Authors: Alexandra Potter
But instead of being racked with insecurities, feeling self-conscious and worrying about cellulite, wobbly bits, boobs that weren’t big enough, firm enough,
up there enough
, and a stomach that hadn’t come within an exercise mat of an abdominal crunch in God knows how long, she’d listened to Reilly telling her how gorgeous she was, how beautiful she was, how sexy she was. And believed him. She might not have shaved her legs in a fortnight, or found the courage to face hot wax and tackle a bikini line that had become more than a little fuzzy around the edges, but Reilly had made her feel all those things and a lot, lot more.
Wonderful, horny, can’t-keep-my-hands-off-him Reilly. Everything about him gave her that toothpaste tingly feeling. She’d always promised herself she’d never sleep with a guy on the first date – not that you could even call this a first date – but some promises were meant to be broken. And this was one of them. Resisting Reilly would have been like resisting a cigarette when she was drunk, a four-finger KitKat the day before her period, Karen Millen when she’d just been paid. Even though being with Reilly felt strange – after all, she had shared a bed with Hugh for nearly two years – it was also bloody exciting. To put it bluntly: the sex had been fucking unbelievable. In fact she’d never known sex like that existed, except in carefully choreographed bedroom scenes in movies, or on the pages of bonkbusters written by middle-aged women with vivid imaginations. But this was the real thing. What she’d had with Hugh was good, but compared to what she’d experienced with Reilly, it seemed like a shoddy imitation. As if she’d suddenly been given a taste of Dom Perignon, after a lifetime of M&S Cava.
There it was again
. She was suddenly jolted out of her daydreams. No mistaking it.
The earth was actually moving
.
Lifting her head from the pillow, she peered into the unfamiliar darkness of the bedroom. But she couldn’t see anything. Only feel it. A shuddering sensation similar to when she’d lived in a basement flat in Earls Court and the tube trains used to pass nearby, rattling the cups on the draining board and making the picture on the telly go squiggly. Except of course the District Line didn’t go as far as LA. Which could only mean one thing.
An earthquake
.
Oh my God
. Panic grabbed her by the throat as she felt the floor beginning to shake beneath her and out of the corner of her eye saw the 1930s-style wardrobe trembling on its walnut legs. She’d seen pictures of earthquakes on the news, houses being reduced to rubble, motorways collapsing, people being buried alive.
‘Reilly.’ She gasped his name.
He didn’t stir.
She daren’t move. Terror made her illogical and she was scared that the slightest movement would cause the room to shake even more.
‘Reilly.’ Louder this time.
A glass fell off the trunk, smashing into splinters on the wooden floor and waking Reilly. He lazily opened his eyes, blinking like a cat basking in the sun. ‘What’s wrong?’
His croaky whisper waved a magic wand. No sooner had he uttered those words than the earthquake rumbled to a halt, stopping just as quickly as it had started. The only evidence it left behind was the shards of glass scattered on the floor-boards and the distant sound of car alarms and neighbours’ dogs barking in the street below.
Stretching out his broad arm, Reilly scooped her towards him. ‘It was just a tremor, nothing to worry about,’ he whispered, smiling at her naïvety and the frightened expression on her face.
‘But I was so scared. I thought . . .’
‘Ssshhhh, you’re OK. Nothing’s gonna happen to you.’ He started softly kissing her face, moving his lips across her eyelids. ‘Well, maybe not nothing.’ His hand ran stealthily along her inner thigh.
Her body trembled, but this time she wasn’t scared. Closing her eyes, she let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. It was starting all over again. Repeats had never seemed so good.
‘Guess what . . .’
The front door slammed and Frankie’s footsteps thudded down the hallway into the darkened living room. She stopped short when she caught sight of Rita, slumped sullenly on the sofa, picking her chipped nailpolish and watching
E
with the curtains drawn. It was three in the afternoon and she was still in her dressing gown.
‘What?’ muttered Rita, not even bothering to look up.
Something told Frankie that now might not be the best time to share her news about Reilly. Doing a complete U-turn, she did what only a sensible British girl could do when caught in a tricky situation: she talked about the weather. Luckily, as with everything in LA, the weather was bigger, better and more outrageous than anywhere else, which meant there was a lot more to talk about than the UK’s uninspiring drizzle, drizzle or more drizzle. For a start, there were earthquakes.
‘Did you feel the earth move last night?’
‘Move? It didn’t even twitch,’ spat Rita bitterly. ‘Matt wasn’t interested.’
Frankie was confused. ‘Matt? I’m talking about the earthquake.
Didn’t you feel it?
’
‘What earthquake? What are you going on about?’
Frankie gasped in exasperation. Rita was a heavy sleeper, but surely even she hadn’t managed to snore her way through a tremor measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale. Grabbing the remote from her, she flicked the TV on to CNN News and a big-haired, lip-glossed reporter who was doing an outside broadcast concerning structural damage to the freeways caused by the earthquake.
‘Oh.’ Showing about as much interest as if Frankie had just switched on the baseball results, Rita continued concentrating on her thumbnail, taking her bad mood out on her non-chip topcoat. ‘That earthquake.’
Realising there was no point pushing Rita when she was in one of her moods, Frankie lay back against the cushions and, kicking off her slingbacks, closed her eyes. Her mind was still whirling from the events of the last twelve hours. First the party, then the drugs bust and Dorian being arrested, and finally
Reilly
. She smiled as she thought about him. Remembering how she’d woken to find he’d left for Mexico, and lain in his bed for hours, not wanting to move, as if leaving it would break the spell. Breathing in the pillow where he’d slept, she’d shifted on to his side of the bed, soaking up the warmth of his body that was still on the mattress, smiling to herself like a lovesick teenager. She’d just discovered something that she never thought existed. Life after Hugh.
‘Do you want an Oreo?’ Rita waved the packet in front of her like an olive branch. It was a sign that she wanted to talk.
‘No, thanks.’ Dragging herself away from her thoughts, Frankie shook her head. ‘So come on, what’s the matter? I thought you’d be all loved up.’
‘You mean fucked up.’ The muscle in the side of Rita’s jaw twitched angrily as she snatched an Oreo from the packet and snapped it in two. Something told Frankie the biscuit had taken on symbolic properties and represented something, or, more likely,
someone
.
‘Last night I tried everything. Champagne, oysters, an essential oil massage, new underwear, aromatherapy candles . . .’
‘And?’
‘It was the most expensive non-event of my whole life.’ Angrily she shoved both halves of the Oreo into her mouth and chewed determinedly. Her diet of lust and raging hormones was definitely over. ‘We did all the usual foreplay stuff. I mean, I must have spent about twenty minutes with his dick in my mouth. But then, when it came to the crunch, nothing happened. Zilch. Fuck all.’
‘You mean you didn’t sleep together?’
‘Sleep’s about the only bloody thing we did do.’
‘But I thought . . .’
‘So did I,’ muttered Rita miserably. ‘How wrong can you be?’
‘Maybe he’d had a bit too much to drink?’ Frankie was trying to think of helpful suggestions.
‘Brewer’s droop?’ Rita huffed bitterly at the idea. ‘You must be joking. The bastard waved it around like Luke Skywalker with his light sabre.’ She finished picking at her fingernails and turned her attention to her toenails. ‘That’s why I couldn’t believe it when he said he didn’t want to. Talk about dangling the carrot.’
Frankie was feeling confused. She’d had about two hours’ sleep and now Rita was making
Star Wars
-slash-vegetable analogies.
‘Maybe he’s got a problem.’
‘I’m the one with the problem,’ sulked Rita miserably. ‘I’m the one with a boyfriend who refuses to have sex.’
‘Maybe he has a low sex drive.’ Frankie was getting desperate.
‘You mean frigid?’
‘Well, he could be.’
‘Are you telling me I’ve managed to find the only straight guy in LA without a sex drive?’ Rita shook her head in disbelief. ‘That would be just my luck, wouldn’t it? I finally manage to find a good-looking bloke in LA who isn’t either gay or married, in a twelve-step programme or a scientologist and bingo, he’s bloody frigid.’
Frankie looked sympathetic. ‘It’s like that episode of
Sex and the City
. You know the one, where Sarah Jessica Parker met that good-looking bloke and it was perfect on paper . . .’
‘. . . bad in bed,’ finished Rita gloomily. ‘I saw it.’ Lighting a cigarette, she stared at the glowing tip. ‘Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe he just doesn’t fancy me.’ She took a deep drag. ‘It’s not exactly beyond the realms of possibility, is it?’ She looked down at herself in her terry-towelling bathrobe. She was still wearing her Trashy Lingerie knicker and bra set. A painful reminder of what might have been. ‘Maybe I just don’t turn him on.’ Picking up her compact mirror, which lay among the make-up strewn across the coffee table, she opened it and peered at her reflection. ‘And who would blame him? I look terrible. Look at me.’ She grabbed the skin on her face as if she was kneading dough.
‘Rubbish. You look fine,’ insisted Frankie.
Rita huffed. ‘It’s all right for you to say, you’ve got cheekbones.’
‘So have you.’
‘No, I haven’t. Cheekbones are like coat hangers for the face . . .’ She prodded her face with her finger. ‘And you know what happens when you don’t hang up your clothes – they get all creased and crumpled.’ She looked in the mirror. ‘Like me.’
Rita’s tragic soliloquy was interrupted by the sound of screeching tyres outside. Looking out of the window, Frankie saw one of Dorian’s cars reverse out of his drive and take off at sixty miles an hour towards Laurel Canyon.
‘Was that Dorian?’ She hadn’t been able to see the driver through the BMW’s tinted windows.
Rita nodded. ‘Yep. He got home a couple of hours ago, while you were still out. Apparently they didn’t charge him. No evidence.’ Deciding that cigarettes and Oreos didn’t go together, she stubbed out her American Spirit. ‘Which isn’t surprising. I mean, Dorian’s the last person to be involved with drugs.’
Frankie didn’t say anything. She felt an attack of guilt. After everything that had happened between her and Reilly, she’d completely forgotten about Dorian’s arrest. ‘How is he?’
‘Sore.’ Rita pulled a face. ‘Apparently they didn’t hold back during the strip search.’
Frankie winced.
‘When I saw him this morning he looked awful. The poor bloke’s had all the stuffing knocked out of him. He could hardly speak. I made him a cup of liquorice tea with brandy in it and he could barely hold the cup his hand was trembling so much.’ Snapping the mirror shut, she looked at Frankie, and for the first time suddenly noticed she was still wearing clothes from the night before. Plunged into her pit of depression, she hadn’t been able to see anything else but her own disastrous situation. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Her forehead creased as her eyes narrowed.
Frankie smiled sheepishly, delightedly, barely able to contain her excitement. Her voice was practically a whisper. ‘Reilly’s.’
Rita gasped. Even in her state of angst, she couldn’t miss the glint in Frankie’s eye. ‘Bloody hell, you didn’t?’ She couldn’t believe it. Surely not. Not devoted-to-Hugh Frankie, there’ll-never-be-anyone-but-Hugh Frankie, I-can’t-even-look-at-another-man-if-it’s-not-Hugh Frankie.
Frankie nodded.
Dumbfounded, Rita fell back against the sofa, her mouth hanging open. ‘Fuck.’
‘Yep,’ grinned Frankie. ‘Three times.’
33
For the next few days, the grin never left Frankie’s face. Any initial doubts she may have had about sleeping with Reilly evaporated with his first phone call. Not a cool couple of days later, but just a few hours after he’d left her asleep in his bed. A scratchy, echoing line all the way from baggage reclaim at Cancun Airport in Mexico, and his low, lazy voice telling her what a great time he’d had last night and how he couldn’t wait to get back to LA to ‘take up where we left off’.
Pressing the receiver tightly against the side of her face, her lips touching the mouthpiece, she’d drank in his words. She knew when she repeated them back to Rita they’d probably sound silly, even a bit sleazy, but they hadn’t been spoken in a blokish nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of way. If anything, he’d sounded nervous, unsure, hesitant. As if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened between them.
He wasn’t the only one.