The Home for Broken Hearts (17 page)

“Oh, God, I’m a total failure,” Matt half joked.

“Don’t be silly! You are still young, this might be where you are starting out, but it doesn’t have to be where you end up.”

“And what about you,” Matt asked. “What new heights will you achieve now?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ellen answered absently, curling a tress of hair around her finger. “I’d like to get the oven cleaned by Friday, though.”

When Matt laughed, Ellen couldn’t see what was so funny, which made him like her all the more.

He couldn’t exactly claim that he had made any friends since he’d arrived in London—mates, yes, through work; lads to have a laugh and a drink with. He had underestimated exactly how much it mattered to have someone you could really talk to without needing to put on a front or an attitude. Matt had left his lifelong best friend behind in Manchester along with his PlayStation, and it was his fault that they didn’t talk anymore. Unwittingly, Ellen had become the nearest thing to a friend that he had in the huge, sprawling, unforgiving city, and theirs was small-hours friendship characterized by crumpled cotton pajamas, tangled scooped-up hair, and steaming cups of tea on sweltering summer nights.

As Matt had traveled to work that morning he kept picturing her as they had both knelt on the kitchen floor that day when Charlie had flipped out about his dad’s chair, the tears welling in her eyes, displaying her raw vulnerability in front of a virtual stranger. And then he could not shake the image of
her when they had first met in the kitchen later that day. She had been wearing those stupid red pajamas that hid whatever curves she might have, her face worn with worry. He sat in the kitchen, the body heat of the associate editor still cooling on his skin, and yet he realized that he would rather have spent time talking to Ellen than be in bed with any willing blonde. And she had told him off, only a little and so mildly that he might not have noticed, but when he finally tumbled into the already rumpled sheets of his bed alone, he realized that he felt regret about what had happened between him and the associate editor. It was not a sensation that he was familiar with. He decided that he would call her, not to ask her out again or to try to take the relationship further, but just because calling her seemed like the decent thing to do, and after fifteen minutes in the company of Ellen, Matt found that he wanted to be decent. It was a complaint that intensified the more he got to know her. Nevertheless, it was two weeks since his night with the associate editor and he hadn’t called her yet. It seemed that the desire to be decent and the actuality of it weren’t quite on a par yet.

What had begun to trouble Matt was just how often he thought about his landlady, and whether or not the kinds of things he was thinking or feeling were the kinds of things that invariably ended up trashing a friendship. Even now, as Pete went on about some women at the bar, Matt kept thinking about Ellen standing barefoot in those pajamas. There could not have been a less sexually stimulating image of a woman, and when he thought about her, it wasn’t sex that was at the forefront of his mind at all; but for some reason he was unable to shake that image that seemed so firmly lodged in his brain, and it would pop up at any given moment, quite taking him off guard.

“Bloody hell, mate—that brunette—look at her, you can tell she likes sex. Look at them hips, they are the hips of a girl who doesn’t mind getting flipped over, grabbed by the arse, and properly shagged from behind.”

Dragging his thoughts back to the present, in the pub, Matt looked up. Sitting at the bar were two women enjoying a lunchtime drink, both dressed in what seemed like the unofficial uniform of office workers around here, pencil skirts and white shirts, although the blonde’s had a faint pink candy stripe. They both had long, glossy, straightened hair. The blonde was slightly skinnier, with what looked like small, high breasts that offered no challenge to the buttons of her shirt, and the brunette was curvy, rounded in all the right places. They were both pretty, Matt thought, but he especially liked the way the zipper at the back of the brunette’s skirt strained against the girth of her hips. She was by no means fat, but like so many women, she’d chosen to squeeze into a skirt one size too small for her, which, personally, Matt didn’t mind at all. He imagined the red welts that her discarded garments would leave bitten into her skin when she removed her clothes that night and absently thought about how he’d like to trace a finger along those phantom seams and find out where they led.

“You take the blonde, I’m going for that hippy little minx.” Pete surged up out of his chair and, finding his feet entirely out of touch with his legs, immediately blundered back down into it again. He scowled at his empty glass.

“Fuck, they’ve made the beer stronger in here.”

“Or you had a couple of vodkas on the quiet before we even came to lunch?” Matt asked mildly. How on earth was he supposed to police a man who kept bottles of spirits concealed all around his office?

“I’ll be all right in a second, I just need a few of these peanuts to line my gut,” Pete slurred. “Here’s the plan. You go over there, sweeten them up; keep your hands off the one with the big tits, she’s mine. Tell ’em we work at the magazine, offer ’em a photo shoot, tell ’em you can make them rich and famous, and then arrange to meet them in here later. I’ll be your wingman.”

Matt looked up at the girls, who by now had noticed the attention they were getting. They looked neither impressed nor flattered, and the blonde waved her credit card at the barman, clearly keen to settle up and get back to work.

“I don’t think they’re interested, mate,” Matt said. “Tell you what, how about we get you back to the office and get a few coffees down you before the features meeting this afternoon. Maybe you could have a little kip in your office.”

“No, no, no—they’re interested,” Pete insisted, slamming the palm of his hand firmly on the tabletop, talking loudly enough for the whole bar to hear. “That blonde’s giving you the eye—go on, mate, you go over, give ’em some of that charm you’re so famous for, go on. Warm the frigid bitches up.”

The two women stood up, collected their bags, and, shooting Matt a contemptuous look, mouthing something under their breath that Matt strongly suspected was the word
arseholes,
left with their noses in the air.

Relieved, Matt glanced at his watch. “Time we should be gone, too.”

“Fucking hell!” Pete shouted, angrily gesturing with his hand so that Matt’s nearly full pint shot across the table and rolled onto the floor, spreading a sea of lager across the polished boards. “You fucking let them get away! I haven’t had a decent shag in fucking weeks. Fucking hell, Matt, you…”

“Get him out of here now.” The barman had leaped across the bar and now stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the sodden man. “I can’t have him in here, intimidating the customers, swearing his head off. It’s my job on the line if my boss hears of it. One more stunt like that and he’s barred and so are the rest of you cocky bastards.”

He glared at Matt.

“God, I’m sorry—we’re going, I won’t let it happen again.…” Matt tried to imagine the aftermath of Dan and the lads finding out that they’d been banned from their favorite pub because the rookie had let Pete get out of hand.
It shouldn’t be a reason for him to fail his probation, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

It took Matt some minutes to drag the angry and resentful Pete to his feet and then a good deal more to stagger with him, reeking with stale alcohol and something more, which Matt didn’t want to think about, to the door and out into the hot, exhaust-filled, oppressive afternoon on Fulham Palace Road. The hundred yards to their office entrance and the air-conditioned shelter it offered seemed very far away.

“Let’s not go back,” Pete coaxed blearily in Matt’s ear. “Let’s go over the road to that Irish pub. They’ll serve any fucker.…”

“Pete, we’ve got an editorial meeting in under an hour and you’re totally fucked. You need to get back and sober up quick.” Matt was resolute.

“I’ll be fine,” Pete said, lurching into Matt so that he in turn staggered into a passing woman, nearly knocking her off her feet and unleashing a tirade of curses from her in a language that he was very grateful not to understand.

“No, you will not. We’re going back.” Matt put one arm around Pete’s back, supporting him under his hot and fetid armpit, and with gritted determination propelled him down the road and into the office building. With relief he saw the lift doors slide open, and he bowled his charge into the cubicle before it could move.

It was only when he had Pete propped in a corner, pinned in place by Matt’s steadying hand on his chest, and the doors had closed that Matt realized he was not alone. The associate editor stood in the corner, staring resolutely at the panel of illuminated numbers. His gut sinking, Matt really wished that he had found the time to make that call after all.

“Hello…” Matt had called her associate editor so repeatedly that her actual name had escaped him.

“You got home okay then?” he inquired belatedly, talking to her back. “The other night?” Matt watched her shoulders
rise and fall in an almost imperceptible sigh before she turned to face him, her pretty features set and tense.

“Yes, thanks, luckily I found a taxi driver at the end of the road who didn’t turn out to be a mugger or a rapist.” Unsurprisingly, she was angry with him, but not as angry as she would be if she ever got sight of that column, he thought. He remembered Ellen in the kitchen, her quiet disapproval when he’d told her about his night with the associate editor, and he squirmed internally.

“Everything okay then…?” Matt cursed himself inwardly, her name simply would not come to mind.

She barked a mirthless laugh. “Lucy,” she said flatly. “My name is Lucy, and yes, everything is fine, except that I’m the kind of idiot who wakes up with a fuck of a hangover after letting someone who is obviously an utter, utter twat take me home, get me into bed, and then kick me out in the middle of the night without so much as even phoning me a taxi. And you don’t even remember my name, you arsehole!” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “God, I hate myself. I make myself sick. I just did everything the magazine I work for is constantly telling its readers not to do—and for
you,
of all fuckwits—I mean sure, you’re pretty, but that’s about it. You’ve got the conversational skills of a mentally impaired rottweiler and your bedroom skills are frankly lacking in finesse.” She sighed as the lift stopped at her floor. “When will women finally learn what cunts men are?”

“Hey, hang on, that’s not fair—Lucy!” Feeling compelled to go after her and to have his moment of decency, albeit a couple of weeks late, Matt momentarily stepped away from Pete, who immediately threatened to topple like a felled tree, forcing Matt to stay where he was to shore him up again. He called out of the lift just as the doors began to slide shut, “I didn’t turn you out, it was like I told you, my landlady… and anyway, I was going to call you…” The lift doors closed before Matt could finish his explanation, which he
realized belatedly wouldn’t have exactly done him any favors with Ellen.

Still, Matt felt unjustly slighted. How did Lucy know that he hadn’t been about to call her and ask her out again, how did she know that he hadn’t been telling the truth about his landlady being a dragon and that of course he would have called her a cab only his mobile was dead and… and the land line had been cut off? Matt sighed as the elevator rose one more floor, groaning as if it, too, could smell Pete’s rancid fragrance. Lucy was right, he’d behaved like an awful shit. She had him bang to rights, and, weirdly, he liked her more in that moment than he had in any other in their brief acquaintance. What he should do, what he wanted to do, was to find that column and pull it from the shared folder and replace it with something else. That would be the fair thing to do, but Pete and Dan had already seen it and liked it, so he would look like some kind of cowardly idiot if he tried to come up with a reason to change it now.

“You fucked her, too? You bastard,” Pete slurred as Matt dragged him into the magazine office. After a moment’s hesitation about what to do with his addled charge, Matt bundled him into the men’s toilet and pushed him into a cubicle.

“Stay there, don’t move, I’m going to get you coffee.”

“Bastard,” Pete murmured, resting his forehead against the cubicle wall, his eyes closing and his jaw slackening simultaneously.

Matt paused briefly to look at himself in the mirror, running his fingers under the cold tap and then through his hair, before patting his damp palms against his hot cheeks. Then he headed out to find coffee.

“That for Pete?” Suze asked him coolly as he filled first one and then a second plastic cup at the coffee machine. Matt considered lying, but as Dan’s PA, Suze missed nothing; besides, it was fairly obvious that Suze did not like him, which was a bad thing. Suze seemed to wield a disproportionate amount of
power in the office. She was the only woman whom none of the lads talked or joked or made smutty innuendos about, and she ran Dan like a military operation, making him look much more efficient and good at his job than he really was, and everybody knew that if you were on the wrong side of Suze, it was only a matter of time before you’d be on the wrong side of Dan. Matt had been trying to warm her up to him since he’d first arrived, but no amount of flattery or charm would coax that perfect pout into a smile. Maybe by showing that he was taking care of Pete, if accompanying a known alcoholic to the pub could strictly be called taking care of, he would somehow impress her, show her that he was more than just another jack-the-lad.

“Yep,” Matt told her, grimly serious. “I’m trying to sober him up again. He does this a lot, doesn’t he? This is the worst I’ve seen him, but I bet it’s not the first time.”

“Or the last,” Suze said primly. “Dan puts up with it because Pete helped him a lot when he was a rookie, got him some breaks that got him where he is today. That’s why he’s practically the only person in the industry who’ll give Pete a job—but he won’t be able to turn a blind eye for much longer. The old fool’s getting out of hand.”