Drive Me Crazy (18 page)

Danny takes a step closer to me, our faces just inches apart.

‘Don’t listen to it,’ he says softly. ‘It’s drunk.’

Before I have a chance to cave in to peer pressure, I feel Danny bump into me, spilling the glass of red right down the front of my cream top.

‘Oh, whoops,’ Emma says, without a hint of sincerity. ‘Clumsy me bumping into you like that, Dan.’

‘Candy, your top,’ Danny says, frozen in position because he knows what to do about as much as I do.

Andrea comes rushing over.

‘No drama, Candy, nip into the loo and take that off. Danny, come with me, I’ll get you something to help with the stain,’ she instructs.

I glance back at Emma as I head for the bathroom, feeling myself growing increasingly angry at her smug look. She’s clearly jealous. Well, I’ll give that bitch something to feel jealous about.

I close the door of the downstairs bathroom behind me, quickly taking off my top. As I sit on the bathroom counter in my bra, in my drunken state, I finally realise how I’ll get Will’s attention: I’ll send him that dirty picture he asked for. There’s no way he’ll be able to resist that.

I hold my phone at a flattering angle, pull the biggest most over-the-top pout I can contort my face into and push my boobs together with my elbows. I’m drunk, but not so drunk that taking my bra off seems like a good idea. Instead, I pull one strap down, allowing one of the cups to slip aside just enough to show a hint of nipple. I’ve never done this before, but less is more, right?

I snap what I think is a good one, just as Danny starts knocking on the door.

‘Can I come in?’ he calls from the other side.

‘Hang on,’ I call back, a little snappy, as I fidget with my phone to try and get this sent before I let him in.

‘But I miss you,’ he calls back. Someone must be there.

‘Just a sec, honey,’ I say sweetly.

I try to hurry up, rushing my way through the motions of attaching a photo and…sent.

‘Right, come in, dear,’ I chirp, having made sure my bra is back in place. Then I grab the nearest towel and wrap it around my upper body.

As Danny walks through the door, his phone makes a noise. He takes it from his pocket and glances at the screen.

‘Did you just send me a text?’ he asks.

‘Me? No,’ I reply, glancing down at my own phone in my hand. That’s when I realise that I have drunkenly, absentmindedly sent my slutty selfie to Danny instead of Will. I snatch his phone from his hand.

‘Listen, I need you to just trust me: type your passcode in on your phone and let me delete it. I didn’t mean to send it to you and it’s embarrassing.’

‘Embarrassing? Well normally I’d be all over that, but you did me a huge favour today. Go on then.’

Danny does as he is asked and I quickly delete the photo. Crisis averted.

‘I know you’re pissed off at me, so it must have taken a lot for you to do what you did for me today.’

‘No worries,’ I reply.

‘Well, I want to return the favour. I remember your friend saying something about you not having a date for her wedding – and I think I overheard the two of you talking about maybe seeing if I’d go with you out of pity. Well, here’s the pity. You showed me mercy; I’ll do the same for you. I’ll go with you.’

‘Really?’ I ask in disbelief.

‘Yeah. Why not?’

I suppose I’m just surprised because I know how hard it was going to be to get Will to go, even before everything that happened.

‘Well, thank you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m going to hold you to that. Speaking of holding you…’

I notice Emma, peeping into the bathroom from where she is sitting in the living room. She has a perfect view, and as unsubtle as she’s being, I pretend not to notice her. Instead, I wrap my legs around Danny’s waist and pull him close, gently kissing his neck.

‘Emma is watching,’ I whisper. ‘Play along.’

Danny runs his hands up my back slowly as I kiss my way up his neck and nibble on his earlobe. He makes this cute little noise.

‘Very convincing,’ I whisper.

I keep my eyes on Emma, who is getting increasingly annoyed at our display. She soon gets up and walks away, so I stop, but Danny doesn’t let go.

‘Danny, she’s gone, you can let go now,’ I tell him.

‘Hmm?’ he says. ‘Oh, right.’

He releases me, but he looks a bit awkward.

‘You OK?’ I laugh.

‘Yeah, I’m good. Give me your top. My mam says she’ll clean it. I brought you this to shove on while it dries.’

Danny hands me a T-shirt with the slogan: ‘Talk QWERTY to me’ emblazoned across the front.

‘You truly are a massive nerd.’ I laugh.

‘Yeah, well, you’re welcome,’ he replies. ‘Hey, I’m glad we’re getting on,’ he says as he leaves the room, and he sounds sincere.

‘As mad at you as I am for last night…I’m glad we’re getting on too. You don’t know how much I need a friend right now.’

‘Maybe we’ll talk about it,’ he says with a smile.

‘Maybe.’ I smile back.

Chapter 23

‘Well, I’m beat,’ I announce as I pull myself to my feet. It’s ten p.m., and as much as I’m enjoying spending time with Danny’s family, sitting out on this warm summer’s night, drinking too much wine, I know that we’ve got an early start.

‘I’m pretty tired too,’ Danny agrees – well, neither of us got much sleep last night, did we?

‘Oi, oi,’ Chris says. ‘They’re gonna be bucking tonight.’

I feel my cheeks flush.

‘Oh, no.’ Danny laughs. ‘I told Candy she can have my room. I’ll kip on the sofa.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ His mum laughs. ‘We were young once; we don’t mind if you share.’

I shoot Danny a look.

‘Honestly, Mam, we don’t mind.’

‘It’s fine, really,’ Andrea insists.

‘What are you, a prude?’ Emma laughs.

‘No at all.’ I smile. ‘Just respectful of my boyfriend’s parents.’

‘Well, that’s lovely,’ Paul says with a nod. ‘We’re not used to that around here.’

‘Well, goodnight, pet,’ Andrea says. ‘Danny, your dad will run you for your car in the morning. You sure you can’t stick around for breakfast?’

‘Thanks, Mam, but we’ve got to hit the road early.’

Danny walks me to the kitchen door.

‘Your mum just called me pet.’ I chuckle, both amused and warmed by her Geordie charm.

‘It’s a term of endearment. A term of endearment is a
nice
name that you call someone who you
like
,’ he teases, stressing certain words for emphasis. ‘I realise the concept is alien to you.’

I laugh sarcastically.

‘Listen, you go to bed. I’ll sit up for a bit and then sleep on the sofa after everyone has gone to bed. Don’t worry,’ he whispers.

‘Are you sure?’ I reply.

‘I’m sure. Thanks for everything. Sweet dreams.’

I smile at him for a second before heading indoors and upstairs.

I take off all of my clothes except Danny’s T-shirt, which I’ve decided I’ll sleep in, scrub off my make-up and climb into Danny’s bed. He’s got a double bed squashed into the corner of the room, so I climb in and sit with my back against the wall. I glance at my phone – still no word from Will. It’s sad, but when I was with Will, life was just bridging the gaps between moments with him. Whether it was being called into his office for no real reason or just receiving an unexpected text from him over the weekend, when he acknowledged my existence, unprompted, it meant everything. It would send me soaring up on a high that I felt like I’d never come down from…until the next quiet period. My mood was all over the place. I suppose now that he’s ignoring me, at least my mood is balanced, even if I am permanently in a bad one.

I sit and think for a while, anxiously picking at my manicured nails, but doing so in such a gentle way that the polish doesn’t actually come off because I didn’t bring anything with me to touch them up. Time is ticking away, but now that I’m in bed I just can’t sleep.

I lean over and flick the light off, before lying back and trying to make myself comfortable. As I lie there in the pitch black something catches my eye: a small, glow-in-the-dark star stuck to the ceiling in the corner of the room. It seems strange, the way it’s just tucked away in the corner on its own, but it’s beautiful. I can’t stop staring at it.

There’s a knock on the door, snapping me from my thoughts.

‘Come in,’ I call out.

‘Hey,’ Danny says as he shuffles in awkwardly. ‘So, my mam is insisting I get to bed. Maybe if I can just chill here with you until everyone has gone to bed, then I’ll go back down.’

‘Sure,’ I reply, sitting upright. ‘I can’t sleep anyway; I’d appreciate the company.’

Danny closes the door behind him, plunging the room into darkness again, before hopping on the bed next to me. He doesn’t get under the covers, but he sits by my side, leaning against the wall too.

‘Why do you have one glowing star on your ceiling?’ I ask curiously.

‘I was – no, I
am
a space nerd. You know that.’ He laughs.

‘No one is in any doubt over your nerd status.’ I laugh. ‘Just seems weird that you have just one shoved in the corner.’

‘My nana used to live here with us,’ he tells me, his voice softening. ‘When I was little, she stuck them all over the ceiling for me.’

‘Aw, that’s cute,’ I tell him.

‘One day when I was a teen – I don’t even remember why now – I think I was pissed off because my parents wouldn’t let me do something because I was too young. I remember sitting in here, fuming about how I wasn’t a baby any more, and the stars just served as a reminder. So I ripped them all down, all but that one, which I couldn’t reach because I was a short-arse thirteen-year-old.’

Danny laughs briefly.

‘They diagnosed my nana with cancer not long before I went travelling. I was going to cancel my trip, maybe stick around and go to uni, but she insisted I went, telling me she’d be fine.’

‘Did you not go to uni then?’ I ask, curiously. I would have thought you’d need to in his line of work.

‘Nope. Self-taught. Started working on code on MySpace when I was a teenager, and built on it from there. Got a job at some dot-gone company when I left school, earned enough to travel and since then I’ve managed to alternate travelling around with jobs here and there. I like to keep moving.’

I smile, although I only understood about half of that. When Danny talks, it’s like every other word registers and the rest fall on deaf ears with me. I don’t think he’s being pretentious, I just don’t think he realises that some of us have no idea what a ‘dot-gone’ is.

‘Anyway, my nana wasn’t fine,’ he continues. ‘She passed away before I got home. So, the last star stays. It’s going to sound lame but, I don’t know, it’s like she’s watching over me, or something. That one star in the sky that she put there.’

‘That’s not lame at all,’ I tell him. ‘I wish I had more to remember my parents.’

‘It must have been tough for you, losing them both,’ Danny says, taking my hand and squeezing it.

‘It was, very tough. I lost my mum first, so at least I had my dad to help me through it. We knew my dad was close to the end, and I remember sitting by his hospital bed, knowing that as soon as he left me, that was it, I’d be all alone in the world. I remember it like it was yesterday though. It was the middle of the night – a horrible, cold, windy winter’s night. Two of the nurses on duty had come in to check on him, so he was telling them the story of the day I was born. There was a terrible storm going on while my mum was in labour and, at the exact moment I left my mother’s body, all the lights in the hospital went out. At least, that’s how my dad told it. The same dad who insisted, despite me being born at 03:13 a.m., that the nurse write down 03:14 a.m. Just in case. The storm, the dip in power and the time I decided to make my entrance somehow convinced my selectively religious father into thinking that he needed to do something – anything – to dispel the bad juju.’

‘Better safe than sorry.’ Danny laughs.

‘My mother, who was far more level-headed, couldn’t give a toss about the time I was born, and when I heard this story for the first time she assured me that the lights on the maternity ward only flickered for a second, thanks to the epic storm going on outside. She also told me that on the day in question I repaid her by giving her an utterly filthy, unimpressed look the first time I was placed in her arms.’

The reports of my demonic behaviour over the years were greatly exaggerated. My mum would often remind me how lucky she was to still have nipples, because as a baby I made it my life’s work to remove them. She explained that, when she was breastfeeding me, I would often get this look in my eye, a look that always preceded the same, brutal attack. She told me how she would gently plead with me, ‘Candice, no!’, to this little demon baby attached to her breast, but I paid no attention to her calm pleas, and I would bite her – hard. For the lone fact that she continued to feed me at all, I will be forever grateful.

‘Your dad sounds funny,’ Danny says, rubbing my hand. He just seems to get how difficult this must be for me to talk about, despite still having both his parents.

‘He was hilarious – rarely intentionally.’

‘Were they both ill then?’

‘Yeah, my gene pool isn’t great. Dementia, diabetes – so even if I make it into old age, I’ll probably forget I can’t have sugar and eat a cake and die.’

‘Well, that’s why you’ve got to make the most of life. I keep telling you, YOLO.’ He laughs.

‘It’s fair enough saying you only life once, but if you live recklessly, that once is going to be short.’

‘So long as you’re happy. Except I don’t think you are,’ he says.

‘Why not?’ I squeak, trying a little too hard to protest otherwise.

‘Because you’re having an affair with Will,’ he replies.

‘Me? And Will? Don’t be…’ My voice trails off. He’s not stupid. There’s no point trying to pretend he’s not right. ‘How did you know?’

‘I can just tell. He gets jealous when I talk to you, this weird little holiday you guys had planned – you were sharing double rooms. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes. I’m going to guess that’s why you keep checking your phone. You fallen out?’

‘When I started seeing him, he told me he and his wife were separated, but living together to keep up appearances. Yes, I realise how unbelievable that sounds, but I had no reason to doubt him. I was in a sad, weak, vulnerable place and I believed what he said because it’s what I needed to be true, I guess. When I found out she’d had a baby – his baby – I realised he hadn’t left her, and that he probably never will.’