She started to drift off, and she was in that soft, peaceful place between sleep and not-quite-sleep, when a heavy arm snaked under her duvet and a fiery hot hand clamped over her breast.
‘What is the matter with you?’ Neve snapped, using elbows and arms and legs to shove Max over to his side of the bed. It was just as well she was used to lifting weights. ‘Get off me!’
In the dim light, she saw Max’s eyes flicker open, then they closed again and he went back to sleep.
She was never going to get back to sleep, Neve knew that for a fact. But if she got out of bed, she was admitting defeat. She was admitting that she wasn’t able to – or ready to – sleep with someone else, and sleeping with someone else was a prerequisite for a relationship. She was staying put even if it meant not sleeping for the entire night.
Half an hour later, as Neve was silently reciting as much of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as she could remember, Max rolled over, curved himself against her side and began to breathe hot air on her neck.
‘Max? Can you move?’ she whispered, and when there was no reply, not even a pause in the moist exhalations hitting her neck, Neve pushed back with her hips in an effort to dislodge him.
This time she got an immediate reaction. Max ground his pelvis against her bottom and Neve could feel his cock hardening, which was an interesting sensation but not really the point right now.
‘Max!’ she repeated with more feeling and volume. ‘You’re too heavy. Will you please get off me?’
Neve lay there for a few sweaty moments trying to think cool thoughts of blizzards and snowstorms and how her freezer really needed defrosting, but they weren’t working, not when she could feel a trickle of sweat run down her cleavage. She was just debating the pros and cons of pinching Max really hard on his arm, maybe even using her nails, when she heard a buzzing sound.
Before she even had a chance to discover what it was or where it was coming from, Max was rolling off her with an emphatic grunt. Neve gave a grateful sigh of relief and stretched out her cramping limbs, only to realise that the buzzing noise was getting louder and louder as Max sat up and reached down to retrieve his BlackBerry from his jeans.
Neve didn’t know who she should be more annoyed with – whoever had the temerity to be calling people past midnight on a Sunday, or Max who slept through poking and pushing and pleas, but woke in a nanosecond at the distant trill of his BlackBerry.
He was having a tense and heated discussion with someone in a monotone, which was completely unnecessary when she was awake and likely to stay that way for quite some time.
Neve sat up and snapped on her bedside light so Max would be able to get the full effect of her most ferocious frown. He didn’t seem that bothered by it. Sure, he grimaced apologetically, but then he went back to his whispered conversation.
‘It’s OK, Max,’ Neve hissed, even though it really, really wasn’t. ‘I’m up. I’m awake. You might as well stop whispering.’
‘I really am so sorry about this,’ he breathed, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Been trying to get hold of this publicist for weeks.’
Neve decided that an extravagant eye-roll was answer enough, but Max had already turned away from her. They were going to be having serious words once Max was off the phone with Jennifer Aniston’s people or whoever it was.
‘Well, yes, I can sign something that says we won’t ask her about Brad or Angelina,’ Max was saying, and Neve’s eyes widened as she realised that she wasn’t that far off the mark. Imagine! A really famous Hollywood star’s press person phoning Max while he was in her humble Finsbury Park flat. ‘Yes, I do understand that I’m asking for one day out of her entire life, but I know she’d be very happy with the shoot. Armani are lending us dresses that they haven’t loaned out to anyone else and— no, that’s quite all right. Yeah, call me back in ten minutes.’
There was no point in giving Max a hard time when the person on the other end of the phone was giving him a much harder time. ‘I’m not going to yell at you,’ Neve said, as Max finished the call and turned back to her with a wary look. ‘Well, in my head I’m yelling at you, but I understand that it’s not your fault and you had to take the call.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Max said quickly. ‘I know it’s not really up there with sorting out peace in the Middle East, but as far as the person I’ve just spoken to is concerned, making sure that their client is kept happy is far more important than that.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘God, I really hate that publicist.’
Neve rubbed Max’s back and hoped that he could tell that these were comfort touches and not the touches of a girl who was going to jump his bones. ‘I’m sure everything will get sorted out,’ she said, though she wasn’t sure that it would, but it seemed the right thing to say. The smooth skin of Max’s back was still blazing hot.
‘To completely change the subject, when you’ve slept with other girls have any of them happened to mention that there’s something seriously wrong with your internal thermostat?’ she ventured, because now was as good a time as any to broach this subject.
‘Have they what about my what?’ Max no longer had his head in his hands, but was staring at Neve like she’d confessed to wetting the bed.
‘You’re really hot. Like, temperature hot,’ she clarified when Max grinned as if she’d been passing judgement on his sex appeal. ‘And when you go to sleep, you get hotter and hotter and you drape yourself over me, and I feel as if I’m being boiled alive, like a lobster.’
‘Are you accusing me of being a snuggler?’ Max asked, folding his arms.
‘No, I’m not accusing and that wasn’t the part that I wanted you to focus on,’ Neve said. She reached out to touch Max’s arm. ‘Could you – I don’t know, is there anything you can do …’
‘To make myself a little less hot? It’s not really something I have much control over, but you could wear fewer clothes in bed.’ Max nodded at Neve’s long-sleeved thermal top. ‘Maybe wear short sleeves and lose the socks.’
‘I have already lost the socks and the hot-water bottle and quilt: if I lose anything else then I’ll be cold!’ Neve protested and they were at an impasse. Of all the problems Neve had imagined coming between them, their incompatible body temperatures hadn’t been one of them. It was just as well she hadn’t started with Max’s other annoying nocturnal habit of feeling her up in his sleep. ‘We could sleep with a pillow between us.’
‘That defeats the whole purpose of sleeping together.’
‘Well, I’m not doing much sleeping when you’re in the same bed as me.’ Neve held up her hands. ‘I can’t see a way past this.’
Max was saved from having to reply when his BlackBerry rang. He looked at it helplessly. ‘I have to get this.’
‘I know you do,’ Neve said, already halfway out of bed. ‘I’m not mad at you, I’m really not, but I’m going to sleep on the sofa.’
Chapter Seventeen
It turned out that Neve’s dream was alarmingly prophetic. The next day when she switched on her computer there was an email from her father (In town mid-April, is your shower still leaking?) and an imperious summons from the Archive’s Board of Trustees, reminding Neve that the AGM was the following week and her attendance was mandatory.
And because bad luck always came in at least threes, there was also a letter from William on the doorstep, which was usually a cause for joyous celebration, except he’d skipped all the flowery reminiscences of their Oxford days for a very abrupt three sentences.
Have to be brief as I have a lecture in half an hour. Have you sent the Carr’s Water Biscuits and the Sainsbury’s Red Label teabags, as previously requested? Would very much appreciate it if you could ASAP.
There wasn’t even a mention of Neve’s last letter to him, which had taken her hours to write and had painstakingly compared their friendship to the relationship between the literary theorist Lou Andreas-Salome and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, complete with quotations.
It put Neve in such a foul
mood that she actually snapped at Mr Freemont when he told her off for getting back from lunch late because she’d had to queue for ages in Sainsbury’s to buy the biscuits and teabags that William loved more than life itself – certainly more than he loved her.
Snapping at Mr Freemont was not a good tactical move when the AGM was so close, there were no funds coming in and no minor literary figures had had the decency to die recently. Neve had nothing to archive or transcribe, which normally would be all the incentive she needed to spend a couple of peaceful hours at the British Library, but she had an awful sense of foreboding that her name was top of the list of employees to be fired. What other reason could there be for Chloe and Rose to be avoiding her? Even Philip had joined their cabal, and whenever Neve happened upon the three of them whispering in the kitchen or in Rose’s office, they’d immediately start talking in unnecessarily loud voices about whose turn it was to make tea or the ungodly stench Our Lady of the Blessed Hankie had left in the ladies’ loos.
Neve took advantage of the downtime by working on her Lucy Keener biography so at least she looked busy when Mr Freemont did his hourly sweep of the offices, but on the inside, she was in torment.
Her mother was no help at all on Neve’s work-related woes. ‘I don’t know why you still work at that library, they pay you a pittance,’ she railed when Neve tried to talk to her about it. ‘Have you thought any more about the Civil Service? Shall I put it into Google for you?’
Even an unexpected phone call from William to thank her for the speedy delivery of teabags and water biscuits failed to raise Neve’s spirits. Usually, she could talk to William about work problems and he never once called her a librarian, but this time he was less than sympathetic.
‘You’re wasted there,’ he said baldly, after Neve had spent twenty minutes detailing her latest conspiracy theory, which was that Chloe and Rose were going to stage a coup d’état, take down Mr Freemont, install Chloe as the Head Archivist, sack Neve for skiving off at the British Library and split her salary between the two of them. ‘It was a good part-time job while you were studying for your MA, but it’s not a career.’
‘But I like working there,’ Neve protested. ‘Or I did, until I became a victim of Chloe’s naked ambition.’
‘This is a sign that you’re meant to do a PhD. Then you can begin undergraduate teaching in your second year, and once you’ve finished your thesis, you’ll be a shoo-in for a lecturer’s position at a good redbrick university. We both know that you will sooner or later, Neve, so why not make it sooner?’
Neve didn’t know any such thing. She was not cut out for teaching and, short of chopping off both arms and legs and her ears while she was at it, she couldn’t think of anything that would make her less employable than spending five years writing a thesis about … God, she didn’t even want to think about having to write a thesis on anything.
‘Please, William, don’t give me such a hard time about this,’ Neve pleaded. ‘Do you think I should send my CV to Senate House and the British Library? But the thing is, I know that Rose is really tight with the admin staff at both places, and they might say something to her.’
‘You can’t give up so easily,’ William insisted with a touch of exasperation that Neve had never heard from him before, though she was exasperated herself at how whiny she sounded. ‘It’s one thing to leave of your own accord to pursue a PhD, but you can’t go down without a fight. Don’t be a quitter. It’s not an attractive quality.’
In a horrible twist of irony, Max had said almost the same words to her when he’d woken up on the Monday after the sleepless Sunday night before. When she’d said that there was no point in a repeat of their disastrous attempt to sleep together, he’d told her, ‘Nobody likes a quitter, Neve. It’s not like I got much sleep either, with you tossing and turning and sighing every five minutes, but I’m prepared to stick it out.’
Neve could only silently gasp at the injustice of it all and she was still riled up about it a week later when they tried again. At least this time, there were no phone calls from LA publicists and she’d jettisoned the top quilt and the hot-water bottle, and had worn a short-sleeved T-shirt. To no avail. Within ten minutes of turning out the light, Max was fast asleep, snoring and doing a really good impression of an octopus – a very hot, very amorous octopus, which kept nudging her with its erection.
Unlike Neve, Max woke up in a sunny mood and even stayed for breakfast, though the previous Monday he’d left within ten minutes of getting up. Max’s good humour didn’t last long, however; his top lip curled until it was the same shape as the banana that Neve presented him with, along with a bowl of unsweetened muesli and soya milk.
‘This is breakfast?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Can’t I have toast?’
‘Well, this is your breakfast,’ Neve corrected him. ‘I always work out on an empty stomach on Monday mornings and I don’t have any bread in the house. Sorry.’
Neve didn’t know it was possible to eat muesli resentfully, but Max managed it. She didn’t want to start the new week on such a sour note, even though the thought of the Board of Trustees’ meeting on Wednesday afternoon made her stomach clench. Which was another good reason not to eat breakfast; she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep anything down.
‘Actually this muesli isn’t too bad,’ Max suddenly announced. ‘As long as I make sure there are at least two raisins in every spoonful. And I can have coffee, can’t I? You wouldn’t deprive me of coffee.’
Three cups of espresso later, Max was restored to his usual vaguely chipper self and ready to leave. Neve walked with him and Keith to the bottom of the road, her mind already on her workout and what she’d say to Rose and Chloe, and even Philip, if she actually found some reserves of courage and confronted them about their whisper campaign. It was blatantly obvious that the three of them were planning to throw her under the bus to keep their own jobs. After all, there had been that time when Rose caught her sticking a personal letter in the post tray and …
‘… and maybe during the week isn’t such a good idea but we should have another crack at it next Sunday.’
Neve realised that Max was talking to her about something important, judging by his serious expression. Even Keith was gazing up at her solemnly.
‘A crack at what?’
‘Sleeping together!’ Max jostled her arm. ‘If we can’t sleep together without you disappearing into the living room halfway through the night, then this relationship is doomed.’
‘Pancake relationship,’ Neve reminded him.
‘Whatever! Do you know what an achievement it is for me to share a bed with a woman that I haven’t had carnal knowledge of? And get up at six thirty without a word of complaint?’ He nudged Neve’s arm and gave her that cheeky smile that he seemed to think could get him out of any amount of hot water. ‘I feel like I’ve grown as a person.’
‘It would only be an achievement if I was your proper girlfriend and you actually wanted to have carnal knowledge of me but you managed to hold yourself back,’ Neve bit out. ‘But I’m not and you don’t.’
‘Christ! You can’t have it both ways, Neve! You’re the one who’s saving it for that William bloke and I’m the one who’s allowed a few kissing and groping rights before I have to stop.’ Max scowled at her. ‘And you are starting to sound like a proper girlfriend. You’ve got the nagging part down perfectly.’
‘I’ve had no sleep,’ Neve growled, and she didn’t think she’d ever growled at anyone before. ‘Have you any idea how hard it is to do a two-hour workout on no sleep?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
They’d both stopped walking, all the better to stand still and glare at each other. Neve didn’t know how long they stood there, but in the end she gave a tiny, defeated sigh. ‘I haven’t got time for this. Gustav will be furious if I’m late.’
She expected Max to rap out another ‘Whatever!’ Instead, he took her chin in one hand. ‘Are you all right?’ he wanted to know. ‘
Is something bothering you, apart from our complete failure to sleep together?’
Neve hadn’t told Max about the AGM and her fears of being sacked for gross misconduct. He never asked her about her work and was already on record as stating that the Archive was the last bastion of tweed-wearing lesbians and a far cry from his world of wall-to-wall parties and celebrity wrangling. And she certainly couldn’t tell him that she and William had had their first ever argument.
‘It’s nothing. Just really dull work stuff. I’d tell you but it would render you catatonic,’ she muttered, turning her head so Max had to let his hand fall away. ‘I have to go. I’ll call you in the week.’
Then she hurried away, because Gustav really was going to be furious with her if she didn’t get a move on.
As she was about to cross over the road, some impulse made Neve turn around, if only to see Max and Keith walking in the opposite direction. But Max was still standing where she’d left him, and when he caught Neve’s eye, instead of raising his hand and waving like a normal person, Max just stood there watching her so Neve had no option but to start walking again, her cheeks a fiery red as if she’d been caught doing something completely awful.
It was the kind of situation that was so out of Neve’s remit that she longed to be able to talk to Chloe and ask her advice, which wasn’t an option any more.
When she got home from work that evening she found a note from Charlotte shoved under her door. Whn r u going 2 do smthng abt yr bike. Is totes in way. Won’t tell u again!!!!!!!!!!!!! For a brief moment, a faint smile appeared on Neve’s face and for an even briefer moment, she contemplated knocking on Charlotte’s door to ask for relationship advice, if only because Charlotte’s head might actually explode.