You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (4 page)

‘Well, go on then,’ she said in what she hoped was a challenging tone. ‘Kiss me if you want to.’

This time Neve was ready, tilting her head back as Max cupped her cheek and slowly kissed her. Just his lips on her lips, nothing more than friction, but it sent a thousand sparks shooting down her arms and legs so Neve was flexing her fingers and trying to curl her toes in her too-tight shoes. It was only her third ever kiss. There’d been an horrific collision with her second cousin’s tongue at a wedding where she’d also got drunk for the first time, and there’d been the dreadlocked Philosophy student who may or may not have taken her virginity, and that was after she’d consumed a huge number of fudge brownies, which she’d later discovered had been heavily laced with marijuana. They barely counted. Whereas this was stellar kissing, the kind of kissing that she’d only read about in the lurid bodice-rippers she’d sneaked from her grandmother’s bookshelves.

Neve did what any self-respecting Regency heroine would do and wound her arms around Max’s neck with a rapturous little sigh so the kisses could get deeper, more heated, and they only stopped when someone across the street bellowed, ‘Get a fucking room!’

Her hat had fallen off in all the excitement. Max crouched down to pick it up, as Neve tried to get her breathing under control. She really had to try to be more blasé about this.

‘So, what do you think?’ Max asked as he placed the hat back on Neve’s head, pulling it over her eyes and grinning when she scowled and adjusted it. ‘Back to yours or am I catching the last bus home?’

Neve was never very good at making split-second decisions. Even choosing a DVD from Blockbuster could be a fraught experience and she needed at least a week to debate this question, but Max was tapping his foot impatiently.

‘Well, I … I don’t … I think you’ve already missed the last bus,’ she choked out, staring at the top button on Max’s black wool coat because she’d lose her nerve if she had to look at his face. She’d give him coffee and have another half-hour of those dark velvet kisses, then she’d kick him out. ‘I suppose that would be all right.’

Max nodded. ‘Cool.’ He paused. ‘By the way, I don’t think I ever caught your name.’

Finsbury Park was an area of London that was meant to be up-and-coming but still hadn’t quite up and come. If you turned right when you came out of the tube station and walked under the bridge, it was a soulless morass of minicab offices, fast-food joints and gangs of hoodies.

But Neve always turned left and walked past the little supermarkets, their stalls displaying exotic fruit and vegetables, the Afro-Caribbean beauty store that had row after row of be-wigged mannequin heads in the window, the fishmonger’s and up to the Old Dairy, which was now a gastro pub. When Neve’s parents had first got married and moved into a maisonette a couple of streets away from her grandmother’s pub on the Stroud Green Road, the area was a grimy collection of betting shops, off-licences and crumbling terraces converted into poky flats; the sort of place where one didn’t linger too late after dark. In the last ten years though, the streets of solidly built Victorian terraced houses, the huge park and the ten-minute trip on the Victoria line to Oxford Circus had reeled in the middle classes.

Neve could never imagine living anywhere else. She’d spent three years at Oxford, but the dreaming spires, medieval churches and punts bobbing on the river had completely lacked the poetry of the roar of the crowds spilling out of the station when Arsenal played a home game or the sun falling in dappled shadows on the Parkland Walk. Besides, who’d want to live anywhere where you couldn’t get a can of Coke and a bag of chips after midnight within two minutes of opening your front door?

It was, however, the first time Neve had walked these familiar streets with a man who wasn’t a member of her immediate family or gay. Neve wasn’t sure what a suitable topic of conversation would be for an almost stranger that you were taking back to your house solely for kissing and possibly some of the other things that went hand-in-hand with the kissing. But then Max started talking about the tramp who could usually be seen under the railway bridge swigging from a bottle of cider and, ‘Have you ever been in that charity shop? It smells like the bowels of hell.’

All too soon they came to her gate. Max paused for a moment as if he was giving her time to back out, but Neve simply unlatched the gate and hurried up the path to the house that had once been her grandmother’s. When she’d died, her son, Neve’s father, had converted the property into three flats and divvied them up between his three children. Celia was still seething that she’d been in New York when the conversion was completed and so she’d got stuck with the ground-floor flat.

Celia was currently pickling her liver somewhere in Soho and the house was dark and silent, but Neve didn’t turn on the hall light, and as soon as Max stepped through the door he crashed into her bike, which was propped against the wall.

Neve’s heart shuddered. She looked fearfully upwards, expecting the landing light to snap on and a shrill voice to start screaming. When nothing happened, except Max swearing under his breath, she sagged in relief.

‘Um, can you take your shoes off?’ she whispered.

‘Why?’ Max asked in his normal voice, which sounded loud enough to wake the dead.

‘You have to keep your voice down,’ Neve hissed. ‘My brother and my sister-in-law own the first-floor flat and she’s
… an evil psycho bitch …
very noise sensitive. Please, Max.’

It was too dark to see anything, but Neve was sure she could
hear
Max rolling his eyes with great force. ‘OK,’ he said in a stage whisper, toeing off his Converses.

They crept up the stairs, Neve holding her breath until they’d cleared the first-floor landing and she could exhale very quietly. When they reached her door, she carefully inched her key into the lock.

‘This reminds me of being sneaked into girls’ homes when I was a teenager and their parents were asleep upstairs,’ Max grumbled as Neve frantically shushed him and pushed him through her front door.

‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered, snapping on the hall light. She went to unbutton her coat and froze because now in her hall with Max looming over her, reality was beginning to sink in. She had a man in her flat who’d come home with her for the sole purpose of getting his hands on her body, and suddenly taking off her coat felt like getting naked. And though there was no way in hell she was having sex with Max, there’d still be touching, and the way she’d kissed him outside the station meant that Max would expect … God, she didn’t know what he’d expect, and in some ways that was the most frightening thing of all.

Neve didn’t even know what to do with her hands but just let them flutter helplessly as Max unwound his scarf and took off his coat. ‘Shall I hang them up here?’ he asked, gesturing at the wall hooks.

‘Yeah.’ Neve did a slow turn as if she’d never been inside her flat before and was trying to get her bearings. ‘The living room is through here.’

She imagined that she could feel Max’s breath on the back of her neck as she bustled into the lounge and turned on a couple of lamps; the only way she’d get through this with any measure of dignity still intact was with very subdued lighting.

Max sat on the sofa that Neve pointed at jerkily and looked around with interest. The lounge had originally been two bedrooms; now it was one huge room lined on two walls with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Neither Celia nor Douglas had wanted their grandmother’s old furniture so Neve had claimed the battered leather Chesterfield and the two threadbare red velvet armchairs. In the furthest corner of the room was her desk, pushed in front of the window so she could look out over the railway lines and the woods. And then there were the books, not just on the shelves but stacked on her desk and in piles on the scarred wooden floorboards, which her father had begged her to sand down and varnish, and even books fighting for space with the collection of Clarice Cliff pieces on the mantelpiece. The computer, television and iPod dock looked as if they’d been imported from another universe.

Max simply nodded and smiled. It was a secret sort of smile as if he wasn’t just pleased with the room but with something else that he didn’t feel like sharing. ‘I don’t know why your sister-in-law gets so bent out of shape by the completely reasonable noise levels of someone going up the stairs when you live right by a railway track,’ Max remarked.

Neve had often wondered the very same thing. ‘Apparently I’m very heavy-footed,’ she confessed, but Max snorted as if the notion that Neve could stomp up and down the stairs ‘like a herd of fucking elephants’ was ridiculous. Though at that moment, still wearing her coat and with her knickers and tights on the downward slide yet
again
, Neve felt more lumpen than she had done in months.

‘Have you got something to drink?’ Max asked, settling back on the couch. ‘And are you going to take your coat off?’

Neve was still standing in the middle of the room on her plush art deco replica rug from IKEA. ‘Yes, sorry, yes. Wine. I think I’ve only got white. Except there’s some red but it’s pretty nasty. It’s cooking wine …’

‘White will be great,’ Max assured her. ‘There’s no need to look so scared, by the way. I don’t bite.’

At least he hadn’t added
unless you want me to
, Neve thought as she took off her coat and stared at her reflection in the hall mirror. She had a severe case of hat-head, her hair a mass of static, and her flushed cheeks were a perfect match for her smeared lipstick, but her face would do; it was the rest of her that she was worried about.

Neve flipped up her skirt and hoisted her tights so high that they almost touched her bra band, then smoothed her dress back down and peered at herself critically. In profile her waist looked tiny, but that was only because of the wide flare of her hips, and even with the finest shapewear that Marks & Sparks had to offer, her belly still pooched out. The sweetheart neckline of her fitted, black vintage dress didn’t show much cleavage, which was just as well, and the tight sleeves were keeping her upper arms in check. Neve looked down at her stockinged feet; the hem of her dress swished pleasingly and covered her legs to mid-calf. Yes, fully clothed she passed muster so she’d just have to stay fully clothed but the tights would have to go, Neve decided, as they slowly began to unpeel for the gazillionth time that evening.

With the kitchen door shut firmly behind her, Neve pulled off her tights and stuffed them in the empty bread-bin to be dealt with at a later stage. There was an unopened bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge and Neve poured herself a glass, drained it, then, wedging the bottle under her arm, went back into the living room, where Max was lounging back on the sofa as if he ended up in some strange girl’s living room every night. Point of fact, he probably did.

‘I hope you don’t want cheese and crackers,’ Neve said doubtfully, placing wine and glasses on the coffee table in front of him. ‘’Cause I don’t have any. I do have some oatcakes.’

‘Just the wine will do,’ Max said easily, watching intently as Neve sat at the other end of the sofa, curling her legs beneath her as she grabbed a polka-dot cushion to shield her tummy. ‘Shall I pour?’

‘Yes, please.’

Once her fingers were curled around the stem of the glass, her other hand clutching the cushion to her like a motherless child she’d sworn to protect, Neve willed herself to relax. She was feeling all fuzzy round the edges and everything in the room, except Max, was in soft focus as if someone had smeared her corneas with Vaseline.

Max sipped his wine and Neve waited for him to make a move. She’d imagined that they’d move straight to more kissing, not this awkward silence while she racked her brains for something to say. Not that Max seemed ill at ease; he was leisurely sipping from his glass and gazing at her stuffed bookshelves with a slightly bemused expression on his face. Then he glanced at Neve, just in time to see the anxious look she was giving him from under her lashes.

‘So you and Celia are sisters?’ Max asked suddenly. ‘You don’t look at all alike.’

It was the single most predictable thing that anyone ever said when comparing the Slater sisters. And even after all this time, it still hurt. ‘Yes, well …’

‘Because she’s always banging on about her Celtic roots and you don’t look at all Irish,’ Max continued, not seeming the least bit put out that Neve was sitting there with a stony face. ‘You’re more of an English rose.’

‘I take after the Yorkshire side of the family,’ Neve explained, forcing herself to relax muscles that were rigid with tension. It was going to be all right. Max appeared to be chatting her up and surely, after chatting her up, kissing would be the next item on the agenda. ‘Celia is the spitting image of our Irish grandmother. She had a really mean right hook.’

‘How do you know she had a mean right hook?’ Max wanted to know. ‘She didn’t use it on you, did she?’

‘Of course not,’ Neve said, though her Granny Annie had never been able to resist pinching her cheeks hard enough to leave bruises. ‘She owned the roughest pub on the Stroud Green Road and she was always wading into the middle of fights to throw people out and tell them they were barred for life.’

‘And you weren’t tempted to go into the family business?’

Neve shook her head. ‘No. I punch like a girl and the smell of beer makes me dry heave.’

‘You and Celia: you’re really not at all alike,’ Max murmured again. Maybe Celia was more his type. Maybe Celia and Max had already … No! Celia would definitely have said something. She always over-shared to a horrifying degree about her sexual escapades, even though Neve clamped her hands over her ears each time. But if Celia was more Max’s type …