‘Yeah.’ He stretched the word out almost all the way through an Asda commercial. ‘No. I meant from … like … us.’
Now he had my attention.
‘We should take a break?’
Whatever it was that was so fascinating in the empty space in front of the fireplace had apparently just started doing a jig. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him concentrate on something with such intensity that wasn’t attached to an Xbox.
‘Are you dumping me?’ I pulled my legs up off his knee and curled into a semi-foetal position. I really wanted to brush my hair.
‘No,’ Simon shook his head. ‘It’s not that, I just need a bit of a break.’
‘Sounds like you’re dumping me.’ I was trying very, very hard not to cry. I already looked bloody awful; tears were not going to help my case. But then, neither was talking in a voice so high and squeaky that it made dolphins sound like they were smoking twenty a day. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Stop freaking out. I just need to sort some stuff out in my head. I’m not breaking up with you.’
‘Is there someone else?’
Oh my god, there was someone else. Five years, a mortgage, a co-signed car loan for a crappy secondhand Renault Mégane and he was seeing someone else.
‘No,’ he practically shouted. ‘Of course there’s not someone else.’
Fair enough.
‘Is this because I don’t want to go to the cinema?’ I wrapped my arms around my knees.
‘Do you want to go to the cinema?’
I shrugged, not knowing what else to do. ‘I might.’
And that was it. We ended up going to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film but, to be honest, it was a bit difficult to concentrate. And when Johnny Depp can’t hold your attention, what chance does anyone else have? When we got home, I ran a bath and Simon moved his stuff into the spare room.
The next night, I got home from work to find a note on the bed to say he needed a bit of time to think and he was going to stay with a friend for a couple of days. But he did come home. Just as soon as I went away to work in Manchester for a week. And when I got back, he’d gone away on a business trip. Then I spent a week at my mum’s while she got to grips with a nasty broken leg. After that, he was off on a stag do. And then, one night, he just didn’t come home.
But we weren’t broken up. It was just a break.
A break that was rounding the four-week mark.
But still, it was just a break …
Four weeks later …
CHAPTER ONE
‘If someone had told you, ten years ago, you’d be standing here doing this, you wouldn’t have believed them, would you?’ Anastasia asked, adjusting the strap of her lacy bra. She piled a mass of artificial blonde curls onto the top of her head before letting them fall perfectly around her slender shoulders. ‘I mean, modelling? It’s not something your career adviser usually recommends, is it?’
I glanced up from the ridiculously painful kneeling position I’d been locked in for the last fifteen minutes and stared daggers at the clueless blonde.
‘Well, no, it’s not,’ I shuffled from side to side, trying to ignore the shooting pains in my kneecaps. ‘But, to be fair, if someone had sat me down and told me I’d be spending most of my life covering bite marks on your arse, I might have found “model” more believable.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ She shuffled her boobs around while I fought the urge to scrawl ‘slag’ across her bum cheeks in Ruby Woo lipstick. ‘This new bloke’s a bit kinky. Think I’m just going to stick with one boyfriend from now on. I mean, it might be dull as shit, but I’m thinking go with the one who isn’t into all that weird stuff, you know? Thank god we didn’t have this shoot last week – you’d never have been able to cover up the rope burns on my wrists …’
Breathing out, I blocked Anastasia’s mid-Atlantic, Eastern-Europe-via-Essex drawl and focused on the job at hand. If there was one thing I was good at, it was focusing on the job at hand. Rachel ‘Blinkers’ Summers, make-up artist extraordinaire and queen of elective deafness. It was one of those jobs that sounded super fancy and terribly exciting but, in reality, being a make-up artist boiled down to getting up very early, standing around for hours, making someone else look beautiful and then going home very late. Glamorous.
But at least there was the all-inclusive workout. My kit currently weighed in at over thirty pounds, and lugging it backwards and forwards on the Tube had more or less replaced my weekly run. And there was a chance you might meet the odd celebrity, but all that really meant was that you too could experience the wonder of covering up evidence of sexual exploits so sordid that you could never watch Coronation Street ever again. There wasn’t a soap star alive that wasn’t into something weird. Happily, most days, I was just locked up in a studio in exotic Parsons Green, powdering body parts from dawn till dusk. It was hardly conducive to going home, whacking on the false eyelashes and glamming myself up for a night out with the celebs I’d been rubbing shoulders with all day. In fact, it was mostly conducive to going home, running a bath and passing out by myself while my boyfriend, Simon, watched TV.
I could never date a chef, I thought, sponging on one last layer of body foundation. He might be the best cook in the whole world, but he’s not going to want to whip me up a seven-course tasting menu when he walks through the door. You’d be lucky to get spaghetti hoops on toast for two. Not that I even had that in the house, I lamented. It was Friday, which meant tomorrow was Saturday, and Saturday was food shopping day. It really didn’t feel like a weekend unless I’d had my blood pressure tested by a run around Sainsbury’s. Unfortunately that usually meant Friday-night dinner was a dodgy low-cal ready meal left over from my last diet, or pizza. Which explained why, on occasion, I needed the ready meals.
‘Raquel, you’re always so quiet,’ Ana said loudly, arching her back to get a look at my handiwork. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing,’ I lied, stepping back to take a critical look at her now perfectly peachy arse. Not a trace of her sexploits to be seen; just as well seeing as this was a shoot for multipacks of high-street undies. I wasn’t sure my mum would want to buy a five-pack of knickers that enticed wannabe rock stars to gnaw on your rear end. Or maybe she would: she and dad had been divorced for twenty years, after all, so it had been a long time since anyone had rocked her kasbah. I hoped. Ew.
‘You’re done.’ I waved her off with one final flick of the bronzer brush. ‘Go on.’
Ana clapped her hands together and skipped over to her happy place. In front of a camera. Behind said camera, Photographer Dan called out words of encouragement, snapping away while Ana threw herself around the fake bedroom set with all the gusto that I guessed had resulted in her getting bitten on the backside in the first place. It was pretty impressive stuff. I tucked my long blonde hair behind my ears and tried not to be jealous. It was a while since I’d been thrown around a bedroom.
I shook my head at the cavorting occurring in front of me. What did ‘a break’ even mean? Both television and movies, my most trusted advisors in life, had shown us that breaks were never actually a good thing. Fingers crossed, Simon was staying away from copy girls. This was, after all, the relationship all of our friends were jealous of because we were so incredibly sorted. Five years in and we were all set with the mortgage, a proper car, irritating pet names used in public, everything. I was certain he was going to propose. I actually had the odd wedding magazine stashed in my work kit, hidden away like girl porn. What’s more, we still Did It relatively often, which as far as I could tell, was a pretty big achievement after five years. OK, so it wasn’t like a Dita von Teese show every night (you try rocking stockings and suspenders when you’ve