Page 6 of The Price of Love
‘Yeah. Christ, I’m still ashamed of myself, the way I used to follow you around. I was too shy to do anything about it, of course.’
I coughed, and the grapefruit juice did a little celebratory dance. ‘Shy? Were you?’ Shy? This man — I met his eye for the first time — this man had regularly taken most of his clothes off on stage in front of hundreds (another of the reasons why I had attended just about every gig Fresh Fingers gave) and been famous for his double-mooning trick in the Union bar.
‘With girls, yes. Terrible. So. Sorry. I bet you’re, what, married now?’
How did I play it without making myself sound like the lonely spinster I sometimes feared I was becoming? ‘Not really. I mean, no. Not married. In fact’ — inventing quickly so as not to sound less attractive than a case of typhoid — ‘I’ve recently split up with someone actually.’
Luke let out a long sigh. ‘Yeah, know the feeling.’ We kind of stared at each other for a moment. At least, he stared and I clenched. ‘Bad breakup?’
‘Pretty bad, yes. I caught him with someone else.’What happened there?I mean, one minute we’re inTrue Confessionsmode, and the next I’m laying down the ‘How I Dated a Serial Cheater’ precredit sequence for Jeremy Kyle’s new TV extravaganza.
‘Shit happens, yeah? Was it the guy from last night? The one with the crazy eyes?’
Crazy eyes? Jazz?Although, now you come to mention it . . . ‘Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I’m still feeling . . .’ a bit like a lying cow. Why hadn’t I simply admitted that my last relationship of any kind had been six months ago? It had ended because I couldn’t find model aircraft flying at all fascinating and we’d broken up sotto voceon his mother’s couch during one of her feted scone and jelly teas. Answer — because I didn’t want to look a total tit.
‘Yeah, course. Sorry. So.’ Was it my imagination or did he really look quite sorry to drop the subject of my love life. ‘What do you usually do on a Saturday night?’
Oh, you know, the usual. There’s the laundry. If I’m really feeling like pushing the boat out, I might pumice my feet. ‘Not a lot. Well, sometimes I sing in a band.’ Yeah, right. Sometimes, like when Jazz’s band is completely desperate and even its last-ditch singer, the one with a squint and no boobs, has got dysentery.
‘Hey, that’s great. We’ll have to get together sometime, have a jamming session.’ Luke leaned across the table and a waft of exclusive aftershave hit me in both nostrils. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of weirdo, stalking girls I used to have a thing for. It was completely accidental, but I’d been thinking of you a lot. After so long away, I guess, all the old gang were on my mind.’
A sudden, grim thought struck me. ‘You aren’t confusing me with someone else, are you? I mean, we didn’t really move in the same circles much.’ And every time I saw you, you completely ignored me. And I’d noted the words ‘used to’.
Luke gave a grin so hot that diamonds would have gone runny. ‘Oh, now, let me see. You had longer hair, love the new cut by the way, read English, rode around on a bright red bicycle like you thought you were at Cambridge, wore possibly the biggest boots on campus and hung out with Katie somebody.’
‘O’Connor,’ I supplied. ‘She’s Katie Gardner now, she married Daniel, do you remember Dan?’Shut up, Willow.
‘Yeah. I was so crippled up with shyness that I could hardly even bear to look at you.’
Now our eyes met properly. His gaze was level and steady. The stomach churning was becoming unignorable and my throat began to constrict, but the eye contact was luscious with promise. If I ran for the toilets now I might never see a look like that again.
I made a quick decision — pulled my jacket towards me and pretended to be having a coughing fit, searching for a handkerchief whilst in reality I was throwing up the grapefruit juice into a pocket. It was short, sharp and nasty, but Luke thankfully didn’t seem to notice.
‘So, then. Would you like another drink? Or’ — he waved a hand at the crowded bar — ‘would you rather go on somewhere else?’
I would have toured the inner circles of hell to keep Luke Fry’s attention on me. I mean, how much would it take to makeyouvomit in your own pocket? We ended up walking through the darkening streets, and before I knew it, he was walking me home. It had started to rain at some unnoticed point and umbrellas were erupting around us. The streets shone, colours bleeding into one another as my eyes glazed with sheer happiness. Our heads bent together in introspective conversation, what with the twirlingparapluies, the neon shimmer and the muffled background sounds of Saturday night falling on a suburban area, it was like the closing scene of a Jeunet film.
Luke bid me a decorous goodnight. (Although I noted, when he leaned against me to give me a peck on the cheek, the bulge in his trousers indicated that he would have gone for something a lot less chaste.) I did the cliché thing of closing the front door and leaning against it breathing heavily. This ended swiftly in a very unclichéd rush to the bathroom, where I stripped off all my clothes from which a slight smell of sick was beginning to waft.
Chapter Four
‘No, I’m sorry, Luke. I can’t make it tonight. I have a very important meeting to go to. Perhaps some other time?’
‘What’cha muttering about? You goin’ bloody loony on us then, Will, or what?’
I looked up from my computer screen to see Neil and Clive, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the front office, hanging over my desk. ‘What?’
‘All this chuntering away to yerself, soundin’ like you’re as barmy as’ — a gesture — ‘the Lady of the Lake down there.’
The lady in question, namely Katie, could be heard singing a Killers track from the filing room, which was meant to be soundproof but wasn’t because the boys hosted farting competitions in there and the tiles had fallen off. ‘No, I was just . . .’
But Neil and Clive had lost interest in me and my amusing foibles and were taking themselves off to annoy Katie. She gave much better value in the irritation stakes since she had a far wider vocabulary of expletives and, because of the twins, was always slightly sleep deprived.
‘No, really, Luke,’ I continued to myself as I absentmindedly typed in the wording for a badly written advertisement. ‘I am soterriblybusy. Maybe next month, sometime.’ And then the telephone rang, making me jump. ‘Hello,York Echo, how can I help you?’
‘You can let me take you out for dinner tonight.’
‘Luke?’
