This is a Love Story (30 page)

I gently pulled it out and took it down to my girlfriend, who had now drawn a blanket around her and lit some candles. They filled the room with a vanilla scent, the kind of smell you would only have in your house if there was a woman in it. Nights like this were my favourite kind. It was achingly cold outside, and I was warm inside with a beautiful girlfriend and a takeaway. A chicken dansak, to be precise. A dish I hoped I wasn’t about to be wearing.

‘Don’t you think we should wait until we’ve eaten and cleared away the food, Chloe?’ I asked, wincing at the thought of curry oil blotting the pages and seeping into the photographs.

‘No. I think we should look at it now,’ she responded bluntly.

Her messy hair was pulled up into a high ponytail and one of the plaits had become detached and was hanging next to her face. I sat next to her on the sofa, balancing the book on my left knee and her right knee. Some talentless plum was whining away like a dying animal on
The X Factor
, so I turned the sound down.

My pulse started to race. This was quite scary. How was she going to react?

‘Right, let’s have a look at this,’ she said, wiping her fingers on the blanket. I wished she wouldn’t do things like that.

The first page was the squirrel article clipping, something I’m amazed that Sienna kept. Even then, when we could have gone our separate ways and simply become colleagues who didn’t really like each other very much.

Chloe gently leafed through the pages over the next fifteen minutes as I sat beside her, waiting for the fallout. Waiting for the claws and tears. She traced her index finger over some of the photos, read the receipts and tickets, trying to maintain an expression of calm and happiness. But it was fake. I could tell.

She saw everything: the photo booth, the trip to Amsterdam, even the dry-cleaning ticket from the time I dropped a garlic chicken on her lap in a French restaurant (long story). She reached the end, closed the book hard, took a deep breath and turned back towards the television. Silence.

‘Oh come on, Chloe . . .’ I said.

‘What do you mean, come on? Why didn’t you tell me about this?’ she said, tears starting to drip from her eyes.

The doom feeling filled my stomach again. ‘I was worried you would react like this, Chlo. That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.’ I sighed, realising this looked even worse now.

She continued staring at the telly, pushing a chunk of fluffy naan bread into her mouth as her chin wobbled. Another fat tear slid down her cheek.

‘It’s too much, Nick. I don’t like it,’ she said, wiping the water from her face with a shaking hand. The tears were falling rapidly now.

I shuffled closer to her and wrapped my arms around her slim shoulders, understanding why this would upset her, but knowing I wasn’t guilty of anything.

‘Listen, sweetheart, I’m sorry I didn’t show it to you. She doesn’t mean any harm by it. Look, maybe you should get to know Sienna a bit more, then maybe you’ll understand what she’s really like.’ I instantly regretted this.

‘Do you think we would get on?’ she asked, but I was unsure whether or not she was being sarcastic.

Would Chloe and Sienna get on? Chloe: blonde, feline sexpot with a temper like molten lava and a raging libido. A smoking, drinking, wild child. Sienna: a naturally beautiful (stunning, in fact) angel whose biggest tantrum came when someone stole my wallet in Soho and the police wouldn’t take a statement. Even then she just raised her voice a bit and slammed her fist on the desk. Carer to her father and a saviour to her friends. Calm, devoted, loyal and trusting. Probably not.

‘Yes, of course you would,’ I said, hoping we could change the subject. I suddenly imagined them in various coffee shops, eating shortbread and laughing over the size of my penis. Chloe might even tell Sienna that I fart in my sleep.

‘Great, well, let’s organise something,’ she said. She was being serious.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Anything.’

‘OK,’ I agreed, taking a bite of chicken decadently steeped in the most delicious sauce.

‘Can I have her number?’

‘OK. I’m just eating now, but I’ll give it to you later, yeah?’ I replied, desperately hoping she would forget.

She nodded and turned the sound up, assaulting my ears with a tone-deaf builder from Stoke who had endured great tragedies in his personal life and now felt the need to torture the great British public live on air to make up for it.

‘I got a good film for us to watch, you know,’ I said as I cleared away the greasy plates, glad that this hadn’t blown up into a proper row. I felt a wave of guilt at the thousands of calories but felt sure I would burn some of them off with a couple of hours of duvet sports. Well, if Chloe wasn’t too upset still . . .

‘That sounds lovely,’ she responded, kicking off a pair of cute slippers. The impending storm seemed to have passed over.

From the doorway I looked at Chloe and saw her lying there with a look of contentment on her face. Maybe it was all over now. All the drama would dissolve and become this silly thing we’d once gone through when we were young and stupid. All the hurt and the confusion would fade into the blackness of a memory. I had found my girl. She had found her man. Simple.

‘Chloe,’ I called quietly from the edge of the living room.

‘Yeah?’

‘I love you.’

Sienna

BEEP.

It was half past two in the afternoon, a Sunday afternoon to be precise, when I got the message. The olive-branch text from Chloe. It was a shock, to say the least.

‘Hi, Sienna. It’s Chloe. I got your number from Nick. Hope you don’t mind. Are you free for a coffee this afternoon? Xx’

So that was how I ended up in an overpriced deli with her, warming my cold hands on a latte. The place was mainly decked out in green marble, with big glass counters displaying a feast of expensive meats, smelly cheeses and strange sticks of bread twisted like strands of DNA. There were numerous strings of salami hanging from the ceiling behind the tills, and the staff looked like genuine Italian food buffs, wiping their rough hands down crisp white overalls. Near the window was a gold freezer containing a plethora of brightly coloured ice cream packed with chunks of chocolate, pecan nuts and ripples of caramel, glittering under the dimmed lights. It was a typical trendy London haunt, selling things I could neither pronounce nor afford. It was nice, though.

Chloe was wearing a pair of light blue skinny jeans and a T-shirt with some band on it that I’d never heard of. As I knew already, Chloe was achingly cool.

I had been a little nervous about this, fearful that she was going to start asking me about the incident in the toilet on Nick’s birthday. The time when she overheard me telling her boyfriend that I adored him. We hadn’t spoken about it since, but she was clearly furious at the time.

The café was packed with wealthy-looking couples, some with their children wearing miniature versions of designer labels. It really wasn’t my cup of tea. We ordered a plate of shortbreads with little jam hearts in the middle.

‘The reason I wanted to go out just us two is because obviously I’m going out with your best friend, and I’ve heard so many great things about you,’ she gushed sweetly, brushing some crumbs away from her top lip. ‘I don’t know you, but I’d really like to. We work together and everything, but we hardly talk. I feel like you’re a stranger, really.’

That was sweet, I thought, as I nibbled the edge of one of the biscuits, which crumbled luxuriously. Maybe we wouldn’t discuss the toilet incident. I really hoped we wouldn’t. I’d often thought about contacting her too, but she’d beaten me to it. I’d been hoping we could break the ice and shift all this awkwardness that had built up between us.

‘Thank you. I’m really happy for you and Nick – he seems so chilled out now you’re together.’

She smiled, a look of real accomplishment.

I recognised that expression. It was the look a woman wears when she has discovered the man she wants to be with, the man of her dreams. The one who inspires her to be a better person. And I can hardly blame her. For years he has been the man I want to be with too. He’s a catch. And she is so lucky.

‘Are you OK with Nick and me, you know, being friends?’ I asked, my heart thumping hard in my chest. I believe in honesty and I’m not afraid to ask questions like this.

She looked down into the bottom of her cup and bit her lip. She was so damn pretty it hurt.

‘I need to be truthful with you here, Sienna. I haven’t always been OK with it. At times I’ve been really mean to Nick over it, kicked off and stuff because I was worried there was something more between you than there is.’

I didn’t say a word; I was starting to experience tunnel vision. The bustle of the people around us seemed to slow right down and I was just looking at Chloe’s face until I got double vision. There were two of her now.

‘But he’s told me time and time again that he’s never felt anything for you like that, and that you’re just friends.’ Chloe almost sounded as though she was sneering. I felt like she was mocking me, but I knew I was only imagining it.

Just friends. I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my stomach as I imagined him holding her close at night and telling her that I wasn’t a big deal. Maybe they even laughed about it. About me. But what did I expect? Of course that was what he was going to say. That was all he felt. I’d always known that, but hearing it hit me hard.

I suddenly thought about Ben and felt guilty that the disappointment had cut into me like this. ‘Of course, Chloe. You should never feel worried about Nick and I. He’s a pain, anyway,’ I joked, touching her arm and giggling.

‘God, I know!’ she shrieked through hysterical laughter as all this energy ebbed from her. Love-fuelled energy, no doubt.

‘He has all these really annoying habits, Sienna.’ She leaned in and began to whisper. ‘He always puts his head in his hands on his lap when he feels stressed or happy – or anything, really. And he doesn’t wash up enough, and – oh, this is brilliant – he farts in his sleep!’ With this she tilted her head back and started to wipe away a little tear of joy. A bunch of bracelets round her wrist jangled against each other like wind chimes.

I wondered if she really knew him well. Did she know what his favourite book was? How he likes to iron his boxers and put them in colour order? That he has a strange penchant for honey and banana on toast? Maybe she knew him better than I did now. Maybe I didn’t really know him at all any more . . .

I imagined them getting married, and me somewhere in the congregation with a large black hat on, as if I was in mourning. And how the vicar would ask if anyone had any lawful impediment, and I would have to keep my lips sealed for fear of shouting out that he was the love of my life, and somewhere along the line there had been a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.

A cold feeling rushed over my body and I felt detached from the room. It was as if I and the chair I was perched on were rushing backwards, away from the shortbread and the coffee and the Prada handbags, into some unknown world. I felt sick, just like I had that day in the gym.

Come on, Sienna. Wear the dress. I imagined pulling the green gown from my wardrobe, stepping into it and carefully zipping it up my back. I tried to feel tall and beautiful and proud of who I was. A strong, confident woman.

‘Sienna, are you OK?’ Chloe’s voice brought me back and I realised I had been staring at her forehead in silence for quite a long time.

‘Yes, sorry, I’m fine.’

But I wasn’t. The feeling just wasn’t going away. A gut-wrenching sensation, cold and tingling all over, like thousands of tiny needles were biting into my skin. ‘Actually, Chloe, I’m not feeling too well. I have to go.’ I shot up suddenly, the coffee cups clattering loudly as I bashed the table with my knee. Oh shit, I didn’t want to make a scene. I just wanted to get out of there.

‘Sienna, honey. I hope you’re OK?’ She reached out her arm, but it was too late. I was pushing past what seemed like rows and rows of prams all pressed together in a wall. It was like they were speaking, laughing, taunting me.

I felt guilty about leaving her there – she was such a nice, sweet girl. It wasn’t her fault she’d fallen in love with Nick, anyone would. But I felt like poison and if I spent any real time with her, I would make her dangerous, just like I was. A bad person who loved other people’s boyfriends.

I rushed through the streets and turned corners like they were the pages of a book I was desperate to finish. Street signs were a blur. Faces had no features. People spoke but no sound came out. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe I should get some help. Someone, please help me.

My heart was pumping and my legs felt like jelly. I just needed to get away from there. As I pounded the concrete in my high-heeled boots I imagined what it would be like to just get the train to Heathrow and fly somewhere and not come back.

I needed to talk to someone, anyone. I jumped on the tube and went to Covent Garden. There were even more people there, thicker, deeper swathes of strangers to wade through. I started to run all the way to that strange dancewear shop I’d visited all that time ago. As mad as it sounded, I thought I could talk to that crazy lady. Maybe she would understand.

I turned one more corner and raced up to the shop window, but the door was closed. It looked dark inside. That was odd, I thought, while I caught my breath. After a few seconds I noticed a crumpled piece of white paper taped to the window. I pushed my nose against the glass and started to scan the wobbly handwriting.

I read the notice again and again and let out a deep sigh. My fingers were pressed against the glass and a tinge of condensation was gathering around them. I slid all the way down the window, leaving a sweaty trail with my hands until I collapsed on the dirty ground.