How We Met (40 page)

Fraser put his towel on and opened the door. They were both smirking.

‘Well, this is like old times, isn’t it, Fraser Morgan?’ she said, wielding a bottle of Baileys. ‘This is back to 5 South Road days. Us getting ready to go out, you going on a hot date with another lady, me walking in on you naked. You were
always
naked. Jesus, I must have seen your bits as much as Liv did.’

Fraser grinned and felt a rush of affection for his old mate, Melody Burgess, and her mothering, nagging ways. The divorce was going through and she seemed more sane. The house was on the market, she was going to buy herself a ‘fuck-off bachelorette pad and a new soft-top Beetle’, apparently. Credit to her and Norm, they’d sorted everything out amicably and she was feeling sociable again, and was about to go out tonight with the girls, like old times.

He got her in a headlock.

‘Come here, me old mucker,’ he said. ‘I love you, Burgess, I proper do.’

Melody wriggled.

‘Ow, get off, you freak. And you’ve got far too much aftershave on. Honestly, did you jump in the bottle?’

He let her go, she sighed, smoothed down her hair and held the bottle of Baileys out.

‘Now, left over from Christmas,’ she said. ‘Bit of Dutch courage?’

It wasn’t hard to pronounce but it was thick and it was very alcoholic and, right now, he needed all the help he could get.

The first week of January, and Lancaster was a graveyard, the only people out being those with unfortunate birthdays or, in Mia’s case, selfish exes who refused to even entertain the idea of giving up their New Year’s Eve, and instead offered the brilliant alternative of 3 January.

Christmas had been surprisingly OK. Eduardo had moved out into a flat-share and the only emotion Mia felt was relief. It was as though they’d spent two years dragging out the remnants of a relationship that had never got off the ground in the first place.

He wouldn’t be able to have Billy overnight, but he would have him every Sunday, and whenever else he wanted, as long as Mia had some notice. He’d come over for Christmas dinner, too, which Mia was glad of, since it made it less intense with her mum and, miraculously, perhaps now that they weren’t together any more and he was ‘observing boundaries’, he’d even refrained from flirting with Lynette.

Sadly, the snow had not lasted till Christmas; now it was just freezing and wet and, as Mia stood at the bar in the Merchants, looking at the decorations that seemed to be hanging on till the bitter end, she tried desperately to fight it, but she could feel her mood descend. She felt on edge. Drink more. That was the answer.

She leant across the bar
. ‘Actually, can I have three tequilas with that?’ she asked the barman on a whim.

The barman raised his eyebrows. ‘No January detoxing for you then, I see?’

‘Lord, no,’ said Mia. ‘January detoxes are the work of the devil, to be eyed with nothing but suspicion and loathing.’

The barman laughed. ‘My kind of client.’ He nodded, impressed, putting the drinks on a tray with salt and lemon.

Mia carried them back to her table where Melody and Anna waited, their faces aghast.

‘Good work,’ said Melody, rubbing her hands together as Mia plonked the drinks on the table. ‘I like your style.’

Anna was not so enthusiastic.

‘No. Bloody. Way. I’m meant to be detoxing, it’s January.’

Mia rolled her eyes, downed her drink and then Anna’s, trying very hard not to visibly wince.

‘Happy?’ she said. Anna and Melody looked at one another, incredulous. ‘All sorted. That was easy.’

She sat down. Behave yourself, she told herself, just behave yourself, Mia, and grow up. It’s just, try as she might, she couldn’t get them out of her mind. Where were they now? Were they having fun? Were they snogging? Every time she thought of them, all she could picture was Emilia fixing Fraser with her hypnotic green eyes. And it didn’t take much to hypnotize Fraser. Let’s face it, a dumpy, dolphin-obsessed, forty-something had done the trick, she was pretty sure a six-foot Brazilian would manage it.

And she’d half engineered this – was she actually insane? She was beginning to bitterly regret that she’d ever introduced them in the first place, that she’d ever invited Fraser to that fated picnic in the park where Emilia gadded about practically naked.

After all, there was a perfectly nice, very exotic, perfectly rotund Hungarian who lived two flats up. This could have been all so different.

‘So, what did Fraser wear in the end?’ she asked Melody, very casually, she thought, as she sipped on her wine chaser. They’d already been for a Chinese, a rather depressing start to the evening
, since nobody could afford it (Anna had insisted, as she had to complete her ‘Learn to use chopsticks’ task), and there’d been someone celebrating their birthday in there, which made Mia really sad, when, after they’d sung ‘Happy Birthday’, they’d all buggered off before 9 p.m.
Skint, out-partied. She vowed never to get pregnant in May.

She’d done very well to manage not to ask any questions at all about Fraser and Emilia whilst she was there, but now she could no longer hold out.

‘Oh, it was hilarious,’ said Melody. ‘He was in the spare room getting ready and I walked in on him, butt-naked …’

Anna grimaced. ‘I bet that was nice for you.’

‘He was checking himself out in the mirror, the little poser. He must have been because he was standing right in front of it!’

Checking himself out in the mirror, eh? Why did he feel the need to check himself out in the mirror?

Anna and Melody were laughing. Mia was too, but only on her face.

‘So, um, what did he wear in the end?’ she tried again. Both of them looked at her and she suddenly felt self-conscious. ‘You know, when he
finally
stopped parading around and actually put
some clothes on?’

Melody frowned, looking slightly baffled. Mia shifted in her seat.

‘Um, he was wearing that olive-green shirt and a nice coat, the one he got for Christmas,’ she said eventually. ‘He looked hot, actually. If I didn’t know him better, I could have rather fancied him myself.’

This was torture, thought Mia, absolute torture. The olive-green shirt. Why the olive-green shirt?! He looked gorgeous in the bloody olive-green shirt!

‘Where were they going? Do you know?’ she asked. She was pissed now, shameless, these questions were just toppling out of her mouth.

‘The Borough, I think.’ Melody shrugged. ‘God knows, I didn’t really quiz him. Too busy recovering from seeing his bare arse.’

Melody and Anna carried on laughing and drinking. Mia could hear the two of them talking but didn’t seem to be able to contribute to the conversation, her mind constantly assaulted by images of what he might be up to. In the past month, her feelings for Fraser had become more urgent, much harder to conceal, and the thing was, she didn’t want to conceal them any more.
Yesterday, she’d been to see Mrs Durham, and Mrs D had said, quite matter-of-factly as she’d poured the tea:

‘So how long have you been in love with Fraser? I have to say, he’s much better than that awful foreign one you had.’

She’d spent so many months battling with her feelings,
actually trying to extinguish them, and she was knackered! Exhausted! It was out of her control. It had been manageable, just, when he was seeing Karen, but only because Karen was no real threat; but now, knowing he was going to be out with Emilia, almost certainly going to have sex with a gorgeous young woman, and more than that, possibly enjoy it? It had given rise to feelings of jealousy, debilitating jealousy that she had never known in her life, that she never even knew she was capable of.
These were bad enough on their own. The fact she didn’t seem to be allowed to have them made it even worse.

Melody had gone to the toilet, so now it was just Mia and Anna. Mia could feel Anna’s eyes boring into her. She looked away just as Anna gave an exaggerated sigh.

‘So, Mia,’ she said. Her voice was cold; it was freaking Mia out. ‘What’s going on? Because anyone would think you were actually jealous of Fraser and Emilia going on a date. You seem to be asking a lot of questions.’

Mia shifted uneasily on her chair.

‘I’m just interested,’ she said. ‘She is my Portuguese teacher, I do sort of have a vested interest.’

Anna gave a little snort.

Mia became alarmingly aware of the fact that she was very drunk, Anna was not, and of the potential for trouble that this spelt.

Anna leant forward, so close that Mia could feel her breath on her face. Her eyes looked enormous in her tiny little face. She looked like a mad, fragile bird. Mia didn’t know if she was going to cry or hit her.

‘You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re in love with Fraser.’

Christ, she had some nerve, confronting her like this.

‘I’m not in
love
with Fraser,’ said Mia but, even as the words left her mouth, she was aware of how unconvincing she sounded. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

Anna blew air out through her lips. ‘I think the least you can do is be honest,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you owe it to Liv to be honest, Mia?’ Anna’s lip had started to tremble now.

Didn’t Liv already know? thought Mia.

Mia could feel hot tears threatening. She fought furiously to stop them. A million different emotions seemed to collide in her head – overwhelming sadness, regret: how could she and Anna have come to this? How could losing their best friend have opened an ocean between them? Not brought them closer?

And then, literally in a second, these feelings cleared to reveal startling clarity.

It didn’t matter what anyone said or thought. She loved him. She could not help herself. She loved him with every molecule in her body. If anything was to come of this night with Emilia, she would never forgive herself.

Melody came back from the toilet.

‘Right, so, shall we get another round in?’ she said, brightly. ‘One more tequila?’

Mia slowly shook her head.

‘Actually, no, I think I’ll go home,’ she said, knowing perfectly well she was about to do nothing of the sort.

Deep down, in some tiny corner of her still-sober consciousness, she knew what she was about to do was a bad idea. In most of her drink-fuelled one, however, this was the best idea she’d ever had in her life. But first, she needed to do something else.

In a candlelit corner of the Borough pub, Emilia leant over the table and stared into Fraser’s eyes. ‘Do you know what, Fraser?’ she said, rolling the
r
of Fraser, which terrified him slighty. ‘I think you have something dark about you, something mysterious.’

‘Really?’ he said. Actually, he just felt stuffed and exhausted. Exhausted from all this intensity, and stuffed after a Portuguese meal of meat, and more meat. He’d never seen a girl eat so much meat.

Emilia gathered her hair and cocked her head to the side. ‘Yes,’ she purred
, ‘I think you’re fascinating, actually.’

Under the table, he swore he could feel Emilia’s foot circle his.

Fraser flinched slightly. He was aware that the more intimate Emilia’s body language was becoming, the more closed his got. Christ, he was sitting with his arms, legs and feet crossed now, and she still found some naked part of him to rub her foot up against. The woman was a fiend.

She sighed deeply, taking a sip of her wine.

‘I also think you have a lot of potential,’ she said, and she tapped her head. ‘In here. I think you have a LOT of potential.’

‘Thank you,’ said Fraser, whilst inwardly crying for help.

They’d been on a date for almost three hours now; during that time, Fraser had deduced that Emilia didn’t really have much in the way of conversation. He’d tried to talk to her about Brazil, about what she thought of England, but she always brought it back to these strange, intense statements that Fraser had no idea how to respond to. He felt like a specimen in an art gallery or museum.

He looked at her now, her eyes positively smouldering in the low light. There was no mistaking she was a beautiful woman. Long, honey-coloured hair, the most incredible green eyes he’d ever seen. Gravity-defying breasts that, when she leant forward, he could see were held in a leather bra, which perturbed him a little, it had to be said.

She was a stunner, there was no mistaking it. But she initiated no desire whatsoever in him. He just did not fancy her. In fact, he had no desire to go to bed with her – he didn’t even want to kiss her.

All he could think of, when he looked at her minute, hard waist, was Mia’s soft one, the way it rolled – just ever so slightly – over her jeans. When he looked at her red-painted mouth, he could only think of Mia’s mouth, wide and full, which always looked so kissable, as if she put strawberries and cream on it – or something like that, anyway – not bright red war paint.

Every time Emilia got up to go to the bar, he looked at her endless, slim, Amazonian legs and only craved Mia’s sweet, slightly full ones, with their cyclists’ thighs (her description, not his).

He thought back to how beautiful she’d looked when she’d turned up at the Scrabble night. How glamorous. Even though she said she looked like Barbara Cartland.

It was no good, his heart just wasn’t in this – it felt like a betrayal, which was inconvenient but there it was. And yet, the more the evening went on, the more obvious it was becoming that Emilia was up for it. Not just up for it, but that this was the reason she’d come. Why else would you wear a leather bra, for crying out loud?

The question was
, how was he going to get out of this? He knew right now, he couldn’t go through with it.

‘Shall we go to another bar?’ he said, hoping for somewhere noisier. ‘Or maybe dancing? Do you like dancing?’

She reached out, caressing the side of his face, and curled her foot around his again. ‘Shall we just go back to your friend’s place?’ she said, through her canopied eyelashes.