Just Friends (The Agency Book 1) Read online

  “Have they? Where was that then? In darkest voodoo-magic land?”

  He shrugs, but his expression changes back to pity again. “Do you want to sleep here tonight?”

  The mention of sleep suddenly makes me feel exhausted. I shuffle down on the sofa, curl up into a ball and nuzzle my cheek into Ethan’s super-comfy Beatles cushion. “Thank you, that would be nice.”

  “You can have my bed if you want.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll be fine here.”

  “Okay, I’ll get you a blanket.”

  He disappears over to his bedroom, which is around the corner of his L-shaped open-plan studio. He returns with a dark-orange knitted throw and drapes it over me. Then he perches at my feet and rests his hand on my curled-up knee. “I am sorry about tonight,” he says softly.

  “Even if Stuart’s a tube?”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, you can do much better than him, but I want you to be happy.”

  “Thanks, Ethan. I just hope I haven’t screwed things up for you at work.”

  “Well, if you need advice from an expert, just pretend it didn’t happen and go on as normal. That’s what I do. And I have a lot of experience sleeping with clients, and co-workers, and—”

  “And the models we hire. And actresses. And the woman who scrubs the office toilets.”

  “That only happened once, and Kiki is a very lovely girl.”

  “She doesn’t speak a word of English.”

  “She speaks the language of love.”

  I groan and turn over as he laughs and pats my knee.

  “Look at it this way, Vi. The fact Stuart shot his load before the main event means you must be pretty damn hot in bed.”

  I play along. “Maybe I am, but you’ll never find out.”

  “Why not?” he teases.

  “Because I have to start obeying my law, so I’m not just swearing off dating men I work with; I’m swearing off all men, everywhere. I’m going to enjoy being single until I’m at least thirty.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” he says with a chuckle, tucking the blanket around me. “And just for the record, you are hot. You’re the hottest woman I’ve ever met.”

  What the hell? My stomach flips, and I have no idea why it’s flipping because Ethan and I joke like this all the time. I close my eyes and listen to the sound of his feet padding over to his bed, followed by the creak of his mattress as he climbs in and gets comfortable. And just for a very brief fraction of a moment I imagine joining him.

  My eyes fly open in surprise. I must be really bloody hard up if my brain is thinking about my best friend in this way. Thanks a lot for breaking my brain, Stuart Inman!

  I push it out of my mind and fall asleep to the strangely comforting sound of traffic mixed with spring rain falling on the windows.

  2

  TONIGHT IS THE HOTTEST DATE in the advertising world’s calendar, attended by all the big names in the industry. Every young, ambitious creative in the city hoped to get an invitation – everyone, that is, except me. Ethan and I have been nominated for Best Advertising Campaign of the Year, but I couldn’t care less if I win. I work in advertising because it’s challenging and it pays the rent. I’m not here for accolades, so while my “rivals” are slipping into their newly purchased designer dresses after spending the entire day throwing money at hair stylists and beauticians, I’m hiding out in my basement flat hoping that my admittedly rubbish excuse for skipping the show is deemed acceptable.

  My mantel clock ticks past the number seven and my stomach leaps – I’m almost home and dry. I daren’t look at my phone in case there’s a barrage of abuse waiting for me, so I snuggle into my sofa, wrap myself up in my purple velvet blanket, delve into a brand-new tub of strawberry cheesecake Häagen-Dazs and settle my laptop on my knee. I flick between the half-dozen open windows and curse the fact that I can’t focus on anything but last night’s embarrassing Stuart episode. The reason I’m hiding out is because I didn’t handle it like a grown-up.

  A ping from my inbox calls me away from Candy Crush, which can only be a good thing given I’ve been stuck on Level 374 for . . . ooh . . . probably the last seven and a half years and I need to give up for the sake of my blood pressure. Another ping, another message. Apparently Selfridges are having an in-store sale all next week. As I have neither the time nor the inclination to go up west to be poked and prodded by crowds of people carrying armfuls of shoes, I’ll be giving that a wide berth. But in far more interesting news, my next email tells me that the British Museum is starting a new exhibition on the Rosetta Stone in July. I’ll admit to being more than a little bit excited about this. I’ve been a tad obsessed with Ancient Egypt ever since I was seven and I learned to write my own name in hieroglyphics at school: snake (V) – leaf (I) – wheat (O) – lion (L) – reeds (E) – bread (T). I’m just about to pay in advance for a ticket when there’s a knock at my door.

  I know it can only be one of two people – the only two people who ever come to my apartment – Ethan or Max. Yes, Barrett McAllan Gray is my life and the people who work there are my family. That should tell you everything you need to know about my actual family.

  A second knock on the door lets me know that my visitor is very impatient. “I’m coming,” I call as I unlock the door, and I open it to reveal Ethan Fraser dressed as James Bond.

  “You look pretty,” I say with a chuckle.

  He rolls his eyes and twists his mouth into an exasperated pout. He thinks I’m teasing, but I’m not. He looks totally drop-dead gorgeous. He stands at my door dressed in his tux, his shoulders broad, his blue eyes sparkling and his dark hair impeccably styled. My stomach repeats the strange somersault it did last night. Jeez, I wish it would stop doing that.

  He walks into my flat as if he owns it, spins around and fixes me with a glare. “What the fuck’s got into you?”

  “Excuse me?” I say, narrowing my eyes.

  “Do you think I’m buying your bollocks excuse for not going to the awards show tonight? How stupid do you think I am?” His accent, which usually has a lovely, soft David-Tennant lilt, has advanced to “shit-faced Glaswegian on a stag do”. This means he’s angry. He always gets more Scottish when he’s angry.

  My hands go to my hips. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “You’re damn right I am. What kind of shitty excuse for missing an event like this is ‘I’m on my period’? In case you didn’t receive the memo, we’ve both been nominated for our work and we come as a team. Recycling a sick note you used for getting out of PE when you were thirteen doesn’t even scratch the surface of convincing.”

  I swallow hard. I honestly thought I could play the crampy-and-bloated card and both he and Max would sign it off as woman stuff and run a mile in the opposite direction. “I just don’t feel well.”

  “I don’t believe you, Vi. I know you hate these awards, and you said last night you didn’t want to face Stuart.”

  Shit, why does he have to be right and reasonable all the time? It makes it so much harder to lie to his face. I decide to change tack – a bit of humour might save my bacon. “Well, there’s only one way to prove to you I’m not lying, and I don’t think you’d want to go down that road . . .”

  He screws up his nose and I feel my mood lift when I see his trademark smirk tug at the corners of his mouth. See how well I know him? All it took was a spot of random vulgarity. I watch his smile grow wider until his cheeks dimple. “Well, you know some men like to visit when—”

  “Oh my god, stop talking!”

  He laughs a filthy laugh, and I know we’re back on track. “Okay, Vi, time to come clean. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I just . . .” I exhale in defeat because I know the game’s up. Maybe it would have been easier to tell the truth from the start. I walk into the sitting room and he joins me on the sofa, narrowly missing the empty Häagen-Dazs tub.

  “Was that your dinner?” he says with a smirk. He’s always ribbing me for my lacklustre eating hab
its. I cook and eat like a ten-year-old, which means I can make a cracking sandwich and little else.

  “No, just a pick-me-up.”

  “Look, Vi, I’m not going to the awards without you.” His expression is etched with disappointment. “Please come.”

  I sigh and curl my legs up on the sofa underneath me. I hate disappointing him. “Okay, I admit I’m hiding from Stuart, but there’s more to it. You know I hate all that pseudo-celebrity awards-show stuff. I mean, our job is hardly important to world peace or the advancement of mankind.” He registers my prattle with an eye roll. I knew he wouldn’t see things the way I do long before I opened my mouth. He’s my best friend and he knows me better than anyone else in the world, but he still doesn’t understand me the way I wish he could. “I keep out of the spotlight for a very good reason. You know I don’t like that kind of attention. I thought you got that about me?”

  “I do get you. I just didn’t think you’d spoil this for the rest of us.”

  “Ethan, you’re being unfair. You can have a good time without me. You don’t need me to be there.”

  “We’re a team. We did this together. Of course I need you.”

  My heart misses a beat as my eyes lock with his. His pleading is making me waver. “You should leave now or you’ll be late.”

  “It’s not even half past seven, and the awards don’t start till nine. We’ll only miss the pre-show dinner. We could grab a kebab from that Lebanese place you love on the High Street and eat it on the way. Come on, Vi, please. We did an amazing ad and we had a great time working on it. I want to share this with you.”

  I sigh again. I know I’ve lost. “Okay, give me fifteen minutes.”

  “You’re coming?” he asks, beaming a huge smile.

  “Yes, on the condition I sit nowhere near Stuart Inman.”

  “You’re on.”

  I hear him laughing as I head to my bedroom and start trawling through the dresses in my wardrobe. I pull out something black. It’s plain, calf-length, slightly floaty but elegant all the same. No idea where it came from or when I last wore it, but at least it’s ironed. I match it up with a silver sequinned bag and strappy shoes. I have no time to do anything but backcomb my long dark hair into a wispy side bun, and then I start with the make-up, my signature look being classy, understated and natural, but with a splash of red lipstick. The red is necessary when your alabaster skin tone would make a polar bear look like he’s got a suntan.

  “You look . . . amazing,” Ethan says when I walk back into the room. He drops the magazine he’s been flicking through and stands to greet me. My stomach cartwheels and I feel like I’m seventeen.

  “You owe me big time for this,” I say as I pick up my mobile and keys and pop them into my bag.

  “Fine. The kebab is on me.”

  “It’ll take a lot more than that, but it’s a start,” I say with a jokey scowl, pulling on my coat. “And no garlic.”

  I open the door and he walks out into the corridor before me. “No garlic, eh? Who are you planning on getting off with tonight?”

  “Shut up, you idiot.”

  ***

  It’s after nine when we arrive at the Grosvenor Hotel on Park Lane. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have visited the Beirut Grill, but when a man’s gotta eat, a man’s gotta eat, and Ethan can’t function on an empty stomach. More to the point, given tonight’s free bar, he can’t drink on an empty stomach. I’ve seen the evidence – two years ago, at the annual agency summer party. He barfed on the pavement outside and accidentally painted my white shoes a permanent shade of red-wine puke.

  By the time we take the two empty seats at the Barrett McAllan Gray table, we’ve missed dinner and two awards have already been declared. Oh, and I’ve just noticed an oily kebab stain on my dress. Could the night get any worse? Of course it could, and I fully expect it to. Shit, I need to stay positive and look on the bright side. I don’t live in a cardboard box. Bacteria aren’t eating me alive. I don’t live in a cardboard box. Bacteria aren’t eating me alive.

  Ethan greets the other seven guests seated around the table and makes our apologies – or rather he lies his arse off. Apparently there were roadworks in Kilburn which blocked up my road into the city for two hours. I look around the table at the familiar faces, skipping Stuart, who I can’t bear to make eye contact with, and I wonder who’s buying it. The clear answer is nobody.

  Max is sitting to my right. Or to be more accurate, Max slouches to my right with the posture of a giraffe who doesn’t have enough space for his legs. At a gangly six foot four, my lithe German friend’s enduring life struggle is to be comfortable. Just ask Debra in Facilities. She’s provided him with six expensive ergonomic chairs for tall people over the years, and he hasn’t come close to finding the chair of his dreams. Max and Ethan are wearing identical tuxedo suits, but while Ethan looks like he’s working undercover for MI6, Max looks like he’s off to see the wizard. His muddy-blonde scarecrow hair is wild and unkempt, while his thin, patchy beard looks like it’s been drawn onto his face by a four-year-old. I try to catch his eye, and he responds with one of the filthiest looks I’ve ever seen him give anybody – including the one he gave to the intern who tripped over and landed a pile of canvasses on top of the miniature model of a Spitfire he’d spent two months making.

  “I’m pleased you could make it, Violet. We were beginning to worry,” says Malcolm Barrett, our CEO and owner of the agency’s bushiest moustache. Malcolm has bouncy blow-waved grey hair and a body that seems too small for his skin. He’s always been a great boss to me, but he’s as popular as swine flu with everybody else. Malcolm knocks back his glass of wine and glares at Ethan. “I must say your being this late doesn’t look good.”

  “Yeah, well, it couldn’t be helped,” replies Ethan without making eye contact. This kind of exchange between them is usual. It’s common knowledge that Malcolm and Ethan loathe each other.

  “What have we missed?” I ask with fake eagerness, attempting to move the grey cloud on.

  “You’ve missed dinner,” says Stella Judd, our formidable head of Creative Services. “My lamb was so undercooked I half expected it to skip off my fucking plate, so you’ve had a lucky escape.” I’ll admit to having a bit of a girl-crush on Stella. She’s beautiful and brave, with a platinum-blonde razor crop, the dress sense of royalty and an aura that exudes power. In contrast to her stately appearance, she smokes like a chimney, swears like a sailor and couldn’t care less if anyone has a problem with either. I’ve never met anybody like her.

  “MRT won Best Print Ad for Hurly Gurly, and Diablo Brown won Best TV Ad for AirCat,” says Daniel Noble, the lead account director for Quest – our current biggest client. Daniel is smart, good-looking and confident, and he could sell a glass of water to a drowning man. I realise that MRT’s art win means Max lost in his category. I hope that’s the reason for his mood, rather than our lateness. I make eye contact with him again and he looks as though he’s still thinking of ways to kill me. I peek under the table to see if I can see an axe.

  “I personally thought the Hurly Gurly ad was top-notch,” says Ridley Gates, who, as usual, looks like he’s just stepped out of a 1990s Brylcreem advert. Whenever I’m in the same room as Ridley I’m struck by how slimy he looks and what a slimeball he is. He’s writing his own rules of rhetoric – visual onomatopoeia. Easily one of the least popular people at BMG, Ridley is the head of Client Services and Malcolm’s loyal number two. “I think MRT definitely nailed ‘adventure’ much better than we did with the Quest for Life print ad. We should let that influence the Quest Living launch.”

  “Sounds like a great idea, Ridley,” says Stuart, Quest’s representative, seemingly unaware of the agency politics and the fact that Max looks fit to explode at Ridley’s comments. “The board is keen that Quest Living delivers something distinct from the main Quest retail brand.”

  “Of course,” says Ridley. His stiff, dark hair looks like it’s been moulded to his head tonight,
reminding me of a Ken doll. “Daniel and I will get to work on it right away.”

  I fill up my glass from one of the bottles of wine in the centre of the round table and I sense I’m being watched. I’ve tried to ignore Stuart’s assistant, Carly Hayes, so far, but we finally make eye contact.

  “I love what you’ve done to your hair tonight, Violet,” she purrs as she scans the full length of my body, casting a disdainful glance at my dress. “I wish my stylist could achieve that tousled, just-got-out-of-bed look on me.”

  My hand wanders subconsciously to my hair and I feel a sharp twinge of insecurity in my gut. I catch Stuart smirk, and my blood starts to boil. Has he told her about last night? If he has, I’ll bet my life savings that she’s been given the director’s cut as opposed to the official highlight reel. Argh. I curse myself for letting her get to me.

  The music in the Grosvenor’s ballroom starts up to herald the announcement of another award. I lean over to Max, squeeze his arm lightly and whisper, “I’m sorry.” His frown slowly melts away and a tiny upwards twitch of his mouth reveals the faintest hint of a smile. I decide he’ll be good by the end of the evening as long as I keep the wine flowing, so I reach for a bottle and top up his glass.

  ***

  As the giant screen in the ballroom starts to play the video showcasing the eight nominated campaigns in our category – Best Advertising Campaign of the Year – I suddenly realise there’s a chance we might win and, if we do, I’ll have to go up on stage and – panic – I don’t want to. I haven’t written a speech, and I don’t ad-lib. I’m not a great talker. I write, therefore I don’t need to speak.

  I turn to Ethan and whisper into his ear. “If we win, I’m not going up there. You’ll have to do it.”

  “How about we both go?” He leans in so close that I can feel his breath on my neck. It still smells of onions and grilled lamb.

  “How about no, we both don’t,” I whisper back.

  He leans even closer, places his hand gently on top of my hand and, as if to run the gamut of inappropriate physical gestures, he lets his thumb trace – no, caress – circles onto my skin. “We’re a team, so we’re doing this together,” he whispers into my ear. I expect him to pull away after he speaks, but he doesn’t. He leaves his hand in mine and . . . Jesus . . . what the hell is happening? I swear my ovaries have just leapt into my womb and danced the cha-cha. Has the Stuart Inman disaster turned me into a sex-starved desperado?