Irresistible (2 page)

I’m the same with movies and stuff—I start off desperately
hoping to be scared, but it never seems real enough. Gabi, my best friend, never had this problem; at sleepovers she would continually dig her fingernails into my leg when we were watching some slasher film we were probably too young for, while I was usually a little bored. And when we got taken to see
The Woman in Black
on the Year Eight theater trip, she got taken out for screaming too hysterically.

I think that if I get this job, I’ll probably be here till late each night. My ten-year-old self would be delighted. Gabi’s current sixteen-year-old self would go completely crazy. I’m going to look tonight for any scary “haunting” stories about this place. I bet there have been a few scary children singing nursery rhymes. Or maybe one of these portrait women in wigs was driven mad with grief and can still be heard wailing in the corridors.

We turn off into a room on the right, which is the reception area, where the receptionist had made me wait for ten minutes while she “verified” that I was really here for an interview, as opposed to being here to steal or set fire to things.

Julia asks the receptionist for “Jennifer Fish’s mother’s number.”

“Unfortunately, we’ll be letting her go,” she explains.

“Oh? Why’s that?” asks the receptionist, barely containing her desire to get the gossip.

“Overindulgence,” Julia replies through her false smile. “And there’ll be a bottle of port to replace.”

The receptionist
tsk
s and mutters something under her breath that sounds like “Another one …”

Julia leaves to make her phone call and I sit opposite the receptionist. Jeff won’t be here to pick me up for another half hour. I could probably walk, but I’m not totally sure of the
way. I lean back, wondering what I’m going to do for half an hour, and the wooden back of the chair creaks loudly. I sit up quickly, thinking that breaking antique furniture is probably not the best way to fill my time.

The receptionist coughs. “We have books if you are looking for something to do, dear,” she says pointedly. She’s reading a book, exaggeratedly licking her finger each time she turns the page and peering at me over her glasses.

I look around. There’s a shelf of very old-looking books behind me—the kind with brown leather spines. I wonder what she would do if I picked one up and did what she is doing, which is essentially wiping her spit all over it.

I’m about to pull out one of the old books when she snaps her fingers and points to a box by the door. It’s full of paperbacks, mostly those with photo-style illustrations of couples kissing on the front. The one I choose has a guy with long hair and an oiled chest and a woman whose clothes are falling off. I wonder if they were left by guests and the receptionist has hoarded them. Well, at least it will pass the time.

After spending a while trying not to laugh at “dangerously sexy Dante” and his “rock-hard thighs,” I feel a breeze coming from the door. I shift forward on my chair so I can see through an archway and into the castle courtyard.

Julia comes sweeping back in and sees me watching. “Do have a look around while you wait,” she says.

I hand the receptionist back the book and thank her. She holds it in an overly dainty manner between her thumb and finger and places it back in the box.

I go across the corridor and into the courtyard. It’s like a mini garden, with trees and flower beds and a stone
path running through it. Walls loom at me on all sides, with windows too small to see into, apart from the ones at ground level. On the right I can see into the restaurant. The wall ahead of me is broken into a series of archways at the bottom that lead out to a terrace of stone slabs with tables and chairs on it. There’s one old man at a table with his head on his chest, snoring. The restaurant leads to a conservatory building on the left, and through the glass I can see the outdoor swimming pool. Julia said it is available to guests in the day. Maybe staff get to use it in the evening …

It looks awesome, surrounded by stone pillars with plants growing around them. And at the end there’s a building that looks like a Greek temple with four huge stone pillars at the front of it. I cannot believe people actually live here.

Sitting between the building and the pool on a lounge chair is the boy from the window. He’s reading a book and smoking, putting the cigarette in his mouth each time he turns the page. He’s wearing the same black shorts, but no shirt now. He’s too far away to see clearly. I think that it would be useful in situations like these if I carried binoculars with me, then realize that makes me sound like a pervert. He’s probably been swimming, I think. I imagine his chest drying off in the sun. Then my phone goes off loudly.

The old man snorts and glares around, and the boy looks up from his book. I fumble to reach the phone in my bag and run back through one of the arches into the courtyard. My phone is still blaring, and I still can’t find it in my bag.

I press the answer button just as I reach the reception area again, and the receptionist is saying, “Excuse me …” above the noise of my ringtone.

On the phone, Jeff says, “I’m here! I think …”

I go out the old wooden door at the bottom of the left tower and walk across the gravel, heading to the parking lot on the left. I can’t see Jeff’s car, which is a relief, to be honest, because it’s a Volvo and really old, and Gabi always says I should get him to park around the corner when he picks us up from parties. I tell him I’ll start walking to meet him.

“I’m on a windy country lane. I nearly killed a deer!” he says helpfully.

I walk toward the point where the parking lot meets the lane and see Julia and another woman standing by a car. Julia is talking while the woman looks uncomfortable and fiddles with her car keys. As I pass them, I hear Julia say, “… a bottle of the nineteen-forty-five Graham’s she’d stolen from the cellar. It won’t be drinkable now that she’s opened it and shaken it up.”

“Mmm, yes. Of course. Shaken up,” says the woman in a shrill, wobbly voice. “I’m very, very sorry. We’ll replace the port, of course.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” says Julia, and I know she’ll be smiling the fake smile, “unless you have a thousand pounds to spare. It’s not something one gets in the grocery store.”

“David’s a chartered accountant,” the shrill woman says, and then trails off.

I’m nearly on the other side of the car before I feel I can turn and look. In the passenger seat is the girl I saw kissing the boy at the window. Even from here I can see a dark red stain at the top of her white shirt where she must have spilled the port. Pretty incriminating. She is crying, and on one side of her face her mascara has run down in a long black drip.

I wonder if I should tell them it wasn’t her fault. Or even that if she did steal the port to drink with the boy, then it’s
his fault too. I hover behind them, but I can’t speak up. Julia is too terrifying. And what if I didn’t see everything? The girl in the car must be wondering what I’m doing. I try to give her a friendly smile, but I don’t think she really registers me. She’s looking back up at the castle.

The boy is standing at the front door with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. The huge stone facade towers behind him at a slight angle. At first I think he’s too far away to have noticed us, but then I see his head turn in our direction, and for a second I’m sure that he’s looking over at me. He lights up another cigarette and walks off.

“O. M. F. G.,” says Gabi, with a dramatic hand wave between each letter. She grips my arm across the table, nearly knocking my coffee over in the process.

“What?”

“Jamie. Elliot. Fox.”

“Can you speak in normal sentences?”

“He’s, like, famous, Mia.”

“He seems like a jerk. What’s he famous for?”

“Um, for being
rich
and
hot
? You must have heard about him! God, it’s like you live under a bridge.”

Within a second she’s whipped out her phone and is scrolling rapidly. She hands it to me triumphantly. “Ta-da!”

A few people who are quietly murmuring over their coffee look at our table, which is something that often happens when we’re out together. It’s like Gabi has a
volume dial on her voicebox that is always turned a few notches higher than everyone else’s.

“That was some quick stalking, even for you,” I tell her.

“But you want to see him, don’t you?”

“No. Maybe. Okay, yes, I want to see him.”

I’d like to be all nonchalant and cool, but I’m intrigued. Obviously he’s good looking, with his stubble and dark eyes. And his muscly chest that I haven’t actually seen close up, but that I imagine being muscly. Not that I’ve been imagining him walking around in just his shorts, all wet from the swimming pool.

But he clearly knows he’s hot or he wouldn’t go around kissing people in windows. Or staring. Why would he stare at me? What does he think I’m going to do—run outside and say, “Now that you’ve glared at me through a window, I must have you”?

Gabi sees that I’ve gone into a daydream, so she does her usual trick of digging her nail into my hand.

“Hey! Okay, so his Facebook is, like, really private, but Han and me met him and his friends that night we went to York’s.”

She says the night we went to York’s. She means the night we didn’t get into York’s and instead stood freezing our asses off in a nearby bus shelter, passing around a Smirnoff Ice. It seems that these days it’s all about trying to get into clubs and places, instead of just going to people’s houses when their parents are away. I miss getting all excited about house parties and making playlists for them and putting all our money together to give to whichever tall person was going to go try to buy drinks at the supermarket. I have no chance of getting into any clubs—I’m only just over five feet tall, so bouncers spot me immediately. Gabi has the most enormous
boobs ever to have grown on a person, though, so she just strolls in.

Maybe if I get this job then I’ll be able to socialize in the Radleigh Castle bar, like a sophisticated … um, woman, and drink port with Jamie Elliot-Fox. And kiss Jamie Elliot-Fox against windows. But without getting fired.

While Gabi’s talking about that night, I look at the first picture. There’s Jamie in a suit, but with the shirt collar open. He’s leaning back on a sofa, casually holding a glass of wine, while the people around him, including two girls practically sitting on his lap, clutch vodka bottles and generally look totally wasted. He’s fixing the camera with that same critical, amused look he had at the window.

“You took off with those goths,” she continues.

Gabi thinks that anyone who doesn’t like pop music is a goth. Actually Han’s sister and her friends had turned up and were on their way to see a band, so I went with them.

“They’re not—” I try to interrupt.

“Whatev. So you went with the goths and then I texted you saying we’d met all those Woodbridge guys outside the club and gone to their house party—remember?”

“Yeah, they were all named Tarquin or Octavian or something.”

“So Jamie was there, and that was the night I became Facebook friends with that guy Willem.”

“William?”

“No,
Willem
.”

“That’s not a real name.”

Gabi dramatically takes a sip of her hot chocolate. Well, to anyone else it would be dramatic, but it’s how she does everything.

“Anyway, Max got really jealous and they were, like, actually going to fight, but Fat Steve calmed everything down.”

“Really?” I raise my eyebrows at her. “Max has never been in a fight, Gabs. We’ve never even seen a fight.”

“Whatev. You weren’t there. There was fighting in their
eyes
, Mia.”

“Just not in reality.”

“Exactly!”

“So you’ve met him, then?” I scroll through some more photos. He’s not in all of them, but every so often he’ll appear. On the beach in his shorts again, wearing shades. In another suit, sitting by a bonfire. In most of the photos he’s got a drink in his hand, but he looks in control, in stark contrast to lots of the people around him.

“Well, he didn’t talk much. He stood there drinking and watching everyone. Oh yeah, and he was with this girl, apparently. The richest girl I’ve
ever
seen. Like a horse with lots of hair. But all these other girls kept crowding around him, and he was whispering to them and making them laugh, like, really flirty. If Max did that, I’d go crazy. He said something to this one girl, and she took her top off and swung it around her head. Next thing, she’s looking around for him, but he’d walked off!”

“Wow, he sounds great.”

“His friends said he lives in this pool house outside Radleigh Castle. How awesome is that? He has parties all the time. When you work there, we should totally go—Babe!”

We are interrupted by Max’s arrival.

“Hey, princess,” he says, pointing both fingers at Gabi. He shuffles over in his ridiculously baggy jeans, stopping briefly when the oversized cap he wears perched on the back
of his head falls off. I’d like to point out that he is both white and middle class. Considering the amount Gabi bitches about other people’s fashion sense, I think that she must go temporarily blind whenever Max is around.

He slides into our booth. “Aight, baby?”

Okay, make that temporarily blind and deaf.

Max nods at me. “Mia.”

“Hi, Max.”

Then he and Gabi start kissing, which, as is usual for them, carries on for about five minutes. I keep my eyes on her phone. A girl with dark curly hair keeps appearing in the photos; she must be the one Gabi was talking about, because she does have a
lot
of hair and is near to Jamie in most of the pictures. Her name is Cleo Farah. She is stunning, with big brown eyes, sharp cheekbones, and coffee-colored skin.

Max and Gabi are still firmly attached to each other’s mouths, so I look at the next photo. Jamie is dressed up again, but it looks like it’s for a family thing rather than a party. Maybe a wedding. He’s wearing a vest and has his arm around a girl who looks about twelve years old. She must be his sister. He’s smiling, but not in the frowny way he is in the other photos—this looks more real.