Page 29 of The Love Hack

Then Amelie leaned up and kissed Zack on the cheek before dropping his hand and turning back to the room. She glanced around, a slightly glassy smile on her face, before her eyes lit on me and she hurried over.

‘Come upstairs with me,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘But what about Zack? I can’t gatecrash your wedding night, you weirdo. And it’s not like you need a chaperone or anything.’

‘Don’t be mad! Zack’s coming up in a bit. I told him I was going to take my make-up off and get ready for bed. He’s waiting for the big reveal of my wedding negligee.’

It was the first I’d heard of this and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I asked anyway. ‘Wedding negligee?’

‘Snoopy T-shirt,’ she said. ‘The boning on this basque is digging in something chronic and the lace is itching my armpits and if I don’t get into something comfortable soon I’m going to claw my own skin off. Let’s go.’

She grabbed a bottle of champagne from the bar and led me to the lift, and a few moments later had beeped us into the bridal suite with her key card.

Housekeeping had clearly been in and done their thing. The bed was turned down, the lights dimmed and the curtains drawn. There were chocolates on the pillows and fresh fluffy robes hung on hooks in the bathroom. On top of the snow-white duvet, red rose petals had been scattered in the shape of a heart.

‘Quick, get rid of those,’ Amelie ordered.

‘What? Why? Aren’t they romantic?’

‘I think so, but Zack will think they’re tacky. Just do it, Luce, please. We haven’t got much time.’

I scooped up the rose petals and chucked them down the loo – a mistake, as it turned out, because several of them refused to flush and floated on the surface of the water like splats of blood. Then, while Amelie stood in front of the mirror yanking pins and grips out of her hair, I carefully undid all the tiny buttons down the back of her dress, one after another.

‘Isn’t this Zack’s job?’ I asked, kneeling on the floor with her bum by my face while I wrestled with the little loops of satin that encased each miniature pearl.

‘He’s even more cack-handed than you. He’d snap a button off for sure. Ah, that’s better.’

Amelie pulled a brush through her hair and scraped it up with a scrunchie, then stepped out of the dress and sat on the edge of the bath, easing off her shoes, unhooking her suspenders and reaching behind her to release the clasps on her basque.

I hung the dress up, back in its protective sleeve, while she rummaged in her bag for her Snoopy T-shirt.

‘Want to open the fizz?’ she asked. ‘I’ll make a start at getting this slap off.’

Through the open bathroom door, I could see her peeling off her false eyelashes and wiping oil-soaked cotton pads over her face. They started off pristine white and ended up a muddy greyish-brown. By the time she’d finished, the bubbles were dying away in our glasses.

Amelie came back into the bedroom and sat on the bed, her legs crossed. I handed her a glass and joined her, watching as she took a huge gulp of champagne as if it was the first thing she’s drunk for hours.

‘God, I needed that,’ she said.

’So.’ I took a cautious sip from my own glass. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘I need to tell you something,’ she said. I felt a cold hollowness in my stomach: whatever it was, it couldn’t be good news. Surely if there was something wrong between her and Zack, she wouldn’t have gone ahead with marrying him?

But she went on, ‘It’s about Adam.’

‘Adam? What about Adam?’

‘Zack,’ she explained patiently, as if reminding me of something I’d known for years, ‘doesn’t know about Adam.’

‘Well, I mean, why would he know about Adam? We’ve only just started being Adam. And I guess Zack doesn’t read Max! – I mean, why would he? I bet he reads The Economist or something.’

‘He does, actually. I tried it once because I thought I’d be able to have an intelligent conversation with him about inflation and interest rates, but it lost me after the contents page.’

‘Anyway,’ To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t that interested in Zack’s reading habits, ‘what’s Zack got to do with Adam?’

‘The thing is,’ she said, crossing her legs and looking intently down at her French-manicured nails, ‘Zack doesn’t know about Adam, so he doesn’t know you’re Adam. And he doesn’t know I’ve been helping you.’

‘Okay. So tell him – or don’t tell him. I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal.’

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