The creature of pure sensation exited stage left and Neve was back in her own unwieldy flesh and arching her hips away from Max’s fingers. She could handle the sex because she was going to insist on nothing fancier than the missionary position so Max would be on top with nothing much to look at but the framed Modigliani print above her bed. But there was no way she was going to spread herself out like a sexual smorgasbord. Sex was definitely the safer option.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said, pressing her legs tight together and shuffling away from him. ‘I’m ready to go.’
‘You’re sure? ‘Cause I don’t mind if you want to go twice.’
Celia had painted Max as a love ’em and leave ’em, cut-price Casanova, and instead he was being sweet and considerate and doing more for Neve’s bruised ego than the week-long Goddess Retreat that her mum had bought her for her birthday, when she’d specifically asked for a Wii Fit, but she had the winning hand so to speak.
‘No, honestly, I’m good,’ Neve said firmly as she applied the same pressure to Max’s cock as she had when she’d milked a cow on a school visit to the City Farm in Kentish Town. The farmer said she’d been a natural and it turned out he was right because Max closed his eyes and flung his head back.
‘You keep doing that, and it’s going to be game over before we’ve even started,’ he muttered. ‘Condom.’
‘What did you do with it?’ Neve said, loosening her grip on him.
‘Nightstand.’
‘Why are you only talking in one-word sentences?’ Neve asked, as she groped for the foil packet.
‘You know why,’ Max gritted. ‘As you’re so attached to my dick, maybe you could do the honours.’
Neve tried to cast her mind back to her sex education classes and the unripe banana she’d sheathed in slimy rubber. Except Charlotte had said she needn’t bother because no one would ever want to have sex with her. The entire class, apart from her friend Paula, had roared their approval and Neve had been so upset that she’d eaten her unsheathed banana while everyone else was watching a film about STIs.
Just the memory of it made Neve shudder. She thrust the condom at Max. ‘I always put my nail through it,’ she lied with an ease that surprised her. ‘You do it.’
Neve wouldn’t have thought it possible to put on a condom so quickly without even looking, but Max was pressed up against her in a matter of moments so he could kiss the corner of her mouth, which was drooping downwards. Those bad memories had killed Neve’s mood but that didn’t mean she was going to back out now. No. She wasn’t a quitter. When she decided to do something, she saw it through to the bitter end.
They were lying on their sides, face to face, knees knocking together, but Neve pulled gently away from Max to lie flat on her back and tried to think of something sexy to say to hurry things along.
‘Come on then,’ she said in what she hoped was an alluring manner.
Max propped himself up on his elbow. ‘You sure about this?’ he asked. ‘Ready to be ravished?’
‘Quite sure,’ Neve said shortly, tugging at his arm. ‘Please, can you just …’
‘God, you’re impatient,’ Max said, like he didn’t really mind, but at least now he was looming over her, pausing to kiss her while Neve obligingly parted her legs.
Neve lay there completely still, until she remembered that she needed to tug her slip down where it had ridden up over her belly because the quilt wasn’t covering everything she wanted it to.
Max was fumbling at her girl parts now and Neve was sure her clitoris was actually recoiling as it tried to evade his touch. She stared at the ceiling and tried to divorce her mind from her body, just like she did when she was having a smear test. What was taking him so long?
‘Neve? I know you said you were ready, but you don’t feel ready …’
She lifted her head. ‘Believe me, I’m completely ready.’
Max frowned, a lock of hair flopping over his forehead. ‘Could you tilt your hips a bit? No, tilt them towards me.’
Now it felt like she was in her Pilates class and trying to find ‘neutral spine’. Though actually breathing in through her nose and exhaling through her mouth seemed like a good idea as Max began to enter her slowly and laboriously, lower lip caught between his teeth. It seemed to take for ever, as if they weren’t two people having sex but two satellites docking.
At least this time, Neve knew for absolute certain that she was being penetrated. It didn’t hurt but it was extremely uncomfortable and not something she was planning to do again any time soon. But it would be different when she was having sex … no, making love with someone she was in love with. Only love could make this more bearable.
Max was pulling out and Neve wished he wouldn’t, because he’d only have to push in again and he was hissing slightly, teeth bared, features tight, his hands on her hips. Neve shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him, and how could she have been so stupid? She’d been too impatient and decided that sex was something she could rush through, then cross it off her to-do list. But it wasn’t an item that could be scored through; it was special and it was really, really intimate. If someone had never really got inside your head and your heart, then they shouldn’t be inside your body. Neve got that now, but her epiphany was too late. She’d reached the point of no return about ten minutes ago.
She steeled herself for re-entry, eyes screwed tight shut, fists clenched until she realised that nothing was happening. Max had stopped.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked tersely, taking his hands off her hips so he could move back.
‘No, I’m fine. You can carry on if you like.’
‘Well, I would, but it’s not easy staying hard when the girl underneath you obviously wishes she was somewhere else,’ he bit out.
The searing flush of utter mortification was like being plunged into boiling hot water. He thought she was crap in bed. She was crap in bed. And she was so utterly repellent that he’d lost his erection. Neve willed her eyes to open but they decided to stay shut so she wouldn’t have to see the obviously repulsed look on Max’s face. It was bad enough that he swore under his breath and slid out from under the covers so he could sit on the edge of the bed and put as much space between them as he could.
Neve said the only thing she could in the circumstances. ‘I’d like you to leave, please.’
‘I asked you if you wanted to do this. Not just once but several times.’
‘Please, will you leave?’ Neve rolled over so she was cocooned in her quilt and wouldn’t have to look at Max when she finally opened her eyes.
‘You should have said something, because I would never have … I don’t force myself on women. Did I hurt you?’ He was angry, not without good reason, but Neve could hear other things in his voice: shame, guilt, uncertainty. All the things she was feeling too.
‘You didn’t hurt me,’ she said woodenly. ‘You didn’t force yourself on me. Not at all. But I really need you to go now.’ She couldn’t stand to stay in the same room with him so she inched her legs out of bed and when she felt the floor underneath her feet, threw back the covers and snatched up her dressing-gown from the chair in one fluid movement. ‘I’ll give you some privacy,’ she mumbled as she sped for the door.
Neve scurried for the safety of the lounge so she could curl up in an armchair and huddle miserably in her ratty old dressing-gown, arms round her knees and listen to the sounds of Max getting dressed. Her heart thudded painfully in time with his tread on the stairs and she waited for his footsteps to keep going and for the front door to open, but they stopped – and when she looked up, he was standing in the living-room doorway.
She cringed back from his steady gaze, though it wasn’t angry or accusatory as much as thoughtful.
‘Bad break-up?’ he asked.
Neve blinked at him. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘You’ve just broken up with someone and you thought you could go out and grudge fuck some random guy but your conscience got the better
of you.’ Max smiled thinly. ‘Usually it happens about ten minutes after, not during.’
‘You think I’ve dated? That I have had a boyfriend?’ Neve shook her head in disbelief. She’d turned on all the lamps because the darkness had just made everything seem, well, darker, so Max could really see her in all her tarnished glory. The smudged make-up, the voluminous dressing-gown, and her calves were pressed up against her body so there was no disguising how stocky they were. He could see all that and still think that she had at least one other notch on her bedpost. ‘It’s nothing like that.’
Max folded his arms. ‘So, what is it then?’
‘It’s not anything I want to talk about,’ Neve said stiffly. ‘I really need you to leave. Now. Please.’
‘I’ll see myself out then, shall I?’ Max snarled and Neve couldn’t blame him for being mad at her. She totally deserved it.
The sound of her front door opening was the sweetest symphony, although Max slammed it shut behind him. Neve heard Charlotte start shrieking and the familiar sound of a broom handle banging against the floor but she ignored it and listened to Max thumping down the stairs, then another slam of the street door – and only when she was sure that he was gone, she stretched out on the sofa because she wasn’t sleeping in her bed until she’d run the sheets through on a boil wash.
Chapter Five
Neve woke up a few scant hours after the tumultuous night before and wondered why she was asleep on the sofa. There were a few seconds of blissful ignorance, then the events that had cast her out of her own bed came flooding back. She stared at a spot on the rug where she hoped a handy vortex would open and swallow her up. Alas, those handy vortices never appeared when you really needed them so Neve settled for Plan B.
An hour running on the treadmill at the gym helped immensely, and by the time she arrived at work Neve was calmer and the exercise seemed to have staved off her hangover too.
Neve had worked at the London Literary Archive for the last three and a half years. It would have been impossible to continue in higher education without a part-time job, unless she’d had a huge trust fund, so Neve had supplemented her tiny British Academy grant by toiling away part-time at the LLA, which was situated in the grimy hinterland between King’s Cross and Holborn. Once she’d finished her MA and realised that she didn’t have the appetite or the funds to spend another four or five years turning it into a PhD, she’d gratefully accepted the full-time position of Senior Archivist, even though her mother insisted on telling everyone that Neve was a librarian. Which she wasn’t. The LLA’s dusty files and even dustier books could only be seen by prior appointment and after sending in references from two accredited educational establishments.
Not that many academics wanted to search their archives because the bulk of the LLA’s collection had already been turned down by every other archive in the western hemisphere. Their roster largely consisted of obscure writers who’d yet to be rediscovered, and they rarely turned down a donation from a literary estate, which usually consisted of collections of mildewed books with their spines battered and their pages heavily foxed. Every six months or so, rumours spread among the staff that the archive was closing due to lack of funds, but another pot of money always turned up from the unlikeliest sources: a bequest from a recently expired philanthropist; one of ‘their’ dead authors’ books suddenly getting adapted for an arthouse Hollywood movie; or that Holy of Holies, National Lottery funding.
Even their building was entirely lacking in architectural merit. The LLA occupied the ground floor and basement of a small, squat building that they shared with a firm of accountants and a solicitor who specialised in Legal Aid cases and ambulance-chasing. The Reading Room, reception and the office of the Head Archivist, Mr Freemont, were on the ground floor. Neve worked in the basement where the only natural light came from a tiny window in the tiny kitchen at the back of the building, and where everything – walls, floor, ceiling, even the Health and Safety notice pinned to the corkboard – was nicotine yellow.
Neve wended her way through the huge open-plan basement office which was an obstacle course of cardboard boxes stacked in precarious piles, dilapidated metal filing cabinets lined up against each wall and anywhere else there was room for them, and stopped to say hello to pretty blonde Chloe, who was meant to be in charge of new acquisitions but spent most of her time filling in job applications to become a literary agent. She then greeted Rose, the Office Manager, who’d been at the LLA for donkey’s years and was a good person to have on side because she was in charge of the petty cash and could quell Mr Freemont with a raised eyebrow and one terse word, and Neve’s work ‘husband’, Philip, who put in time at the archive when he wasn’t writing his PhD thesis. The other members of the staff were a motley collection of socially inept academics who’d been unable to find employment with even the most lowly universities. ‘The ones that used to be polytechnics,’ Mr Freemont was fond of sneering when he was hauling someone over the coals for inaccurate cross-referencing.
Once she’d established that Mr Freemont was out for the morning, Neve hurried to the little ante-room that she’d commandeered as her office, to switch on all three bars of the portable heater. She turned on her computer, which was still running on Windows 98, and wriggled around on her hard-backed chair in a futile attempt to get comfortable. Then she slotted a cassette into a battered Walkman, which had to be tapped gently in just the right place to coax it into playing.
A large part of Neve’s workday was spent listening to crackling cassettes because an awful lot of minor literary figures had dictated their memoirs on to tape before they died, and Mr Freemont insisted that they were all transcribed. He honestly believed that one day they’d stumble upon an undiscovered Shakespeare play or even a lurid sex scandal featuring members of the Bloomsbury Set that would put the LLA firmly on the academic map.
Not today. J. L. Simmons (1908–97) had a peevish, querulous voice and was so verbose that Neve had to keep pausing the tape to consult from three different dictionaries on obscure words that had the spellcheck on Microsoft Word completely flummoxed. It was boring and her mind kept wandering back to the night before. It didn’t take any effort at all to conjure up the awkwardness and embarrassment that had been the overriding themes of the hours she spent with Max. That was when she wasn’t diving into his mouth tongue-first.
But the moment Neve kept coming back to again and again was the excruciating part where Max had stopped and slid out of her because he’d lost his erection. In fact, she didn’t even know how he’d managed to get hard in the first place, because she wasn’t the sort of girl to make a man feel that he might just die if he couldn’t be inside her. After last night’s débâcle, Neve felt as if she was destined to be alone and unloved, which would mean that the last three years had been for nothing.
She had six months to get her act together. Six months to be the best Neve she could be. Six months until William came back from California and saw the new improved, streamlined her.
Neve paused the tape again so she could rummage in her bag for the letter she’d received a fortnight ago. The pale-blue airmail sheets were creased and crumpled because she reread the letter at least once every hour, even though she’d already memorised the contents. She loved that they wrote letters, proper letters that they posted to each other, though Celia had been appalled.
‘Why can’t you just send each other messages on Facebook like everyone else?’ she’d asked.
Because friending William on Facebook so he had full access to her daily status updates and photo albums would give the game away. It wasn’t as if either of them were technophobes, they talked on the phone once a month, sent each other emails with links to articles from literary journals, but mostly they exchanged letters because, ‘We studied English literature and there’s a rich tradition of epistolary …’
‘Oh God, you know I don’t like the long words,’ Celia had whimpered.
‘Writing letters is more romantic,’ Neve had
clarified, and Celia had rolled her eyes and said she needed to get out and meet real, live boys so she wouldn’t still be crushing on her student adviser from Oxford.
Neve stared at her computer screen but all she could see was the encouraging look on William’s face when he’d ask her to go to the pub with the rest of her seminar group. How he’d always want to know her opinion on the book they were reading or what she thought of the article by their Dean that had just run in the Times Literary Supplement. How he’d always smile and nod and really listen to what she was saying, in a way that no one else ever did. There’d been a hundred of those soft looks, a multitude of those tiny kindnesses until he’d accepted a three-year teaching post with the English Faculty at UCLA, and it felt like he’d taken a piece of her heart with him in his carry-on luggage when he’d flown to California. But now he was coming back to her. She read the letter out loud, under her breath:
You’re the absolute first name on my list of people to see when I get back to London. It’s odd that three years and an ocean between us have made us so much closer. There are so many things I have to tell you, but not in a letter – I need to see your face. You never hide anything or hold yourself back; everything you think and feel is reflected in your eyes and the curve of your mouth when you smile at me or bite your lip because I’m talking utter nonsense and you don’t want to tell me because it might hurt my feelings.
This is why I can tell you anything and everything with no fear of censure or judgement. I know that you’ve changed since we’ve been apart; grown stronger, more sure of yourself, and I’m intrigued to meet this new incarnation of the girl you used to be.
Neve sighed. She was so fed up with unrequited love and platonic love and all the other kinds of love that weren’t passionate, romantic, can’t-live-without-you, I-have-to-have-you-right-now, the-beat-of-your-heart-matches-the-beat-of-mine love. She loved William like that, and the three years that he’d been away had just honed and refined it, made it burn that much brighter. She could tell from his letters that he felt something new for her that was more than just intellectual respect. So when he came back from LA, she couldn’t afford to screw it up; everything had to be perfect, nothing could be left to chance because Neve was determined that when she and William began their relationship, it was for ever and ever. And for ever and ever was going to mean a lot of forward planning for Neve. For starters, she needed some real-life experience of a successful relationship. She also needed to be a lot more worldly and fit into a size ten little black dress. Currently, Neve still couldn’t get into a little anything.