‘I’d say better than fifty per cent.’
‘OK. Tess?’ He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked back up at me, all pale skin and big eyes and wide, happy mouth.
‘Charlie?’ I sat back down on the settee, happily stroking my camera. I was probably overreacting. He wasn’t trying to force me into a decision I wasn’t ready to make. That wasn’t Charlie at all. He wouldn’t do something like that.
‘I love you.’
My eyebrows shot up so high I assumed they were forever lost in orbit around the earth.
It was hardly the first time the ‘L’ word had left Charlie’s lips and found my ears but this was different. This wasn’t the same as when I brought him an Egg McMuffin because he had a hangover or called him an Addison Lee because he was too lazy to get the night bus from mine. This was a legitimate ‘I Love You’. This was my first ever ‘I Love You’. I had no idea what to do.
‘OK,’ I replied, nodding and trying not to be sick. ‘That’s brilliant.’
Charlie scratched his head and I knew he was waiting for me to say something else but my mind was completely blank. Charlie Wilder had told me he loved me and I had no words. None of them.
‘OK,’ I said again.
And then it was happening again. I felt myself leaving my body and floating up into the corner of the room, watching as I stared blankly at the first man to tell me he loved me.
This is where you’re meant to say ‘I love you too,’ my brain whispered.
And I knew that. I’d been waiting for this moment forever. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I smiled brightly and gave him a double thumbs up.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he echoed, staring at me from the top of the stairs. ‘Brilliant.’
And then he was gone.
‘I cannot believe you gave him a thumbs up!’
Out of everything I’d ever done, nothing had tickled Amy quite like this.
‘Double thumbs up,’ I corrected. ‘It was a double thumbs up.’
‘I’d take that if it were me,’ she said, heaving her first enormous suitcase off the luggage carousel at Malpensa airport, barely blinking at the fact it weighed almost as much as she did. Agent Veronica had assented to my bringing her to Milan as my assistant with only four ‘fuck you’s’ and one use of the ‘c’ word. It was as though she was starting to like me. ‘Charlie Wilder finally drops the L bomb and you give him the double thumbs up and say thank you. Thank you!’
‘I didn’t say “thank you”,’ I said, looking for my own sad little bag. A hasty patch-up job with duct tape meant it was very, very recognisable. ‘I said, “brilliant” and I haven’t heard from him since. Now, can we agree to never speak of it again?’
‘What did you expect him to do?’ she asked as she pulled up the suitcase handle and leaned forward, using it as a chin rest. ‘Propose? “Oh, I just told a girl I love her and she said ‘Brilliant’ so I should totes put a ring on it?”’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘And you gave him a double thumbs up,’ Amy stretched her arms over her head and smiled. ‘Good job on getting the camera out of him first.’ The camera. He gave me a camera, told me loved me and I gave him the thumbs up. What a knobhead. ‘You can’t really be surprised that he’s pissed off, can you?’
I shrugged, eyeing my case as it rattled along the conveyor belt towards me. Half the size and a third the weight of Amy’s case; I couldn’t even begin to work out what she had brought with her.
‘No,’ I protested, grabbing my case and wrenching my still-sore shoulder as I pulled it from the belt. ‘Of course not. But I didn’t think he’d be so flippant about the whole thing.’
‘He isn’t being flippant.’ She pushed her hair out of her face and sighed. ‘He’s being hurt. This is what hurt looks like. Isn’t it obvious?’
Honestly, my hurting Charlie was an entirely new concept. I’d spent so long nursing my unrequited crush that the thought that I could actually damage his feelings was a bit of a mind-blower. But she was right.
We’d spoken on Saturday night when I called, determined to make things right between us before I left for Italy. Unlike a certain other man I would not name, Charlie answered his phone when I called it. But similarly to Mr Unmentionable, he wasn’t best pleased with me. I was met with a variety of one-word responses to my every question, and when I finally suggested we get together for dinner as I was leaving for Milan in the morning, he declined, citing prior plans for his mate’s birthday. Since I had been his social secretary forever, I knew it really was Robbo’s birthday, but I also knew when Charlie was pissed off. And above all else, I knew a man would never put the thirty-second birthday of a passing acquaintance above the opportunity for a shag. Not that I was planning to shag him, but clearly my track record of declining a sleepover wasn’t fantastic in these situations. After blowing me off, he switched to the pitch, telling me he was leaving for Portugal on Monday morning and that I should email him my stuff for the pitch so he could work everything up for Friday, then hung up. No ‘have fun’, no mention of us living together, no mention of his declaration of love, no mention of my appalling response to said declaration. He was all business.
As was quite obvious to everyone alive, I was not an expert in men but I was an expert in Charlie. He was clearly furious. The only time he’d been this cold to me in the last decade was when I accidentally washed a pair of his jeans that had tickets to the FA Cup final in the back pocket. That resulted in almost a week of stony silence but he soon came round when he needed help picking a birthday present for his then girlfriend. Suffering the indignity of trying on lingerie that was going to be worn by a woman who was sleeping with the man I believed was the only possible father to my future children felt like more than enough punishment for denying Charlie the opportunity to see Arsenal lose on penalties in extra time.
But knowing he was perfectly justified in his huff didn’t help me. It still felt overwhelming – starting a business, moving in together, the first ‘I Love You’ and a chicken cook-in sauce? Who did he think I was, Beyoncé? I was an organized person who liked a plan, and in my head I had always imagined these things happening in a timely, organized fashion. I’d waited ten years – why did they all have to appear at once?
‘This is good timing,’ I said, wiping away an errant tear that had crept out of nowhere before Amy saw. Stupid eyes. ‘This slows things down. We’ll both be so busy this week, we won’t have time to stew on stuff. And when I get back, it’ll all be OK.’
‘Totally healthy reaction,’ Amy said, shoving her passport in the back pocket of her hot-pink jeans. ‘You’re so on top of this.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ I replied, pulling her passport out of her back pocket without her even noticing and placing it safely into my travel wallet with my passport. ‘I can make my own decisions.’
My suitcase was light to the point of embarrassment, compared to Amy’s gargantuan twosome. All I had packed were comfy jeans, a few T-shirts and shirts and a couple of jumpers in case it got cold at night, even though I had been soundly assured by Agent Veronica that Milan in July would be ‘fucking roasting red hot like the seventh circle of hell’ and that she would rather hang herself by her own ovaries than ‘spend a second in that shithole’. It wasn’t all boring though; I had been to M&S and bought two new packs of pants especially for the trip. It hardly mattered what I wore on my nether regions, since Amy was the only person who was likely to see them and, given my natural tendency to be a never-nude, that tended to