One Thing Led to Another

‘Hiya…is that Tess? This is Keeley. You came to our house last week to interview me and Dean. Fing is, yeah, we woz a bit pissed when we did the interview. Dean had just bought me that bottle of Asti to help with the nerves and now we’re worried everyone’s gonna find out…’

Oh dear. Another second thoughts casualty. You’d think what with the tape running and the photographer turning up, people might realize the larger ramifications before they start blabbing about their boyfriend’s penis enlargement to the national press.

Next!

I try to concentrate but thoughts of Laurence are like a swarm of butterflies in my brain.

Next is a message from a woman from Dudley. Her husband is forty-three stone and bed-ridden, can we do a campaign to save his life?

‘Before I ballsed it up,’ he said. I can’t stop those words from circulating in my mind. Admittedly, there had been a brief moment when I felt like punching the air – it is only right he should have suffered a bit after what he did to me. But that was years ago now and anyway, let’s face it, I ballsed it up too. If I hadn’t been so flighty, if I hadn’t done a Tess special and buggered off around the world, assuming everything would be hunky dory when I got back, maybe we would be together now, in love, married, maybe even a baby on the way.

I’ve got seventeen things to do on my desktop To Do list but I all I can do is day-dream. The fact is, when I look back to my two and a half years with Laurence the entire era reverberates with a huge WHAT IF. What if I had engaged my head as well as my heart, what if I had not been so naïve, what if I had been thinner, more demure, more exotic. What if, for example, I had not got caught having sex with Laurence Cane the very first time I met him, by Mrs Cane herself? At her garden party. Maybe it was jinxed from the start.

I blame the sun. That and his liberal parents who plied us with an endless flow of Beaujolais. (My parents would have provided two boxes of Asda’s best, announcing, ‘and when that’s finished, it’s finished, Tessa.’) By three a.m. everyone who was going home had gone and Gina had passed out on the sofa-bed in the spare room. So, it was just the two of us, talking and drinking at the kitchen table.

‘Your mum’s so cool,’ I slurred, nursing about my eightieth glass of wine, my teeth black as a peasant’s. ‘So exotic and bohemian.’

Laurence laughed. ‘Everyone says that,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I suppose she is.’ Then he paused, hesitated, then said, ‘But she’s not as cool as you.’

That’s when he turned to me, took my face in his hands and started kissing me, passionately and urgently. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘Funny?’

‘Yeah, and kinda sexy, you make me laugh.’

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But what did it matter anyway? I was snogging a Thierry Henry look-alike.

He reached inside my top and placed his hand on my breast. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, fixing me with eyes that told me how much he wanted me. Then his hand was suddenly in my bra and he drew me close and we were kissing, harder this time, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths hungrily, hot, quick breath moist on my skin. He gestured for me to hold my arms up, he removed my top. He removed my bra. And not with a teenage fumble, but in one, smooth, masterful stroke, as if he undressed women for a living.

Then, pulling me upwards, never taking his lips from mine, he put his hands around my waist and picked me up, sitting me on the table in front of him. His hands were big and warm and as they explored me: my shoulders, my neck, my stomach, the nerves in my groin suddenly sparked into action.

‘Should we be doing this?’ I looked at him, eyes shining under the table lamp.

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I bloody want to!’ I said, which came out far more eager than I had anticipated.

‘Well that’s good then,’ he said, looking at me from under canopy-sized eyelashes.

He swept my hair back from my face, then gently pushed me back onto the table, never diverting from my gaze.

‘Stop it!’ I giggled. ‘Your parents might come down, your brothers might hear!’

‘So what,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’

He undid my jeans and I undid his, my hands trembling, and we were kissing all over each other’s faces and necks and he ran his hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face and kissing me again. Then he was flicking his tongue all over my nipples and I was moaning and half laughing at the same time and pulling him into me and we were going at it hammer and tongs over this huge oak table and I’d already decided it was true what they said about French men. And the lamp above us was creaking slightly with the motion of us, and I felt like Vanessa Paradis in one of those late-night saucy films. Then:

‘Putain de merde Maman! Qu’est ce que tu fou?!’

Doing a course in French, I knew this loosely translated as ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Then Laurence leapt off me, his erection waving about like a rather awkward third person and pulled up his jeans.

‘Oooh la la.’ I noted the distinct lack of humour in his mother’s voice. Then in her face. She was standing right in front of us. ‘It’s three a.m. And you have a bedroom to go to, Jesus Laurence, have some respect.’

And then I said the weirdest thing, to this day I don’t know what possessed me.

‘Merci beaucoup!’ I shouted after her. Just like that. No joke. I nearly died.

‘What did you say?’ Laurence said incredulously. Eyeing me up like he’d just spent the last half an hour getting off with a mutant.

But I couldn’t say anything. I covered my face with my hands.

My stomach churns at the memory. I turn back to my inbox and there it is.

From: _LCane@blackberry.co.uk

To: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

I was wondering, now we have our glad rags back, you free tomorrow night?

I am now!

I am on my way back from lunch, after reciting the email word for word and relaying the whole dry cleaners scenario to Anne-Marie and Jocelyn and basically the entire office, when I feel the growling vibration of a text message in my pocket.

It’s Jim.

Warren. House party tomorrow. Keep it free.

Presumptuous or what! Now I get my own back. I text:

Sorry, no can do, have hot date with sexy ex. Ha! Kiss that! One all. I do have a social life of my own, you know.

My phone rings immediately. ‘Jim’ flashes up.

‘Oh, now that is lame,’ he says.

‘Come again?’

‘Resurrecting an old boyfriend. I don’t think that counts.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize this was a competition!’ I laugh.

‘You started it. You’re the one who said “one all”.’

Jim is always like this when he is on school holidays. Too much time on his hands, gets very childish.

‘It’s a date isn’t it?’ I say. ‘He’s a bloke isn’t he? He fancies me, I fancy him, what’s not to like?’