The title of my latest novel does not become clear until towards the end. Currently going through its fourth edit, the working title may change but may now be settled on. Billed as a cosy, clean, strangers to lovers novel, chapter one is given here for anyone wishing for a preview.
Ashley.
Friday of Week One.
I twisted uncomfortably on the club’s bar stool and allowed a bony and bare, left elbow to rest on the bar, obviously after checking that the bar tender had made the surface dry and it wasn’t sticky, and then I blew out in abject boredom and looked around the dark but almost silent room wondering why in God’s name I was sat in the dump of a place. Maybe later on, I thought, this grotty club might look okay because it would be too dark to see anything, but now, now it looked desperately in need of a freshen up, or at the very least a replacement of the beer-stained carpet areas that held the smell of alcohol long after any liquid had dried out of them and were also frayed at the brass edging. Camlyn, my bestie, who can always read my mind, was stood in front of me, and tilted her head to one side with raised eyebrows, as if to say “go on then, what’s wrong?” It didn’t stop her moving though, as if music was playing generally, rather than just playing in her head. She swayed but her feet were planted, confirming my theory on the sopped-out carpet.
“What are we doing here in this dive Cam. Why don’t we just go to one of our usual haunts, meet the others there and maybe enjoy ourselves a bit? This place is a time waster.”
Cam, who was passionate about never being late to get anywhere, forced a smile because it wasn’t the first Friday night that I’d asked that question.
“You know full well Ash, girl. Taylor insists that we meet here for cheap shots to quickfire our bodies, then we catch up on all the goss from the week, and only when the air is clear and we all know who said what to who and which side we take do we delve into the shadowy areas of town, where the music is too loud for us to communicate without shouting, and maybe the beautiful young men in their twenties find it hard to see through the darkness that we are all thirty something and looking to maybe catch a relationship. In that loud atmosphere you wouldn’t want to be shouting to the other girls about how you kicked shit-head out now, would you. Anyway, it’s central to all of us.”
I fidgeted again with discomfort, as if clothing under my black dress needed moving without using my hands, and as if I wasn’t looking forward to having to explain personal things to everyone. I took a sip of a very ordinary white wine which maybe had at one time included a grape-taste to it, when it was chilled, while wondering if I really wanted to relive a blow-by-blow, literally a blow by blow, account of Brad leaving me. “His name was Brad, as you well know, not shit-head, and I didn’t kick him out, he left of his own accord.”
I tried to make my voice sound ordinary, with no warble, and not as if I already missed him, but whether I missed him or not was something I was still trying to work out. Did I still love him or had I just got used to a bloke being there and now there was a hole in my life? He was still affecting me by making me skip meals and making me feel that just a few drinks on an empty stomach would hopefully take me over the top. On the one hand, Brad had been boring at best and abusive when angered, and violent at worst, but on the other hand, life was never dull with him and when you have an extremely dull job as I do, then to get home to find out which Brad would meet you at the door was strangely something to look forward to.
Cam broke me out of my thoughts. “You’re talking to Camlyn Watson here Ashley my girl.”
Cam placed her clenched fists on her hips and she only ever called me by my full name of Ashley when she wanted to emphasise something. She then talked down to me as if she was my mother, but also because she was standing and I was sitting.
“He left with that schoolgirl - don’t raise your eyebrows at me like that. I know she’s in college but that still makes her far too young for him - and how long do you think it would have taken before one of our merry band of nine found out about shit-head and the schoolgirl being at that party together and then you would have kicked him out? Him choosing to leave was a short cut, saved you time, helped you out. Unless, of course, you were thinking about being shite enough to let him have his young tart and come home to you to do his washing and ironing.”
Cam unclenched her fists to reveal the empty shot glass she’d been cradling there and I put my wine down on the bar as if I might abandon the warm grape juice and wouldn’t really care if I did. “That’s my point Cam. Getting into a noisy atmosphere with the chance to let myself go a bit would be great for my head and maybe take my mind off things, instead of sitting here waiting for the others to come, with everyone telling me how much they’ve never liked Brad anyway, and then them all hoping Brad and me don’t get back together again so that they all look like fools. Let’s just take all that for granted and move on. Oh, here they come. They must have travelled together.”
My gang walked in, probably doubling, or trebling the club’s population, and looking as if they were dressed to kill, which was just a tiny bit out of sync with the dive we were in. Their combined presence was a flash of sophisticated glitter and colour into a colourless and dreary room. Emily and Joanne had gone for the long leg, tiny skirt, massive heel, lowish but respectable top look, Sarah and Hannah had obviously discussed things before dressing and gone for their usual tits-out look to display their faked-tanned best assets to any prospective males, and Sam and Taylor, both in recent marriages, both desperately trying for children, had chosen boring trouser suit combos as if they’d been dressed by their foreign and extremely domineering husbands. I had always clung onto little wins, like, well, Brad knocked me about but he never told me how to dress to go on a night out.
We always stayed at the bar area because we’d agreed that the ripped material covering the perimeter seating, exposing the foam behind, could well have sponged up more alcohol than the carpets had. I think it was because of Sam and Taylor’s husbands, who insisted that their wives be covered up, if they were going out, that had put the rest of us off marriage and when those two partnerships first formed, we asked if their men were Muslim or something, but no, we were told, it was customary where they came from and the girls had abided by their men’s wishes. The two married girls had both described to the rest of us how they found the domination cute and it made me shiver with disgust when they’d said it, because my own form of receiving domination was not cute and often left bruising.
There was no need to look at what Alexis was wearing because ripped jeans and a tee shirt designated her as the weirdo of the group, the art rather than science type, the one who always wanted to be different and to look different. Okay, my black, strappy mini-dress was predictable and boringly brave for me, revealing arms that had carefully not been bruised by Brad, but I’m not a ripped jeans sort of girl and could never wear a tee advertising bubble-gum like Alexis had. Come to think about it, I wasn’t brave enough for the heels and tiny skirt thing either, or even clothing that wasn’t black. Maybe Brad had knocked the confidence out of me drip by drip. Cam had long ago told me that she thought so, knocked it out mentally anyway, not knowing about the physical side of things.
Taylor spoke first which was no surprise. “How you feeling Ash? Like your hair by the way. A black bob suits you.”
I picked up my wine again before answering, only half surprised that it was still there and hadn’t been cleared away. “I’m feeling that the atmosphere is crap here, this pathetic wine has gone warm and I can’t wait to move on. Oh, and thank you for the compliment but my hair has been like this for about a month now, reverse bob, shorter at the back.”
“That good a mood then,” Taylor observed. “Not what I meant and you know it.” Taylor sounded as if she wanted some juicier details. “Anyway, shots are half price here, even on a Friday night, before we move on to somewhere better but more expensive.”
I finally gave in to her while noticing heads looking towards me with interest as my voice went all monotone and as if I was reading from a list written down in front of me. “Nothing much to report really. I got home from work. He was packing a case. I asked him what was happening. He told me he was leaving. There was no shouting or fighting. We agreed that things had gone stale and that the apartment was mine, so it was a clean break. It’s not as if we were married or had kids, or worse a joint bank account, so the best of luck to him and his young tart who in no way makes me feel older and more decrepit than I actually am.” I left out of the conversation his parting shot, the punch to my stomach, his answer to what I’d called him. He was, as usual, careful to leave no visible bruising.
Hannah, who was in the middle of ordering drinks so had obviously ignored my plea to move on, turned her head towards me and went into her usual psychiatrist mode, even though she really works in the back-office area of a supermarket. “Seems to me like you’re not accepting things yet and you need to ditch the wine and join us all on shots. We’ll get you a bloke tonight and make sure he’s better than shit-head. Yours is a lemon-drop, yeah?”
My face must have looked indignant. “Did you all call him that behind my back? Brad was good to me while things lasted. Maybe it was both our faults that things went stale. You know, his pressure at work, me hating my tedious job, no time for ourselves, money tight all the time.” Weirdly, I’d morphed back into the woman who’d accepted Brad and all his faults, I knew I was defending him, and knew I no longer had to so couldn’t understand why I was. Maybe I was defending the amount of time I’d spent with him.
Alexis, who speaks her mind with absolutely no attached filters looked surprised. “Didn’t you call him shit-head Ash? I thought everyone did. To be honest I thought he was a stop gap for you while you found someone decent and that’s why you eventually kicked him out. Anyway, when all the mobiles started ringing with your news that’s what I guessed.”
“Look, everyone.” My voice was slightly raised with frustrated anger, reminding me that Cam had said that these chats would be difficult in a busy and noisy bar. “I did not kick Brad out and I never called him shit-head and I didn’t realise that you all did. I was in love with him and maybe I still am, maybe, slightly, despite all his failings, so no, I do not want your help in fixing me up with a bloke tonight, thank you very much and I’m off men, maybe permanently. My plan is to enjoy myself while staying relatively sober and single, maybe just getting stupid-drunk, and then to be able to get a cab home and to sleep - on my own. I have a busy day planned for tomorrow which will involve not having too much of a hangover, gathering up anything that relates to Brad, bagging it all up, placing it in the downstairs store room, informing him of its whereabouts, getting the locks changed on my apartment door and maybe having a good cry while feeling sorry for myself. From that point on, I intend to live in a clean and tidy apartment with no man to mess it up.”
Joanne, always Joanne and never Jo, gave a dirty laugh but often did. “Who’s talking about the daytime tomorrow girl. Back to his, or back to yours, do the biz, then your cab home or a cab for him and do all your packing tomorrow without the tears and with a huge smile on your face. You are single remember.”
“Thanks Joanne,” my voice I knew sounded sarcastic. “I knew you’d be the one to understand that I’m not quite ready for another relationship just now, it being three days since the last one finished.”
The lemon-drop shot hit the back of my throat as if it was waking my body out of slumber after being put to sleep by the warm, white wine. I felt it trickle down my throat like volcanic larva and settle in an empty stomach that had probably expected food. Maybe it tasted too nice, even sweet, and more-ish. Strangely, after it hit my stomach, it then highlighted the path it had taken through my chest, waking most of the rest of my body. My good angel told me it would affect my head maybe too much without food, my bad angel told me, so what, have another one.
Joanne looked genuinely puzzled at my answer to her suggestion.
“Relationship Ash? I thought I just described a one-night stand with no ties.”
“I need the loo before we move on,” I told them all generally. “So, you can all talk about me while I’m in there, and when I get back, because there is no more discussion to be had about me and my lack of a need to be out of the frying pan and into the fire, can we please go somewhere with at the very least some decent music to move to?” As I moved across the room, my heels were okay but the fronts of my shoes stuck to the carpet, and could have pulled them off if it wasn’t for the ankle straps. Why wasn’t this carpet cleaned, I wondered, as if it was a more important question than the direction of my life or any future relationship.
Nobody followed me straight to the toilets luckily, allowing me to sit on what smelled like a recently disinfected toilet seat and it let me contemplate the fact that I didn’t really want to go. That is, I didn’t really want to go with respect to urinating and that my bladder could easily take more than half a glass of rubbish wine and a shot, and also to contemplate the fact that I didn’t really want to go in relation to being anywhere else and moving on to a louder venue. I wanted to go home.
I knew I’d been coerced into going out clubbing against my will and tradition held that we all went out every Friday night. The girls would never accept me abandoning them to go home alone now. I knew their hearts were in the right place and they were probably right about me getting out and not sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, so I couldn’t blame them for that.
I didn’t think I’d been sat for very long when Cam’s voice asked the toilet area generally “Are you alright?” which produced a water-flush of nothing in particular and then produced me exiting the cubicle.
Cam was smiling. “I’ve convinced them to move on. That new club that opened last month. Sam and Taylor went there last Saturday with hubbies in tow and said it was okay and probably good for a Friday girlie-night. Like you said, you and Brad weren’t married. Imagine being married to an Eastern European and having to wear trousers to go out like those two have to. There must be an upside to their marriages but I don’t know what it is. We can only guess.” Her eyes went wide in a dirty sort of way but even that couldn’t produce a smile on my face.
There had always been a problem, us being nine women together, because wherever we went locally, it involved two taxis. Some larger taxis took six passengers, others only four so there was no logical way to split costs. Years ago, there used to be friendly discussions over who would travel in each cab, splitting by four costing each of us more than splitting by five. These days the four and the five are always the same girls and we chip into a kitty to fork out for the two cabs, like the sensible adults that we are not.
We arrived at the said new club and walked straight in, there being no queue and no bouncer to object to the way that Alexis was dressed, and that did not bode well. It gave me something else to grumble about, except I couldn’t grumble, it having been me that had insisted on moving on.
“It’s early,” Taylor defended her club choice. “I did say we should have stayed in the last place for some more shots. It’ll cost us at least double here.”
Taylor was generally ignored, well, I ignored her anyway, and even if we were still bar-propping, a shuffle to the music was appreciated by me and it was loud enough not to be able to have general conversation, only one to one comments stood on an extremely clean carpet that even had a clean-carpet smell to it as if it had only just been fitted. My life was a mess and it seemed to me that maybe carpet-smell was my new hobby.
As the night went on and the club filled up with people, the shots took more and more of an effect on both me and my empty stomach. Some of the girls were dancing but I was still just about sober enough to be thinking that it was a little early to announce that I was getting a cab home without the girls demanding that I stay longer, and I wondered how long I’d have to wait before disappearing. They had convinced me to join them in continuing to drink shots and if I’m honest, their intended cure was beginning to work and my head had stopped concentrating on sane things. I wondered if alcoholism started this way, a sort of cushion against life.
“My round.” The slurred words came from Taylor who was clearly enjoying being away from hubby for the night. “Same again?” She shouted too loudly into my ear, nearly bursting an ear drum.
“Please Taylor. I’ll neck this one and help you with the other drinks.”
Taylor waved her hands about towards one of the barmen in semaphore that spelled out “I want to be served,” then eventually handed me my drink, then another before I could drink mine, and then another and she clearly believed I was an octopus and could carry nine drinks somehow, while she did the biz with her credit card. She’d told me which shot was which as she’d handed them over but I lost the thread after the third one and wondered if the girls would be able to tell if they had the wrong drink or not, or even care at this stage. My drunken head was also trying to work out if an eight tentacled octopus could carry nine drinks.
“Can I help you with those?”
The question came from a deep voice from behind me, maybe from Alexis doing a silly voice and trying to sound super masculine. I spun around too quickly, my brain had difficulty keeping up with the rest of my skull, and two large but firm and warm hands took me by my bare shoulders to steady me and to stop any dizziness. Whoever it was moved his lower body back slightly to avoid the drinks going over him but his hands stayed firmly on my shoulders, so I didn’t flinch because I wanted those hands there for the rest of my life, or failing that, the rest of the evening.
I was staring at the chest of someone in a tight, white, short-sleeved shirt that left nothing to the imagination with regard to the sculpted body that it covered. I tried not to look up too quickly but when my head eventually reached his face I could see his beautiful smile, his chiselled jawline and the jet-black hair that had flopped down over his forehead. He was gorgeous, probably had a hundred women chasing after him, and I stood no chance whatsoever, not that I was looking for a chance. Was I? I didn’t want a relationship but surely there could be exceptions if this hunk was available to sweep me off my feet and he’d mistakenly, in the dark, thought that I was in a different league, like his league. The darkness of the club, I reasoned, had maybe fooled the guy into talking to little old me.
“No. I’m fine. That is, I can manage thank you.” I managed in a voice that didn’t seem to be mine and seemed to be more sophisticated, sultry, and sexy than usual.
In my head we were a couple on a sultry book cover, the desperate girl, and the hunk, except he still had his shirt on and I, pathetically, was trying not to be an idiot by spilling all the drinks in my hands while imagining ripping his short off. If I hadn’t been lumbered with the drinks, I thought, I might have just moved that hair of his away from his right eye and back to where it should be, which would be an indication to everyone in the room that he belonged to me.
Taylor chipped in and I guess I should have expected it.
“Let him help Ash, you’ve already spilled a load.”
The reason that I didn’t turn around to tell Taylor to keep her nose out of things was because this man had hypnotic blue eyes that could not be ignored, or even let go of and I knew that by not turning to Taylor to answer her meant that I would look pathetic in the man’s eyes, but it did also allow his hands to remain on my shoulders which was where I wanted them to be. Weird, I thought, how a girl’s brain could make automatic decisions concerning moving her hands or her feet but not her shoulders, which may have indicated that I was just a bit more than tipsy.
“Ash,” he said in that deep voice again. “Please, I just wanted to help because you looked as if you were struggling.”
Before I knew it the so-called friends of mine had taken the drinks out of my hands and moved away somewhere where, no doubt, they couldn’t be seen by me but could follow everything that happened. Whoever took the last drink pushed me in the back even closer to Mister Adonis who then had let go of my shoulders leaving them feeling lonely and cold. I wanted his hands to return and I wanted him to say my name again.
“Look,” I decided to start talking instead of just staring into those dreamy eyes as if I was a cross between a love-struck teenager and a puppy begging for a treat. “I appreciate your offer of help, which is not needed now, obviously, thanks to my friends, and I know you were only being kind and if that was it then that’s great, but it’s only fair to tell you that if anything else was on your mind then you should know that I’ve just come out of a relationship and I’m having a break from men at the moment, and also that I never stop talking when I’m nervous and tend to do it in over long sentences and don’t breathe.”
“O-kay,” he dragged out while watching me gulp for air like a fish out of water. “I won’t propose marriage, or us having black-haired blue-eyed babies, or anything similar at this point then, not even a friendship if you feel that all men are bastards at the moment, but what about a quiet drink in the cool-off area and a chat? You sound as if you could do with a chat and your friends seem to have left you without a drink.”
I was just about to say “yes, a drink and a chat about my hair being mousy-brown but dyed black, maybe over in that quiet area, then maybe a friendship, then propose to me tomorrow, and the baby thing might follow the day after, and wow, you noticed my eye colour in this light,” but then I had to spin around yet again when I heard a too familiar voice.
“Didn’t take you long to get over me Ashley Beale. Or maybe you’ve been with this guy for a while and with me leaving, you no longer needed to hide it.”
“Piss off Brad,” I snarled. Realising far too late that I was not being very ladylike in front of my dark and dreamy friend. Then I added, “You never come here so please go to your usual club with your schoolgirl.” I knew she wasn’t a schoolgirl but my mates had loaded that gun for me and I also noticed that I didn’t deny being with the guy who wouldn’t really want pathetic little old me and had possibly disappeared from view by now.
“This place is new Ashley dear,” he told me with sarcasm in his voice. “I have as much right to be here as you and your giggly little friends.”
I got angry with him then, maybe even more angry with the smiling schoolgirl behind him who had no idea what was in store for her later in her relationship. I didn’t want to cause a scene though and didn’t want my girls to come over and maybe make an even bigger scene, so I decided on negotiation. “Look I’m here with my eight friends. We can’t all go just because you are here, so I’m asking nicely…”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence because two hands slipped into my armpits that were thankfully recently shaved and well deodorised, and I was lifted into the air, turned, and when my drunken, spinning-yet-again head had worked out where I’d landed, I was the other side of my new friend, facing away from him, back-to-back with him, I’d been literally swept off my feet, and the deep voice was saying something to Brad. Whatever it was that was said it worked because Brad and his bit of stuff left immediately and I watched them to make sure they did go as they walked up the stairway at the far side of the club and into the outside air.
“I owe you one,” I told the stranger without knowing what that actually, really meant. Obviously, I thought, it doesn’t mean the next time you find yourself arguing with your girlfriend, I’ll be there to lift you out of the way and then to see her off.
“Ryan,” he told me.
“Sorry?”
“I owe you one Ryan. It’s my name. Do you know that when you’ve had a drink you think out loud? I don’t have a girlfriend and hardly ever argue with anyone, it’s not my style, so I wouldn’t need you to see her off, even if she did exist.”
I knew that my face was both hot and red. I could feel the redness travelling down my neck and onto my chest and I felt that soon I would be red all over and looking like a pickled beetroot. “I’ve had too much to drink, you’re right, and I need to go home,” I admitted, as if I was either saying goodbye or inviting him to take me home, but I’m sure he already knew about my state of drunkenness. “But I’ll have to tell all my friends first that I’m going for a cab. Could you please see me safely to the taxi rank in case my ex is still about?” It seemed to me that being seen safely to a taxi was midway between saying goodbye and inviting him home and it would also give me a little more time with him and more time to think. It would, of course, allow him to see me, in the flesh, outside the club, for him to decide that I was an ordinary women and not the woman he thought I was.
He smiled to show me that the dimple in that square chin was matched by dimples in his cheeks and when you added those deep blue eyes into the equation it was impossible for a girl to concentrate on only one facet of his face at a time. He was right and our babies definitely would have blue eyes and hopefully, his black hair. I shook my head to come out of my dream state.
He turned slightly and pointed. “If you need to tell the eight girls over there in the shadows who haven’t taken their eyes off us since my first offer to help you, I think they already know that you’ll be leaving and if you told them you were leaving to get a cab, alone, they’d either murder you or not believe you. Am I right?”
“Pretty much so, yes, but I don’t know you and you could be an evil axe murderer and I don’t want to share a cab with an axe murderer. You’re very confident aren’t you.” I knew I was trying my hardest not to sound drunk or pathetic and that it made my speech sound both drunk and pathetic.
He looked confused and his thick eyebrows turned down to point to his nose adding yet another feature to stare at. Which I think I did.
“I’m going to assume that was you’re talking Ash and not thinking out loud then. If I was an axe murderer, I’d be a pretty poor one because I don’t have an axe or anywhere to hide one, and believe it or not I’m one of the least confident men around when it comes to talking to women.”
He opened his arms wide and twisted through three-sixty to prove to me that there was no axe there and then I was staring at the arm muscles that had lifted me into the air earlier, muscles struggling to get out of the tight shirt cuffs of a short-sleeved dress shirt. I couldn’t be just a friend to this guy, I thought, because my eyes would be all over the place and maybe my hands too. I made sure to think that without saying it out loud but it was hard. I also stifled the giggle that tried to come out about him not being confident and that was harder. I didn’t like the game of charades and preferred us talking because each time his head came close to mine to talk into my ear above the noise of the club, his citrusy aftershave hit my nostrils as if I was picking oranges in a Spanish orchard and the sun was affecting my head making me all dreamy and submissive. Very submissive.
“And anyway,” he continued, “I don’t drink and my car is quite close. I can drive you to your place, make sure you get in safely, I won’t ask if I can come in for coffee because you are off men, and if you think it advisable, we can swap numbers. I’ll be able to ring you and ask you out for a meal, no axes, and if the number I ring is unobtainable I’ll know you’ve made one up because you didn’t want to see me again.”
Now I was stuck. I’d wanted to leave the club alone and go home but my friends wouldn’t allow that. The potential axe murderer had offered to take me home and had already proved that he could easily overpower me, or at least lift me into the air. Then, while I was trying to decide, I realised that all the way through his speech I’d been nodding like a nodding dog and seemed to be agreeing to everything he said. Before I knew it, we were walking towards the staircase, the one that Brad plus one had left on and I heard a loud cheer in the background from eight girls who I knew would be waking up tomorrow and ringing me before they’d even had coffee. I knew that if I’d been sober, I wouldn’t have left with Ryan. Was it Ryan that he’d told me?
I was taking a huge risk, but to be honest, in the mood I was in, I fancied taking a huge risk in being driven home by this courteous man and I was half hoping that Brad and his young tart were still about somewhere, outside the club, to witness us leaving the club together as a couple.