It’s not like he’d promised me anything, but there had been unspoken assurances –hadn’t there? I hated that I was so thrown by this. I wasn’t an insecure teenager. I was a confident, insouciant woman who only occasionally tried to win arguments by flicking her hair. Okay, that one was a bit childish, but still. Confident. Insouciant. Mature. Attractive (ish).Right?
I needed to snap out of it or I was going to end up mired in self-pity. I was already in it up to my knees.
Gavin looked even more depressed, and after I’d got our fifth round I found out why.
‘I love her,’ he announced as he slammed his glass on the table. ‘But she’s not interested.’
Poor Gav, I’d suspected as much. ‘Lucy?’
He nodded glumly. ‘I’ve loved her since she first strolled in with that ridiculous coat of hers. Do you remember it?’
I could see why Gav had fallen for her. On her first day she’d worn a floor-length sheepskin coat that reeked. I remember thinkinghow could sheep smell that bad?Gav had greeted her with a bleat and I’d waited for her response, convinced she would either start crying or thump him. She did neither. Instead, she’d thrown her head back and laughed. I think we all fell in love with her a bit that day.
I rubbed his shoulder. ‘Have you talked to her?’
‘I don’t need to. She’d never go for me. And besides, she’s interested in someone else.’
I sat straighter – this I could help with. ‘It’s not Lucy in those pics with Jonny, Gav, I should have told you sooner.’ It would have saved his liver. ‘I checked with his publicist.’
‘Maybe not, but she’s definitely got the hots for him.’
‘No way. I’ve got good intuition about this stuff.’ Not when it came to my own love life, evidently, but we weren’t discussing that.
‘Well, why did she leave early today?’
I laughed. ‘That’s your proof? She could be anywhere. It doesn’t mean she’s out with Jonny Delaney.’
‘You wait – he’ll put something up on social media tonight.’
‘You’re being daft. He’s very publicly dating that superhero actress.’
‘Jeanette Jerome? That’s a smokescreen to cover up certain same-sex proclivities.’
‘If he’s gay he can’t be interested in Lucy.’
‘Jonny’s a beard for Jeanette –she’sgay.’
He’d stumped me there.
‘She wouldn’t stop talking about him after the interview. He played her some new tracks and she thought they were brilliant. This is Lucy we’re talking about. Then they went for dinner together.’
This was news to me, but for Gav’s sake, I tried not look surprised. ‘I doubt it would have been just the two of them. She probably tagged along to something he was going to with his entourage.’
Gavin didn’t look convinced. ‘Her write-up was full of sexual chemistry.’
‘You’re imagining things.’
‘She banged on about the turquoise orbs of his eyes and the way the light played over the freckles on his arm.’
‘She most definitely did not.’
‘She did in the first draft she showed me. And it’s all implied in her finished copy.’
‘She was having you on, Gav. There were no smouldering yearnings in her piece, trust me.’
Snooker Man sank another black and gave us a toothless grin. We both held up our drinks to salute him.
For a couple of minutes, neither of us spoke. Then Gav shook his head. ‘I should just give up. She only thinks of me as a laugh.’
