Swept Off Her Stilettos

by Fiona Harper

  Adam frowned. ‘Chatterton-Jones? Isn’t he …? Doesn’t he own that investment company? Eagle something or other?’

  ‘That’s him.’ I could feel myself sinking even deeper into the sofa, but it wasn’t a relaxing kind of feeling. It was as if all the energy was leaching right out of me.

  He whistled. ‘He’s the one that almost played rugby for England, but an injury stopped him.’

  I just wilted a little further, my head bobbing in agreement. I knew every date and event of Nicholas’s personal history, and quite a lot about the previous three generations of the Chatterton-Jones family. Sometimes an internet connection can be a girl’s worst enemy.

  I looked at Adam and took a deep breath. We both knew the game we were about to play. We always did this for each other when one of us was down. Friend A would relay the issue of contention, while Friend B nodded in all the right places and supplied suitably supportive comments, even if those comments were either a) outrageously optimistic or b) patent falsehoods.

  ‘He’s just not attracted to me in the slightest,’ I said mournfully.

  Adam shook his head. ‘What? The guy must be blind!’ He was grinning as he said this, and the cold feeling that had been churning my stomach began to disappear. The truth was that Adam was much better at being Friend B than I was. He always knew exactly the right thing to say to cheer me up, and he always said it with that slightly devilish look in his eye—a sure-fire way to get me to smile. But behind the cheeky look I knew he was also a little bit serious, that despite the jovial nature of our banter he believed in me.

  Told you he was my Best Bud.

  ‘It gets worse,’ I added, almost starting to enjoy moaning about my spectacular flirting flop of the previous Saturday. ‘I made a complete fool of myself.’

  ‘Now, I find that very hard to believe.’ The sarcastic sparkle in Adam’s eyes made me want to hit him. It also made me want to laugh.

  We carried on like that for quite some time. Me relaying a blow-by-blow account of the party and Adam commiserating and commenting with precision and great comic timing. Only the momentary lift from Adam’s sideswipes didn’t improve my mood this time. The more I talked, the more morose I felt. Even Adam seemed to wince slightly with each mortifying detail, and I could tell he was struggling to keep his Friend B smile in place. We both fell quiet, knowing that we were losing our game, not sure that carrying on would salvage anything.

  He gave me a softer, less Adam-like smile, and I leaned across and rested my head on his shoulder. It really was a lovely shoulder. Warm. Comforting. Solid. I wanted to believe things were going to work out right, but in my heart of hearts I just wasn’t sure. It might sound big-headed, but being invisible to a man was a new experience for me. I didn’t like the way it brought back flickers of other memories of being passed over, being invisible. Old memories, ones I’d done everything in my power to erase.

  ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I whispered. Adam was a man. I know he wasn’t the same type of guy as Nicholas, but he had to have some kind of insight. They must have more in common than just shared biology.

  That was it! That was the thing both Adam and Nicholas had in common.

  I sat up and looked at Adam. ‘Why don’t you find me attractive?’

  If I could work that one out, maybe I could find a way to reach Nicholas after all.

  Adam looked stunned. I suppose it wasn’t that surprising. We didn’t ever really talk about the fact that he was a boy and I was a girl. I knew he’d rather veer away from this topic of conversation, but I batted my lashes and gave him a look that said Please.

  He chewed the inside of his mouth for a few moments. ‘I’ve never said I don’t find you attractive, Coreen. A guy would have to be unconscious not to find you attractive.’

  Well, now it was my turn to be stunned.

  Adam gave a one-shouldered shrug. His lazy demeanour had returned and he didn’t look at all bothered by what he’d just said.

  ‘Then why haven’t you …? Why have we never …?’

  ‘Hooked up?’ he suggested.

  I pulled a face. That sounded kind of tacky. Adam wasn’t the sort of guy you ‘hooked up’ with. He was keeper material. And I didn’t like the thought of anyone treating him in such a … disposable manner.

  ‘See? That face you just made is one of many reasons why.’

  I shook my head. He was taking it all the wrong way. The face I’d pulled didn’t mean—

  ‘And I’ve seen the way you treat men, remember? I’ve never jumped through hoops for you and I never will.’

  I gasped. There had never been any hoops! Well … not for Adam.

  He read my mind and fixed me with a knowing stare. ‘How did it go? Oh, yes. I remember …’ He did a rather good impression of my eyelash sweep and added an earthy, softer tone to his voice. If I hadn’t been so horrified I might have admitted it sounded quite a lot like me. “Adam, sweetie, would you mind coming along with me to a party this evening? I know it’s short notice, but I could really do with some moral support.”’

  And then he flicked some pretend hair away from his shoulder, and I forgot to be horrified and descended into giggles. Adam, strangely enough, wasn’t laughing so hard.

  ‘When we got to said party I realised my role was more stooge than moral support.’

  I stopped laughing. ‘That’s not true!’

  He raised his eyebrows at me.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. I’d buried that memory—along with a whole host of others from those days—quite effectively until that moment. It all came back to me with searing clarity: Adam’s face, his jaw set. The way he’d stormed from the party. They weren’t moments in my life I wanted to be reminded of.

  I bit my lip. Something I hoped would show my contrition. Although—and I honestly did out of sheer habit this time—I knew it made me look very appealing too.

  ‘That was a long time ago. Back when we were teenagers. Teenagers do lots of stupid things.’

  ‘Like kissing their best friend in front of the whole room when the current Romeo is being a slightly harder nut to crack?’

  Oh, hell. I’d actually done that too, hadn’t I? Not that I’d planned it, though. I’d just got carried away in the heat of the moment.

  Adam hadn’t spoken to me for a month after Sharon’s party, even though I’d wheedled and whined and pulled every trick in the book to get him to forgive me. In the end I’d just turned up on his doorstep one day—no tricks up my sleeve, not even any make-up on—and begged him to give me another chance, to say we could be friends again. There’d been a huge Adam-shaped hole in my life. One I hadn’t cared for very much. One I hadn’t thought I could go on living with. Its presence had nibbled away at my very soul.

  Adam had forgiven me. Eventually. But since then we’d both tacitly agreed to ignore the boy-girl element to our relationship, and I must have done a pretty good job of it if I’d managed to forget how atrociously I’d behaved.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m such a horrible person. No wonder Nicholas Chatterton-Jones wants nothing to do with me.’ And this time I wasn’t even angling for a compliment. I really meant it.

  Adam pulled me close again and let out a long breath. ‘Don’t be silly. You’re fabulous. You know you are. It’s just that I realised that you won’t let the men in your life be anything but “puppies”, and I’m the sort that refuses to wear a collar and lead for anyone—not even you. So for that reason, and probably a few more, I decided we work better as friends.’ And then he kissed the top of my head.

  One corner of my mouth tried to smile.

  Adam carried on talking, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. ‘I have to warn you … well … I’m sorry to say I don’t think you stand a chance with this one. You’d better find yourself a different puppy to train.’

  Sorry? He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest.

  I sat up and looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’ />
  He hesitated, and I half hoped he would drop it. Adam and I didn’t have conversations like this. But then, instead of looking down at his battered old trainers, he looked me straight in the eye. I held my breath. Just a little.

  ‘Guys like Chatterton-Whatsit … Well, sometime less is more. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘You think I’m too …?’ I trailed off, not quite sure how to label myself.

  ‘Maybe.’

  I frowned. ‘But that’s who I am! Nicholas Chatterton-Jones might be a god, but I’m not changing myself for anybody.’

  Adam looked rather weary. He shook his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that there’s a girl underneath all of—’ he waved his hand to encompass the hairspray, the lipstick, the polka dots ‘—this. Just don’t forget that.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course I brushed the hairspray out and took the lipstick off at night. I knew what I looked like without all of it. It was just that all of this, as Adam had so articulately put it, was how I felt on the inside. I only dressed the outside up to match.

  I scowled at him. It felt as if he was criticising me, and I didn’t care for it much.

  ‘What makes you such an expert at relationships?’ I said sulkily, folding my arms and shifting back to rest against the opposite end of the sofa. ‘You haven’t had a serious girlfriend since Hannah, and that was a good couple of years ago.’

  Adam matched my position, folding his arms across his shirt. ‘I’ve been working hard on building the business up. I haven’t had time for relationships. Unlike some people I know, I don’t think it’s fair to toy with people and then drop them when it suits me.’

  See? This was why we should have never veered into to this territory. It was all getting horribly messy, and the lovely, smiling, joking Adam I knew had totally disappeared. I suspected that I too was being less than my normal charming self, but I wasn’t about to back down, and I wasn’t about to let my Best Bud analyse me further.

  ‘You never did tell me why it all fizzled out with Hannah. Did she get fed up with you spending all your time mucking about in garden sheds?’

  That was below the belt, I knew. But Adam’s role was to make me feel better, not kick me when I was down, so he’d kind of brought it on himself.

  He looked away. ‘My heart just wasn’t in it. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t fair to Hannah to keep pretending.’

  Blast, Adam! Just when I was all revved up for a cat fight, he had to go and get all honest on me and deflate my nice little bubble of adrenaline.

  He looked back at me, an expression in his eyes I hadn’t seen many times before. ‘I hate it when you get like this about my job. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’ve been nothing but supportive of you.’

  Urgh. I felt like an utter heel. He was right. I was taking cheap shots at my best friend just because some guy had had the nerve not to fall instantly at my feet. I was behaving despicably.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I would have gone on, but there was a lump as big as one of my paste brooches in my throat.

  Adam put his hand on top of mine and squeezed. ‘Apology accepted. You’ve really got it bad for this Nicholas guy, haven’t you?’

  He looked slightly pained, as if he was sharing my misery. I nodded, and my whole insides started to ache. I don’t normally do the crying thing. Who has the time when liquid liner and three coats of mascara are involved? But I’d got this stinging sensation right up at the top of my nose and I knew I was perilously close.

  I didn’t know why I liked Nicholas so much. Apart from the obvious looks-like-a-Greek-god, has-piles-of-cash thing. It was more than that. I never usually let guys get to me this way. Adam was right. Normally I was the one pulling all the strings. But there was something about Nicholas that had called out to me right from the start. I had a feeling he might be the elusive cupcake that would assuage my nagging hunger and satisfy all my sweet-toothed desires.

  The stinging got worse. I looked at my shoes. Beautiful red peep-toe creations. But even they made me sad, and I didn’t even really know why.

  Maybe Nan was right. Maybe something was ticking inside me. I was almost thirty, after all. But, seeing as I was … well, me, I was obviously going for the full-fledged meltdown rather than the polite tick-tock in the background of my life. Nan always says I can’t do anything unless I make a production out of it.

  Adam shuffled closer on the sofa, so his arm was touching mine. He leaned down to try and see into my eyes, and nudged me. ‘Coreen …?’

  My bottom lip slid forward. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am too much for Nicholas Chatterton-Jones.’ I shrugged and tipped my head slightly to look at him. ‘It’s a moot point now, anyway. I found out a couple of days ago that Nicholas might be off the market soon. There are rumours about a possible new girlfriend.’

  Adam gave me a lopsided smile. ‘That’s never stopped you before.’

  I punched him on the arm. ‘That makes me sound awful! I’ve never actually stolen a man away from anyone. I can’t help it if they take one look at me and realise I’m the one they can’t live without.’

  Adam pressed his lips together and nodded sagely. ‘That’s what I love about you—your matchless modesty.’

  I punched him again. And then I smiled. How did he do that?

  He put up his fists and nudged me on the shoulder with one of them. ‘So? Who’s this girlfriend? Do you think you can take her?’

  I swatted his hand away, but he kept jabbing me gently on the upper arm, the way boxers did when they warmed up with one of those swinging punch bags.

  ‘I’m going to take you down in a minute, if you don’t cut that out!’ I said, laughing.

  The devilish twinkle was back. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said.

  ‘It’s that awful Louisa Fanshawe,’ I said, not rising to the bait. And if we were talking fisticuffs, I probably could take her. She was another one of those willowy sorts who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk breaking a nail on her, though, so she was safe on that count.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard how awful she is,’ Adam replied. ‘All that charity work … visiting sick children in hospital and campaigning for the homeless. It’s positively disgusting.’

  I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. He was supposed to be on my side, so why was he practically bouncing up and down? What had he to be so happy about? I decided to direct my ire at the absent Louisa.

  ‘When she’s not swanning up and down a catwalk for some pretentious designer,’ I pointed out.

  I thought about Louisa Fanshawe and her stick-like limbs and big doleful eyes. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but I’d allow for the fact she was striking—in that understated, slightly duck-faced way some high fashion models were. The women on Nicholas’s arm always looked frighteningly similar. Duck-faced and stick-thin was obviously his type.

  I sighed again. Louisa was the less Adam had been talking about. I looked down at my chest. Less wasn’t something I had a lot of. I was doomed.

  I was about to point this out to Adam, but when I looked up at him he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the last of the prawn toasts. I think he felt me looking at him, because he offered me the foil tray. I shook my head. ‘You have it.’

  He demolished it in one bite, and then turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘Like I said …’ The seriousness there made my pulse kick. ‘The guy’s an idiot.’

  I felt a smile start somewhere deep in my chest and work its way up to my mouth. ‘I love you, Best Bud,’ I said, and wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close.

  For a long time he was silent and he just held me, soothing me with the rhythmic warmth of his breath on my neck. Then the inhaling and exhaling stopped. Seconds and seconds seemed to drag past before it started again, and when the next breath came there were words floating on it.

  ‘It’s hard not to,’ he whispered into my neck.

  And then I hi
t him again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Very Thought of You

  Coreen’s Confessions

  No.3—You’d think that someone as vain as I am would enjoy looking in the mirror, but sometimes I just can’t face it.

  I CONTINUED to mope around for the next few days, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe Nan was right about something ticking inside me.

  Of course I didn’t tell Nan that I might be on the verge of getting serious with someone when I visited her the following Sunday. She’d have had me up at the church to book a date so fast my head would’ve spun. Baby steps. Just thinking about being with one man for a considerable chunk of time was about as far as I wanted to go at present.

  No, when I visited Nan we did what we always did—ate roast dinner, drank tea, and planed to watch an old black-and-white movie on the telly. After lunch I observed a further ritual. I went into the spare bedroom, opened the rickety wardrobe, and looked at all the dresses hanging there in their clear plastic covers.

  They had been my mother’s. She’d died about ten years earlier, in a shabby little bed and breakfast in Blackpool, killed silently, invisibly and senselessly by a faulty boiler spurting carbon monoxide. And when she hadn’t turned up to go on stage that night at the club they’d just slotted another singer into the bill and carried on. It shouldn’t be that easy to replace someone, should it? People ought be remembered for their unique qualities, even if the choices they made in life weren’t ones you respected, or even understood.

  As I did most weeks, I pulled out just one of Mum’s stage dresses and studied it more closely. This one was all shoulder pads and sequins, probably from around the time she’d met my dad. I could imagine Mum, her big Joan Collins-style hair stiff with half a can of hairspray, singing a soft rock ballad into a microphone, her eyes closed and her heart on her sleeve. She’d had a lovely voice. I had a few cassette tapes at home, but I didn’t play them much—too scared they’d warp or wear out.