Chapter Sixteen

I was a nervous wreck the next day, desperate to make the night go off without a hitch but vacillating on how best to do that.

Simple food or fancy food? Chicken or beef? Candles, or was he joking? Romantic music? What constituted romantic? Barry White? Oh God!

I hadn’t dated in over a decade! And if that wasn’t enough to drive me crazy, Darren’s insults kept popping into my head at inopportune moments!

I was becoming rather frazzled. Buttons watched me with ill-concealed contempt for interrupting his dozing by nervously pacing around my own home.

Oh! Maybe we just should order in! That would take all the cooking pressure off me.

“Then he’ll see you for the loser you are—can’t even cook a meal!” Darren’s nasty little voice nagged at me.

Okay, so I was cooking. But what? Something simple, like fish-finger sandwiches?

“I can’t believe you still eat those abominations!”

Shut up, Darren!

My favorite comfort food dish probably wasn’t the best choice anyway. I could go all-out and make beef Wellington. My parents had loved it.

“It’s pathetic how desperate you are to please him!”

Yes, and who exactly beat that trait into me, Darren?

I sighed and decided to move on to what I would wear. My new dresses were nice.

“You’ll look desperate. Then again, you are desperate.”

Oh, fuck off, Darren! Go spin in your grave or something!

I was about ready to commit myself to the nuthouse for a few days when I decided to write a list. No matter how impulsive the choice, I told myself I wouldn’t break it.

Food? Breaded chicken, hand-cut chips—posh oven chips, I’m not going to that much trouble, nor am I risking a lot of hot oil in my nervous state! Served with . . . Mediterranean vegetables and coleslaw? Yes.

“Does it matter? You’ll only burn it anyw—”

Shut up, Darren!

Candles? Yes, but lighting too.

“Talk about—”

Nope!

Music? Set to my “chill out” playlist. God, I hoped that would be romantic enough. Shit! Maybe I should . . . no, stick to the list, idiot!

“You are an idio—”

Not today, Satan! Not today!

Clothes? Smart casual. It’d have to be one of my black maxi dresses again. Besides, I didn’t want to come off as slutty, and it covered me pretty well.

Slowly but surely, I planned everything out and even found time for a shower before he came.

I was wearing a sparkly cardigan over my maxi dress and some pretty jewelry—not too smart, but far nicer than what I usually wore when I was with Tom.

Doubts had continued to plague me all day, my negativity narrated in Darren’s prissy voice, but I had managed to ignore them, mostly, and usually cut them off midthought. It had taken me a while to learn the trick of replacing the negative thoughts with positive ones, but the skill came back easily enough.

That didn’t stop me from making silly mistakes, however, like putting my knickers on back to front! I took a deep breath. I’m allowed to be nervous. I’m allowed to make silly mistakes, just like anyone else.

The doorbell went, and I made myself walk calmly to let him in.

Tom had made an effort too. He had shaved off his stubble and was wearing cargo pants and a red jumper. God, he was gorgeous.

“You look lovely,” he said, hugging me rather awkwardly since he had a bottle of wine in one hand and a dozen roses in the other.

I have to say, I was rather stiffer than usual. Maybe that was why he didn’t kiss my cheek like he normally did.

I accepted the gifts, invited him in, and fetched him a drink. Then we sat awkwardly and made small talk for about fifteen minutes, until it was time for me to finish cooking. Tom followed me into the kitchen. We chatted while I shallow-fried the breaded chicken. Because my chairs were hard and wooden, he had to perch on the edge. I noticed him adjusting his pants a couple of times, and I realized that, while baggy, cargo pants didn’t have any stretch in them like his sweats did.

I almost told him he shouldn’t have worn them on my account but I didn’t want to make him feel self-conscious.

Then I remembered that I’d forgotten the music!

I dashed about for a minute, finding the safe place where I’d left my MP3 player, then hooking it into the speakers.

“Sorry about that,” I said as I returned, quickly turning the chicken—but not before it had burned.

Shit!

“Told you!” I could even picture Darren’s smug smile and his singsong voice as he reveled in my mistakes. Mistakes he usually caused by putting me on edge in the first place.

Maybe he was right. Maybe no one would ever love me. Maybe I was too stupid, too fat, too silly for anyone to bother with.

“Can I help?” Tom asked, pulling me from my downward spiral.

I forced a bright smile and turned to him. “No, no, I’m fine. Thank you.”

It wasn’t too badly singed. If I put the burned side down, no one would know . . . right? And even if Tom noticed, it was hardly the crime of the century. And Tom was not Darren. He would not revel in my mistakes and rub salt into the wound.

I lit the candles on the kitchen table, then began serving up as an awkward silence descended upon us.

“There,” I said as I placed the plates on the table.

“It looks delicious, darling.”

That was the first time he’d called me darling. I liked it.

Of course, all I said in reply was, “Thank you.”

Silence reigned once more. The only sounds were the music I’d put on and the scrape of cutlery on the plates.

“So what time does the show start?” Tom asked.

“Oh, eight o’clock I think? But I’m recording it so we can start watching later.”

“Good idea.” We lapsed back into silence.

“How’s the film project going?” I asked.

“Do you want to talk about work?”

We were supposed to be on a date. “Maybe not,” I agreed. But what else could we talk about? This was torture! How had Tom and I gone from comfortable and able to talk about anything to this excruciating unease? Where had I gone wrong? I swallowed down the tears that threatened to fall.

Somehow, we made it through the meal. Then I made us coffees and we adjourned to the living room . . . which I was now viewing with a newly critical eye. That decorative bowl looked a bit dusty, and the mantelpiece could have used a quick dust too. Why hadn’t I cleaned?

I sat next to Tom on the sofa, but before I could put the television on, he took my hand.

“Thank you. Dinner was lovely,” he said quietly, turning toward me.

His free hand reached out and cupped my cheek for a moment, and then he leaned in and kissed me softly, his dry lips pressed against mine. My heart was hammering in my chest, and I felt a little light-headed. He kissed me a second time, his lips slightly parted. The third time he kissed me, his tongue sought entry to my mouth.

I wanted this so badly, but at the same time, it was wrong! All wrong!

I shivered, and Tom pulled away from the kiss.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Tom suggested softly, striking panic into my heart. He must have read my stricken expression, because he rushed on. “No! No, I don’t mean . . . no.” He struggled to explain, then took a deep breath before continuing. “I mean tonight, you inviting me for dinner and a movie, explicitly calling it a date. We both got dressed up and we both, well, if we didn’t have expectations of what would happen, we wondered what might happen.”

I nodded along, still not really understanding his point.

“The thing is, when it’s just you and me, we get on well, we chat easily, we’re affectionate. It’s easy and comfortable. Tonight it’s like we’ve added a layer of artificiality to proceedings that’s making us both uncomfortable.”

He was right.

“So let’s stop ‘dating’ and ditch all the expectations that involves. Let’s just carry on being us. What do you think?”

“So what would we be doing?” I may have panicked earlier, but I did not want to go back to merely platonic affection.

“I don’t know. Does it need a name?”

I shrugged. “How about we’re just friends?” I said, taking his hand and slowly leaning closer. “Really, really good friends. Like best friends who also happen to do other stuff—like kiss.”

“Works for me.” Tom was smirking.

I closed my eyes as our lips met.

It wasn’t hot and heavy, nor was it platonic. I felt as if static filled the air. My skin was tingling with excitement.

We pulled away, both feeling rather light-headed, despite the brevity of the contact.

Tom wore a satisfied smile with maybe a touch of smugness to it. That perfectly summed up how I felt.

“This ‘friends’ thing is quite nice,” I told him.

“I could get used to it,” he assured me. “What do you want to do now?”

“Can we watch the show?”

“Of course,” he said without hesitation. I snuggled into him while the miniseries played.

It wasn’t quite the night I envisaged when I invited him over, but now we’d removed the expectations that came with dating, it was better.

After the show finished we chatted and kissed, had another coffee and a nightcap. It was easy and fun.

I felt as if I was finally starting to leave the past where it belonged. Behind me.

***

I woke up early the next morning. By the time the sun was rising, I was ready to photograph some frost.

I now had a stand to hold the glass panes—really just a block of wood with a groove cut that the glass could slot into, so it was unobtrusive. The light reflector was a little like a projector screen, but I was better able to angle it to reflect light onto the sheets of glass. I used a macro lens to capture the detailed beauty.

It was a bit of a disaster, to be honest. It took me forever to find the right distance for the light reflector. I’d melted two panes by having the reflector too close and reflecting too much light and heat. I moved it away then and slowly brought it closer again until I had the perfect lighting, but by then the sun was high enough to just peek into my garden. It hit the final pane and defrosted it.

Not that I was deterred. I was prepared for at least a couple of mornings to be spent learning. I outlined the base of the wooden stand and the reflector stand in chalk so I’d know exactly where to place them again.

I then checked my emails and discovered that Tom had sent me a copy of the script for his movie. He’d included a shooting schedule. He’d allowed five days. I supposed that wasn’t bad; if we took the monologue separately, since it would be a voice-over and interspersed with the other scenes, that meant we only have to shoot five minutes of footage a day.

I was probably missing something—I mean, they usually take three months to film an hour and a half film, which is about a minute a day. This schedule sounded eminently doable to me.

As I read the script, I saw that Tom had added the visual descriptions of the scenes that would play out under the voice-over. I was impressed both with his imagination and his eloquence in expressing his vision.

It had begun to rain, so Tom and I called off our walk. I used the afternoon to finish my website, which looked brilliant if I do say so myself!

Then I checked on the social media posts of my work, which were doing very well! Tom had posted his Christmas present on Twitter and Instagram, and some of his famous friends had shared it, which meant he had thousands of retweets. Two of his other friends who had been gifted my photographs finally posted pictures of my work, but it seemed that the last two weren’t going to share theirs. Not that I was put out—Tom and four friends helping me did more than I could have imagined!

I considered calling galleries, but I thought that it might be a tiny bit soon. Best to give them a few days to recover from the holidays—and the horrors of being back at work. Maybe by then I’d have my first frost shots to add to my website portfolio anyway.

For the rest of the week I got up early to take photographs. They got better and better as I became more experienced. The new camera really was amazing! I’d even splurged and bought some other lenses so I would have all my bases covered.

After I’d captured some stunning magnetized frost patterns, I began experimenting with sprinkling a few very fine iron and steel filings onto the glass. The black iron filings created too much of a contrast, but the silver steel filings added a beautiful extra layer of depth to some of the images.

I managed a walk with Tom every day. Although it was dull, it didn’t rain again. We were affectionate as we walked, but probably no more so than we used to be. We linked arms sometimes, or held hands, but we certainly weren’t advertising our relationship. That’s why Mary, from the paper shop, caught me off guard.

I’d spent the morning helping out in the lifeboat charity shop—not that they were busy at that time of year, so getting time off to help Tom film was easy to arrange. On my way home, I decided to pop in and get Mum some new notebooks as she told me she’d nearly finished the one I’d given her at Christmas. Rather than a smile, I was greeted with a scowl.

“I don’t know how you have the nerve to show your face in here!”

“I’m sorry?” I was completely taken aback.

“You should be!” Mary snarled.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“Sure you don’t, home-wrecker!”

“Mary—”

“Don’t you play innocent with me. We all know you lured Tom away from the lovely Evelyn!” She pointed to one of the gossip rags she sold. It featured a small picture of Evelyn, and another of what might be Tom and me on the beach. The article title read, “She Stole My Man!”

“They were so happy until you came along and he cheated on her!” Mary added.

“Mary, I’m not playing innocent. I am innocent,” I tried to explain. I felt rather shell-shocked really, so it wasn’t my most vehement defense. “Tom and I have only been dating since New Year’s Day. Not that it’s your business, but we still haven’t slept together. But hey, if you’d rather believe a total stranger in a gossip rag than me—or him, or his mum—then you go right ahead.”

We had attracted a small crowd. I just wished the ground would open up and swallow me whole.

“Get out of my shop!”

“Gladly. You’ll never get another penny out of me.”

I turned on my heel and marched out with my head held high. I knew Mary liked the gossip rags. She was always talking about some story or other from them—it had just never occurred to me that she would believe them over someone she knew!

I wanted to cry but I wouldn’t let myself. Instead, I marched up to Diane’s house and banged on the door. There was no answer. It was then I noticed that her car was gone and remembered that Tom was having his balloons filled that morning.

Damn.

I would just have to get answers on my own, so I headed home and got straight onto Google.

Stories of our relationship had first been published on the fourth of January, with low-resolution pictures of us walking on the beach, taken over the past few months if I wasn’t mistaken. The accompanying story told of his new romance and named me by my first name only.

The next day, stories appeared with my full name and a brief biography of my life.

The day after that came professional paparazzi pictures of Tom walking along the sea front, and pictures of us laughing and joking, holding hands. I hadn’t even known they were there. They had pictures of us wearing two different outfits, plus someone had dug up the pictures that had been taken last year, just after Tom’s surgery to insert the balloons.

Then came Evelyn’s lies about how Tom cheated on her with me. She was telling a series of lurid tales to anyone who would listen.

I remembered Tom telling me that she’d signed a contract when they broke up. Evelyn wasn’t personally allowed to talk about me, but she hadn’t actually directly spoken to these publications. The stories were all from “a source close to the star” or “a good friend who declined to be named.” Could she get around that clause by going through friends, or did telling those friends count as breaking the contract?

I sighed. Did it really matter? Even if she faced a financial penalty, clearly she was willing to pay it, or risk paying it. Her words were already out there for all eternity. I was a home-wrecking bitch, and the Internet would never let anyone forget that.

Some masochistic streak made me Google Evelyn to look through headlines about her and her film credits. Just after her breakup with Tom, she’d signed up to do the next Breakneck movie, a huge film franchise about motor racing. No wonder she wasn’t worried about a financial penalty—those movies raked in hundreds of millions.

She also had an indie horror film coming out the following month. Everyone loves a personal scandal, so this would be good indirect publicity for that.

What was I doing dating someone from a world where people would rather publish interesting lies than tell the truth?

I was out of my depth. I felt as if I was floundering.

What I had with Tom was so lovely. He respected me, supported me, he made me laugh. Why couldn’t we just be happy? Why is there always a catch?