Charlie Glass's Slippers (25 page)

Actually, thank Christ he
doesn’t
know.

And if the reason that he fancies me is because I’m a breath of fresh air compared to his usual type, then it’s in my interest to have him
not
knowing for as long as humanly pos
sible. Frankly, I’ll mainline shepherd’s pie if that’s something he finds attractive about me. I’ll go about the place with my nose in a horse bag of the stuff. I won’t even complain about all the additional hours of loathsome running I’ll have to do (clandestinely, of course) if it means that he keeps gazing at me with those incredible sexy eyes the way he’s doing right now.

“Anyway. Now that I’ve finally persuaded you to spend an entire evening with me, how about telling me a little bit more about yourself. After all, all I really know about you so far is that you work for MI6, you’ve recently suffered a nasty bout of kidnapping, you prefer shepherd’s pie to salad, and that you look just as incredible by candlelight as you do by moonlight.” His handsome face—pretty incredible by candlelight, too, as it happens—creases into a grin. “Tell me about your work, for example.” He gestures around the store. “This place looks quite the project. And was it a photo shoot you were working on this afternoon?”

“Yes. But I tell you what, why don’t you tell me about
yourself
.” After an entire afternoon of faking wild enthusiasm for the so-called glamour of a photo shoot, I’m not sure I’m up for more. But more to the point, I’m in danger of being rendered speechless by the fact that he’s just placed a strong arm, very lightly, over my shoulders. “I’d love,” I croak, “to know more about you. Your driving career, for example.”

“What is there to know that people don’t know already?” He takes a sip of his wine. “Winner of one world title, runner-up of two more. Some people thought that was spectacular overachievement, some people thought that was spectacular underachievement. Quite a lot of people thought I only got as far as I did because of my father’s money. But it wasn’t my father’s money driving the car the year I won the Formula One world championship. Mind you, it wasn’t my father’s money driving the car when I plowed it into the crash barrier on the sixth lap of the Suzuka circuit, either.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because he isn’t smiling anymore.

“It’s okay.” He shrugs. “Shit happens. I wasn’t badly hurt. Just a couple of fractures and a dislocated shoulder.”

“That must have been painful.”

He shrugs again. “You have to keep it in perspective—or so people are always telling me. I could have been killed, I suppose . . .”

“Exactly!” He looks so bleak, all of a sudden, that I want to be one of those people who try to help him put it in perspective. “Honestly, Jay, there are worse things that can happen in a car than that! My mother was killed by a hit-and-run driver, so . . .”

“Jesus!” He sets his glass down on the tablecloth-covered crate and stares at me, appalled. “That’s . . . my God, Charlie. That’s awful.”

Okay, I think my attempt to put things in perspective has gone a little too far. I think, in fact, that I might just have killed the moment. For my next trick, maybe I should tell Jay all about Dad’s lingering and unpleasant illness, or my miserable childhood being tormented by my wicked stepmother.

“Don’t apologize! It was twenty years ago! I’m perfectly okay these days!” To prove how very okay I am, I pick up my fork and start to tuck heartily into the shepherd’s pie. “God, Jay, it really is absolutely delicious . . .”

But he’s surveying his own plate, bleakly. “I can’t eat this.”

“Oh.” I’m disappointed. After all, if he doesn’t eat the shepherd’s pie, then I can’t exactly sit here gorging myself. “Um, well, did you say you’d brought a lemon tart?”

“No, I mean, I can’t eat. At all.” He shoves his plate away. His wineglass almost topples over.

“Because of what I just told you about my mother, you mean?” I stare at him. “Jay, that’s sweet, but you . . . you don’t have to care that much!”

“I don’t have to care about the fact you’ve just told me
your mother was killed by a hit-and-run driver? When you were—what?—six?”

“Eight,” I say, unable to suppress my tiny thrill that—really?—he thinks I’m twenty-six.

“Fuck.” He gives his plate another shove. “Well, aren’t we a couple of peas in a pod?”

“Sorry?”

“My mum died when I was eight, too.”

Now it’s my turn to look appalled. “Oh, Jay.”

“Cancer.” His handsome face has darkened, as if there’s a thunderstorm about to pass directly over it. “She was thirty-four. Only a year older than I am now.”

“Jay, I . . .” For once, I feel my own childhood tragedy dwarfed by someone else’s. It makes me want to put my arms around him and never let go. But he’s not looking like he’d appreciate that, so I just try reaching for his hand instead. “I’m so sorry. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“What, watching your mum die from stage-four breast cancer? Nah.” He pulls his hand away. He looks, suddenly, like a little boy—specifically, a very, very sad little boy who won’t let himself cry, and who certainly won’t let himself be comforted. “It’s delightful.”

I know from my own painful experience that there’s nothing I can say right now. Besides, his mood is actually making me feel distinctly upset. Because I recognize only too well this precise kind of hurt and anger. It’s the hurt and anger of an eight-year-old who has just lost a mother. It’s the hurt and anger I had to swallow every single day, after Mum died, because there was no place for it at Diana’s house. Diana was always crystal clear about that.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jay mumbles, getting to his feet. He doesn’t even bother to pack up his hamper, simply striding for the door and out onto the pavement. His Aston Martin is parked on the curb right outside, and I hear one of the doors
open and then slam shut as I grab my bag and hurry out after him, stopping only to lock the shop door behind me.

He starts the engine, before I’ve actually managed to close my door, and roars away from the curb.

I could cry. In fact, I’m very close to crying.

On the bright side, at least I don’t need to worry anymore about how to prevent Jay from encountering my disastro-wax. He isn’t going to come near my disastro-wax with a barge pole, after what I’ve just done. Seriously: make sweet love to the girl who’s just inadvertently reminded you of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? Sensuously caress the body of someone who brought the sensitive topic of dead mothers into the conversation?

He doesn’t say a single word as we hurtle, way above thirty miles an hour, up King’s Road and towards . . . well, actually, I don’t know where he’s heading. Jay doesn’t really seem to know, either, but simply seems keen to drive as fast as he possibly can, what with the unfortunate circumstances of that pesky speed limit to stay within nodding distance of, and those pesky pedestrians making their way home, and all the pesky cars and buses that keep forcing him to slow down. We’re bombing all the way out along the Great West Road, ten minutes later, before he finally speaks.

“Where am I taking you?” He yanks the gearstick down a couple of notches as he’s forced to slow down for a red light. “And don’t tell me I can just drop you anywhere,” he adds, before I can say exactly this. “Just let me take you to your actual home, Charlie, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to care two hoots if you live in some kind of slum or something.”

“It’s Earl’s Court.”

“God.
Worse
than a slum.” He glances at me when I don’t say anything. “That was a joke, by the way. Not that I’d expect you to realize I can still make jokes. Not when I’ve been such an arsehole.”

“You haven’t been an arsehole. It’s completely understandable to get upset about your mum. I still do, too, sometimes.” I glance out of my window. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” He reaches across the gearstick and puts his hand around mine again. “You’ve been perfect. Direct me from here?”

So I do direct him into a turning off the Great West Road, then back around the side streets of Baron’s Court towards Earl’s Court until we reach Old Brompton Road. Jay pulls the Aston Martin up where I tell him, on a single yellow line on the opposite side of the road to my flat, and turns the engine off. He turns towards me, and I’m expecting him to say something else—about the shepherd’s pie we abandoned (my stomach is still rumbling) back at the store; about the fact that the newsstand we’re parked outside is security-shuttered-up, at ten p.m., despite its bold signage claiming it’s
OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT
; about the fact that it’s been fun while it lasted but that it’s probably better if we don’t see each other again. But he doesn’t say anything at all. He just pulls me towards him and starts to kiss me.

It takes me a good couple of minutes to stop being stunned into immobility and start kissing him back. At which point (look, the past half-hour has been really stressful, for one thing, and let’s not forget that Jay is officially the best kisser in the world, for another) I can’t prevent myself from letting out an actual, wild-animal moan.

“You, too, huh?” Jay pulls away. He’s looking delighted again, which suggests I don’t need to be quite so mortified by my unwitting moan as I thought I did. “Look, you know, I could always come up to your flat . . .”

“No!”

“Okay, okay.” He holds up his hands, grinning. “I get the message, Charlie, don’t worry! You don’t have to do anything with me that you don’t want to do!”

“No, it’s not that!”

It really, really isn’t: I want to do
everything
with him, then go right back to the start and do everything all over again. I don’t even care anymore that I live in a gloomy basement flat, or that—now I come to think of it—I’ve left tights and bras drying all over the banisters. And I’m not sure I even care anymore that I’m not Cassia Connelly, or any of the anorexic salad-munchers he usually goes to bed with. Frankly, I’m so limp with desire for him that I’ll happily run the risk that he flees, after the sex, and never calls me again, just so long as it’s
after the sex
, that is. But how—
how?—
can I possibly do the sex parts without getting sufficiently undressed to reveal the mortifying plucked-chicken lady parts? Admittedly there are probably all kinds of moves to get around that . . . but I don’t
have
any moves! And I’m not sure that even Jay has enough moves for the both of us.

“Look, honestly, Jay, it’s not that I don’t want you to come in . . .”

“It’s just too soon?”

Too soon after my Brazilian wax?

“Yes,” I reply, honestly.

“You’d rather know me better before . . . well . . .
you
know?”

“Mmm.”

“Then how’s this for a plan?” He leans closer and puts a hand, gently, on the side of my face. “Why don’t we spend this whole weekend together? Just hang out for a couple of days, get to know each other better? Hey, I know! We could go to my place in Shropshire. I chill out there like nowhere else. Fresh air, good food . . . and I keep a lot of my cars there, so we could put a couple of them through their paces.”

He’s inviting me to spend an entire weekend in his company? When my red-raw thighs will be back to normal? And fit (as they’ll ever be) for close-quarters contact . . .

“We could make a proper house party of it, if you fancy,” he’s going on, fired up with enthusiasm by the prospect of a hearty weekend of good food, country air, extreme speed . . . and me? “I’ll see which of my friends is free . . . and why don’t you bring some friends along, too? That way,” he adds, with one of his devilish grins, “they can check me out on your behalf. Let you know whether they think you ought to be falling into bed with me or not.”

I can feel myself flush hot pink. I’m too flustered to think straight. “I suppose I could invite my best friend, Lucy . . .”

“Lucy. I like the sound of her already. Now, just give me a heads-up—is she susceptible to bribery, in any way? If I accidentally-on-purpose leave a Cartier bracelet in her room, do you think she’ll be more or less likely to give me the thumbs-up as a candidate for her best friend’s affections?”

I’m about to laugh, but then I remember one problem. “Oh, dear. I forgot. She’s got a Norwegian boyfriend.”

“So she’ll be in Oslo this weekend? Or busy eating whale meat? Or otherwise engaged at an A-ha concert?”

This time I do laugh. “No. But I don’t think her boyfriend will let her out for the weekend.”

“Wow. He sounds a barrel of laughs. Well, invite him along, too. There’s plenty of room at the house. The more the merrier.”

“Not in Pal’s case.”

“And maybe I can bribe him, too. With a first-class cruise along the fjords. And a Morten Harket T-shirt.”

Barrel entirely scraped of Norway-stereotype gags, Jay gets out of the car to come around and open my door again. He accompanies me across the road to the steps outside my flat, then puts his arms around me and kisses me, once more, firmly on the lips. It’s incredible, and intoxicating, and—thank God—as if the whole horrible comparing-dead-mothers episode has never happened.

“So I’ll pick you up Friday afternoon,” he says, when he comes up for air. “And I’ll text you details of where we’re going in Shropshire, so you can tell your friends where to meet us.”

I watch him while he crosses the road again, back to his car. Then quite suddenly—and I don’t, honestly, know what possesses me—I dart back over the road myself and tap on his window just as he starts the car engine. He winds the window down, and when it’s down all the way, I lean through it and kiss him—again, I don’t know what possesses me—softly on the forehead.

He looks rather startled, though not displeased. “What was that for?”

“Just a thank you,” I hear myself say. “For a really lovely evening.”

He lets out a low chuckle, then blows me a kiss of his own as he starts to maneuver the car away from the yellow line. “You’re a very unusual girl, Charlie Glass,” he says, just before he roars away, again, at twice the speed limit. “Very unusual indeed.”

• • •

I don’t go into my flat. I nip up the road to the late-night Tesco and do a whip-round with my basket, finding my way effortlessly to the right shelves despite the fact that I’ve bought nothing but no-fat yogurt and blueberries here since I’ve been back from America. Tonight I buy minced lamb, a bag of potatoes, then carrots, celery, and onion, and—glancing over my shoulder as I do so—two packs of creamy, unsalted butter.