Chapter Fourteen
Tess was adamant that she wasn’t going to have anything to do with The Love Library anymore.
‘Back to the apps I go!’ she said to Jay as they queued in the Sentinel staff canteen. It was Taco Tuesday and Tess hoped that eating vast quantities of the rather watery guacamole that always had a weird aftertaste might cure some of her ills.
‘You hate the apps. I hate the apps. Are the apps the answer to what we seek?’ Jay said. ‘I don’t even think tacos are the answer. How many times have they refried those refried beans?’
‘Those are two questions that I don’t want an honest answer to.’ Tess decided that maybe she’d avoid the refried refried beans and double up on the cheese.
Whatever the question, more cheese was always the answer.
Once they’d assembled their unappetising lunches and paid a heavily subsidised price for them, they took their trays out to the wraparound rooftop terrace that was the best thing about working at The Sentinel.
It felt like the first genuinely hot day of the year.
Like Fools Spring and False Spring and Third Winter were finally over.
Jay’s colleagues, the infamous Chiara and Zara, waved at them from where they’d snapped a prime piece of terrace real estate; a wooden table and two benches with views across the Thames to the Embankment.
‘Don’t you want the bench with the riverside views?’ Tess asked.
Chiara tapped the arm of her Gucci sunglasses. ‘The sun’s on the river side and I’m still testing how effective this new SPF is. You know how I feel about fine lines, Tess.’
Fine lines were the least of Tess’s problems. Happily, her trusty factor 50 tinted moisturiser was one of the few things in life which had never let her down.
‘A bit of Botox never hurts in the war against fine lines,’ Zara piped up.
She was also wearing huge wraparound shades, so it was like sitting opposite two very beautiful, well-groomed bugs.
Tess was under no illusions about the two women she considered to be quite good friends.
If she wasn’t Jay’s work wife and one of his out-of-work besties, and if she hadn’t known Chiara and Zara since they were lowly assistants, then she probably wouldn’t be allowed to sit with them.
Everyone at The Sentinel was terrified of them.
Even Claire quaked in her low-heeled, sensible court shoes when she saw either of them coming.
‘Unless you’re weird about needles. But no pain, no gain.
How did that date go, Tess? Who did you pick? ’
‘Terrible – Rochester from Jane Eyre,’ Tess said as she contemplated her first big comforting bite of the well-below-average taco. ‘I can’t even go into details or I’ll get PTSD.’
‘Now she says she’s going back to the apps,’ Jay informed them.
‘I might have a brief period of reflection during which I contemplate my terminally single existence so then I’ll be excited and motivated to go back to the apps,’ Tess mused.
‘You should do what I did and just still be with your first boyfriend. Such a relief that I got the whole love thing locked in before I was fifteen,’ Chiara said, as she always did. Very smugly.
‘Yes, Tess, what could be easier?’ Zara snapped.
She was no stranger to the apps herself and the sub-optimal men on the apps, even though she’d been a model before she’d moved into fashion editorial and was still front cover, runway beautiful.
‘We’ll just invent a time machine and go back to our first boyfriends and suffer it out.
FYI, my first boyfriend told everyone that I stuffed my bra and I didn’t know what a blowjob was. ’
‘My first, last and only boyfriend was Sean, and he very much did not want to be locked in anywhere with me.’ Tess wasn’t going to speak ill of another woman.
She was determined not to be that bitter, but she couldn’t help but add darkly, ‘He wanted to spend this pivotal chapter of his life with that nail clacker.’
‘Wilde, the worst fucking intern in the world,’ Chiara said happily, as she always did when the nail clacker came up in conversation.
Which it did quite frequently, despite Tess’s good intentions not to bitch about the much younger, much prettier woman who seemed to make Sean happier than she ever had.
‘I think the three of you are being very defeatist. If I was single, which I’m not, I’d want to find someone IRL. ’
‘I’m better on the apps than I am in IRL,’ Tess admitted. At least on the apps, she could use photo filters and try to charm men with her mad prose skills. Neither of which she could do in the flesh.
‘It’s more romantic to meet someone’s eyes across a crowded room then see if you’re matched with them on any of the apps,’ Zara said, perking up slightly. ‘Try before you buy.’
‘If they’re not on any of the apps they’re either already hooked up with someone and shouldn’t be eye fucking you in the first place or they’re some weird freak of nature who isn’t on the apps.’ Jay pushed away his half-eaten taco. ‘As a plan, it’s got my vote. You in, Tess?’
‘I don’t have a very exciting IRL. There’s the gym, but I am very much not my best version of myself in the gym; or maybe a bookshop, but I don’t want to ruin any of my favourite bookshops by meeting someone in Contemporary Romance only to end up two weeks later scouring the Self-Help shelves when they inevitably break my heart. ’
‘That’s a great line. You should use that in your next piece,’ Chiara said, but there wasn’t going to be a next piece because when Tess had emailed Sarah on Features to say that she’d decided not to use The Love Library again but had pitched her another three articles, not one of them to do with the flatlined state of Tess’s love life, there’d been no reply.
‘We’ll see,’ Tess muttered. ‘Unless I happen to bump into someone on the bus home tonight and can spin 800 words on that.’
She tried not to look self-pitying but carefree as she took a sip of her diet Coke, but she’d clearly failed because Jay groaned and put his arm around her.
‘We can do better than the bus home. Leave it with me. I get invited to fabulous parties all the time. Fabulous parties full of fabulous men.’ He took Tess’s chin between finger and thumb so he could look her deep in the eyes. ‘Tonight. We are going to get you laid.’
Panic rose up in Tess like a sudden attack of prickly heat.
‘I don’t want to get laid!’ As someone who loved a midi dress, she’d only been shaving her legs halfway down her calves for months.
That was just the least of it. She was nowhere near ready to go any further than kissing, maybe with tongues, but maybe not.
‘Just a little light banter would do me.’
And that was how Tess found herself, six short hours later, in a private members’ club in Mayfair, at the launch of a new cologne for men.
Everything from the monochrome décor to the fashion crowd with their very baggy but tightly belted distressed jeans and hedge-trimmer haircuts, to the fragrance itself, which smelt like diesel oil cut through with tonka beans, was aggressively trendy.
Thankfully, no one had actually acted aggressively towards Tess. After Heathcliff and Rochester, a third act of aggression would have finished her off altogether. Then again, at least aggression would have been some kind of reaction.
There wasn’t much that Tess could work with when it came to blank indifference.
‘I’m a big girl, I can look after myself,’ Tess had said after they’d descended a glass staircase to the function room, which was now proving to be her own ninth circle of hell. Jay was there in his official capacity so was going to be busy working the room and shmoozing the crowd.
Anyway, ninth circle was a bit of an exaggeration. It wasn’t that bad. Barely even a third circle of hell.
Tess would have been content to plonk herself down on one of the white leather cube seats, which turned out to be aggressively uncomfortable, and simply people-watch with an engaged expression on her face.
But Jay was a good friend. Goddamn him. He kept coming over with a selection of men for Tess to choose from. Like an XX-chromosome charcuterie board. Except not one of those men wanted to be served up as Tess’s girl dinner.
Obviously, the male models and fashion professionals were so far out of Tess’s league that they might just as well have come from Mars.
But even the more homely-looking, the ones who worked in marketing, and the guy who after some gentle probing reluctantly revealed that he was just a plus one of someone who worked in marketing and was a butcher by trade, didn’t want anything to do with Tess.
Even though she’d shaved her legs (well, from the knee down, which was still an improvement) in The Sentinel loos and done a flicky eye and a bold red lip, her black smock dress was crumpled from being worn all day.
This wasn’t the appropriate venue for a smock dress, even if it did have pretty embroidered flowers trailing over the neckline and the cuffs.
This was the land of fashion-forward, on-trend looks.
Even a barrel-leg jean would be too basic for this crowd.
That was probably why the constant supply of men ferried over by Jay couldn’t wait to make their excuses. Or rather, give Tess a brief and comprehensive appraisal then make their excuses and leave.
‘I should warn you that I’m not looking for anything serious right now,’ one of them had said in answer to Tess’s polite enquiry as to what had brought them to the fragrance launch.
After an hour of so many brutal rejections, Tess had no choice but to move to a second location. She holed up in a little powder room off the Ladies loos with a platter of dessert canapés, sadly all featuring heavy accents of tonka beans.