Alice Brown's Lessons in the Curious Art of Dating (40 page)

‘Oh!’ came a voice from the other side of the office, diverting Audrey’s rage and knocking her off kilter.

‘Oh!’ said Hilary again. ‘Fuck!’

‘Shut up, Hilary!’ Audrey bellowed irritably. ‘I won’t tolerate foul language in my office.’

‘Sorry, Audrey.’ Hilary didn’t sound the least bit sorry. She sounded positively excited. ‘It’s just that, fuck; my waters have just broken!’

Audrey swung towards Hilary in alarm.

‘Not here!’ she barked. ‘Not on the carpet!’

‘It’s a bit too late for that!’ Hilary said cheerfully.

‘Right, well . . . Hold the rest in!’ Audrey ordered uncertainly. Childbirth was an alien area for her and she suddenly felt out of her depth. But she couldn’t let it show – not when the troops were watching.

Hilary’s face contorted suddenly in a most unladylike fashion.

‘Fucking hell!’ she exclaimed inelegantly. ‘That was a contraction!’

‘Maybe I should call a taxi, take Hilary to hospital?’ Alice suggested quietly.

Audrey turned back to face her, rage being jostled for supremacy by panic. She wasn’t even sure whether she could claim for the carpet on the insurance.

‘Yes, maybe you should,’ she managed to utter gracelessly. ‘At least if you’re out of the office you can’t lose any more of my clients.’

She headed towards the sanctuary of her glass-walled office and closed the door. Despite her nightly diet of cop shows and murder whodunnits she’d never been able to stand the sight of blood . . . or semi-naked bodies, come to
that. Bodies should remain clothed at all times and birth should happen behind closed doors – not glass ones. She grunted unhappily and tried to ignore the sight of Alice helping Hilary out of her sodden tights.

Kate landed sweatily on the bed, her cheeks flushed and her hair a mess. She swiftly pulled the sheet over herself and set about catching her breath.

‘That,’ panted Tommy, ‘was brilliant!’ He rolled over towards her and drew her close with a strong, sweaty arm. ‘You’re hot stuff, Miss Biggs!’

Kate grinned. Nobody had ever called her hot stuff before. But then again, nobody had ever made her
feel
like hot stuff before.

‘And I’m liking this sweaty look,’ Tommy teased, letting his hand slide over her wet skin. ‘It’s very next season.’

She laughed.

Tommy brushed her hair away from her face with his fingertips and looked at her closely. She felt herself tingle at the gentle firmness of his touch.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said softly.

Shyly Kate’s eyes met his. She was surprised by how tenderly he was looking at her.

She hadn’t expected to jump into bed with Tommy so quickly. She’d broken her six-date rule. Years ago she’d decided
it wasn’t good to have sex too early; women who gave out too soon never made the transition from a ‘bit of fun’ to a girlfriend. In her twenties, ending a night out with drunken, pornographic sex with a random stranger was almost the law. But taking your clothes off in front of a stranger had never been Kate’s idea of a good time, and imposing the six-date rule had been a relief. However, she hadn’t anticipated that the consequence would be almost no sex at all. The few men she did meet had all melted away by a fruitless date three.

Also, Kate thought as she nestled happily into Tommy’s warm body, she hadn’t expected sex with Tommy to be quite so good. It had been so long since she’d had it, she’d almost forgotten what it was like. She had memories of awkward encounters in squalid bachelor bedrooms; quick, unsatisfying fumbles that ended with her partner spent and snoring and Kate creeping to the bathroom to floss her teeth and smooth down her hair before positioning herself prettily on the pillow and dreaming of being brought breakfast in bed. When morning came, her hungover partner barely remembered where his own kitchen was, let alone served up coffee and croissants.

But tonight, with Tommy, everything felt different. They’d had such a great time at the comedy club. And in the taxi, any thought of going back to her place hadn’t even crossed her mind.

And then there’d been the sex itself. When Tommy had pulled away her shirt she’d felt a succession of tiny electric shocks as his naked skin brushed against hers and her body suddenly ached to be touched again. She’d forgotten
just how good skin on skin felt – how dizzyingly erotic. As he gently pulled her half-naked body to his chest, she’d almost lost her breath. She could have let him slowly touch her skin with his all night.

But of course she hadn’t. Things had gone much further than that. And in the candlelit bedroom she’d been unembarrassed about her naked body. Tommy’s own body was so manly and muscular, she hadn’t worried that her hips might be too wide, that her weight might crush him, or that he might change his mind and send her home when he saw the size of her bottom. She actually felt sexy! Tommy ran his hands through her hair and bit at her breasts, his big hands cupping her buttocks and smoothly lifting her up and onto him. His groan of appreciation made Kate feel foxy for the first time in her life. A thought suddenly entered her head. This must be what Lou felt like when she had sex. No wonder she did it so often.

She suddenly fell back to earth with a bang. As Tommy stroked her face and the sweat started to dry on her body, Kate felt something sink within her stomach.

She hadn’t spoken to Lou since their argument. Lying in Tommy’s bed with his arms wrapped around her, Kate suddenly felt lonely. Normally if something great happened she rang Lou straightaway. It was as though it hadn’t really happened until she’d told her every tiny detail.

Kate looked at Tommy, her body still tingling deliciously from their exertions. She knew she wouldn’t be telling Lou about this. Something had changed and there was no going back.

‘I don’t normally do this sort of thing,’ she heard herself whisper.

‘What, have sex?’ Tommy joked.

‘No! Yes! I mean, I don’t normally, you know,
do it
so soon.’

Tommy looked confused.

‘Not until the sixth date.’

‘Why?’ he spluttered.

‘Because nice girls don’t . . . too soon.’

Tommy threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘And that’s what men want, is it? Nice girls?’

‘No!’ Kate said primly. ‘They want bad girls who do it on the first night.’

Tommy propped himself up on an elbow and looked at her closely.

‘So, you’re saying that your strategy with men has been
not
to give them what they want?’

‘They get it eventually,’ Kate reasoned. ‘Men respect women who make them wait. And besides, things are better if you’ve looked forward to them. It’s delayed gratification.’

‘It’s why you’ve stayed single!’ Tommy laughed. ‘Kate, trust me; men aren’t that complicated! We’ve got the attention spans of goldfish. If we wait too long for anything we’ve forgotten what it was we wanted in the first place. It’s why we love our TV remotes so much. Otherwise, by the time we’d got as far as the telly, we’d have forgotten why we got up in the first place.’

Kate felt confused.

‘But if you really wanted someone, you wouldn’t forget
her,’ she insisted. ‘You’d want her more because you’d had to wait.’

‘You’re mad!’ Tommy laughed and rolled away. ‘You
do
know that, don’t you?’

Kate’s face froze. She panicked. She’d given away her body too soon, and now she looked an idiot by giving away too much of her mind.

‘Have I blown it?’ she asked nervously.

‘Don’t I have to wait for the seventh date for that?’

‘Oi!’ Kate laughed and punched him with her pillow.

‘It’s just as well I’ve always had a thing for nutty girls, isn’t it?’ Tommy teased, stretching out across the bed and pulling Kate towards him. ‘Especially nutty girls who give out so quickly.’

And he wrestled her into a hug.

Alice opened her front door and placed her keys in the dish. It was half past midnight and she was utterly shattered.

It had been a draining few days. As she’d held Hilary’s hand in the delivery suite, shouting words of encouragement and supporting her as best she could until her husband, Kevin, could find a babysitter and make it to the hospital, she’d managed to forget the sleepless nights of the weekend just passed. She had a new and powerful burst of energy that pushed aside all thoughts of John and his double life and the aching gap he’d left behind. She’d been a pillar of positivity as she praised, roused and rallied her friend. But by the time the baby was crowning and Kevin arrived, Alice started to back out of the room.

‘Oi, where do you think you’re going?’ Hilary demanded fiercely, breaking away from her gas-and-air and eyeballing Alice like a woman demented.

‘I thought I’d give you and Kevin some privacy . . .’

‘Privacy my arse! You’ve already spent the last couple of hours peering up my lady bits. You might as well stay to
see me shit myself, cry like a schoolgirl and pop this enormous bastard!’ Hilary bellowed.

Realizing that she was no match for a woman in labour, Alice stayed and joined Kevin in holding Hilary’s hand though the last few minutes of labour and having all the bones in their fingers crushed by the primeval force of Mother Nature at work. And when Kevin held his brand-new baby boy, father and son blinking at each other in bewildered recognition, Alice sat back and smiled her first real smile in days. But when an exhausted Hilary tenderly took her son to her chest and kissed the top of his waxy head, something suddenly switched itself on in Alice’s head, with a click so loud she couldn’t believe that the nurses couldn’t hear it. Everything suddenly made sense. Here, in this room, was what life was all about: partnership, childbirth, family. This was what really mattered. But this was what she was never going to have.

Hilary and Kevin were too happy to notice the light dying in Alice’s smile. She stayed with the besotted parents a few more minutes and then discreetly slipped out of the room.

As she fell into a taxi, she couldn’t hold the tears at bay any more. She sobbed indiscriminately, alarming the taxi driver with her barely concealed wails. She cried for Hilary and Kevin and the baby. And she cried for herself and for John, and for the future she’d lost and the dreams she’d had shattered. And she cried for Kate and her determination to find Mr Right and have kids. She’d never thought about having children before; there’d never been a man in her life to have them with. But could that have been her
and John one day in the delivery suite, just like Hilary and Kevin? Would they have made it that far? Could they still?