And that, she thinks to herself as she walks away from his block of flats, is why she really should have just gone home last night.
Chapter Three
Lissa arrives at the office a full fifteen minutes early on Monday morning, something that’s pretty much unheard of for both her and Darcy, but something that Darcy reluctantly agreed to due to the need for an emergency debrief. Lissa waits for her friend to join her in the small kitchen. They are on the fourth floor of a building shared with other offices. Out the window you can see the River Avon and, if you squint, Pulteney Bridge in the distance.
She folds her arms as she watches the kettle boiling, then looks up at the sound of heels on the laminate wooden flooring. Darcy is wearing a pair of blue shoes with small, tasteful white flowers today – Lissa swears she has a new pair every week. Her brunette hair is pinned back in her signature knot, perhaps slightly damper than usual, and her lips are painted the same bright red she always wears, no matter the occasion.
As Darcy crosses the small kitchen to where Lissa is leaning against the counter, Lissa catches a waft of her Chanel perfume. When she asked her once how she afforded Chanel and designer shoes, given they’re on very similar salaries at a very average digital marketing agency, Darcy waved her away.It’s aspirational, sweets. Live the life you dream of having and one day it’ll catch up to you.Lissa isn’t sure the credit card companies would agree with that, but there’s no point in arguing with Darcy – she learnt that on day one of working together.
‘Good,’ she says, as the kettle clicks off the boil. ‘You’re here. I—’
But Darcy holds up a hand to stop her. ‘Lissa, I love you, but if you don’t give me coffee immediately, I’m not going to be any use to you at all.’
Lissa rolls her eyes as she gets down two mugs, puts a teaspoon of instant coffee in each, then fills them with boiling water. Darcy petitioned Liam, their boss, for a proper coffee machine, but he said he considered it an unnecessary expense. At which Darcy launched into an explanation of the definition of unnecessary and why a coffee machine did not qualify as such, which didn’t go downsuperwell in the team meeting when they were supposed to be discussing the performance of several different Meta adverts for an organic dog food company.
Lissa hands Darcy a mug and they both move to the ‘break-out’ area in the kitchen – which is, in fact, just a plastic table and chairs, but which Liam insists that, outside lunch hours, is to be used only to ‘brainstorm strategy’.
Darcy takes a sip of the coffee, grimaces a little, then sighs. ‘It’s caffeine, I guess. So.’ She lowers her voice, even though they are currently the only ones in the office. ‘Is this about the job?’
Lissa frowns. ‘The job?’
Darcy raises her perfectly shaped eyebrows. ‘Your interview. On Friday?’
‘Oh, right.’ She’d forgotten about that, truth be told, what with the drama of Saturday. But she’d left work early on Friday under the pretence of a dentist appointment – a classic – for an interview with another marketing agency in Bath, only this time for a specific graphic design role, where she’d be working on the artistic creation of the advertising rather than endlessly monitoring click-through rates.
‘I’m pretty sure it’s a no-go,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘Well, the interviewer called me Katie throughout the whole interview, then asked me if I had any experience in graphic design specifically, to which I said no, then asked me what I love about digital marketing, to which I drew a complete blank.’
Darcy groans. ‘Lissa, you are supposed tolieduring these interviews, didn’t anyone ever tell you that?’
‘I must have missed that key piece of advice on careers day. Anyway, it’s fine – given I can’t think of a single thing I like about my job, I probably shouldn’t be moving to another company that does the exact same thing. And,’ she adds more loudly, when Darcy opens her mouth to interject, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I slept with Mark.’
Darcy’s eyebrows shoot up practically into her hairline. ‘Didyou now?’
‘On Saturday night.’
She purses those red lips. ‘Well, good on you. Or good on him, I should say. It’s only taken him, what, a year?’
Lissa half laughs half groans, and slams a palm to her forehead.
‘That bad?’ Darcy asks, taking another sip of coffee.
‘No.’ Lissa blows out a breath. ‘Bad’ wasn’t a word she’d use to describe that night. ‘No, it’s just …’ She chews on her lip, fighting a horrible knot of anxiety in her stomach. Darcy doesn’t know the significance of Saturday’s date, so it’s sort of hard to explain why, exactly, she’d come over all ‘live in the moment’. Only people who were around during her childhood know what happened to Chloe, and it’s difficult to broach the subject with anyone else, given it happened so long ago. That and the fact that she hates talking about it means that it’s easier not to bring it up.
‘I don’t know if I should have,’ she finishes. ‘That’s all.’
‘Well why not? He’s good-looking and nice and …’
‘… and we work together.’ Lissa gestures emphatically around the small kitchen.
‘Well how do you think couples meet? Over seventy per cent meet in the workplace,’ Darcy adds promptly, without waiting for an answer.
Lissa narrows her eyes. ‘You just made that up.’
Darcy shrugs. ‘Probably something like that, though, isn’t it?’
