About a Girl (17 page)

Putting pen to paper, I scribbled down some more words. Assertive. Bold. Fickle. Sexy. Carefree. Un-self-conscious. Proud. Adventurous. Exciting. Confident. Basically, Vanessa was all the things I wasn’t. I noticed the Vanessa column was a lot longer than the Tess column. And a lot more interesting.

With all my keywords written down, I moved on to the next part of my rebrand. My visual message. After several deep breaths, I locked myself in the bathroom and stripped off. OK. It wasn’t so bad. I’d definitely seen worse on
Embarrassing Bodies
. Clearly I’d spent considerably more hours sitting on my arse than hammering the treadmill, but I was only twenty-eight, I’d mostly stayed off the pies, and gravity hadn’t been too cruel a mistress. My ridiculous boobs balanced out my slightly too big arse, and my middle wasn’t squishy to the point of offence. I could wear a bikini and get away with it if I tried not to slouch and breathed in. All the time. And no one really had arms like Jennifer Aniston, did they? Like most things in life, it was all about finding the right angle.

I untangled my plait and fingered my hair into loose, frizzy waves. With the right amount of Frizz Ease, this could be managed. Or maybe I could cut it all off and dye it blonde. Or shave my head. It had worked for Miley Cyrus. Not so much Britney. Maybe just a trim. But something was still missing? Vanessa still had something I didn’t, aside from a gap between her thighs. I was missing an attitude, confidence. Vanessa just didn’t give a shit.

Grabbing either side of the sink, I leaned in towards the mirror and stared myself in the big, brown, bloodshot eye.

‘You don’t give a shit,’ I told myself. I didn’t look convinced. I mostly looked a bit cold. The AC was on very, very high. ‘You are brave and bold and you get what you want out of life.’

I’d always been very, very good at selling my campaigns to clients, even when I thought they were ludicrous. The trick was to find a way to believe it, to find the truth in what you were saying and selling. But where was my truth? Retying my bikini, I dashed back out into the kitchen to look for my phone. I needed to call Amy. Amy would know how to make this make sense. The front door was still wide open and the warm breeze was so much more tempting than the frigid air-con that I padded outside while pulling up her number.

‘Working hard?’

Across the way, Nick was sitting outside his cottage, laptop set up under a huge white cotton parasol on a white wooden table. The upkeep on all this white paint must be insane. I made a mental note to ask Kekipi about it. And then immediately erased that note. That was a Tess note. I was not Tess. I was Vanessa.

‘And what would Vanessa do?’ I whispered under my breath.

Phone in hand, number undialled, I marched over to Nick, barefoot and wearing nothing but my striped bikini. I could not think about what I was about to do or it would never happen. Nick rose as I approached, looking as annoyingly bemused and irritatingly handsome as he had at dinner. Pushing my hair back from my forehead, I stopped dead, right in front of him. At five nine in bare feet, I was almost eye to eye with him. I figured he couldn’t be more than five eleven, maybe even five ten if he wasn’t wearing shoes. But this was not the time to take in his choice of footwear. This was the time to take in his golden skin, his ashy-blond hair and his grey-blue eyes.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

Without saying anything, I grabbed him by the collar of his pale blue shirt and pulled his face down to meet mine. The kiss was an explosion. As soon as I felt his scratchy stubble against my tender, sunburned skin and his full, firm lips pressing against mine, I was lost. I pulled him closer, kissed him harder until I forgot to breathe. Nick recovered from his surprise like a pro, and before I’d even closed my eyes, his hands were sliding around my back, down my spine. His skin was hot on my air-con-cool body and while my bikini might have afforded me ample support in the boob department, according to the warm hands currently cupping my backside, the bottoms were much skimpier than I remembered. Suddenly, the shock of physical contact was too much. Just as Nick’s hands began to move up and around my body, I pushed him away, pressing the back of my hand against my bruised lips.

Nick stared at me like I’d slapped him round the face. I stared back as though I might.

‘So I can help you?’ he asked with a wounded, dark tone.

‘No.’ I shook my head and tried to pull my bikini bottoms out of their semi-wedgie as subtly as possible.

‘Vanessa.’ Nick coughed and laughed all at once, one hand held out to me, the other rearranging his linen shorts. I tried very hard not to look, but obviously I did. And woah. ‘Come here.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ I said, backing away before turning towards my own cottage and sprinting inside. As soon as I stepped through the door, I slammed it shut, my hand still pressed against my lips. So that’s how it felt to be Vanessa. And it was not awful.

I set my phone carefully down on the worktop and pretended I wasn’t shaking from head to toe. Someone was hammering on the front door, but rather than answer it, I made the perfectly rational decision to run into the bathroom, lock the door and start running a shower to drown out the knocking. It had to be Nick, and if I opened it up, I had no idea what would happen. Either I’d have to shag him on the kitchen counter or he’d slap me round the chops. Neither solution would be productive, even if one would be considerably more fun than the other. Why hadn’t I just called Amy? What on earth had possessed me to do something I had never, ever done in twenty-eight years? I blamed the sun. And sand. It was Hawaii’s fault. It was Vanessa’s fault. Tess didn’t walk up to a man she barely knew and definitely disliked and kiss him as if the world was about to end. Tess sat in her seat and watched her best friend kiss said man and then judged her quietly from behind a bottle of Pinot Noir. I needed to get out of my bikini and into some more sensible clothes. I ripped it off. Who could make good decisions while they were prancing around in tiny triangles of fabric?

‘I need to relax,’ I told myself. ‘And I need a drink.’

I cautiously opened the door and sprinted to the kitchen. Glasses seemed surplus to requirements and so, classy gal that I was, I opted to swig straight out of the bottle and ran back to the bathroom with it. I was really just saving Kekipi a job. I was really just very thoughtful.

‘Hello?’

Why hadn’t I locked the front door?

‘Just a minute,’ I yelled, clanking the wine bottle far too loudly against the marble sink and grabbing a towel to cover myself.

‘Vanessa?’ The voice came closer and closer. ‘It’s Paige, from
Gloss
?’

‘Hi.’ I flung the bathroom door open, towel tucked around my boobs, steam billowing out behind me. ‘Hello.’

‘Christ, it’s like a Bananarama video.’ The blonde girl in front of me stared back with wide eyes. ‘Nice hair.’

‘Thank you?’

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to drag you out of the shower.’ She could not stop staring at me. I subtly glanced down to make sure my boobs hadn’t escaped from my towel. ‘I was looking for Vanessa?’

‘Oh, of course, that’s me.’ I casually stretched my leg out backwards and kicked the bathroom door shut, hoping she couldn’t see the open wine bottle. My work brain had helpfully clocked on to remind me that Paige Sullivan was the art director from
Gloss
magazine and would be arriving on Tuesday. Today was Tuesday and, bugger me backwards, here she was.

‘Vanessa Kittler?’ Paige stretched out a confused hand.

‘Yes?’ I took it reluctantly but shook it with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. There were only two absolutes in this world ? nobody put Baby in a corner, and nobody liked a dead-fish handshake. ‘Vanessa Kittler, photographer extraordinaire.’

There was nothing like trying a little bit too hard sometimes.

‘Oh, OK, sorry, not quite with it from the flight,’ Paige said, smiling back at me with a bright, lipstick-commercial confidence that didn’t quite make her eyes. ‘Just literally got in. Delayed for bloody ever. Literally just landed. Just now. I know, I feel like shit. I look like shit.’

She did not look like shit. Her blonde hair fell around her shoulders in perfectly manageable loose curls, her eye make-up smouldered and her lips were painted a perfect Old Hollywood red. She was so pretty, she looked as if she should be famous.

‘And I suppose I’m a bit distracted because I can sort of see your vagina.’ She pointed to the hem of my towel but kept her eyes up.

‘Oh, shitting hell,’ I muttered, crouching down and looking for a new, longer cover-up. ‘Sorry. I was just having a shower.’

‘And a drink?’ She craned her neck, looking over my shoulder to where the bathroom door had mutinously swung open.

‘Little one,’ I said, pinching my thumb and forefinger together. ‘The tiniest one it’s possible to have, really.’

‘Sounds bloody good to me,’ Paige said, slipping out of a quilted bomber jacket to reveal perfectly toned arms in a white cotton vest, complete with peekaboo neon-pink bra straps. Brilliant. ‘Maybe we are going to get along. Tell you what, why don’t I go and unpack, and then we’ll meet back here for a beverage. We need to talk about this shoot, yeah?’

It irked me ever so slightly that she pronounced the end of the word ‘beverage’ the same way you would pronounced ‘barrage’, but aside from that, I couldn’t see a problem with her plan. It was better than anything I had lined up, after all, and what harm could it do me to have the art director of the magazine on my side?

‘Yeah, sure,’ I agreed, still stooping. I bet she had a genuine diamond vajazzle under her spray-on jeans. ‘I’ll even put some clothes on.’

‘Oh, you and your scandalous ideas.’ She gave me a quick blast of a dirty laugh that made me like her even more. ‘Not too many, eh? Might be the odd eligible bachelor out here. Speaking of, don’t suppose you’ve run into our journo boy yet, have you?’

Run into, eaten dinner with, snogged the face off.

‘Nick? I have had the pleasure,’ I replied, considering how best to explain to this complete stranger who was sort of my boss that I had sexually assaulted our journo boy about thirty minutes earlier. ‘He’s in the cottage next door.’

‘Oh, good ? I should, you know, check in,’ she said, immediately preening and peering out of the window. ‘Do you know if he’s there now? Do I look OK?’

Oh. Shit. She liked him.

I nodded and kept schtum, hoping Nick would do the same. Now I really was starting to feel like Vanessa. Forty-eight hours into the job and I’d already snogged my boss’s boyfriend.

‘So, back here in, like, two hours?’ Paige grabbed a huge square bag decorated with interlocked Cs from the worktop and waved her sparkly watch at me. ‘Cocktails and catch-ups?’

‘Cocktails and catch-ups,’ I confirmed, a little bit excited to have a potential new girlfriend. ‘Two hours.’

As long as it wasn’t cock-ups and catch tails, this could be a grand old time.

Almost three hours later, I was perched on the arm of the overstuffed sofa in my living room, watching the ceiling fan spin round and round and wondering whether or not red wine on an empty stomach had been a good idea. I’d spent almost forty-five minutes out of the previous hour blow-drying and straightening my hair while swearing at the humidity, begging it to play nicely and not embarrass itself next to Paige’s perfectly coiffed locks. It had half listened and, as such, I had only had to half pin it up.

Eventually, Paige knocked once on the door and let herself in, just like before.

‘We’re twins,’ she exclaimed, holding up her arms in delight.

We were not twins. We looked like a before and after. Paige had painted a pair of dark blue denim jeans onto her pin-thin legs and wrapped black masking tape all around her torso until it resembled a racer-back vest. I had squeezed myself into a slightly too small pair of Vanessa’s stolen jeans and disguised the resulting muffin top with a slightly too big black T-shirt. That said, we did appear to be wearing the same shoes.

‘Don’t you just love Tribs?’ she asked, pointing a foot at me. ‘I know YSL shoes are stupidly expensive, but they’re so bloody comfy. As soon as I got my first pair, I was like, fuck, no more Choos or Looboos for me. Tribs all the way.’

‘All the way,’ I agreed. I had certainly not had enough wine. I didn’t even know I was wearing YSL shoes.

‘So, this guy who works here, Zippy or something?’ Paige opened up a much smaller version of the same Chanel bag she’d brought in earlier and produced a little black bullet of lipstick. ‘He came over earlier and said there was this little luau thing on the beach a bit further up. It’s not an official work thing, but he said it would be fun. There will be drinks and there will be boys.’

I assumed that by Zippy she meant Kekipi, but I let it go.

‘I like drinks and boys,’ I said, watching her reapply perfect red lipstick straight from the tube without a mirror. ‘Should we maybe not wear massive high heels on sand, though?’

‘Good point.’ She smacked her lips together and dropped the lipstick back into her bag. ‘But I can’t wear jeans without heels ? my legs look like tree trunks.’

‘I can’t imagine for a second that they do.’ I refused to play the ‘I’m so fat, you’re so fat’ game with a creature this well put together. It was insulting to both of us. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘No, I’ll have to go and get changed,’ she said, shaking her head resolutely. ‘If I wear trousers without heels, I basically look like that little guy from
Game of Thrones
, and he’s the only one who’s getting away with being four feet tall and hot. He’s hot, yeah?’

‘He seems very nice?’ I hoisted myself to my feet and waited the obligatory three seconds until I felt comfy in my heels. ‘Do you want to go and change, then?’

‘No need.’ Paige clapped and looked at me like she’d just solved world poverty. ‘I’ll borrow something from you. I’m sure we’re about the same size.’

We weren’t, but I was so flattered-slash-worried she’d suffered a serious head trauma, I let her push me out of the way and disappear into my room.

‘Oh, Vanessa.’ She stood in front of my wardrobe looking at all my rejected outfits for the evening with her hands over her mouth. And by all, I meant three. Because I only had three other outfits. The yellow dress I’d worn for dinner the night before, a black silky number and my newly cut-off denim cut-offs. ‘Is this all you have?’