‘I am so sorry,’ said Joel, clearing his throat and trying to keep a straight face. ‘We’ll go straight back to our room – we didn’t realise the time.’
The security guard, short and round like Danny DeVito, carried his torch like a baton and shone it onto the foaming water. ‘You didn’t realise what the time was? You didn’t realise that it was the middle of the night? What room are you in?’
‘110,’ answered Joel, not missing a beat, his free hand shielding his eyes from the halogen light.
‘We don’t have a room 110.’
‘Er, right,’ said Joel. ‘Must have got that wrong. Let me just check.’ He leaned across Ana towards his trousers.
Ana laughed aloud when the spotlight lit his white buttocks.
Joel whispered in her ear, ‘Get ready to run.’
‘Well, thanks for the hot tub. It’s been awesome,’ he said, and at that they both leaped up, grabbed their clothes and ran panting and giggling naked towards the beach, expecting to be arrested at any moment. Ana looked backed to see the security guard’s torch wobbling as he shuffled through the thick sand. He must have been furious but the roar of the Atlantic drowned him out.
As they lay back in the truck recounting the story to one another, it seemed like nothing in the world mattered at all if they had each other. But that was then.
Of course Joel was now a bloody star, and not just any kind of star, but a country star. She had often thought about picking up the phone to him, to say, ‘Hey, sorry I ditched you when I thought you were going nowhere, but now you are famous can we try again?’ but she was ashamed.
Both Stella and Dixie had heard the whole Joel saga, every permutation, many times over the months and years. They’d pestered her to get in touch with him, even all these years later. Dixie was always telling her that sexual attraction like that was hard to find, that Joel would be thrilled to hear from her. Stella had been more pragmatic – she insisted that Ana must fuck him before they could get engaged. What if, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he just couldn’t actually perform? What if the purity pledge was the perfect alibi for some more serious issue? What if it wasn’t that he wouldn’t, but rather that he couldn’t?
If the press reports were to be believed, Joel was still single, despite no doubt thousands of women throwing themselves at him, which meant, if he was true to his word, which she suspected he was, that he was still a virgin. She couldn’t help but wonder at how much she had to teach him given the chance. All her years of preparation, the diary of experiences. Everything prepared her for exactly this scenario. She could still feel his breath on her stomach as he traced his finger down her taut abdomen, and then soon the weight of his tongue pressing into her. Just the memory was nearly enough to make her come.
‘Marti! Marti! Woo hoo!’ Dixie was waving her hands in front of Ana’s eyes. ‘One for the road. Old Fashioned?’
Ana looked at her watch. ‘No, I have to go to be home for the next fertility window. Rex will be waiting. My work has just begun.’ She laughed half-heartedly and gathered her stuff. ‘Provence – think about it at least.’
Chapter Eleven
Stella
Still hungover from the Old Fashioned Ana had introduced to their girls’ night out, Stella was impatiently throwing another load of the kids’ and Jake’s washing in the machine, bemoaning her lack of a cleaner, and fantasising about the glamorous trips she’d get when she was back in work (maybe then she’d be able to afford long weekends in Provence), when Coco’s follow-up text arrived: ‘As promised, I now have a suitably wild party for you. You wanted variety and adventure: Shoreditch High Street Station, Tuesday, 8 p.m. Cx PS It’s on the ginger line!’
Stella had received Coco’s text while sat with Dix and Ana, and she’d been shocked. ‘Up for something different? Tuesday night? Cx’ The invite would have disconcerted her anyway, but to receive it while surrounded by her closest friends had compounded its power. What was she getting herself into? She wanted to talk to them about it, but knew she couldn’t. They’d laugh at her. In her Uber home, she’d obsessed about what to say. She wanted to go. She ached to go. But it felt so out of character, so she wrote then deleted several texts, alternately agreeing with enthusiasm and declining with decorum. Eventually, as the car pulled up outside 8 Cathcart Road, she’d sent: ‘Absolutely. S’ At the last minute, she’d deleted an x.
Shoreditch High Street, she thought with a smile. She’d been there, of course she had, but only by car to the doors of Shoreditch House. She’d never actually been out there, with people from around there, with 25-year-old Spanish-Brazilian-Colombian au pairs. What if this was an elaborate confidence trick? What if— She stopped herself when she realised that these were unhinged thoughts. Coco was the Van Nesses’ nanny, not Myra Hindley or Rose West. She was not going to end up dead or restrained in a basement.
But what did ‘different’ mean? The word could cover anything. Literally, anything other than the circular reality of Stella’s everyday. Different was exactly what she wanted. Before her paranoid and overactive imagination could retake control, she sent a hasty and very casual: ‘Sounds great. See you there. S’ Again she had to delete an x. It just did not seem appropriate.
Soon she began to panic about what to wear. She knew she needed to look cool, like she hadn’t made an effort, and not too fat. But of course looking like you haven’t made an effort takes a shitload of effort. And she didn’t know when she’d last looked cool. And by most common BMI standards she was overweight. She was a size 12, OK, maybe 14, no more than that, definitely. What she wanted and what she was seemed to be continually in conflict these days, but she still had options. She could either wash some of her clothes, but with this thought she looked down at the backload of Jake’s shirts and Tom’s sports gear and made an executive decision: she needed a new outfit and she needed some tlc. At the very minimum she needed her hair done. An afternoon in the West End should resolve that. She still had some emergency slack on her credit card. This was an opportunity to use it on herself. Just herself.
She quickly called the stylist around the corner from her old office in Soho and fixed a Monday p.m. ‘Roots’n’all’. She was relieved they were still in business; a purple rinse from Cool Cutz on Bellevue Road was not going to do the trick. If the GCSE kid could look after Rory, she’d have time to shop for clothes and be home before Tom needed picking up from school (he had chess club on a Monday).
Having made the commitment and begun her preparations, she felt a surge of energy, a kick of optimism like she could rule the world. Someone was interested in spending time with her, someone apart from her old friends found her interesting, and it made her feel good. There was a spring in her step she hadn’t felt for a long time.
As Tuesday night approached, Stella started to feel oddly nervous. She had no idea why. She was a 40-year-old mother of two, who’d edited one of the UK’s most popular fashion magazines for many years. She could run with the best of them. OK, maybe she was a little out of practice. Besides, she didn’t know what Coco had planned; maybe it was just going to be a chilled evening. Perhaps it was the uncertainty that rattled her, or the feeling it might be wilder than she was ready for. Remember how off-the-wall she’d been at 25! Actually she couldn’t, but that told a story of its own.