Sorry for the delay in updating. Real Life and all. I'm hoping to get the chapters out much quicker now year end is over at work.
Disclaimer: I don't own it.
Chapter Three
I carried the Bayswater Lipstick Ostrich Mulberry bag all the way home with me on the tube and as soon as I entered my flat, I marched over to my small bedroom and hid it under the bed.
I did my best to ignore the bag all night but it was like it was emitting this low hum which was calling to me. Trying desperately hard to get lost in the world of the soaps I watched almost religiously, I still couldn't seem to block out the noise. The hum from the bag was leaving me twitching and restless, until it got to the point where I could tolerate no more and so I tiptoed across to my bedroom, pulled the bag out from under my bed and then stared at it for a very long time.
For the next five nights I slept intermittently, all because I knew that I was sleeping on top of three thousand pounds worth of luscious leather. A familiar routine was starting to take shape. I would twist and turn in bed, biting down on my lip as I told myself I was being ridiculous and I should just shut my eyes and go to sleep. But the tossing and turning wouldn't stop, and then I'd give in, switch the lamp on and grab the bag from under the bed and stare at it some more, as if it held some big secret inside of it and not just a business card belonging to Edward Cullen, before it was stashed underneath the bed again and I could finally fall asleep knowing that it was still there, and some bag thief hadn't stolen it from me while I lay in the darkness.
It was still under my bed on Saturday night. And even though I found myself five miles away from my flat in some dingy, disgusting pub in a dingy and disgusting part of East London, the bag still managed to possess some otherworldly ability to make my palms itch to run along the pink leather.
"You haven't been listening to a word I've been saying, have you?" Alice whined.
I wasn't about to lie to her and agree because what she had just said wasn't one hundred percent true. I hadn't been listening fully to what she'd had to say. But over the rather loud music which was playing through the speakers, and obviously thinking about my bag, I had managed to catch every eighth word she'd said. I tried to piece together what I had from her conversation but none of it made any sense.
"What's directional?" I asked as I tried very hard to sit up straight and look like she had all of my concentration, even though the sofa we were sitting on was sagging so much that I was almost sitting on the floor. Feeling the sweaty heat of the pub, I gathered my hair into a loose ponytail in the hope of catching a cooling breeze on my neck.
"Directions! I was talking about going to the Isle of Wight festival again this year," Alice said. I noticed that her forehead was damp with perspiration, which was a first. Normally Alice didn't do anything as uncivilized as sweat. "But my dad has to give me a car with Sat Nav in it first. You remember what happened last year, right?"
As if I could forget. We'd managed to get to the Isle of Weight, but not without taking an incredibly long detour to Devon first and somehow I'd managed to get the blame for it. "Yeah, Mike called me a stupid bitch because I apparently screwed up the map reading and we weren't even going out then. Remind me why I dated him again?"
"Because you fell in love with each other." Alice responded in an incredibly serious and wistful tone.
That wasn't it at all. Not even close. I had fancied Mike and may have pestered Alice to set me up with him because he had dirty-blonde hair and a dirty grin to match. And he was in a band, which made up for a hell of a lot. Especially when we could curl up on my sofa on a rainy afternoon, and he could strum out Beatles songs on his guitar while I knitted and the rest of the world passed by outside. That had been nice, but it hadn't been love.
"I didn't love him, Alice. I liked him. A lot. Really a lot, for the first two months at least. Then I didn't like him quite so much but it wasn't bad enough for us to split up over it, you know?" I didn't want Alice to agree because when Alice was seeing someone, they usually swore their undying devotion within the first two minutes. "Anyway, I don't believe in love. Never have done. Never will."
Alice rolled her eyes at me. "I've already told you, Bella, that you just haven't met the right guy yet," she said. "And I don't think it will be awkward tonight if Mike turns up, because I really think he's been missing you. Well, he seems like he's been missing you."
"Whatever. If he does turn up then I need more alcohol than the human body can usually withstand. Hold that thought." I fished around in my purse and came up with a handful of coins. "That's all I've got," I announced sorrowfully, counting them out. "Three pounds and fifty-seven pence. Let's buy a bottle of wine and stick it on my card."
Technically I only had one credit card left out of the nine I had wedged in my purse which wasn't maxed out, but along with the scary brown envelops I never opened, there had been a letter from a finance company offering me a shiny new card, which had been in a nice white envelope, and thus had been opened. And it only had an APR of thirty-eight percent, not that I actually knew what that meant.
Alice folded her arms and tried her very best to look disapproving. "Are you having money problems again?"
"When am I not having money problems? It will be okay, no one's phoning up yet..."
"And if they do, you just change your phone number, that's what I'd do if I was you," Alice said blithely and then stood up. "I'm going to the bar, I'll get the drinks."
"No, you always get the drinks," I protested, because if there's one thing that's worse than being broke, it was being tight. And anyway, I was more than used to being broke, in fact, the word 'broke' ceased to have any meaning with me anymore. And spending ten quid on a bottle of bad white wine wasn't going to make much of a difference to the ridiculous amount of money I owed. "Just take my card."
"Bella, I don't mind, honestly."
"I appreciate the offer, Alice, but take my card or else I'm going to drink tap water all night and you'll have to get pissed on your own," I said triumphantly and slapped my card down on the table.
"God, you're annoying sometimes." Alice scooped up the card with an aggrieved air because there was no truer sign of friendship than a shared pin number.
I watched Alice walk to the bar with an automatic sway to her hips, which made every man in the place, even the ones who thought they were too cool for a pub like this, look longingly at her like she was a Siren about to lure them on to the rocks.
E. Cullen
Acquisitions Consultant
I was still wondering what he was acquiring.
Alice was flirting with the Australian barman as I tucked my itching palms under my arms and looked up. The door suddenly burst open and a crowd of people came in; a crowd of lanky, floppy-haired people. And as usual, the first sight of Mike made my heart flip over because he really was pretty, but the stubble and the tattoos gave him a dangerous edge. God, the bad boys really were my kryptonite.
I steeled my mouth to smile at him but I shouldn't have bothered, because he didn't notice it. Mike was far too busy attaching his mouth to the neck of a waifish girl wearing a rip-off Burberry scarf.
"Bella! How's life in the fashion fast lane? Let you out of that cupboard yet, have they?" Jasper, Alice's boyfriend, bellowed as he strode over and took the bottle straight out of Alice's hands before she could put it down on the table. "I'll get some more glasses, shall I?"
"Hey, baby," Alice cooed, patting his bum with a proprietorial air. I couldn't really blame her for wanting to mark her territory, given the type of place we found ourselves in.
"This is Bella," Mike said, sitting down and almost pushing me off the sofa so that he could make room for his little friend. "She's in fashion."
I assumed a nonchalant expression as I was scrutinised by four sets of eyes all clocking my vintage sundress and finding it rather lacking.
"Nice dress," the little friend smirked. "I think my mum has one just like it."
"Oh, do you still live at home?" I asked sweetly. "How retro of you."
I got a glittering smile from the little friend in return, and then she played her winning hand. "Well duh. Of course I still live at home. I'm only seventeen."
~*~*
"You utter, utter bastard! You replaced me with a younger model!" I screeched much, much later. Two bottles of wine and a dodgy kebab from a questionable fast food joint later. There had been a vague plan to flag down a taxi but the glowing orange light of an empty cab had been an elusive sight as we trudged past bleak industrial sites and even bleaker council estates. Still, it had given me the very prime opportunity to get my rant on, and I was taking full advantage of it.
Mike was staring at the peeling toe of his trainers, and looking as if he wished he had somewhere else to be. No one had asked him to walk home with us, but Lauren and her public school posse had piled into a parental people carrier so they could go home and braid each other's hair. Or whatever it was seventeen year old girls did for kicks these days.
"Have you fucked her?" I grabbed Mike's arm. "Did you dump me because you're hitting that fashion-backwards teeny-bopper? It didn't stop you from trying to get into my pants last week, did it?" Being drunk really brought out my vicious inner bitch.
Mike obviously thought so too because he shook free from my grasp and gave me a thoughtful look. It was strange to see something pensive flash across his face for once. "I've been trying to figure it out all week," he said. "Because you're cool and stuff, but you know what? You really want to know why I broke it off?"
"Go on! Enlighten me with your amazing insights, Dr Freud."
"It's because you aren't any fun, Bella."
"Bella is fun!" Alice protested loyally. "She dressed up as a chav last Halloween, and that was hysterical."
Jasper was forced to agree, even though he wasn't really my biggest fan, because my shell suit and chav facelift had been rather amusing.
"We did loads of fun stuff," I insisted as we crossed the street. "I came around and baked you brownies, and I invented the Ugly Betty drinking game. And what about the time you played that gig in Brighton and I made you go on the waltzers afterwards..."
Mike nodded along as I continued to give him example after example of what a great girlfriend I had been. "Yeah, yeah, I know all that," he conceded. "But that's it. You're funny, but you're not happy." He nodded again, a short, decisive dip of his head. "You have no happiness in you, Bella. You just fake it."
We had come to a halt by a zebra crossing so that we could watch the bus we should have caught sail past, making a faint breeze out of the hot summer's night, so my dress fluttered against my legs as I felt the warm gust of the exhaust envelop me. The feint shrieks from a gaggle of drunken girls stumbling home echoed in my ears and I looked over Mike's shoulder at the City stretching out in the distance. I'd never get used to looking up at the London sky and not being able to see the stars, but the neon and the streetlights would do instead.
"You're the fake," I said bitterly. "You're just a lame, tenth-generation copy of Kurt Cobain in your dreams."
"Why can't you two just kiss and make up?" Alice begged. "You wouldn't be getting so mad if you didn't still care about each other."
"The only thing I care about is the three months I wasted on him," I sulked, taking a sharp left. "Fuck this!"
Alice's hand was in mine before I could take another step. "Come back to ours for tea and toast. You shouldn't walk home on your own."
"I'll be fine," I hissed so Mike and Jasper wouldn't hear. I tried to pull free from Alice's hand but she just tightened her grip. "I can't do this. I can't pretend that everything is okay and I'm not bothered about Mike being here, because I am. He dumped me so he doesn't get to flaunt his new girlfriend in my face and then act surprised when I call him up on it."
"He could have handled it better but maybe he was just trying to make you jealous," Alice whispered. "Or he wants to be friends. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"
"It would be beyond bad." I finally succeeded in tugging my hand away and managed a small smile to soften the blow. "I just want to go home and be by myself for a little bit. I still have at least a week's worth of wallowing time."
"Are you sure? It's not really safe..."
I rummaged in my bag. "Look, I'll have my keys in one hand and the rape alarm my gran bought me in the other." I took a step away from Alice's concerned face. "I'll call you later and I'll take a break from wallowing so we can go out for a fry-up."
I continued to take steps back until there was a huge expanse of space between us.
"Okay," Alice agreed grudgingly. "But you're still going the wrong way."
Alice was right, but there was no chance of me retracing my steps and having to walk half of the way home with the three of them until we parted ways. "I fancy some fresh air," I lied, and finally Alice was nodding so I was able to walk away.
~*~*
Going home via a three mile detour hadn't been the smartest of all my plans. However, I was finally turning into my street and I ran the last few yards home just so I'd get there that little bit quicker, then slowed down so I could quietly open the front door and creep down the hall and up the stairs without waking Mrs Cope on the ground floor.
Mrs Cope, my landlady, charged me a moderate amount of money a week for a one-bedroom flat, which was really a bedsit with ideas way above its station. I had two rooms, which were meant to be separated by a screen door but it had shifted off its castors. One room was the kitchen, dining and living room and the other was the bedroom.
The flat could have been lovely. It had high ceilings and a huge bay window behind my bed, but the damp had taken hold and wouldn't let go. The place had been freshly painted when I had handed over my deposit, but now there were streaks of moisture staining the walls and mildew collecting on the insides of the windows, and I had packed all my worldly goods from clothes to books to magazines, in huge, vacuum-sealed plastic storage bags so they wouldn't rot.
If I wasn't always six months in arrears with my rent, I would have found somewhere else to live, except I remembered the poky rooms in shared houses I'd looked at when Jasper had moved into Alice's and I'd moved out. Still, it would have been nice to have my own bathroom rather than sharing the one on the ground floor with Mrs Cope and the Polish girls who had the flat above mine.
I could hear the two of them clumping up the stairs now as I realised that drunk and depressed had become sober and depressed and actually it was too cold to be sanding in my underwear eating peanut butter straight out of the jar with a teaspoon. It was almost four in the morning and staying up so that the dark was turning into smudges of lights always made me feel the chill.
I licked the teaspoon thoughtfully and tried to find my happy place, though according to Mike I didn't actually have one. Mike wasn't big with the perception, but he'd half-glimpsed something that I thought no one else ever saw. A girl who drifted through life without ever touching the sides. A girl who didn't get the most cake, because she was something less than all the other girls.
Then again, there was a Bayswater Lipstick Ostrich Mulberry bag underneath my bed which said otherwise.
Maybe I hadn't sobered up completely. I definitely had the early morning blahs. That's why I was walking over to my bed and was pulling the bag out from underneath it with my phone in my other hand. If he hadn't wanted me to call, then he shouldn't have given me a card with his number on it.
And before I could pontificate on the wheres and whys and the absolutely spectacular what-the-fuck-am-I-thinking, I punched in the number.
The plan was to leave a message. A breezy, casual 'thanks even though you don't do thanks' voicemail because... because... because it was rude not to.
"Hello?"
I took the phone away from my ear so that I could stare at it in disbelief. Why was he answering on the first ring? That wasn't part of the plan.
The next 'hello?' was tinny and tetchy.
"Hi," I said quickly, my mind racing through the possibilities of why he was up and why I was ringing before the cock crowed. Not that where I lived had a huge number of crowing cocks. "It's Bella. We met in Selfridges."
"Oh yes, I remember." There was a delay on the line, which threw me into even more confusion.
"I'm sorry to call you so late. I was just going to leave a message," I babbled, my words sticking together in a garbled rush.
Edward gave me the tiniest chuckle. "It's not that late where I am."
"Where are you?"
"In Miami, just coming back from a very boring business dinner."
"For real?" Incredulity won out over breezy and casual.
"Yes, for real. I could stick the phone out of the car window to see if I can pick up some salsa music if you need proof." Edward snickered again and God, I thought, this had been such a bad idea.
"Okay... I'll take your word for it," I said, walking into the kitchen and flicking the corner of a postcard I'd pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen as an alternative to hurling myself out of the window. "Well, I just –"
"But it's very late where you are," Edward continued, and now I remembered how he'd constantly interrupted me mid-sentence when I'd been sitting across from him in that red room. "Why are you still up?"
"Oh, I only just got in and I wasn't ready to go to bed yet. Thought I'd catch up on my outstanding correspondence." That was better. It was almost breezy and casual. "So anyways," I rushed on, "how did you find out where I worked?" That two-second pause after everything I said while the fibre optics sent my words over several time zones, made me feel as if my tongue was this cumbersome thing that had found its way into my mouth by accident.
"Would you buy that I put a tracing agent in your champagne? No? You had a very fetching security laminate around your neck," Edward replied. "What do you do at Fabulous magazine?"
"Well technically I'm the style director's assistant but mostly I live in the fashion cupboard."
"In the fashion cupboard?"
"Yeah, the fashion cupboard. It's where we keep the, er, fashion."
"And do you like it?"
"I love the fashion part but the cupboard bit, not so much. What do you do? I've narrowed it down to a weapons supplier or human trafficking."
The chuckle of his upgraded to a full-throated laugh and I wondered what Edward looked like when he did that. "Oh, it's much worse than that. I'm an art dealer."
That would be my cue to say something incisive and intelligent about the modern art world gleaned from all the articles I'd flicked through but not read in the free evening paper. But I was too busy nervously twisting my legs around each other, until I banged into the side of the fridge. I settled for a hesitant: "Cool." The two-second delay stretched into five and counting. "So, like, anyway, I wanted to thank you for the bag but you don't do the thanks thing, so can I take you out for a drink sometime instead?"
Where the fuck had that come from? Edward was saying something and I didn't really want to hear what it was. "You're offering to buy me a drink?" He didn't sound at all repulsed. "That's... well, rather charming. You lower-middle-class girls do have beautiful manners."
"I am not lower middle class," I gritted immediately. "I come from St Albans and my grandfather was a bank manager for God's sake." Edward laughed again and being mad at him made the nerves and the awkwardness melt away. "I'm sorry, did I ask you out for a drink? I must have taken huge amounts of drugs at some point during the evening."
It would have been easier for me to just hang up the phone instead of walking into the bedroom and flinging myself down on the bed, which creaked in protest, but I still hadn't figured out how to do easy. I also wished I hadn't got undressed because this wasn't the kind of conversation I wanted to have while I was wearing a pair of rainbow patterned knickers and a bra that had been through the wash too many times.
"Are you pouting?" he asked.
"No," I lied. "And I take back the drink thing. Revoked. Never happened."
"You can't take it back," Edward said smugly. "You said it, it's out there. I'm checking my BlackBerry right now."
"Well I'm going to New York the week after next so I'm very, very, bus-"
"I'm in New York then too." Of course Edward would be in New York too. He probably spent loads of time in New York; it was like a second home to him and he had a favourite deli, bought his cufflinks in Barney's and he'd go to a New York version of the club he'd taken me to where all the staff knew his name and his favourite brand of champagne.
"I've never been to New York before, " I hear myself confess haltingly, because there was something about Edward which made me feel so nervous that I just blurted out the first thing that came into my head.
"Well, how fortunate that our schedules have us there at the same time," he said smoothly. "Fine, we'll do drinks there if you can find a window in between doing the Circle Line tour and trying to find the Empire State Building. Where are you staying?"
And I had just been imagining that my gaucheness was going to pass unnoticed. "Did you hear what I just said about the drinks thing being totally revoked?"
"Give me your exact dates."
"God, you're pushy," I sighed without much bite, because there was something to be said for a man who got what he wanted and didn't just wheedle and whine until she did it for him. Like, say, Mike.
"Determined," Edward corrected firmly. "Dates: sometime before the end of the year would be preferable."
I rattled off the relevant information after a few false starts because Heidi had been changing the dates and times on an hourly basis. "I probably won't return your calls," I warned him. "Just so you know.
"Of course you won't," he said cheerfully. "It's very late, you should get some sleep. Being tired obviously makes you cranky."
And then he rang off before I could give him an example of just how cranky it made me.
