There was nothing like trying a little bit too hard sometimes.
‘Oh, OK, sorry, not quite with it from the flight,’ Paige said, smiling back at me with a bright, lipstick-commercial confidence that didn’t quite make her eyes. ‘Just literally got in. Delayed for bloody ever. Literally just landed. Just now. I know, I feel like shit. I look like shit.’
She did not look like shit. Her blonde hair fell around her shoulders in perfectly manageable loose curls, her eye make-up smouldered and her lips were painted a perfect Old Hollywood red. She was so pretty, she looked as if she should be famous.
‘And I suppose I’m a bit distracted because I can sort of see your vagina.’ She pointed to the hem of my towel but kept her eyes up.
‘Oh, shitting hell,’ I muttered, crouching down and looking for a new, longer cover-up. ‘Sorry. I was just having a shower.’
‘And a drink?’ She craned her neck, looking over my shoulder to where the bathroom door had mutinously swung open.
‘Little one,’ I said, pinching my thumb and forefinger together. ‘The tiniest one it’s possible to have, really.’
‘Sounds bloody good to me,’ Paige said, slipping out of a quilted bomber jacket to reveal perfectly toned arms in a white cotton vest, complete with peekaboo neon-pink bra straps. Brilliant. ‘Maybe we are going to get along. Tell you what, why don’t I go and unpack, and then we’ll meet back here for a beverage. We need to talk about this shoot, yeah?’
It irked me ever so slightly that she pronounced the end of the word ‘beverage’ the same way you would pronounced ‘barrage’, but aside from that, I couldn’t see a problem with her plan. It was better than anything I had lined up, after all, and what harm could it do me to have the art director of the magazine on my side?
‘Yeah, sure,’ I agreed, still stooping. I bet she had a genuine diamond vajazzle under her spray-on jeans. ‘I’ll even put some clothes on.’
‘Oh, you and your scandalous ideas.’ She gave me a quick blast of a dirty laugh that made me like her even more. ‘Not too many, eh? Might be the odd eligible bachelor out here. Speaking of, don’t suppose you’ve run into our journo boy yet, have you?’
Run into, eaten dinner with, snogged the face off.
‘Nick? I have had the pleasure,’ I replied, considering how best to explain to this complete stranger who was sort of my boss that I had sexually assaulted our journo boy about thirty minutes earlier. ‘He’s in the cottage next door.’
‘Oh, good – I should, you know, check in,’ she said, immediately preening and peering out of the window. ‘Do you know if he’s there now? Do I look OK?’
Oh. Shit. She liked him.
I nodded and kept schtum, hoping Nick would do the same. Now I really was starting to feel like Vanessa. Forty-eight hours into the job and I’d already snogged my boss’s boyfriend.
‘So, back here in, like, two hours?’ Paige grabbed a huge square bag decorated with interlocked Cs from the worktop and waved her sparkly watch at me. ‘Cocktails and catch-ups?’
‘Cocktails and catch-ups,’ I confirmed, a little bit excited to have a potential new girlfriend. ‘Two hours.’
As long as it wasn’t cock-ups and catch tails, this could be a grand old time.
Almost three hours later, I was perched on the arm of the overstuffed sofa in my living room, watching the ceiling fan spin round and round and wondering whether or not red wine on an empty stomach had been a good idea. I’d spent almost forty-five minutes out of the previous hour blow-drying and straightening my hair while swearing at the humidity, begging it to play nicely and not embarrass itself next to Paige’s perfectly coiffed locks. It had half listened and, as such, I had only had to half pin it up.
Eventually, Paige knocked once on the door and let herself in, just like before.
‘We’re twins,’ she exclaimed, holding up her arms in delight.
We were not twins. We looked like a before and after. Paige had painted a pair of dark blue denim jeans onto her pin-thin legs and wrapped black masking tape all around her torso until it resembled a racer-back vest. I had squeezed myself into a slightly too small pair of Vanessa’s stolen jeans and disguised the resulting muffin top with a slightly too big black T-shirt. That said, we did appear to be wearing the same shoes.
‘Don’t you just love Tribs?’ she asked, pointing a foot at me. ‘I know YSL shoes are stupidly expensive, but they’re so bloody comfy. As soon as I got my first pair, I was like, fuck, no more Choos or Looboos for me. Tribs all the way.’
‘All the way,’ I agreed. I had certainly not had enough wine. I didn’t even know I was wearing YSL shoes.
‘So, this guy who works here, Zippy or something?’ Paige opened up a much smaller version of the same Chanel bag she’d brought in earlier and produced a little black bullet of lipstick. ‘He came over earlier and said there was this little luau thing on the beach a bit further up. It’s not an official work thing, but he said it would be fun. There will be drinks and there will be boys.’
I assumed that by Zippy she meant Kekipi, but I let it go.
‘I like drinks and boys,’ I said, watching her reapply perfect red lipstick straight from the tube without a mirror. ‘Should we maybe not wear massive high heels on sand, though?’
‘Good point.’ She smacked her lips together and dropped the lipstick back into her bag. ‘But I can’t wear jeans without heels – my legs look like tree trunks.’
‘I can’t imagine for a second that they do.’ I refused to play the ‘I’m so fat, you’re so fat’ game with a creature this well put together. It was insulting to both of us. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘No, I’ll have to go and get changed,’ she said, shaking her head resolutely. ‘If I wear trousers without heels, I basically look like that little guy from Game of Thrones,
‘He seems very nice?’ I hoisted myself to my feet and waited the obligatory three seconds until I felt comfy in my heels. ‘Do you want to go and change, then?’
‘No need.’ Paige clapped and looked at me like she’d just solved world poverty. ‘I’ll borrow something from you. I’m sure we’re about the same size.’
We weren’t, but I was so flattered-slash-worried she’d suffered a serious head trauma, I let her push me out of the way and disappear into my room.
‘Oh, Vanessa.’ She stood in front of my wardrobe looking at all my rejected outfits for the evening with her hands over her mouth. And by all, I meant three. Because I only had three other outfits. The yellow dress I’d worn for dinner the night before, a black silky number and my newly cut-off denim cut-offs. ‘Is this all you have?’
‘I didn’t think there was going to be a lot of call for black tie,’ I said, standing shame-faced in the doorway. ‘And I came in a hurry.’
Paige turned her back on my dressing room in disgust and fixed me with a very odd look. ‘Back to mine, then.’
It shouldn’t have been a shock that Paige’s wardrobe was bursting to the seams, but I was still a little astounded that her plane had been able to take off with all the shit that was spilling out of her bedroom. I was sitting on her bed waiting for her to show me outfit number three, and so far I’d counted seven bikinis, two swimming costumes, ten pairs of shoes and three striped American Apparel T-shirts that were exactly the same. And that was just what was on the floor. Inside the wardrobe, all manner of silk and satin concoctions threatened to leap out and make their bid for freedom.
‘What about this?’
She