Chapter Three
Lissa arrives at the office a full fifteen minutes early on Monday morning, something that’s pretty much unheard of for both her and Darcy, but something that Darcy reluctantly agreed to due to the need for an emergency debrief.
Lissa waits for her friend to join her in the small kitchen.
They are on the fourth floor of a building shared with other offices.
Out the window you can see the River Avon and, if you squint, Pulteney Bridge in the distance.
She folds her arms as she watches the kettle boiling, then looks up at the sound of heels on the laminate wooden flooring.
Darcy is wearing a pair of blue shoes with small, tasteful white flowers today – Lissa swears she has a new pair every week.
Her brunette hair is pinned back in her signature knot, perhaps slightly damper than usual, and her lips are painted the same bright red she always wears, no matter the occasion.
As Darcy crosses the small kitchen to where Lissa is leaning against the counter, Lissa catches a waft of her Chanel perfume.
When she asked her once how she afforded Chanel and designer shoes, given they’re on very similar salaries at a very average digital marketing agency, Darcy waved her away.
It’s aspirational, sweets. Live the life you dream of having and one day it’ll catch up to you.
Lissa isn’t sure the credit card companies would agree with that, but there’s no point in arguing with Darcy – she learnt that on day one of working together.
‘Good,’ she says, as the kettle clicks off the boil. ‘You’re here. I—’
But Darcy holds up a hand to stop her. ‘Lissa, I love you, but if you don’t give me coffee immediately, I’m not going to be any use to you at all.’
Lissa rolls her eyes as she gets down two mugs, puts a teaspoon of instant coffee in each, then fills them with boiling water.
Darcy petitioned Liam, their boss, for a proper coffee machine, but he said he considered it an unnecessary expense.
At which Darcy launched into an explanation of the definition of unnecessary and why a coffee machine did not qualify as such, which didn’t go down super well in the team meeting when they were supposed to be discussing the performance of several different Meta adverts for an organic dog food company.
Lissa hands Darcy a mug and they both move to the ‘break-out’ area in the kitchen – which is, in fact, just a plastic table and chairs, but which Liam insists that, outside lunch hours, is to be used only to ‘brainstorm strategy’.
Darcy takes a sip of the coffee, grimaces a little, then sighs. ‘It’s caffeine, I guess. So.’ She lowers her voice, even though they are currently the only ones in the office. ‘Is this about the job?’
Lissa frowns. ‘The job?’
Darcy raises her perfectly shaped eyebrows. ‘Your interview. On Friday?’
‘Oh, right.’ She’d forgotten about that, truth be told, what with the drama of Saturday.
But she’d left work early on Friday under the pretence of a dentist appointment – a classic – for an interview with another marketing agency in Bath, only this time for a specific graphic design role, where she’d be working on the artistic creation of the advertising rather than endlessly monitoring click-through rates.
‘I’m pretty sure it’s a no-go,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘Well, the interviewer called me Katie throughout the whole interview, then asked me if I had any experience in graphic design specifically, to which I said no, then asked me what I love about digital marketing, to which I drew a complete blank.’
Darcy groans. ‘Lissa, you are supposed to lie during these interviews, didn’t anyone ever tell you that?’
‘I must have missed that key piece of advice on careers day. Anyway, it’s fine – given I can’t think of a single thing I like about my job, I probably shouldn’t be moving to another company that does the exact same thing.
And,’ she adds more loudly, when Darcy opens her mouth to interject, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.
’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I slept with Mark.’
Darcy’s eyebrows shoot up practically into her hairline. ‘Did you now?’
‘On Saturday night.’
She purses those red lips. ‘Well, good on you. Or good on him, I should say. It’s only taken him, what, a year?’
Lissa half laughs half groans, and slams a palm to her forehead.
‘That bad?’ Darcy asks, taking another sip of coffee.
‘No.’ Lissa blows out a breath. ‘Bad’ wasn’t a word she’d use to describe that night.
‘No, it’s just …’ She chews on her lip, fighting a horrible knot of anxiety in her stomach.
Darcy doesn’t know the significance of Saturday’s date, so it’s sort of hard to explain why, exactly, she’d come over all ‘live in the moment’.
Only people who were around during her childhood know what happened to Chloe, and it’s difficult to broach the subject with anyone else, given it happened so long ago.
That and the fact that she hates talking about it means that it’s easier not to bring it up.
‘I don’t know if I should have,’ she finishes. ‘That’s all.’
‘Well why not? He’s good-looking and nice and …’
‘… and we work together.’ Lissa gestures emphatically around the small kitchen.
‘Well how do you think couples meet? Over seventy per cent meet in the workplace,’ Darcy adds promptly, without waiting for an answer.
Lissa narrows her eyes. ‘You just made that up.’
Darcy shrugs. ‘Probably something like that, though, isn’t it?’
Couples. Lissa experiences a little spasm of panic, the same feeling she always gets when she imagines any sort of long-term relationship. So far, her longest has been three months, but then he wanted to do stupid things like meet the family and she decided enough was enough.
On her lap, her hand throbs, and she looks down at the graze on her palm. She took the grit out of it at the time, and has used a ton of antiseptic on it since, but still …
‘What’s up with your hand?’
She wrinkles her nose at how obvious she’s being. ‘Nothing. Just fell over on the pavement the other day.’ She decides to leave out the exact how, given that causes a flare of embarrassment whenever she thinks about it. ‘But it feels a bit hot and I’m not sure if …’
‘Give it here.’
Lissa holds out her hand to Darcy, who takes it gently, twisting it one way then the other. ‘Looks totally normal.’ She lets go. ‘If it was infected it would be getting more red, not less.’
Lissa allows herself a long exhale. ‘Thanks, Darcy.’ It’s a stupid thing, but it helps, sometimes, having reassurance from someone else, even if they are no more qualified than she is.
Maybe all it does is pull her back to the world of the sane, but whatever it is, she’s grateful.
Grateful, too, that Darcy never makes a big thing of it, and somehow knows the exact line to walk between not dismissing her entirely and reassuring her that everything is okay.
‘Just call me Dr D,’ Darcy says with a wave of her hand.
‘I definitely won’t.’
‘Sounds like a superhero, doesn’t it?’
‘A supervillain, more like.’
‘Hmm. Maybe villain suits me better. They always seem to get the nicer shoes, don’t you think?’
Lissa laughs, and feels her body settle a little. Laughing releases endorphins, she reminds herself. Endorphins are good for you. She should definitely try to do more laughing.
‘So are you going to go out with Mark again?’
‘Umm …’ She sips her coffee to buy herself time.
‘Maybe you should. It’d be good for you.’
‘Good for me how?’
‘You know, getting out. Dating.’
‘What if it doesn’t work out?’
Darcy shrugs. ‘What if it does?’
At that moment, the lift doors opposite the kitchen open, spitting out one of their colleagues, who heads straight for her desk, zombie-like. Lissa lets out a long exhale, then smiles a little when she meets Darcy’s gaze.
‘You know,’ Darcy says, ‘we really ought to have had this conversation at a café or something, rather than here.’
At the word ‘café’, Lissa experiences a brief tug in a corner of her mind, one that takes her back to her dream the other night, to sitting outside the café in Paris, to the smell of coffee, the colour of the man’s eyes.
‘Lissa?’
She jolts, nearly spilling her coffee over the rim of the mug. Just like he’d spilt his over her at that table. She blinks, looking up at the owner of the voice – not Darcy, but Liam, who is peering down at them. He glances between them, then at their mugs, somehow making the action disapproving.
He strokes a hand down his stupid little beard.
‘Nice to see you’re both on time.’ The for once is left as subtext.
He levels a look at Lissa. ‘How are you feeling?’ The question is careful, and she can tell it’s less concern for her and more to do with whether she’s about to have a negative impact on the ‘office flow’, as he likes to call it.
‘Fine, thanks,’ she says brightly, partly because she knows it will annoy him, partly to curtail the embarrassment that is trying really hard to flare up. ‘And you? Good weekend?’
He grunts a non-answer. ‘I’ll see you both in the Monday meeting at half nine, yes?’
Darcy gives a salute – honestly, Lissa doesn’t know how she gets away with it. ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking about those lookalike audiences for that health water company all weekend.’
Liam gives her a suspicious look, but clearly decides it’s too early to deal with her, and walks away. Darcy and Lissa get to their feet – he’ll only keep shooting them looks if they stay sitting here.
‘He’s such a dick,’ Darcy mutters as they cross the office floor to their desks.
‘Mm,’ Lissa agrees, though non-committally enough that she could deny it if overheard.
He’s never exactly fun, Liam, but he’s been worse since her panic attack in the office a few weeks ago.
She grimaces thinking of it, the way she dropped her glass of water, cut herself when she picked up the smashed pieces.
How she saw the blood, so much from just one tiny cut, and spiralled.
The dizziness, the way her heart raced, breathing harder and harder until she couldn’t breathe at all.
Then she was on the floor, curled in a ball under her desk.
She can still hear Darcy’s voice fighting through the ringing in her ears, before her friend managed to get her to her feet and to the bathroom, while Liam looked on in comical horror.
Darcy gives her a look, like she might bring said incident up.
Lissa shakes her head firmly. ‘We’re not talking about it.’
‘Oh, is this denial?’ Darcy nods musingly. ‘All right. I can get on board with denial – I’ve been known to partake of that myself every now and then.’
Lissa snorts, just as they reach her desk – and find someone already there. Someone with blonde hair and big brown Bambi eyes, who seems to have quite literally popped up out of nowhere.
‘Oh hey, Mark,’ Darcy says brightly.
He smiles that very straight white smile. ‘Hi, Darcy. Good weekend?’
‘Oh, you know. Not as fun as Lissa’s.’
Lissa feels her cheeks reddening. She cannot believe Darcy went there. Actually, who is she kidding, of course she can. She just wishes her friend would show a little restraint.
‘Anyway,’ Darcy continues, before Lissa or Mark has the chance to make any awkward comment, ‘we were just talking about our horoscopes.’
Lissa raises one eyebrow at her, just as Mark says, all gallant politeness, ‘Were you?’
‘Yep. Mine says I’m going to get shocking news this month.’
‘Does it now?’ Lissa asks drily, before she can help herself.
‘Yep,’ Darcy says again, smiling breezily. ‘And Lissa’s says it’s time to try new things.’
Honestly, the woman is shameless. Lissa tries to convey this with her eyes as Darcy moves to sit at the desk next to hers.
They’d initially had desks on opposite sides of the office to one another, but Darcy had bribed Jan, the woman who used to sit next to Lissa, with a week’s supply of Pret coffee to switch.
With Darcy semi out the way, Mark turns to Lissa and smiles, and she does her best to smile back, to try not to think of when she last saw him, and how very naked he was. You are an adult, she reminds herself. You can deal with this. ‘Hey, Lissa,’ he says, his voice an octave lower.
Right then, Lissa is actually grateful for Darcy when she pipes up with ‘Want to know what yours says, Mark?’
He frowns, glancing at her. ‘My what?’
‘Horoscope.’
‘Ah, no thanks.’ He looks back at Lissa, shifts his weight from foot to foot. He’s nervous, Lissa realises. And that makes her just a little less so. ‘So I was wondering … would you want to get a drink one day after work?’
And just what exactly is she supposed to say to that? ‘Umm, sure.’ Because she can’t exactly say no, can she? Not to his face. ‘I mean, it depends on which day, but—’
‘She’d love to,’ Darcy pipes up, clicking on her mouse and not looking at either of them.
Lissa sighs and shakes her head at Mark to convey her apology, which gets a grin out of him. That’s something, she supposes.
‘Cool. Anyway, I better get going.’ He gestures to his own desk.
‘Need to make sure I’ve got my prep ready for the meeting.
’ And unlike Darcy, he is not being ironic.
For some unfathomable reason, he actually seems to like working here – or at least cares enough about it to be angling for a promotion – and finds discussions about search engine optimisation downright fascinating.
Which, to be fair, is probably what one should look for in a digital marketing specialist.
‘Thanks for that,’ Lissa says to Darcy, once Mark is out of earshot.
‘What?’ Darcy asks, the picture of innocence. ‘I was being helpful.’
‘Yes, well. Maybe the “new thing” I do this month can be giving you a lesson on just what exactly being helpful usually constitutes.’
Darcy grins, in a way that makes it impossible for Lissa to even contemplate being mad at her. ‘Much as I love your lectures, I can think of plenty of other new things that would be far more fun, can’t you?’
All things considered, Lissa decides it’s best not to reply to that.