manager, which mostly meant that I spent fourteen hours a day worrying over whether or not the target demographic would respond better to a happy squirrel selling them toilet paper or a friendly-looking bear, while he took the people who owned the toilet paper company out for dinner and then asked them for more money. But, like lots of agencies run by men who liked to blow all their money up their nose rather than into their employees’ pension fund, Donovan & Dunning was not prepared for the recession and had gone rather spectacularly bust, leaving me, Charlie, and about forty other people, out of a job.
‘So you’re going for Come Dine with Me instead?’ I asked. ‘This is a very interesting development.’
‘I’m not very good,’ he acknowledged, reappearing in the living room with two very full glasses of white wine. What went better with codeine than wine? ‘But I’ll get there. I’m making a chilli but I didn’t have any kidney beans so I used Heinz. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, sipping the wine and trying not to wince. Charlie had never been much of a wine drinker; clearly this had been bought in for my benefit. I couldn’t help but wish it hadn’t been. ‘You can’t put baked beans in a chilli, but I’m really impressed that you tried.’
‘Then you’ll be completely wowed by my ability to call for a pizza,’ he said, sitting down next to me and pulling his phone out of his back pocket. ‘Because I’m amazing at that.’
‘A man’s got to have a talent,’ I replied.
His legs pressed against his too-big socks I was wearing and squished my toes in a way that made me feel warm all over. Or it could have been the wine, I wasn’t sure. Whatever discomfort had been between us before my nap had dissolved and all I wanted to do was stare at him in silence while he faffed about with the Domino’s app. But that could have been the wine too.
‘Pizza will be here in forty-five minutes,’ he said and turned to me with a grin. I quickly sipped my wine and hoped my face didn’t look as red as it felt. ‘So what should we do for the next forty-five minutes?’
‘Stop it,’ I shouted, swatting Charlie’s arm away from my face. ‘I hate this.’
‘You’re so bad,’ he laughed, hammering the buttons on his control pad and beating my character into a bloody pulp on the screen in front of us. ‘How can you possibly be so bad?’
‘Because I’ve been drinking for the last hour on an empty stomach,’ I said, adding a hiccup for emphasis and throwing my controller down onto the sofa in protest as he ripped the head off my character with unrestrained glee. ‘And I don’t have a penis.’
‘Loads of girls are good at games,’ Charlie argued as his phone lit up on the sofa between us. ‘You’re just shit. Thank God the pizza is here so I don’t have to kill you again.’
Folding my legs up underneath me, I watched him run downstairs to pick up the pizza and smiled the smug smile of a woman who was spending the evening playing computer games and drinking wine with her crush. It was every girl’s dream, wasn’t it? Here I was, wearing his favourite Arsenal T-shirt and a pair of big floppy socks, looking adorable. Or at least I looked adorable in my imagination; I had no interest in checking out how true that assumption was in a mirror. This was everything I’d ever wanted. Well, maybe I hadn’t pictured quite so many rounds of Mortal Kombat in our future, but the pizza was definitely a plus.
‘Dinner is served!’ Charlie pushed through the door with an enormous white pizza box, a matching plastic bag hanging from his wrist. ‘Do you want some Coke?’
‘Is it diet?’
‘No, it isn’t diet.’ He placed the pizza carefully on the not-really-clean-enough floor and handed me a napkin.
‘Then I’ll stick with the wine.’ I held out my glass for a refill.
‘Wine and pizza …’ He grabbed the almost empty bottle from the side table and poured. ‘We’re practically Italian.’
I flipped open the lid of the pizza box and ignored him.
‘Hawaiian pizza?’ I asked. ‘I suppose you think you’re funny.’
‘I want to hear about it – Amy wouldn’t tell me anything.’ Charlie handed me a piece of kitchen towel in lieu of a plate and grabbed a huge, gooey slice of pizza before settling back onto the sofa. ‘Actually, she kept saying I was a cockwomble and told me to stop calling her. Was it amazing?’
‘It was amazing.’ I chose my words carefully, focusing on my memories of the sea and the sand and the smell of morning pastries and pretty pink flowers and pineapple that tasted nothing like the pineapple on this pizza. ‘It’s really beautiful.’
‘I still can’t believe you did it, Tess,’ he said. ‘Packed up, flew halfway round the world. It’s so not you.’
I shrugged, picking pieces of sad, tinned pineapple off my pizza. He didn’t know the half of it.
‘Being me wasn’t getting me very far, was it?’ I said, wiping my hands on a paper napkin and wrapping my hair around itself in a bun on the back of my head. ‘And I needed to get away from everything.’
The skinny blonde elephant in the corner of the room coughed delicately and tossed its hair.
‘Everything?’ Charlie repeated.
‘You know, work and everything,’ I said, attempting to clarify without using the V word. If I never heard the V word again as long as I lived, it would be too soon.
Charlie wrapped his huge hand around his delicate wine glass and nodded. ‘Vanessa.’
And we’d managed fifteen seconds. Not bad going.
‘You know …’ He cleared his throat and took a drink. ‘Me and her, it was nothing to do with me and you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, meaning it entirely.
‘It was a thing.’ For some reason, he hadn’t stopped talking. ‘It was not a clever thing, I know, but it was like she was in one box and you were in another and I never even thought about you being in that box because you’re you and she’s her and you were in a more important box anyway. Does that make sense?’
‘None, not even a little bit,’ I replied. ‘I really, really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I never had feelings for her,’ he said, continuing to talk in spite of specific instructions to the contrary. gesticulating wildly and using his pizza as a prop. ‘It was all, well, it was all that it was.’
‘It was just sex,’ I said, my mind wandering over to the last time I’d heard those words.
‘I know I’m an idiot and I know I was dick-led and I know you’ll never forgive me …’ I looked away but heard the clink of the wine bottle on the rim of the glass. ‘But yeah, it was just sex. I’m a bloke. I was drunk and a fit girl came on to me and I am fully aware that it was the worst decision I’ve ever made.’
Sipping my wine, I considered his words for a moment. Two weeks ago, that sort of defence would have made my head explode but now, having made my own bad decisions, with my own fit bloke, I could almost understand. Almost.
‘If I could take it back, I would.’ Charlie climbed off the settee, his long legs kneeling in the lid of the pizza box before he pushed it away and I watched it skate across the room and disappear under an armchair. ‘If I’d known what might happen with you, I would never—’
‘You’re drunk,’ I said, half-hopefully. ‘We don’t have to have this conversation now.’
‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this, Tess,’ he said, taking the wine glass and paper-towel pizza plate out of my hands.
His breath was warm and sharp from the wine but he smelled the way he had smelled since the very first day I had met him. A mixture of Head & Shoulders,