This is a Love Story (16 page)

I was still without a top. Damn. Where was my top? I scrabbled around on the floor and found one, bashing my head on the way up on the sharp edge of an open cupboard door. I should have listened to my mum about leaving doors open. It was the kind of pain that made you wonder if your skull hadn’t caved in to let your brain out for a quick stroll.

‘Bollocks!’ I shouted. That really bloody hurt. I gritted my teeth so hard I feared they might just crack and drop out of my mouth like pennies from a broken piggy bank.

‘Nick! Come here!’ Sienna cried as I stormed into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat on the toilet seat and pulled my head into my lap, gripping on to it hard to stop the throbbing pain. Breathe. Come on, just breathe. I was completely consumed by humiliating rage. Tears of pain and frustration started to fill my eyes. I felt like such a fool. It was a mixture of raw anger and deep disappointment and I didn’t know which hurt more – that, or my head. God, she’d only put her arm around my waist and I was already doing the weekly shop with her. What an IDIOT! For a guy approaching his thirties I could be hideously naive at times. This was it. This was my wake-up call. It was time to get real.

There was a gentle knock at the door, like a little angel wanted in. It was hard to stay this incandescently furious with Sienna for long, but my embarrassment was prolonging my bitter feelings towards her. They stung like a fresh cut, and they weren’t going away.

‘Nick. Please come out. I’m worried about you . . .’ There was a long pause while I considered whether or not this situation could get any worse.

‘Nick?’ she repeated softly.

I looked at myself in the mirror and saw an idiot with bloodshot eyes. My hair was flat on the top of my head while a couple of bits stood on end at the back like a radio receiver. I tried to gather the chunks of hacked-up male pride that were scattered all around me and walked to the door. I slowly opened it, peering through a tiny crack between the frame and the knotted pine door.

Sienna pushed her arm through and pulled me towards her. It was a stealth attack and I had no chance to block it. ‘Come here,’ she said, squeezing my body tight. I tried to push her arms away but it wasn’t working.

She ran her fingers gently over my head, a sharp sting making my eyes water when she touched the sore spot. Chills ran up and down my body. I felt really exposed.

‘Oh, Pookie, I can feel a bump,’ she said, pulling me even closer.

I sniggered into her neck despite my concentrated sulking. It was a pet name we’d heard on a train once that had made me want to scream with laughter at the time. Now it was mildly tickling away the agony suffered by my battered ego.

‘I’m OK, Si. You really are overreacting,’ I responded, still pretending not to have been aware of the arm thing. If I couldn’t handle a small bump to the head, then even more of my manliness would ebb away.

‘Are you sure?’ She straightened her body and faced me; I could see the fear in her eyes. She knew that I knew. I knew that she knew.

Her skin was all fresh from the morning, despite our drinking and smoking binge the night before. I was pretty sure I looked and smelled like a used teabag. Strands of dark hair tumbled across her face – the effect was as though she was looking at me through the sharp, thick leaves of a tropical plant. She was painfully beautiful.

For a few moments, we stood and stared at each other. It was then that things changed. That moment between Sienna and me was the start of a shift in our relationship. I had to stop loving her.

Five

‘Isn’t it time you, well . . . gave up?’

Sienna

‘So I just fell asleep with my arm around him,’ I said to a table of transfixed young women, half of whom had their mouths wide open. It was like a crazy golf course, only with very good-looking girls and minus the plastic plants and stuffed monkeys.

Elouise dropped her spoon into her bowl of potato and leek soup in shock, flinching when some droplets leaped onto her face. She wiped them away quickly with her sleeve, her eyes still stuck to me.

‘He didn’t come on to you at all?’ she muttered in disbelief, as if this was a preposterous concept. A shred of leek still clung to her bottom lip.

‘No,’ I said quietly, pushing a chunk of potato around the bowl with my spoon and biting the inside of my mouth. It was a very bad habit of mine and something I only did when I was really stressed.

I kept fiddling with my food. The disappointment was audible – a tut here, a sigh there. Womankind was in mourning. Well, at least the women in this room were.

‘He didn’t even really cuddle me back. I know he was awake too because his heart was beating really fast in his chest and he was doing that fake sleep-breathing thing men do.’ I sighed. ‘What was I thinking?’

My eyes scanned the collection of ladies assembled in front of me. I was hoping for answers to wrap this mess up once and for all.

Lydia dozily reached over to the bottle of wine and poured me a glass the size of a small bath. I gratefully accepted.

‘Oh, Sienna,’ she muttered, shaking her head in shame slash sympathy as the last few drops leaked from the neck of the bottle.

‘Muuuuuuuuuum!’ came a shrill cry from upstairs, piercing the atmosphere at a perfect time. The looks of sadness were starting to panic me.

‘Yes, darling?’ El leaned back in her chair, her blonde locks sweeping over her shoulders as she angled her head.

We waited in silence.

‘I want you to paint my nails,’ came the innocent voice of my best friend’s little boy from what sounded like the staircase.

She blushed. ‘Sorry, ladies – I’ll be back in just a moment,’ she announced, rising quickly to her feet and running up the stairs in a pair of glamorous heels.

The rest of the table continued its silent protest of concern. Lydia was looking at me with a cockeyed expression of pity, her auburn curls falling over her shoulders and resting on an army-green tank top set off by a delicate silver necklace. I’d sworn I would never tell her how I felt about Nick, but she’d caught me crying in the toilet once and I can’t lie to save my life. I had snot on my top lip and everything. She had been surprisingly good, actually, not uttering such scandalous gossip to a soul. I doubted even Dill knew. I had since introduced Lydia to my friends, and she was now invited to anything we planned as a group.

Tess was running her index finger up and down one of the knives, her perfect little nose pointed towards the shiny glass tabletop. She was a stunning Korean girl I’d met at a taxi rank in Clapham two or three years ago. We’d shared a drunken journey back to west London and had been firm friends ever since. She had recently graduated from university and was on the job hunt, the stress collecting in little lines under her eyes. I knew she would be just fine.

Then my gaze moved over to Penny, who almost had a tear in her eye. Her wavy blonde hair was swept into a trendy and effortless-looking updo and her eye make-up made me instantly envious. She was a glamorous creature, working in a Kensington dental surgery to the stars, regularly giving us fantastic gossip about diva-like behaviour over the spit bowl. Now how
did
she do that thing with the eyeliner flicks? I wondered about this for a good few seconds before smiling back at her. Her level of emotional involvement in my screwed-up love life was making me feel bad. She looked bloody miserable.

Before I knew it, Elouise was coming back down the stairs, her torn jeans tight against her slender frame. A pair of sparkling blue eyes hid an undercurrent of embarrassment and we all automatically knew not to mention the nail varnish thing. She covered it up with a lovely smile, the one that melted the hearts of men all over the south-east. Just one smile from Elouise is all it takes and men are putty in her hands. I’ve seen it everywhere we go together – checkout assistants and barmen, all reduced to over-compliant creeps, desperate to get her number and secure that coveted first date.

‘Sorry about that, girls,’ she exclaimed, breathlessly sinking into her seat. ‘So what happened next?’ She turned towards me, the rest of the girls’ heads leaning into the centre of the table as I recommenced my tragic love story.

I took a deep breath and continued: ‘Well, because he didn’t cuddle me back, I figured I’d made a huge mistake, so I woke up in the morning and apologised for getting into his bed.’ I cringed, my face turning crimson. ‘I did the whole “I’d been drinking, I was sleepwalking” spiel – you know . . .’ I poked at my wine glass before raising it to my mouth and taking a colossal gulp to numb the pain.

‘And did you mention, you know,
the cuddle
?’, said Tess, leaning back in her seat and wincing at the humiliation of it all.

Even Lydia was baring her row of perfectly straight white teeth in sympathy, like she was watching some kind of circus stunt gone wrong.

‘No. I figured if I pretended it hadn’t happened, he would just put it down to me doing it in my sleep, or being drunk, or both,’ I retorted defensively. ‘At least I know where I stand now.’

There was more silence.

‘I’ve really fucked this up, haven’t I?’ I asked.

Penny leaned forward and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t be silly. What about the time I cheated on my ex with his brother without realising they were related? Now that’s fucking up,’ she sniggered, clearly quite proud of her naughty accomplishment.

‘They were identical twins, for God’s sake!’ shrieked Tess, elbowing her hard in the arm. The whole table erupted into laughter. ‘And that has nothing to do with this situation. Sienna’s a good girl!’ she continued, pretending to scold Penny. I love my friends.

‘But it gets worse . . .’ I started once more.

The timer on the oven beeped loudly in the background as if trying to put an end to this tale before it
could possibly get any worse. We all ignored it.

‘He started getting dressed as soon as we woke up. He was digging around on the floor for a top, and on the way up he bashed his head on an open cupboard door. Really, really hard. Then . . . he locked himself in the bathroom,’ I finished, raising my hands to my mouth in a bid to hide behind them.

They all gaped at me again.

‘You really are a pair of idiots, aren’t you?’ said Penny, starting to laugh now.

Eventually her giggles became so strong that they were infectious. It was obvious she was trying to stop, her black-painted nails clawing at her face. I loved watching her laugh like that, even if it was at my expense.

Lydia caught it next, flapping her arms around apologetically. Then it was Tess who cackled loudly and melted into a heap. Elouise was the last to go, but she went all right, and with a snort followed by a look of shock that she was capable of making such a noise.

‘Girls!’ I shrieked. ‘Come on! This is terrible, right?’ I pleaded for some seriousness, but it was in vain.

My eyes were full of tears, partly because I had put myself out there with a man who clearly didn’t feel the same, and partly because the whole thing was so farcical it
was
becoming hilarious. Still, it did hurt a bit that the girls were laughing.

The thing is, Nick’s such a nice bloke that he’ll go on pretending that he was asleep, which I know he wasn’t. And I’m such a coward that I’ll pretend to believe this lie, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

When the laughter had died down and I had received an apologetic smile from each of my girlfriends, we got back to the serious stuff. It was Penny who had the bravery to utter this short but brutally honest sentence:

‘Isn’t it time you, well . . . gave up?’

There it was. She had thrown it into the centre of the table amid the elegant wine glasses and scrunched-up napkins. She had skipped the ‘maybe he’s intimidated by you’, ‘maybe he likes you so much he’s scared’ rubbish, and gone straight for the home run. El widened her eyes, looking at her as if to shriek ‘You can’t say that!’ and slapping her across the leg.

They waited for my reaction, which could have been one of several:

What I actually did was draw a deep breath, smile, and simply say, ‘Yes.’

Because yes, it was time to give up. This
had
been a long-term, painful debacle. One big ‘gaffe’, as the papers would call it. A fuck-up. A two-Jags, blow-job-in-the-White-House, mislaid-expenses-receipt, whoops-I-just-set-my-own-house-on-fire, sodding disaster.

Nick was a man. A good one, but still a man. And men were highly sexual creatures. All of my male friends reinforced the notion that thinking about sex or sex-related topics was up there in the top five things they did each day, somewhere below breathing but just above eating. It really was that big a deal. I knew this was a massive generalisation, but if a man liked a woman, he did not pretend to be asleep when she put her arm round him in bed.

No, he didn’t. He pounced on her like she was the last bagel in New York. Or at the very least he panicked, gave her a little kiss and pounced the next time, once he’d got over his own insecurities. So, Sienna Walker, it was time to get real.

‘Yes?’ said Elouise, leaning towards me and narrowing her lovely eyes. ‘So you’re just going to give up on the man you love?’

Ah, the man you love stuff . . . The go-get-em, fight for your fella, stake your claim cliché.

‘Yes, actually, I am.’

Because my level of preoccupation with Nick was now verging on either ‘mug’ or ‘stalker’ (depending on how you looked at it), and that didn’t make me feel particularly confident or attractive. Therefore, this was a great time to give up.

Lydia looked crestfallen. ‘He’s just been a lot happier ever since he met you, Si. I don’t know how to explain it.’

Penny butted in: ‘But maybe that’s just friendship, Lyds. I really think he would have said or done something by now . . . There’s no denying they have a special friendship, but I just don’t think he sees it the way Sienna does.’