‘Why are all the beautiful ones already taken?’ Max sighed. ‘At least tell me that your marriage is on the rocks and there’s a chance you might rebound into the arms of another man.’
‘Oh, there’s every chance,’ Charlotte said, looking at Neve, which was why she probably stopped giggling, simpering and sticking her breasts out and sounded more like her usual, sullen self. Then she gave Keith another anxious glance, even though he was now lying on Neve’s doormat and scratching behind his ear. ‘Is that a Rottweiler?’
‘No, he’s not,’ Neve said indignantly. ‘He’s a Staffordshire Bull Terrier.’
Neve jumping into the fray reminded Charlotte why she was there in the first place. ‘Well, just try not to bang about so much. Honestly, it’s like having an elephant living above me.’
And with that parting shot, Charlotte went back to her lair, swinging her hips more than was strictly necessary.
‘You never said anything about a sister-in-law,’ Max remarked, and Neve realised she was so tense that it felt as if her bones would shatter. ‘She’s quite cute once you get past the orange tan and the hair extensions.’
‘Oh, I can think of a few other ways to describe her,’ Neve said bitterly, slamming the front door shut. ‘I know you feel obligated to flirt with anyone and anything that crosses your path, but I wish that sometimes you could be a bit more discerning.’
‘Oh, Neevy, so I flirt. It’s what I do. Don’t tell me you’re jealous,’ Max said teasingly. ‘OK, chatting up your sister-in-law was a bit close to home, but I was only having a bit of fun.’
‘Did you not hear her shouting at me?’ Neve asked Max. ‘If you had the willpower to hold off the charm for five seconds, it might have occurred to you that she doesn’t like me and I certainly don’t like her.’
From the puzzled expression on Max’s face, it was clear that he was hard-wired to charm whatever the circumstances. ‘Well, yeah,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose she was giving you a hard time. Does she do that a lot?’
‘She’s been doing that for ever,’ Neve said, as she walked towards the kitchen. ‘I was at school with her and she made my life a living hell every day for five years. I’m going to put the kettle on, do you want a drink?’
‘Coffee, please.’ Max sat down on a chair and scooped up Keith. ‘What did she do to you?’
Neve didn’t answer at first. She was carefully spooning fresh ground coffee beans into the cafetière she’d bought in honour of Max’s visit. Normally she made do with a jar of Kenco, but Max seemed to run on multiple tiny cups of espresso.
‘Neve? What did she do?’ Max prompted gently.
‘What didn’t she do?’ Neve said bitterly, all set to launch into a blistering rant about the times that Charlotte and her cronies had followed her home from school, calling her names and throwing stones at her, and when she’d finally reached the safety of her house, the back of her blazer was always studded with globs of spit. There were the times they’d cornered her in the showers at school, until Neve had persuaded her mum to write her a note to excuse her from games. There was even the time that Charlotte had come over to Neve in the school canteen, poured a whole can of Diet Coke over her packed lunch and said, ‘If you swapped your full-fat Coke for this, maybe you wouldn’t be such a porker.’
Neve had spent most Sunday evenings throwing up and crying at the thought of school the next morning and the new tortures that Charlotte had had a whole weekend to devise. But now she wasn’t going to cry because she’d already wasted too many tears on Charlotte in her life. ‘She had this nickname for me,’ she said finally. ‘I think it’s probably the only flash of genius Charlotte’s ever had. She used to call me “Heave”. And then everyone at school called me Heave. Once even Miss Harris, our games teacher, said it, though she pretended she hadn’t.’
‘Did she call you that because … because … of the way you looked, or …?’ Max was treading carefully, trying to pick his way through a minefield of words, and really there was no easy way to say it so Neve said it for him.
‘I was fat, or fatter,’ Neve said baldly. ‘And the beauty of that nickname was that it meant all things to all people. Like, I was so fat that I made people want to be sick or that I should have made myself sick instead of digesting huge amounts of food or I was so fat that I huffed when I walked or I was so fat that I’d have made a great end member of a tug-of-war team. Take your pick.’
‘But you’re not the same person any more,’ Max said. ‘So why do you still let her get to you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Neve pushed down on the cafetière. ‘She always manages to make me feel as if I’m fifteen again, and it doesn’t matter how much weight I lose, the fat me is still lurking just below the surface and Charlotte always makes her rise to the top.’
She placed a cup of coffee in front of Max and let him put Keith on the floor so he could take her hand and trace patterns on her palm with his thumb, even though she didn’t really want to be touched. ‘I promise I’ll never flirt with her again,’ he said earnestly. ‘God, it must have been a shock when she started dating your brother.’
‘I was at university and Mum didn’t tell me because she thought it wouldn’t last. Douglas’s girlfriends never stuck around for long, but Charlotte – boy, did she stick.’ She could still remember coming home after Finals and bumping into Charlotte sneaking out of Douglas’s room at the same time that Neve was heading to the kitchen for a snack. Neither of them had said a word, though Neve could still feel the sickening jolt her heart had given.
Then there had been other things to worry about, and when Douglas and Charlotte had gone to Vegas and got married, Neve had simply been expected to deal with the fact that her adolescent tormenter was living one floor below her and sharing her surname.
Max didn’t say anything, he just kept stroking her palm, and when Neve made a move to tug her hand away, he refused to let go.
‘We were never going to become best friends,’ Neve said, ‘but I’d have accepted her apology, except she’s never once said sorry. Hasn’t even hinted at anything that comes close to sorry, and her tactics might have become a bit more psychological but she’s still bullying me and I let her because I’m weak and ineffectual and—’
‘Bollocks,’ Max said. ‘You wouldn’t be my pancake girlfriend if you were a loser.’
She didn’t want to, but Neve was smiling. ‘Excuse me? I think you’ll find that I was the originator of the whole pancake relationship concept. Stop bogarting it.’
‘How do you even know what “bogart” means?’ Max asked. ‘If you tell me that you smoke spliffs, my entire belief system will collapse.’
‘I might smoke spliffs for all you know.’ Except she never had, not at university and certainly not now, because she’d seen Celia and Yuri rampaging through her fridge when they had an attack of the munchies and that was something that Neve and her hips could do without.
‘But you don’t?’ Max gave her a plaintive look, brow creased with consternation.
‘I don’t,’ Neve confirmed. ‘I just read a lot.’ And it wasn’t as if the nasty encounter with Charlotte, or the subsequent emotional fall-out, had been forgotten but Neve had moved past it because Max had skilfully steered her away from the rocks. She wished she knew how he did it; it would come in very handy the next time Celia was having an existential crisis or Philip was having relationship problems.
Before she turned her attention back to her beef casserole, which had been neglected in all the excitement, Neve dropped an impulsive kiss on the top of Max’s head just to say thank you. Then she waited until he’d stopped looking at her in surprise, to surreptitiously wipe her lips free of hair gunk.
*
Neve was a little subdued during dinner and Max was so uncharacteristically polite, praising the tenderness of the beef in the casserole, complimenting her on the daring choice of fennel and asking for seconds, that Neve wondered if it was some new game of his. He even insisted on helping to clear the table
and do the dishes and kissed her every time she handed him a plate or a bowl to dry.
‘What do you want to do now?’ Max asked after the last teaspoon had been put away. ‘I thought we could pencil in another session on the sofa.’
‘Well, the sofa does feature quite highly in my plans for the evening,’ Neve agreed. ‘I’m going to initiate you into the rituals of Treat Sunday.’
Max raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought Treat Sunday was just about eating complex carbohydrates after six.’
‘It’s so much more than that,’ Neve sighed. ‘If you go into the living room, there’s a cupboard under the bookshelf next to my desk. Because you’re the guest, you get to pick.’
Neve waited until she could hear him rummaging before she started to gather her supplies. When she walked into the lounge, Max was on his knees and rifling through her DVD collection. ‘I think you have every romcom ever made. You even have silent films!’ he added, waving a copy of My Best Girl, made in 1927 and starring Mary Pickford, as proof.
‘It’s a classic,’ Neve said mildly, placing the laden tray she’d brought in on the coffee table.
‘I’m not watching anything with Meg Ryan in it.’ Max’s voice was muffled as he reached into the furthest corner of the cupboard and ran his finger along the spines. ‘OK, do you fancy Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby?’
‘Always.’ Neve curled up on the sofa and held her breath as Max closed the tray on the DVD player and turned round. He stared at the contents of the tray and then at Neve, who shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s Treat Sunday,’ she said, by way of explanation.
‘I think I love Treat Sunday,’ Max said, sitting down next to her. ‘Am I allowed to put my feet on the coffee table?’
‘Only if you take your shoes off first. Also, I have complete jurisdiction over the remote control and I don’t mind you talking during the film, but I don’t want any commentary about what I’m eating or how I’m eating it,’ Neve finished in her strictest voice.
Max poured himself a glass of wine from the bottle Neve had brought in but didn’t touch anything else on the tray. ‘How you’re going to eat it?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Neve clarified, handing Max a huge bag of Thai Spicy Bites and a Snickers bar. ‘That’s yours.’ Aziz in the convenience store had assured her they were very masculine snacks and, as an added bonus, she didn’t like either of them, so she wouldn’t be tempted to steal any.
‘Thanks, but I’ve got all this and you’ve only got a tube of Smarties and a bag of Hula Hoops,’ Max protested, as Neve tipped the Smarties into a tiny china bowl.
‘Did you not hear the part where I said that you weren’t allowed to comment on my snack choices?’ Neve tore open her bag of Hula Hoops and spilled them into a slightly larger china bowl.
Max didn’t say another word, though he polished off his Thai Spicy Bites and Snickers in fifteen minutes, whereas an hour into the film, Neve was still delicately picking her way through the contents of her china bowls.
She always started with the Hula Hoops, letting them sit saltily in her mouth; only when they were just about to lose their crunch did she start chewing. Then, when Neve was halfway through the potato portion of her treats, she moved on to the Smarties.
Those she ate according to colour. Brown, green, blue, purple, pink, red, yellow and the orange ones for last because they had their own unique flavour. She’d pop a Smartie into her mouth and suck long enough that she could bite off the candy shell but leave the chocolate centre intact. Then she’d suck on the chocolate until there was nothing left.
When she was halfway through the Smarties, in the gap between the purple and pink, Neve would stop snacking for ten minutes, just to prove that she could. She’d count the time off on her watch and when the ten minutes were up, she’d pop a pink Smartie into her mouth.
After the Smarties were finished, it was back to the Hula Hoops. The whole process took at least an hour, usually more. Either way, the credits were rolling as Neve finished crunching the last Hula Hoop, her eyes closed as she savoured the salty, potato-ey bliss that would have to last her a whole week.
When she opened her eyes it was to find Max staring at her as if she was a jigsaw piece that just wouldn’t fit. ‘You can’t say anything,’ she warned him. ‘That was the rule.’
‘I’m not going to say anything. Besides, there are no words.’ Neve was about to bristle and get all defensive when she saw the way Max was looking at her, even though she’d just taken an hour to eat a tube of Smarties and a bag of Hula Hoops and she was wearing her ‘just around the house’ jeans. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked, because she’d done absolutely nothing to warrant the speculative gleam in Max’s eyes or the way his tongue kept moistening his bottom lip. ‘Shall I make coffee?’
‘Not in the mood for coffee,’ Max said, pulling Neve closer before she even realised what was happening. ‘Come here, you.’
So there was kissing. Kissing without thinking, so all the doubting voices in Neve’s head were quiet and when Max undid each button on her tunic dress, she didn’t mind because he kissed each inch of skin that he uncovered.
Max’s shirt came off too and the T-shirt he wore underneath so Neve could gently rake her fingers through the fuzz of hair that disappeared below his waistband and though she toyed with the buckle of his belt because she liked the way that Max sucked in a breath every time she did it, her hands didn’t stray any further.
His hands did though. They stroked the curve of her denim-covered hips and when they were lying face to face on the sofa, Max lifted Neve’s leg so it was hitched over his and their bodies were fitted flush together. Neve didn’t know where the urge to grind and shimmy and press against Max came from but it felt so good in a maddening, frustrating way that she gave into it.
‘We need to stop now,’ Max suddenly whispered urgently in her ear. ‘Stop!’
Neve momentarily stopped kissing Max’s clenched jaw. He was hard against her belly. ‘Stop for just a minute or stop altogether?’ she asked. Her voice sounded thick and heavy, probably because her brain and her blood and her limbs felt thick and heavy too.
Max eased back two centimetres. ‘Unless you’re ready for at least third base, we have to stop ’cause I need to … y’know, let my blood flow in the direction of my head again.’
Neve didn’t really want to stop, but you could only kiss for so long with your top unbuttoned and with your kissing partner’s erection prodding against you before the kissing became something else. She smoothed back Max’s hair, and when he gritted his teeth, she made a mental note to Google unrelieved erection + pain.
She slid off the sofa, careful not to touch Max because every time she did, his nostrils flared. Max rolled over on to his back and now that the kissing had ended and the mood was shifting, standing there with her top unbuttoned and the waistband of her sagging jeans halfway down her hips seemed to matter quite a bit. Neve turned around and quickly buttoned herself up.
Max sat up very slowly as if he was getting over major surgery. ‘I need to take Keith for his last walk. Can I borrow your keys?’
Max hobbled to the hall. Keith, who was stiff from sleeping so long under Neve’s desk, hobbled after him. Neve fished her spare set of keys out of a kitchen drawer and dropped them in Max’s outstretched hand.
It was a watershed moment in their funny relationship but Neve had other things on her mind. ‘If I was up for having sex, which I’m not, but if I was, would you want to? With me?’
‘This isn’t just an involuntary reaction I get from eating too many Thai Spicy Bites,’ Max said grumpily, bending down to clip on Keith’s lead. ‘Of course I want to do more than kiss you, but you’re saving yourself for your one true love and I’m trying to prove I’m more than just a fucktoy.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Neve said reflexively, because she was never, ever going to fuck someone. ‘Making love’ sounded much nicer – poetic, even. ‘And I was just checking.’<
br />
‘I would say I was sorry for snapping, but as you’re partly responsible for my current agony, I’m not going to.’ Considering he was talking about his erection, it was sort of sweet that Max looked like a sulky little boy who’d just been bawled out for throwing stones. ‘I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes,’ he added, with slightly less petulance.
Chapter Sixteen
As soon as she heard the street door close, Neve sped into action. Although she was perfectly clean, she had the world’s quickest shower as she waited for the kettle to boil. She filled her hot-water bottle while swilling mouth-wash. She hauled her sleepwear on to her still damp body and quickly spritzed her bed with lavender room mist as she shoved the hot-water bottle under the covers. Then she went through the pile of books on her nightstand, ruthlessly weeding out anything that might look like a romance novel to the uneducated eye.
Neve spent the last five minutes willing her night cream to absorb quicker as she tried to arrange her hair into an artless ponytail. She heard a key turn in the lock just as she decided that she was satisfied with attempt number nine and gave herself a quick look in the bathroom mirror; her night cream had almost sunk in, giving her a dewy look, and strands of silky dark hair framed a face that would have looked much better if she wasn’t gnawing on her bottom lip.
She hurried out into the hall to greet the wanderers. Max looked as if he was in much better spirits; he was smiling for one thing, the smile getting wider as he caught sight of Neve.
‘You look so sweet,’ he said in what sounded suspiciously like the male version of her Keith-inspired coo.
‘No, I don’t,’ Neve protested. Sweet was not what she’d been aiming for. She tugged at the lace-edged cuffs of her long-sleeved thermal vest, then reached down to pat Keith. ‘Where’s Keith going to sleep? With us?’