The Out of Office Girl
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Authors: Nicola Doherty
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #General
The Out of Office Girl
NICOLA DOHERTY
Copyright © 2012 Nicola Doherty
The right of Nicola Doherty to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 0 7553 8686 4
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Nicola grew up in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. After studying English at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford, she worked in book publishing, ending up working on celebrity books before leaving to pursue a freelance and writing career. She lives in London.
From London . . .
Alice Roberts is having a rubbish summer. She’s terrified of her boss, her career is stalling, and she’s just been dumped - by text message. But things are about to change
to Italy
When her boss Olivia is taken ill, Alice is sent on the work trip of a lifetime: to a villa in Sicily, to edit the autobiography of Hollywood bad boy Luther Carson. But it’s not all yachts, nightclubs
and Camparis. Luther’s arrogant agent Sam wants him to ditch the book. Luther himself is gorgeous, charming and impossible to read. There only seems to be one way to get his attention, and it definitely involves mixing business with pleasure. Alice is out of the office, and into deep trouble . . .
. . . with love
Table of Contents
To my parents
and to all the Alices out there
I’m lying on my bed, watching Luther undress. I’ve seen this so many times but it never fails to mesmerise me. First the T-shirt slips off, white against his tanned skin, leaving his dark brown hair even more messed up than before. The expression in his brown eyes is hard to read – he looks passionate, intense, vulnerable. His hands drop towards his jeans. Slowly, he starts to undo his belt
. . .
My phone is ringing. I answer it reluctantly, my eyes still on the screen.
‘Hi Alice!’ It’s Erica. ‘I know it’s last minute but we’re meeting some people in the Dove. Want to come? Or are you out somewhere? I hear voices.’
‘No, no.’ I find the remote and press pause. ‘I’d love to but I’m working.’ I instantly regret saying this, because I know what Erica’s going to say.
‘Oh, come on.
You’re always taking work home. You should be more assertive. Work–life balance.’
Oh God. I love my sister but I can’t deal with her tonight.
‘I will. Listen, I’m sorry about tonight, but next time definitely.’
‘You should. You don’t want to sit sulking at home, you know,’ are her parting words.
That’s where she’s wrong. Sit sulking at home is exactly
what I want to do right now, that and
veg out in front of Luther Carson films (which counts as work) and eat Pringles and drink white wine and generally avoid thinking about the fact that after two months together, Simon doesn’t care about me enough to break up with me officially.
Although I know I shouldn’t have, I’ve saved all my text messages from Simon. It’s like a mini history of our eight-week relationship. There’s the first
one he ever sent – ‘Hi Alice, great to meet you last night. Drink next week? Simon x’. It reads like a really precious memory of a golden age when he still liked me. They continue nicely for a while – ‘Thanks for a great night. See you v soon S xx’. But over the past few weeks, the ‘x’s started to disappear and the texts became more casual and infrequent, saying things like ‘Running late sorry’
or ‘Not sure. Will let you know next week.’
‘It’s constructive dismissal,’ Erica said when I first told her what was happening. ‘He hasn’t actually fired you, but he’s changed the terms of your employment so that your previous job – the relationship – no longer exists.’
It’s good to have an employment lawyer as a sister, I suppose, but sometimes Erica can be a bit
too
businesslike. The very
last text from Simon says: ‘Sorry can’t do Weds. Will call to rearrange.’
That was over a week ago. At first I tried not to worry about it, reminding myself that he’s very busy at work (he’s just been promoted). But deep down I knew he was losing interest. Yesterday I swallowed my pride and sent him a quick, friendly text just to give it one last chance. That was over – I check my phone – twenty-eight
hours ago, and he hasn’t replied. I still can’t quite believe it. How can you dump someone after you’ve been together for two months, not even via phone or text or email but via silence?
My flatmate Martin must be back now, because I can hear the football in the room next door. Martin’s favourite activities are watching European Cup football at top volume – he actually records them and watches
his favourites over and over during the summer – and cooking weird meals, like pasta bake with salami and avocado, that take hours and take over the entire kitchen. He drives me crazy, actually, but I really like my other flatmate Ciara. She’s very easy-going: she always has a bottle of wine in the fridge and she didn’t say anything when I woke everyone up with the smoke alarm by making toast at
3 a.m. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend when I first moved in, so she was a bit depressed, but she seems much better now.
Someone must have scored a goal; I hear roaring and cheering. My room was originally the dining room, and the wall dividing it from the living room is actually a pair of doors with rectangular glass panes. It means you can hear everything next door, and vice versa.
When I moved in, I bought some thick white textured paper from Paperchase and took some cardboard boxes home from work, and filled up all the squares with white textured card. It took me an entire weekend. It’s not
Elle Decoration
, but it doesn’t look too bad. Simon hated it – he thought it was tacky and studenty. Is that why he went off me? Does he think I’m too studenty to be his girlfriend?
Come to think of it, he never actually referred to me as his girlfriend, though I introduced him as my boyfriend last time we met some of my friends . . .
OK, that’s it. I’m going to stop torturing myself by thinking of all the things I might or might not have done wrong with Simon. I settle back on to my duvet and pour myself another glass of wine. It was a bit of a last-minute request from
my boss but I’m very happy to watch
Fever
again. I think it’s up there with
Footloose
and
Dirty Dancing
,
though some would say it’s a shameless nineties rip-off of both. We’re publishing Luther’s autobiography, and Olivia wants me to pick a still from
Fever
to use in the picture section of the book. Which isn’t exactly a hardship. I make a note of the time on the LCD, writing ‘L topless’ beside
it and a star.
Soon the all-too-brief bedroom scene is over. There’s a scene with Jimmy and Donna’s family, where they make it clear that they hate him. The headmaster from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
plays the father. Now Jimmy is trying to persuade Donna to leave her uptight Harvard fiancé and run off to New York with him. They start arguing about it, and then he stops and just asks her to dance
with him instead. They don’t say anything while they dance, but when the dance is over she tells him she’ll go with him.
I love this scene. It sounds crazy, but when I watch it, I don’t feel that Luther is acting – I feel that he is living it, and means it. He really wants to persuade her to trust him and stay with him, not by arguing with her but by showing her what they mean to each other.
It’s so romantic. What a pity that life isn’t a teen dance movie, and that real men don’t do things like this. Instead, they dump you via the silent treatment.
Maybe I’ll have a therapeutic DVD marathon this weekend. I own about thirty DVDs, mostly black-and-white romantic films, or dance or teen movies. I’ve got all the classics:
The Breakfast Club
,
Footloose
,
Dirty Dancing
(obviously),
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
. . . then I have a few randoms:
Coyote Ugly
,
Heathers
,
Point Break
(Patrick Swayze
and
Keanu Reeves in wetsuits),
The Last Legionnaire
(not my kind of film, but Luther is brilliant in it) and my favourite,
Working Girl
. I also have
All About Eve
,
To Have and Have Not
(I love, love, love Lauren Bacall),
Spellbound
and
Brief Encounter
(though, in my current state, that one
might push
me over the edge). Then there’s an Audrey Hepburn box set Erica gave me – my favourite is
Roman Holiday
. My friends all take the piss out of me for how much I adore these films. But when real life and relationships are the way they are, who can blame me?
I can hear my ringtone again over the music. I press pause and scrabble around on my duvet and my bedside table, and finally locate
my phone under the bed. I still always have that slight hope that it’s going to be Simon with some explanation – death in the family, doubts about our relationship, even a dead pet would do – but of course it isn’t. Missed call: Olivia. Oh God. Why is my boss calling me at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night?