I slam shut my locker with such force that the whole bank of lockers sways violently, threatening to topple over. I spin around and face them, stand frozen for a second, glaring at each of them. They both shrink back a little. My nostrils are probably flaring, my eyes narrow and fierce.
The backs of my sneakers dig into my soles as I march out of the locker room. Seconds later I march back in, my sneakers still like flip-flops. I stop in front of the women.
“Just because someone’s husband is good-looking, it doesn’t make him perfect,” I say. “Doesn’t mean being thin is enough to make your marriage work. Just because he’s good-looking doesn’t mean he isn’t flawed in every way possible.”
I was wearing black.
I was wearing a black designer shift dress I’d found in one of the charity shops in central London where all the celebs leave their castoffs. It was last season, but I knew I could pull it off if I wore it with ironic casualness: with my hair in a slightly messy side chignon, and flats, it would seem that I had this season’s clothes but I was fashionable enough to wear what I want, when I want, and know that I still looked good in it. Once I bought it, I couldn’t afford to eat for a week, but I had to have it. Between fashion and food, there was no contest. When something suited me, I had to have it, no matter what I needed to sacrifice to get it. It was a simple case of self-esteem economics: once I looked good, I would feel good. Sometimes looking good, being groomed on the outside, was all that kept me going on the inside. Some women filled the hole inside them with food, their work, alcohol, drugs, unwise sex—I knew that my vice was keeping myself “together.” Running every morning, perfecting my makeup, wearing clothes that suited me—looking the part so I would feel the part.
I’d been in the bar for ten minutes on my own, waiting for a couple of the other legal secretaries I worked with to show up. I checked my watch again, suppressing a sigh as the big hand slid to the five—showing me that it was 8:25 p.m. We’d arranged to meet in this cool bar just behind Marble Arch at seven-thirty, and I’d arrived just after eight because I knew they were always fashionably late—we all were. This time, we’d all outdone ourselves. Some of the partners at the large law firm where we worked had those mobile phone things. Phones you took with you in your bag or briefcase, so you could ring people and ask them where they were if they were late, or ring to tell them you had been delayed. But none of us were even close to being that rich. We had to make arrangements and stick to them, or make use of the pay phones.
Rather than sit alone in a booth, I stood at the bar with a Sex on the Beach, surveying the other drinkers. It was quiet, empty and sedate for that time on a Friday night. Maybe Candice, who read all the gossip columns religiously, had got it wrong, maybe this wasn’t the latest place to be, after all. There weren’t that many men in here, nor were there the sort of women who men would come to try to bed. A smattering of after-work types sat in a couple of booths, but none that interested me. I turned back to the bar, returned my attention to my drink. I could only afford one more, so was nursing the cocktail, using the stiff straw to move the ice around in the practiced way of someone who didn’t earn very much. I’d been known to make a drink last all night the week before payday.
I glanced up from the depths of my drink and he was there. Standing beside me, having appeared from nowhere, it seemed. “Hello,” he said. I hadn’t seen him in the bar—I would have noticed if I had. I’m sure very few people didn’t notice him. He was a tall man, with dark honey-blond hair that lay in boyish curls all over his head. He had a strong jaw and sculpted body; he wore a blue, lightweight V-neck sweater and baggy brown cords that sat on his slender hips. He had a watch on his wrist and that was it. Simply dressed, devastatingly gorgeous.
I smiled a hello back because I was speechless. He was talking to me. This god of a man was talking to me. Men approached me all the time, but none as … none like him. He was out of my league, surely. Surely.
“I saw you coming in here earlier, just as I was leaving, and I decided that if I got to Oxford Circus tube and I was still thinking about you, then I would come back and say hello.”
My mind did a mental calculation: with his legs, it’d take him ten, fifteen minutes to walk to Oxford Circus tube station from here, the same time back, which meant he was telling me that since he saw me, I’d been on his mind for half an hour. Half an hour. It was all true, wasn’t it? All the romance stories I watched and read, they were all true: there is someone perfect out there for you and you might never know it. He had been thinking about me for half an hour and after a mere glimpse of me. That sort of thing never happened to me. And look at him, as well. Look at him.
“So you’ve said hello,” I said. I noticed how warm his eyes were. They were a dark russet-brown that sparkled like a log fire burning gently in the hearth. “What’s your next line?” I sounded so cool and laid-back; in reality my heart was racing. Our eyes met then, and all my thoughts evaporated. After his eyes had cleared my mind, they moved on to my heart, making it thump so loud and violently, it hurt.
He shook his head, his gaze locked on mine. “I don’t have one.” He smiled then, and I thought my heart would explode. “My mate told me to remember kisses if I manage to speak to a woman I truly like.”
“Kisses?” I breathed, my gaze flitting to his lips. Pink and firm and quite probably made to fit perfectly over my mouth.
He nodded. “Keep It Short, Sweet and Especially Simple. K.I.S.S.E.S.”
“Kisses,” I repeated. We were talking about kissing. We’d only just met, but kissing was on our lips.
“She’s going to be insufferable after this,” he said.
She?! My thoughts of a spring wedding halted in their tracks like a needle scratched across a record. Who’s this “she”?! And why is my future husband talking about her? Doesn’t he know that is terribly bad form? “Who’s ‘she’?” I asked, a thin smile stretched across my face. I was trying valiantly to steel myself to hear that he had a girlfriend and was flirting with me because he couldn’t help himself. A clear euphemism for: you’re a quick bunk-up. Or, worse, maybe they had an open relationship, so he was allowed to sleep with other women, on the understanding that he would always be with her. Or, I felt my whole body balk at the horror of it, maybe they were swingers. I’d read about it in the papers and a couple of magazines. They were into partner-swapping and … God help me, threesomes. Maybe he wanted me to join them.
“My best friend, Nova. She told me to go out tonight because she had a feeling I’d meet someone special. She gets these feelings about things. She rang me six times today to make sure I was going out. She said I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I tried explaining to her that if I didn’t go out, there’d be no way of disproving her theory, and if I did come out and didn’t meet someone, she’d explain it away by saying I didn’t go to the right place. Either way, she wins. But I’m glad I came out tonight.” He smiled again. All thoughts of this woman, this friend, flew from my head like dust motes flying from a room with all the windows suddenly thrown open. All I could see was the softening of the lines of his face when he turned his mouth up to smile. I knew at that moment that I didn’t want any other man to smile at me ever again. I didn’t want him to smile like that at any other person. I wanted him to be mine. “Well, I will be glad I came out if I get your number.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s a good idea to know someone’s name before you give them your number,” I said. “Even if it’s just so you can know who it is on the other end of the phone when you answer it.” I was being witty. That was the effect he had on me. I’d never been witty in the whole of my life and here I was, charming him with banter. I wondered for a moment who the dress had belonged to. Which celeb had given me a piece of her allure when I picked it up in the charity shop.
His small laugh brightened his already sparkling eyes.
“My name’s Mal. And yours begins with an ‘S,’ right?”
My ey
es widened. “How did you know that? Did your friend tell you that? Is she psychic?”
“No. People have told her that, but she won’t have a bar of it.” Gently he placed his finger a few inches below the well of my throat. “Your necklace.”
My “S” necklace. I felt my face color up. How embarrassing. He must think I’m a fool. “Oh. Yes. My name begins with an ‘S.’ Stephanie. I’m called Stephanie. Or Steph.”
“Steph.” My name fell gently from his tongue, a short, sweet melody. Even though he’d removed his finger from my throat, I still felt the warmth of the impression it had made, a gentle little brand. “You’re cute when you blush. Cuter.”
“Mal what?” I replied, ignoring what he had said, knowing it had made me blush a little more.
“Wacken. I’m Mal Wacken. Is that enough to get your number?”
“I think so.”
My fingers were shaking with excitement and slight disbelief as I wrote down the number for the pay phone outside my studio flat—I couldn’t afford to have my own phone line—on a piece of till receipt the barman had kindly given to me. “I can’t wait to tell Nova that I got the number of the most beautiful woman in London,” he said.
“You can stop the flattery now, you’ve got my number.”
“K.I.S.S.E.S., remember? No flattery, that’d be far too elaborate for me. Just honesty.”
I blushed a little deeper, could feel myself glowing under my carefully applied makeup.
“OK, Steph, I have to be going now. Can I call you tomorrow, or is that too soon?”
“No, that’s not too soon,” I replied.
“I’ll see you,” he said with a grin, but not moving from where he stood.
“Yes.” I nodded. “You will.”
“You might have noticed that I’m still standing here,” he said. “I’m finding it hard to move away from you.”
“I really do want to answer the phone when you call,” I said. “But I won’t if you start using lines like that. Remember what your friend said.”
His eyes lingered on my mouth. “Kisses,” he said. “Yeah, kisses. Bye, Steph.”
“Bye, Mal.”
Candice and Liz descended upon me the second he left the bar.
“Oh my God!” screeched Candice. “Who was he?”
I watched him raise a hand to wave, I waved back as he disappeared. “Oh, no one,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the space he had left in the doorway. “Just the man I’m going to marry.”
“And you know what? Not everybody comes to the gym to reach a goal weight or to become supermodel-thin. Some people need to come to the gym because it keeps them alive and connected, up here. In your mind. Where it really counts.”
He knew my body.
Every mole, every pore, every wrinkle, every crease, every lump, every bump. Every perfection, every imperfection. He had spent the past few hours mapping them out with his fingers, his mouth, his tongue, his eyes, his body.
I was always shy with a new man. Scared of how they would react, what they would think when my clothes were off and the lights were low enough to disguise, but not completely conceal, although bright enough to reveal.
Mal had undressed me slowly, kissing every piece of skin he exposed, touching every piece of skin he unveiled, examining every piece of skin he saw. It seemed to take hours. Hours of savoring his attention until I could barely breathe with desire. He kissed me all over when I was naked. He touched me all over when I was nude. He made love to me with his eyes first, then his fingers, then his body.
It was making love, not sex or fucking. It was expressing what I felt for him. Even though it was only two months since we met and we had, by unspoken but mutual agreement, decided to wait until now to do this for the first time, I knew I was in love with him. He was my forever. I knew it when I met him in the bar, I knew it every time we met and spoke. I knew it now, curled up like a happy, blissed-out, contented puppy in his arms.
It didn’t matter that we were on an old, lumpy, back-breaking futon that someone had given to me when I moved into my studio. Nor that the tap in the sink kept dripping, and the fusty smell of mold that grew in the corners of the room was strong at the moment because it had rained earlier. None of it mattered. We were together. And he loved me. He hadn’t said so, but I knew from the past few hours that he did.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he whispered, as his fingers stroked through my hair.
I didn’t reply. For a moment I thought of feigning sleep, so whatever it was, he couldn’t say it and couldn’t redefine tonight. Even if it was “I love you,” something I wanted to hear desperately (to my eternal shame), I didn’t want it to take away from this. I wanted, I needed, lots of little bubbles of perfect memories. They were important. When things went wrong—not that they would with Mal, but in life in general—I wanted to have as many things as possible to cling onto in my memory. To shine like beacons in my mind’s eye so I could navigate my way back to happier times. I wanted to have this making-love memory. I wanted to have a separate one of him telling me he loved me. I wanted to have them to sit alongside the memory of meeting him. The memory of getting his first call. The memory of our first kiss. The memory of eating cold fish fingers and drinking warm ginger beer in Hyde Park. The memory of him taking my hand as we walked down the street and showing the world we were together—two who had become one. All those memories glittered like gems in the jewelry box of my mind. I didn’t want them ruined by whatever it was he was about to say.
“Nova can’t believe I haven’t told you already.”
Her again. If it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have gone out the night he met me, so there was a sliver of gratitude toward her that would always live in my heart, but still, why did he have to bring her up now? He talked about her with alarming frequency as it was, why was she invading this time, too? I shifted in his arms so I could see his face. I used my forefinger to slowly trace the outline of his kiss-bruised lips, which were plump and red like overripe strawberries. I was trying to seal his mouth shut because this was a reminder as to why you needed to fall asleep right after you’d made love. Less chance of talking, therefore less chance of ruining things.
He took my hand gently in his large hand, kissed my fingers and then held them over his heart. He wanted to speak.
“It’s about my name,” he said.
“You’re not called Mal Wacken?” I asked, confused and a little fearful.
“Yes and no.”
“Oh, God,” I said with a small groan, “is this the bit where you tell me you used to be a woman and you were once called Natalie or something? Because if it is, I’d rather continue to live my days in blissful ignorance. The op worked really well, there are no scars, all the bits work, let’s just pretend you were born a man and I’ll die a happy, untraumatized woman.”
“No, nothing like that. My name, my full name, is Malvolio.”
I laughed, he was so funny. Not many people would get that joke, but we met on the night of the twelfth. Twelfth Night—Malvolio. I snuggled into him as I laughed gently at his joke. “Very pleased to meet you, Malvolio,” I said through my giggles. “I’m called Steph, but you can call me Sebastian if you like women in drag.”
He sighed. “This is why Nova said I should have told you by now,” he said. “She knew you’d think it was a joke.”
The giggles dried up in my throat and my whole body stiffened in horror as I closed my eyes. Have I just been laughing at his name? Really? When I dared open my eyes again, and raised them to see his face, he was staring at me without embarrassment or anger. “Are you really called Malvolio?”
He nodded. “No word of a lie. My mum’s favorite play or something.” He shrugged, nonchalant and unbothered. “No one really knows why. Everyone tried to talk her out of it, apparently. Nova’s parents said they begged her not to do that to me, but she was insistent. So, I’m called Malvolio.”
“Did you get bullied at school about your name?”
; “There were far better reasons people tried to bully me at school,” he said, a shadow of resentment darkening his words. “But most people called me Mal from when I was about nine onwards. Only my mum and Nova’s parents and sometimes Nova’s sister, Cordelia, when she’s trying to be funny, call me Malvolio.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wondered for a moment if I would have preferred the sex-change thing instead. At least with that, you could always hide it. With his name … Imagine the snickering in the church when we came to say our vows—there’d only be about five people not laughing. Not spending the rest of our natural lives thinking up Twelfth Night jokes. I didn’t like to be the center of attention, to stand out or to give anyone ammunition to make fun of me. Surprisingly, I realized, in this darkened room with its soundtrack of a leaky tap and our breathing, that didn’t seem to bother Mal. He was confident in an unusual way. Not showy or arrogant, simply stable. At the core of him was stability and quiet, unshakeable strength. That was what true confidence gave you. The ability to face up to any situation because you knew without a doubt you could handle it.
Mal, Malvolio, could handle anything.
“So, am I allowed to test-drive this man called Malvolio?” I asked, climbing on top of him, feeling the solidity of his form under me, between my thighs.
“Absolutely,” he said with a smile. His large, firm hands ran up the sides of my body, came to rest on my breasts as I arched back and gently rocked against him, teasing him to get ready to play again.
I had to tell him about me, I knew that. I’d always known that. This thing with his name was a bonus, I realized. It showed me the measure of who he was, proved he had the strength that someone would need when I told them the truth about me.
“And sometimes, it’s not his eyes that go wandering, but his heart. And how do you stop that? How do you stop him being in love with someone else at the same time that he’s in love with you? How? By being thin? Because believe me, that doesn’t always work. In fact, it never works. So, how do you stop him splitting his heart in two and giving you only half? When you’re meant to be the one who gets it all, how do you settle for half?”