When She Was Bad(41)

Charlie let out a deep breath. Sarah was right. It was sour grapes from someone Rachel had rubbed up the wrong way. Nothing to do with him. He deleted the message and got up to go to the kitchen.

‘Fancy a cuppa?’ he asked Sarah on the way.

‘Oh God, yes, please.’ She really didn’t look well. Her complexion was pale and waxy.

As a special concession, he washed up the one decent mug left in the cupboard, the deep one with flowers on it. Most of the others were cheap promotional things with the company name emblazoned on the side, that chipped easily and stained brown at the base. He made Sarah’s tea in the flowery one – remembering to take the teabag out in good time so it didn’t go that orange colour she hated. In his own he put a spoonful of instant coffee and then two heaped spoonfuls of sugar from the packet that was out on the side. He knew he needed to cut down. It had never really bothered him until he started seeing Stefan, but now he felt a twinge of guilt every time he made a hot drink. A few years ago there were lots of them who had sugar in their tea or coffee, but now you felt a bit of a social pariah asking for it. It was like smoking, he supposed. It had just gone out of fashion.

When he gently placed the mug of tea on Sarah’s desk, she gave him a look of pure gratitude and he could have sworn he saw her eyes film over with tears. He would have to persuade her to come out for a drink so he could find out what was wrong with her.

Back at his desk he took a swig of coffee. Holy crap, that was bitter. He wondered how long the coffee jar had been sitting there. Once, they’d checked the sell-by date on a container of hot-chocolate powder that had been at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards for ever, and found it was four years out of date. No one threw it away though.

He took another sip. Briefly he contemplated going back to the kitchen and making another cup, and hated the little voice inside his head that said, ‘But what would Rachel think if you got up again?’ He glanced at his phone and saw, with a rush of excitement, that Stefan had texted him. They’d had a tentative arrangement to go out tonight, but he’d learned quickly that all Stefan’s arrangements were fluid, and Charlie had been gearing himself up to be disappointed. His joy at reading Stefan’s confirmation of the date was slightly tempered by his insistence that they try some new hip Lebanese-Thai fusion place in Soho where you couldn’t book. Stefan had dragged him to one of those places before and they’d ended up having to stand in line and wait for an hour glaring at other diners while music blared out so loudly they had to shout over the top, and all for the pleasure of sitting side by side at a bar facing forward, eating tiny portions of food in huge bowls, feeling the eyes of the people in the queue behind boring into their backs. But Stefan had wanted to try out this new place, and as usual Charlie gave in. What he really wanted was to go round to Stefan’s house, order a takeaway and watch a box-set, and then rip each other’s clothes off. Or, better still, rip each other’s clothes off first. But at least Stefan wasn’t cancelling him.

Occasionally, Charlie forced himself to look at the whole situation with Stefan objectively. If he was his own best friend, he’d have serious words with himself. He could see he was getting in too deep with Stefan far too quickly, being too needy. But the truth was, he was just so bloody lonely sometimes, and it felt good to be with someone. And Stefan already had this hold over him he couldn’t even really explain. Just knowing he was going to see him this evening set his nerves buzzing in a most pleasurable way – even though he knew he’d hate the restaurant and resent paying the no doubt astronomical bill.

His desk phone rang and he checked the clock on his computer. 2.45. Margaret Hoffman. Right on time. Margaret was a client he’d been wooing for ages. It was almost impossible to get to speak to her. This phone meeting had been booked for days.

‘Margaret? How nice to talk to you again.’

As they exchanged pleasantries, Charlie rifled through his in-tray before extracting the paperwork he’d already set aside for this much-anticipated call. Margaret Hoffman ran a string of highly successful shops selling fashion accessories and had just bought up a smaller jewellery chain which she needed to re-staff from top to bottom. If he landed the contract, Charlie would potentially be bringing in many thousands of pounds’ worth of future commission. Tens of thousands. But he knew he wasn’t the only recruitment agent she was talking to so he’d really done his homework, gathering in all the statistics and facts he could find about her company and the accessories market in general, creating an ideal personnel profile and setting out his ideas for a restructuring of staff hierarchy in each of the shops.