Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
OK. Don‘t tell anyone. Do not tell anyone that you were on a date with Jack Harper last night.
As I arrive at work the next day, I feel almost convinced I’m going to blurt it out by mistake. Or someone’s going to guess. I mean, surely it must be obvious from my face. From my clothes. From the way I’m walking. I feel as though everything I do screams, “Hey, guess what I did last night!”
“Hiya,” says Caroline as I make myself a cup of coffee. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thanks!” I say, giving a guilty jump. “I just had a quiet evening in last night. With my flatmate. We watched three videos, Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings. Just the two of us. No one else.”
“Right!” says Caroline, looking a bit bemused. “Er, lovely!”
I’m losing it. Everyone knows this is how criminals get caught. They add too many details and trip themselves up.
Right, no more babbling.
“Hi,” says Artemis as I sit down at my desk.
“Hi,” I say, forcing myself to keep it at that. I won’t even mention which kind of pizza Lissy and I ordered, even though I’ve got a whole story ready about how the pizza company thought we said green pepper instead of pepperoni, ha-ha, what a mix-up.
I’m supposed to be working on a money-off flyer for Panther Prime this morning. But instead, I find myself taking out a piece of paper and starting a list of possible date venues where I can take Jack tonight.
Pub. No. Far too boring.
Movie. No. Too much sitting, not talking to each other.
Ice-skating. Jack and I will glide around to music in seamless harmony…No. I can’t skate. I’ll end up twisting my ankle.
I’ve run out of ideas already. How crap is this?
Suddenly I have a thought. I read this article on marketing innovation last month that said if your mind was blank, you should write buzzwords like SUCCESS and CUSTOMER and DESIRES on a piece of paper and wait for them to stimulate your brain.
I think for a bit, then write down, JACK, DATE, ROMANCE, KISS. I gaze at the words, trying to focus. But it’s hard to concentrate when my brain is half tuning in to the idle conversation going on around me.
“…really working on some secret project, or is that just a rumor?”
“…company in a new direction, apparently, but no one knows exactly what he’s…”
“…is this Sven guy anyway? I mean, what function does he have?”
“He’s Jack’s bodyguard, isn’t he?” says someone.
That’s it. That’s exactly what Sven looks like. A bodyguard. Or a hit man. Maybe he’s in charge of “dealing” with Jack’s competitors.
“He’s with Jack, isn’t he?” says Amy, who works in Finance but fancies Nick, so she’s always finding excuses to come into our office. “He must be Jack’s lover.”
“What?” I say, sitting up suddenly and snapping the point of my pencil. Luckily everyone’s too busy gossiping to notice.
Jack gay? Jack gay?
That’s why he didn’t kiss me good night. He only wants me to be a friend. He’ll introduce me to Sven and I’ll have to pretend to be all cool with it, like I knew all along—
“Is Jack Harper gay?” Caroline is saying in astonishment.
“I just assumed he was,” says Amy with a shrug. “There’s no woman on the scene—”
“But he doesn’t look groomed enough!”
“I don’t think he looks gay!” I chip in, trying to sound lighthearted and just kind of vaguely interested.
“He’s not gay,” chimes in Artemis authoritatively. “I read an old profile of him in Newsweek, and he was dating the female president of Origin Software. And it said before that he went out with some supermodel.”
A huge surge of relief floods through me.
Obviously I knew he wasn’t gay.
“So, is Jack seeing anyone at the moment?”
“Who knows?”
“He’s pretty sexy, don’t you think?” says Caroline with a wicked grin. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Yeah, right,” says Nick. “You probably wouldn’t mind his limo, either.”
“Apparently, he hasn’t had a relationship since Pete Laidler died,” says Artemis crisply. “So I doubt you’ve got much of a chance.”
“Bad luck, Caroline,” says Nick with a laugh.
Just for an instant, I find myself imagining what would happen if I stood up and said, “Actually I had dinner with Jack Harper last night.” They’d all be utterly dumbfounded. There’d be gasps, and questions…
Oh, who am I kidding? They wouldn’t believe me, would they? They’d say I was suffering from delusions.
“Hi, Connor,” comes Caroline’s voice, interrupting my thoughts.
Connor? I look up and there he is, with no warning, approaching my desk.
What’s he doing here?
Has he found out about me and Jack?
I push my hair back, feeling nervous. I’ve spotted him a couple of times around the building, but this is our first moment face-to-face since we broke up.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I reply awkwardly, and there’s silence.
Suddenly I notice my unfinished list of date ideas lying on my desk, with KISS clearly visible. Shit. Trying to stay casual, I reach for it, ball it up, and drop it in the bin.
Around us, all the gossip about Sven and Jack has petered out. I know everyone in the office is listening to us, even if they’re pretending to be doing something else. It’s like we’re the in-house soap opera or something.
And I know which character I am. I’m the heartless bitch who chucked her lovely, decent man for no good reason.
The thing is, I do feel guilty. Every time I see Connor, or even think about him, I get a horrible tight feeling in my chest. But does he have to have such an expression of injured dignity on his face? A kind of you’ve-mortally-woundedme-but-I’m-such-a-good-person-I-forgive-you kind of look.
I can feel my guilt ebbing away and annoyance starting to rise.
“I only came up,” says Connor at last, “because I’d put us down to do a stint on the Pimm’s stall together at the corporate family day. Obviously when I did so, I thought we’d be—” He breaks off, looking more martyred than ever. “Anyway. But I don’t mind going through with it. If you don’t.”
I’m not going to be the one to say I can’t bear to stand next to him for half an hour. “I don’t mind!” I say.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
There’s another awkward pause.
“I found your blue shirt, by the way,” I say. “I’ll bring it in.”
“Thanks. I think I’ve got some stuff of yours, too…”
“Hey,” says Nick, coming over toward us with a wicked, eyes-gleaming, let’s-stir-shit expression. “I saw you with someone last night.”
I feel a spasm of terror. Fuck! Fuck, fuck. OK…OK…It’s OK. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at Connor.
Who the hell was Connor with?
“That was just a friend,” says Connor stiffly.
“Are you sure?” says Nick. “You looked pretty friendly to me—”
“Shut up, Nick,” says Connor, looking pained. “It’s far too early to be thinking of…moving on. Isn’t it, Emma?”
“Er, yes.” I swallow several times. “Absolutely. Definitely.”
Oh, God.
—
Anyway. I’m not going to worry about Connor.
I have an important date to think about.
And thank goodness, by the end of the day I have at last come up with the perfect venue.
It only takes me about half an hour to persuade Lissy that when they said, “The key shall in no circumstances be transferred to any nonmember” in the rules, they didn’t really mean it.
At last she reaches into her bag and hands it to me, an anxious expression on her face. “Don’t lose it!”
“I won’t! Thanks, Liss.” I give her a hug.
“You remember the password, don’t you?”
“Yes. ‘Alexander.’ ”
“Where are you going?” says Jemima, coming into my room in a black trouser suit and enormous creamy pearls. She gives me a critical look. “Nice top. Where’s it from?”
“Oxfam. I mean Whistles.”
I’ve decided tonight I’m not even going to try to borrow anything from Jemima. I’m going to wear my nice gray velvet top and black satin skirt, and if Jack doesn’t like it, he can lump it.
“I was meaning to ask,” Jemima says, narrowing her eyes. “You two didn’t go into my room last night, did you?”
“No,” says Lissy innocently. “Why—did it look like we had?”
Jemima was out until three last night, and by the time she got back, everything was back in place. Sellotape and everything. We couldn’t have been more careful.
“No,” admits Jemima. “Nothing was out of place. But I just got a feeling. As though someone had been in there.”
“Did you leave the window open?” says Lissy. “Because I read this article recently, about how monkeys are being sent into houses to steal things.”
“Monkeys?”
“Apparently. The thieves train them.”
Jemima looks from Lissy to me, perplexed, and I force myself to keep a straight face.
“Anyway,” I say to change the subject. “You might like to know that you were wrong about Jack. I’m going out with him again tonight! It wasn’t a disastrous date at all!”
There’s no need to add that we had a big row and I stormed out and he had to follow me to the bus stop. Because the point is, we’re having a second date.
“I wasn’t wrong,” says Jemima. “You just wait. I predict doom.” She glances at herself in the mirror and adjusts her necklace.
“Nice pearls,” says Lissy. “First date?”
Jemima always follows Mummy’s rule: on first dates you wear “prestige jewelry”—that is, real gems, not something cute from Accessorize. You also drop it into the conversation that you collect Tahitian pearls, diamonds, or whatever, and that you’re allergic to base metal.
The rule was started years ago, apparently, after Jemima’s mother had a date with an oil billionaire and wore a simple silver chain.
The following day a box arrived from Cartier—containing another simple silver chain and a note from the oil billionaire about how he’d had to restrain himself from buying anything more ostentatious.
And then, two weeks later, he died. Apparently she’s never really got over it.
“Well, ciao. See you later.” Jemima tweaks her pearls one last time, smooths her hair down, and leaves the room. I pull a face at her skinny back and start putting on my mascara.
Honestly. Doom. She’s just trying to spoil things.
“What’s the time?” I say, frowning as I blob a bit on my eyelid.
“Ten to eight,” says Lissy. “How are you going to get there?”
“Cab.”
Suddenly the buzzer goes, and we both look up.