Exclusive First Chapter of It Felt Like A Kiss by Sarra Manning

Chapter One

Camden, London, The Present

It had rained hard that lunchtime. There was still a damp, peaty smell rising up from the undergrowth in Regent’s Park, but the sharp scent of wet grass was fading as Ellie Cohen walked home from work. There was a luminescence to the early evening; soft and light, no crispness in the air. Ellie slipped off her jacket and hoped that the good weather would last until the end of the week when she was off to Glastonbury. Spending three rainy days battling the elements and trudging through squelching fields of mud with the risk of getting trench foot would not be fun.

Ellie would spend most of the week anxiously clicking refresh on the Met Office website, but now it was Monday evening, which was household chores night. Then, as a reward for their hard work, Ellie and her flatmates would watch trashy TV and eat like queens, courtesy of Theo, owner of the Greek restaurant downstairs, who needed to get rid of any food left from the weekend. The thought was enough to have Ellie quickening her pace as she left the park by Gloucester Gate and hurried towards Delancey Street.

Five minutes later she was outside her flat but before she could pull out her keys, the door opened to reveal Tess and Lola. For two women who had hummus, lamb kebabs, stuffed vine leaves and back-to-back episodes of The Only Way Is Essex in their immediate future, they didn’t look very happy.

‘Why are you both looking so grim?’ Ellie asked, as they made no effort to step aside and let her in. ‘Is it the thought of the pre-cleaner tidy-up? Come on, you know the thought of it is worse than the actual doing of it.’

‘We need to talk,’ Lola said soberly, and Tess nodded, not looking Ellie in the eye. Instantly Ellie was suspicious.

‘Why? What have you done? Have you broken something? Have you broken something of mine?’ Each thought was worse than the last. ‘Did you borrow something without asking and break it? Please don’t say it was my new hairdryer!’

‘It’s not about your new hairdryer. We haven’t broken any of your things,’ Tess added quickly as Ellie opened her mouth to fire off a new round of questions. ‘It’s about, well . . . first of all you should know that we’re not judging you. We love you, but it’s a case of loving the sinner, not the sin, you know?’

Ellie didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine what heinous act she’d committed that might warrant an intervention. ‘You’re going to have to give me a clue because I don’t remember sinning lately. Anyway, I’m not a Catholic, don’t they have the monopoly on sinning?’ she asked brightly to lighten the mood. It didn’t work. ‘Yeah, and you have the monopoly on bad boyfriends,’ Lola said. ‘After what happened on Saturday night, enough is enough.’

‘Richey is bad news. He’s the zenith of bad news,’ Tess elaborated, as she finally stopped blocking Ellie’s way and pushed her into the living room, then marched her over to the IKEA sofa. ‘Sit!’

It was the tone of voice tweedy women of a certain age used to discipline unruly dogs. Ellie sat. ‘OK, maybe things got a little out of hand on the weekend but Richey is not bad news, he just had a bad Saturday night.'

‘Not as bad as our Saturday night was having to deal with his crap,’ Lola said in a tight voice. They were both standing over her, hands on hips. It was Ellie who had brought the two of them together but they still hadn’t quite made the transition from roomies to friends. In fact they argued a lot, so how ironic that they’d finally bonded over the shortcomings of Richey.

Richey, Ellie’s latest boyfriend, was shaping up to be a fine boyfriend. A great boyfriend. He was very good-looking, almost model standard – not that Ellie was shallow – was gainfully employed as an assistant at a film production company in Soho, had a good sense of humour, didn’t feel emasculated that Ellie earned more than he did, and generally Ellie was starting to feel that the two and a half months that she’d been seeing Richey were turning into something. Maybe even quite a serious something.

‘. . . and really, Ellie, he’s awful. He’s not worthy of you. Not even close,’ Tess insisted so shrilly that Ellie stopped mentally listing all of Richey’s considerable plus points and frowned at her best friend. Ellie loved Tess, and often referred to her as ‘my sister from another mister’. She’d bought Tess her first bottle of Chanel No 5 for her twenty-first birthday and had once endured three hours in Topshop as Tess tried on jeans and cried every time she swivelled round and looked at her bum in the changing-room mirror. There’d also been tough love, like the time she’d nursed Tess through an affair with a married man, or when she’d finally persuaded Tess to get her brown hair highlighted and to soldier through growing out her over-plucked eyebrows, and this was how Tess chose to repay her?

‘I’ve already said I’m sorry about Saturday night at least ten times and you know I’ll get your dress dry-cleaned.’

Lola sat down next to Ellie and gently patted her knee. Lola never did anything gently so it was a measure of just how serious they both thought this was; this fuss about Richey.

‘Sweetie, it’s not about the dress. It’s about you failing to see what’s blatantly clear to all the people who care about you,’ Lola said softly. ‘We don’t want to see you in a relationship with a smack addict or a meth head, or whatever horrible shit Richey is into.’

Ellie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. So, there’d been half an hour during an admittedly wild Saturday night that she hadn’t been with Richey and in that time he’d apparently gone on a drug-fuelled bender? This didn’t equate with the Richey that she’d been seeing. He held doors open for her. He gave her back rubs when she’d had a bad day at the office. He was always sending her funny, sweet little texts . . .

‘You’re blowing this whole thing way out of proportion. Yes, he smokes dope, but more people smoke dope than go to church on Sundays.’ Ellie had read that in the Guardian, so it had to be true. ‘And maybe he caned it a bit hard on Saturday night, but really, Lola, you don’t exactly live a blameless life yourself, and Richey’s been going through a rough time . . .’

‘Yeah, like he was going through my drawers. Probably to find stuff he could sell to fund his habit,’ Tess revealed, and Ellie’s heart plummeted, as it did from time to time.

Usually when she was seeing a guy and it was all going well, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Then her plummeting heart was the precursor to many nights of not sleeping, and drinking too much wine, and wondering why, when everything else was turning out just as she’d planned, right on schedule, the relationship area of her life was piled high with emotional debris.

But the thing was that you had to get back on the horse. Keep on trying. Give potential new boyfriends the benefit of the doubt because the alternative was to become one of those embittered women who sat with other embittered women in bars and said embittered things like, ‘All men are bastards. You can’t trust any of them. Better to be on your own than to be with some waste of space who makes you miserable.’

Ellie didn’t want to end up like that. Half her mother’s friends were like that. She had to stay positive, though sometimes staying positive was really hard. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know how many more times I can say it, but we were all pretty out of it on Saturday night. Therewere Jäger shots—’

‘That doesn’t excuse him trying to steal from us,’ Tess said. She had every right to sound upset – Ellie was upset on her behalf – but there could be a perfectly rational explanation for Richey rifling through her sock drawer, although Ellie couldn’t think what it might be.

‘I’m sure Richey doesn’t have a habit,’ she said emphatically, though she was going to be having words with him later. Serious words. ‘It’s not as if I’ve only just met him. I’ve been seeing him for nearly three months now and anyway, how bad can he be? My mum introduced us!’

‘We’re getting sidetracked here.’ Tess sat down so she could put an arm round Ellie’s stiff shoulders. 

‘Sweetie, this is coming from a place of love. Not a place of judgement.’

Ever since Tess had read How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the hope it would lead to a promotion from freelance dogsbody to permanent researcher on the TV morning show On The Sofa, where she worked, she always used calm, modulated tones when faced with a difficult situation or truculent housemate. ‘Also, I have to point out that Richey is the very worst in a long line of crap men you’ve dated.’

‘I don’t date crap men!’

‘Lame ducks, then,’ Tess countered, like that made it even better. ‘Oh, Ells, you must have noticed that you always end up copping off with men who are, well, challenging and diff—’

‘What Tess is trying to say is that you go out with total losers who hang around the flat with all their neuroses and hang-ups until you straighten them out and then . . .’

Lola took a deep breath, either for dramatic effect or because she needed oxygen . . . ‘and then instead of thanking you, they dump you!’

That was a very harsh way of summarising her previous relationships, and, Ellie thought, a complete twisting of the facts.

‘I’m twenty-six, and yes, I’ve dated a few men and it hasn’t worked out. Big deal.’ Ellie folded her arms and glared at her flatmates mutinously. ‘I’m really sorry that I haven’t settled down with my one true love, but then again neither have you, and while we’re on the subject of exes with severe emotional disorders, two words, Lola: Noah Skinner!’

Lola flushed at the mention of the dissolute fine artist who’d made her life sheer misery for eighteen months as he slept with other women, tried it on with all her friends and had repeatedly ponced money off her even though his family owned half of Shropshire. ‘Everyone’s allowed a couple of bad boyfriends, but you’re stuck in a bad boyfriend loop. It needs to end now.’

Ellie wasn’t going to give up without a fight. She even opened her mouth to remind Lola that the two of them had first spoken only after Noah had come on to Ellie in the hope she’d persuade her boss at the gallery to represent him, but Tess got there first. ‘Mark, your very first boyfriend, had all those issues with low self-esteem. He couldn’t even walk into a room without genuflecting.

Then you encouraged him to talk through his issues with a responsible adult, and his parish priest persuaded him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour, and he entered a seminary instead of coming to Ibiza with us after A levels,’ she said in a furious burst.

‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ Ellie ground out, even as she remembered that awful week after A levels when she should have been excited about going to Ibiza and, well, the rest of her life, and instead she’d stayed in her tiny bedroom, curtains drawn, listening to her mother’s Smiths albums as she began to understand that heartache wasn’t just a word used in sad songs; it was an actual tangible thing and it hurt like hell.

Tess continued to list Ellie’s past boyfriends: including Alex, the cross-dressing performance artist she’d dated when she was studying at Central St Martins, who she’d caught wearing her underwear and who was now one of Australia’s most celebrated drag queens, and Jimmy the alcoholic, until he’d spent a night drinking with Ellie’s mother and her friends. He’d woken up two days later in a skip, minus his shoes, trousers and wallet. Then he’d decided to go straight edge and dumped Ellie for being a bad influence.

Then there’d been Andy, the compulsive gambler, who’d once pawned Ellie’s TV but, buoyed up by her belief in his gift for numbers, left her to study for a degree in Applied Mathematics at Edinburgh University.

Even her attempt at a friend-with-benefits arrangement during her final year at Central St Martins had ended in absolute unmitigated disaster when Ellie broke Oscar’s penis during a particularly vigorous sex session. Or that’s what she thought until the A&E registrar said that it was just a bad sprain.

‘Don’t forget Danny,’ Lola said to Tess, as she finished regaling Ellie with this list of lost loves. Not that Ellie needed any reminding. She remembered all of them. Not just the way things had ended, but the way each relationship had begun, with a smile, a joke, or a surreptitious look across a bar. Ellie remembered the good bits: lazy Sunday mornings with tea and toast, and wild nights out in Soho and Hoxton, as well as the bad bits: the rows and accusations and inability to reach a compromise.

Now Ellie listened as Lola hit the highlights of Ellie’s two-year relationship with lovely, geeky Danny, who she’d been planning on moving in with despite his lax personal hygiene and failure to turn up on dates because he was engrossed in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Then Ellie had bought him a birthday consultation with a personal shopper at Selfridges and he’d fallen heart first for his birthday present, Sophie – they’d just become the proud parents of twins.

Yes, Ellie’s love life was perfect to serve up as bite-sized anecdotes on a girls’ night out when everyone moaned about how rubbish men were, but just as she remembered the good and bad bits of each relationship, she also remembered how they’d ended and that the heartache had never got any easier. On the contrary, it had got worse and had become her special friend, threatening to drag her under, and it had taken all of Ellie’s considerable self-control to pick herself up each time, set her shoulders back and try again.

At least Tess and Lola appeared to have reached the end of their intervention because they each took hold of one of Ellie’s hands.

‘You’re a smart, lovely gorgeous girl,’ Tess told her, holding up her phone to show Ellie a photo as proof. It had been taken on a girls’ weekend in Brighton last summer. Ellie was posing on Palace Pier and, yes, she was quite pretty. Or rather she thought of herself as a bit of a blank canvas. She was five foot seven, and slim because she worked hard at it, with long, straight shiny brown hair, though her mother and grandmother both insisted her best features were her big brown eyes and her smile. But the raw material had been shaped with some subtle warm-toned highlights, not to mention the Brazilian blowdry every three months to transform her Jew-fro into sleek and shiny perfection. The brown eyes were made more remarkable by lash extensions and her eyebrow threader’s skill with cotton, wax and dye, and the smile was a result of several years of painful orthodontics. She wasn’t going to be giving Alexa Chung any sleepless nights, but Ellie was perfectly satisfied with how she looked, apart from her 34As and the sign on her forehead that read, ‘All your problems solved, stop and ask me how,’ which apparently could only be seen by men with severe behavioural disorders.

‘I don’t have bad taste in men,’ she said hotly, though admittedly the evidence was pretty damning. 

‘Everyone has some kind of issue they need to work on so it’s completely unfair of you to act as if my exes were Care in the Community case studies. They might have been fixeruppers but—’

‘No, this is way beyond ironing out a few flaws on another wise decent boyfriend,’ Lola argued. 

‘You’re an emotional fluffer, Ellie.’

‘What’s a fluffer?’ Tess asked.

‘It’s a girl on a porn shoot who gets the men all hard andprimed for action, then after doing all the heavy lifting, asit were, she has to watch while all her good work isenjoyed by another woman.’

Tess looked appalled. ‘Oh my God, that’s exactly what you do, Ellie!’

‘No, I don’t.’ Ellie yanked her hands out of their grasps so she could fold her arms, her head lowered so her chin was almost on her chest. ‘Danny was the only one who went off with another woman.’

‘And you stay friends with all of them,’ Tess added accusingly, like that was a bad thing.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Ellie demanded. ‘What’s wrong with being the bigger person and keeping in touch with your exes? It’s a sign of maturity.’

‘It’s a sign of you not being able to cut the cord. If I’m into some guy and he treats me like shit and dumps me, then no, I’m not going to banter with him on Facebook or invite him to my birthday parties. Look, we just want you to find a nice, normal man instead of these lame ducks you always manage to bring home,’ Lola said, patting Ellie’s knee again, even though Lola, who looked like a 1940s pin-up girl with her dark auburn hair styled in a slinky Veronica Lake do, tight wiggle dresses and tattoos, would never, ever entertain the idea of finding a nice, normal man.

Ellie slowly shook her head. ‘Sometimes lame ducks appear nice and normal. It’s not until you’re at least seven dates in that they reveal themselves and by then, well, it just seems rude to make your excuses and leave.’

‘She can’t dump people,’ Tess explained to Lola over Ellie’s head. ‘Never could. When we started secondary school, we were all assigned people to sit next to until we made friends and Ellie got this horrible girl called Laura Mulkenny, who had BO, the most pustular acne I’ve ever seen . . .’

‘Which wasn’t her fault. She had a hormonal imbalance.’

‘. . . she copied Ellie’s homework and left grease stains over it because she was one of those girls that ate her packed lunch in registration, and teased Ellie for being flat-chested. Ellie was far too chicken to come and sit next to me, even after we bonded about how much we loved Westlife.’

‘I felt sorry for her. No one else wanted to sit next to her.’

Lola smiled knowingly. ‘How long did you sit next to her for?’

‘It’s neither here nor there.’

‘Five years,’ Tess replied. ‘Then Laura failed most of her GCSEs despite copying Ellie’s homework, and wasn’t allowed to stay on for A levels.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to dump Richey,’ Lola said.

‘He’s more than just a lame duck. I know his type from way back, and his type is big, fat trouble. And once you’ve sent him packing, unless you find a decent bloke who isn’t a complete freak of nature then you’re forbidden from bringing any men back to the flat.’

‘I’m sorry, Ellie, but that’s how it has to be,’ Tess added.

‘I know it sounds harsh but it’s for your own good. You have to get rid of Richey.’

‘I don’t have to do anything on the basis of your flimsy circumstantial evidence,’ Ellie argued. ‘It might all be a simple misunderstanding, and if it is then I’ll have broken up with Richey for no reason. He might be the One.’ They both snorted. ‘But he might be! I’m not going to throw that away on a load of hearsay.’

‘It’s not hearsay. It’s your two best friends who witnessed your current boyfriend off his tits on class-As and we’re not doing this to be cruel, Ellster, we’re doing this for your own good.’ Tess had the sanctimonious note to her voice that brooked no denial.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Ellie conceded. ‘But it’s Glastonbury this weekend and he’s booked time off work. I can’t get all heavy and issue ultimatums then head off to Somerset with him like nothing’s happened.’ The injustice of their demands made Ellie clasp her hands to her heart. ‘You can’t expect me to do that!’

‘Don’t care when you do it, just that you do it.’ Lola stopped with the knee-patting. ‘He’s not stepping foot in this flat ever again. End of. Now, can we get the precleaner tidy-up over and done with?’

There was no budging them. Tess and Lola refused to discuss the matter further because Tess was too busy snapping at Lola, who spent the entire pre-cleaner clean moaning about the pointlessness of having a cleaner if you spent the evening before she came tidying up. ‘It’s so middle class,’ she complained.

‘You are middle class,’ Tess told her. ‘I don’t care if one of your grandfathers was a coal miner, your parents live in Reading and your dad’s a GP. We wouldn’t have to do a pre-cleaner tidy-up if you didn’t have a dirty crockery mountain in your bedroom and you never rinse the sink after you’ve brushed your teeth.’

It seemed as if the row would descend into hair-pulling until Tess played her trump card and threatened to get rid of the cleaner altogether and Lola was forced to admit that paying ten pounds for her share of the cleaner was money well spent.

They had the same argument at the same time every Monday evening and it ended only when Theo brought up a bag bulging with takeaway containers, as he did this evening, so the three of them could pick their way through a selection of stuffed vine leaves, lamb souvlaki and assorted dips while they caught up on trashy TV. Every time they skipped through an ad break, Lola would shake her head and sigh. ‘Jesus, I can’t believe I’m living with two people who used to like Westlife.’

Then Tess would bop Lola with a cushion and Ellie would smile faintly, while on the inside she was in turmoil; not sure whether she should be angry with her friends or angry with her boyfriend. She was already steeling herself for the talk she needed to have with Richey. Past experience had proved that these kinds of talks always ended with her boyfriends having some kind of epiphany, then heading off into the sunset without her.

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