You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (52 page)

‘So, Neevy? You having fun yet?’ Max asked with a grin, which quickly turned into an, ‘Ouch! Why the fuck did you do that?’

‘I’m offended that you even need to ask,’ Neve said, as Max rubbed the spot on his arm where she’d just punched him.

‘I suppose it did go pretty well,’ Max said, popping a strawberry into Neve’s mouth. They were working their way through the platter of chocolate-covered strawberries; Max biting off the chocolate and passing the strawberry to Neve when he was done. ‘And I have to say, Neevy, you have some mad skills, and as an added bonus, you haven’t asked me if I can introduce you to a publicist I know, or set up a little shoot with
Skirt.
’ Max leaned back on his elbows. ‘Once, before I’d barely pulled out, this woman said that it had been very nice but she had to get going because she’d left her husband baby-sitting.’

Neve’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s not … good.’ She bit her lip. ‘Do you think that you’re less scared of commitment now?’ She didn’t know why she was holding her breath as she waited for Max to reply, and it seemed like a strange conversation to be having after what they’d just shared, but maybe they both needed a reminder that this wasn’t a for ever kind of deal. It was an eight weeks and counting sort of deal.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I mean, yes, we’ve been dating for a couple of months but it’s pancake dating and maybe I’m cool with that because I know it’s not going to lead to picking out china patterns and making plans to move in together, is it?’

She knew that, but Neve still felt a pang of regret that Max wouldn’t be in her future despite the fact that he was her first lover, the first man to see her naked, the first man to tell her she was beautiful when she was all dressed up or all dressed down or trembling from the ferocity of the first time they’d made love. How peculiar that people could make love, then never see or speak to each other again.

‘No, but we’ll be friends after this, won’t we?’ She prodded Max with her finger when he simply grunted. ‘You won’t get rid of me that easily. I know where you live, Max.’

‘Let’s see how you feel when you’re bedded down with Mr California,’ Max said, not looking at Neve as he picked up the last strawberry.

‘I’ll feel exactly the same way,’ Neve protested. ‘And don’t call him that.’

‘Sorry,’ Max said, though he didn’t sound the least bit repentant. He held the last strawberry just above her mouth so Neve had to lever herself up, one hand on Max’s shoulder to reach it. Which meant that she was back in Max’s arms before she’d even had time to chew and swallow. ‘The post-orgasmic glow looks really good on you.’

‘By post-orgasmic glow, I take it you mean red-faced and blotchy … Ow! What the hell did you do
that
for?’ Neve spat, rubbing the spot on her bottom that Max had just smacked.

‘I had to.’ Max kissed the corner of her mouth. ‘You were being self-deprecating and we have an agreement about that now.’

Neve sighed. ‘If you’re going to smack me every time I forget, then I’ll be black and blue in an hour.’

‘You’ll just have to try harder,’ Max said unsympathetically, his hand sliding up to cup her breast. ‘Because I have plans for the next hour that would be spoiled if your arse was too sore for you to lie on it.’

Neve looked down. Then her hand did a quick sortie to make certain that it wasn’t just the way that Max’s shorts had rumpled. ‘
Again?
’

Max was already lowering her down on to the bed. ‘We’ve got a lot of lost time to make up.’

It seemed to Neve that the world had split in two. There was the world that had Max in it, where she seemed to spend most of her time naked, but Max was naked too so that worked out rather well.

Then there was the other world that Neve stumbled through, always tired and blinking her eyes in the brilliant sunshine that she couldn’t get used to after a cold, grey spring. It was as if she were sleepwalking; only the ache between her legs and her kiss-bitten lips felt real.

When she wasn’t with Max and when she wasn’t thinking about Max, Neve was glad that she’d waited this long to have sex. Not just because she was old enough to have skipped all the teenage groping and fumbling that other girls went through to get to the good stuff, but because she’d never imagined that she’d be so insatiable.

She should have known really. She was the kind of girl who could never have just one chocolate biscuit, not when there were another twenty-nine left in the packet. When she’d kicked that, she’d got such an endorphin rush from exercising that the staff at her gym had actually staged an intervention because she was in danger of becoming an exerexic.

So it was just as well that she hadn’t started having sex at sixteen like most of the girls in her class, because if it had been this good, then Neve suspected that she’d have given up on her GCSEs, never bothered with A-levels, and a degree would have just got in the way of her orgasms.

The only reason she got out of bed to go into work where both Mr Freemont and Rose were finally united in their disapproval of Neve sitting in her back office in a day-dreamy, absent-minded sex-haze, was because Max had to get out of bed. And the only reason that Max got out of bed was because he had an agent, and a book editor and a magazine editor who phoned to shout at him about all the deadlines he was missing.

‘I think I’ve worked out why we’re at it like rabbits,’ he’d said to Neve one morning, when they’d decided they had time for a quickie, even though Neve was already an hour late for work. ‘We wasted two months not having sex and even if we’d only had sex once a day, that’s at least sixty orgasms that we’ve missed out on. We have a lot of catching up to do and we haven’t got much time left to do it.’

Neve still managed to make her three weekly sessions with Gustav, because he’d have hunted her down if she didn’t, but she yawned her way through them and didn’t have the stamina that she used to. ‘It’s that boy,’ Gustav would mutter darkly, when Neve collapsed after five girl press-ups. ‘I knew this would happen.’

For the first time in her life Neve wasn’t hungry so it didn’t really matter that her exercise and training regime had fallen by the wayside. She could just about manage lunch, but having breakfast would have meant getting out of bed half an hour earlier and dinner never seemed to happen because as soon as she got home from work, she was either going round to Max’s, or he was on her doorstep and there was just enough time for one of them to say, ‘Did you have a good day?’ before they were kissing, and kissing just wasn’t enough any more.

They’d emerge from under the covers at around eleven to walk Keith to the nearest convenience store to buy a loaf of bread and something to put on it. Neve was existing on a diet of sex, black coffee, spaghetti hoops on toast, cheese on toast, peanut butter on toast, anything as long as it could be spread, heaped or smeared on two pieces of lightly browned bread.

It was four weeks of being joined at the hip (and other more pleasurable places) until they had to do the unthinkable and spend a night apart. Max had a meeting with a publicist, then an awards dinner, and Neve had to catch up on her laundry and spend quality time with Celia. Though spending quality time with Celia meant facing a barrage of questions that made the Spanish Inquisition seem like light relief.

‘What has happened to you?’ Celia burst out as soon as Neve opened the door. ‘I haven’t seen you in
weeks
and I heard Charlotte screaming at you about your bed banging against the wall, and since when do you pad around in a vest and knickers, and you have three – no, four – lovebites. How did you get a lovebite just above your knee?’

Neve knew that she should shut Celia down, but when she opened her mouth the only thing that came out was a yawn. So, as she lovingly hand-washed her silk slips in the bathroom sink, Celia perched on the edge of the tub and lectured her about just how stupid she was.

‘I know what’s going on,’ Celia railed as she worked her way through a bag of prawn crackers. ‘You and Max are totally doing it. I thought you were doing it before, but now I know that you weren’t, because you are totally and utterly doing it now.’

‘Celia, don’t you ever need to pause for oxygen?’ Neve asked, as she hung her midnight-blue nightie over the clothes-horse sitting in the bath.

‘Oxygen is over-rated,’ Celia said dismissively because they were going off topic. ‘This is more than just the two of you bumping uglies. Max doesn’t even flirt with the beauty girls when he comes into the office any more and you smile in this sappy way every time I say his name. You’re both completely loved up and so, like, is this still a pancake relationship? Or are you serious about each other? Are you going to tell Willy McWordy he’s history? What’s going on?’

It was actually a really good question:
what’s going on?
Neve didn’t know because it wasn’t something she and Max talked about. They talked a lot about how many days they had left and how much of that time they could feasibly spend horizontal. And they murmured words against each other’s skin but they didn’t talk about what they were doing and the consequences of what they were doing and whether they should even be doing it in the first place. Which suited Neve fine because she’d spent her entire life pontificating and hypothesising and it had never got her very far.

So she simply turned to Celia and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, like,
whatever.
’

As long as she lived, Neve would never forget the look on Celia’s face, just before she choked on a prawn cracker. She hadn’t even looked that shocked the time she’d discovered that Charlotte had bought the same Chloe bag that she’d spent months saving up for. ‘Oh my God, Neevy!’ she gasped once the power of speech had returned. ‘You’ve turned into me!’

It was on the tip of Neve’s tongue to point out that in order to turn into Celia she’d have to grow seven inches and lose three stone, but she could just imagine Max’s reaction, then the sound and fury of the flat of his hand connecting with her arse and she shivered, a good kind of shiver, and smiled. ‘Does that mean you’re turning into me then, Seels?’ she asked mischievously. ‘You read any good books lately? And no, the latest issue of
Vogue
doesn’t count.’

‘Stop smiling like that and don’t make jokes about
Vogue
– you’re freaking me the fuck out,’ Celia moaned, but she seemed to like the new laid-back Neve, even though she was very peeved that new laid-back Neve didn’t have a fully stocked fridge and wouldn’t dish the dirt on her love-life.

‘But is it bigger than a bread-bin?’ she demanded after what felt like hours of cross-examination. ‘Well, obviously it’s not bigger than a bread-bin, but is it bigger than a king-size Snickers bar?’

‘I can’t actually remember how big a king-size Snickers bar is,’ Neve replied, as she heard the front door open, then Max’s voice calling out.

‘Honey? I’m home. I skipped out after the speeches.’

‘He has his own key!’ Celia exclaimed, as Neve jumped out of her chair and hurried into the hall.

‘You didn’t bother to get dressed?’ Max asked as he shrugged out of his dinner jacket, which he was wearing with a Clash T-shirt and jeans. ‘Well, that’s going to save us some time.’

Before Neve could tell him that she had one very inquisitive little sister on the premises, Max grabbed her and kissed her for so long and so hard that Neve completely forgot she even had a little sister.

‘Hey, you two, get a room,’ the little sister said from behind them. ‘Up the stairs, second door on the left. I’m going before I’m scarred for life.’

Neve smiled vaguely at Celia from the security of Max’s arms and Max murmured something that might have been, ‘Hello,’ or, ‘Goodbye,’ or even, ‘Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.’

Neve felt a pang of guilt for driving Celia out of her second home, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to feel that bad. She was pretty sure that she’d see Celia every day for the rest of her life, but having quality time with Max, quality naked time, was a very rare commodity.

Then May gave way to June, and it felt as if time was slipping through her fingers. Because all they had left was just over a month. Mere weeks really, if William came back when he said he would, but William had become a vague, blurred figure that Neve couldn’t focus on when all she could think about was Max. She’d received two letters from him and countless emails and she’d read them immediately but it was more force of habit than because she wanted to get that giddy high from poring over each of William’s words like she usually did. All Neve felt was horribly conflicted as she sent William a quick email claiming:
things are really busy at work. Will write properly when I have a chance
. There were subjects she’d shied away from with William like her weight-loss and her adventures in dating, but she’d never lied to him before, and although it wasn’t something she was proud of, it was necessary. William was her golden future and Max was the here and now.

So when Max was sent to LA at twenty-four hours’ notice to salvage a cover-shoot for
Skirt
, which was rapidly becoming a clusterfuck between the celebrity stylist, the celebrity photographer and the actual celebrity and her publicist who’d taken to calling Max at three every morning to scream at him, it felt a lot like the end of the world, even if she did get Keith as a flatmate for the rest of the week.

Neve didn’t need much persuasion to duck out of work early to accompany Max to Heathrow so they could cling to each other at Passport Control as if he was going off to war.