Jack wasn’t just Jack; he was half of Jack and Olivia, bound to another girl by the ties of a friendship that had lasted since they were – well, basically forever.
Their birthdays were three days apart. Olivia’s parents and Jack’s parents lived next door to each other. They’d gone to the same baby music classes and the same riding school and been babysat together while their parents went out for dinner together. They’d even been on holiday together, for God’s sake. And instead of hating each other, like most kids would surely have done with such close proximity imposed on them, they’d stayed best friends throughout their childhood, and when Jack and I started going out, they were best friends still.
Of course, when the closeness of their friendship became clear to me, I’d felt threatened. But Jack had laughed when I asked him if he and Olivia had ever… you know… had they? He’d said kissing Olivia would be like kissing his sister, if he had one. He’d said he couldn’t imagine anything weirder or more wrong – and besides, he said, they didn’t fancy each other. Not in the slightest, not even a tiny bit.