It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Twenty-four




For one all-too-brief-moment Ellie was pressed against the door, David’s body holding her there as he teased her with the promise of a kiss, until the teasing and the waiting became unbearable. Then they were half-falling down the three steps into the living room, staggering across the floor, mouths still locked together.

David fell backwards onto the sofa, Ellie on top of him, kissing him fiercely as his hands fisted in her hair. He even let her pin his arms above his head, watching her with heavy-lidded eyes as she tightened her hands around his wrists to see if he’d try to break free. He didn’t, but he sighed. Not a sad sigh, but a sigh that was full of longing and wonder, or so it seemed to Ellie as she licked a path along his ridiculously sharp cheekbones.

‘I’ve been wanting to do that since the first time I saw you,’ she said. She hardly recognized her voice, it was so breathy. ‘There have been so many times over the last few weeks when I didn’t think you were the same man I’d met at Glastonbury. I was beginning to think that it had never happened. That I just imagined it.’

That should have cast a shadow over the two of them, because all the bad times that had happened since were a direct consequence of the five minutes after that first meeting, and when David strained against the bonds she’d made from her fingers, Ellie let him go.

His hands settled on her hips. ‘I can assure you that us meeting at Glastonbury wasn’t just a dream you had. Unless I dreamed it too,’ he said. Ellie waited for him to elaborate, dreading that he might mention Richey, but he just smiled, eyes darkening. ‘So, was there anything else you wanted to do to me?’

Ellie showed him. For a man who was still so much of a mystery, there were things about him that were unambiguous. He wanted her. That was obvious from the desperate rise and fall of his chest when she slowly unbuttoned his shirt, the insistent promise of his cock against her belly, even through his jeans, and the way he beckoned her closer with one finger so he could whisper in her ear: ‘Shall I show you what I wanted to do to you?’

Ellie let him roll them over. She gazed up at him as he straddled her and slowly unpicked the knot that kept her wrap dress wrapped. She’d never thought that untying a bow could feel like torture, but it did when his eyes never left her face and his plump bottom lip was caught between his teeth as he parted the edges of her dress like he was opening a present that he’d waited months to arrive.

David wasn’t looking at her face any more but at her breasts; it was too hot to wear a bra, not that Ellie had much to lift and separate. She wished her breasts were lush and voluptuous but David made a throaty, approving sound, then swooped down to take one tightly budded nipple in his mouth, to soothe the ache with his tongue while his thumb rubbed and teased the other breast and Ellie lifted towards his hungry, voracious mouth, hands firm on the back of his neck so he knew not to stop.

No one had ever made Ellie sob in sheer frustration before. She tugged David’s shirt off, then wriggled her hands between them to unbutton his jeans and pushed them down with her legs and even her feet, gasping when he twisted on top of her as he kicked them off, cock right there for one glorious second. Then they were skin to skin. Almost skin to skin.

David’s hand trailed between her breasts, traced each rib, followed the curve of her belly and the jut of her hipbones until he reached the white lace of her briefs. When Ellie looked up at him from under her lashes, she knew what he was asking, just from the arch of one eyebrow and the hesitant quirk of his mouth.

‘I’m keeping them on,’ she said, because she didn’t have another option.

‘I could make you come without taking them off,’ he told her without any bravado. ‘If you wanted.’

She did want. That was the problem. Or it was one of the problems. ‘I’m not going to be another one of your women,’ she reminded him, just in case he’d forgotten Jessica, or Melanie from Goldman Sachs, or the girl from Glastonbury and goodness knows how many others.

‘Ah, and it becomes complicated again,’ David said, and Ellie was so sick and tired of complicated. ‘That’s an issue you don’t need to worry about.’


He was retreating, still on top of her, but his mind was somewhere far away. To that place where he had other women he could have sex with who didn’t come with so much baggage.

Ellie folded her arms to cover her breasts. David was levering himself off her in an instant. She grabbed the two sides of her dress and yanked them together, then gave all her attention to trying to find the tiny hole in the side seam so she could poke the right tie through it.

By the time she’d succeeded, David was back in his jeans and shirt, and rooting through the fridge to emerge with a bottle of white wine. ‘I think we need to talk,’ he said to her. In Ellie’s experience those six words never led to anything good, but she nodded and struggled to sit up and swing her legs round so she was no longer sprawled in gay abandon across the sectional sofa.

He sat right next to her, close enough that his thigh was pressed against her, and when Ellie took a glass of wine from him he ran a finger across her knuckles. She should probably have jerked her hand away for appearance’s sake; instead she hung her head so she could see the spot on the little toe of her right foot that she’d missed with the nail polish earlier.

‘Ellie, let’s not lapse into an embarrassed silence. We were both consenting adults who kissed. It was very good, very enjoyable kissing. There’s no reason to look quite so devastated.’

‘I have every reason to,’ she said, ‘until I know whether you’re seeing anyone else. I don’t ever want to be the sort of girl who kisses other girls’ partners. It’s the worst thing a woman could do.’

‘Not the worst thing,’ David mused. ‘Surely murder or even theft would be—’

‘Well, it is theft, isn’t it?’ It was also rule one of the girl code. Chicks before dicks every time. You never body-shamed another woman and let her know she’d gained or lost a few pounds and you never – repeat, NEVER – let another woman leave the ladies with her skirt tucked into her knickers. But mostly, you never put the moves on another woman’s man, and if you did, then you deserved the long, lonely death that was coming to you. ‘Are you involved with someone else, because Jessica seemed to think you two belonged together. And what about Melanie?’

‘People don’t belong to people. They’re not possessions,’ David said heatedly.

‘Are you really going to argue about semantics? Really?’

‘I’ve known Jess for a long, long time. We were involved for a short while, now we’re not.’ Ellie could feel his eyes on her but she resolutely stared at that one imperfect spot of her pedicure. ‘I’m thirty-four. I’ve been sexually active for quite some time and I don’t have the inclination for a long-term relationship right now, so there are a couple of women I see casually. Non-exclusively.’

Ellie couldn’t help the tiny, inelegant sound she made as David spelled out in no uncertain terms why she’d be a fool to take this any further. Not just for all the reasons that she’d already gone through in her head again and again, but because she didn’t want to become just another woman he saw on a casual, non-exclusive basis. If she was having sex with someone, then she wanted it to mean something and she wanted to mean something to the person she was having sex with.

‘We shouldn’t have kissed,’ she said, and she folded her arms and tried to look prim and proper as David sat back and folded his arms, though his eyes were glinting as if he wasn’t really seeing Ellie sitting next to him but remembering what she looked like under her clothes. ‘I suppose, at least, we got it out of our systems but you have to admit, it was a really bad idea.’

‘It was probably one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had,’ he agreed, and Ellie didn’t know how he had the stones to say such crushing things in a calm voice without even a flicker of remorse. ‘Except I’ve been thinking about kissing you all week. Why do you think I kept away? I actually spent Wednesday evening camped out in Pizza Express with my laptop, for God’s sake.’

Her stupid, foolish heart, which should have known better, perked up. ‘But this still shouldn’t have happened and it’s not going to happen again,’ she said. It sounded like she really meant it. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

She’d never meant to stay another night in David’s flat but there she was, in his bathroom, cleaning her teeth and doing her final email check before bedtime.

Madeleine Jones had come through for her, as she invariably did. There was a seat booked for Ellie on the 15.45 Eurostar leaving from St Pancras tomorrow.

It was absolutely for the best, Ellie thought as she perched on the edge of the bathtub to wait for her serum to settle. Just because you had feelings for someone didn’t mean you had to act on them. Sometimes you had to exercise a little self-control.

With her face slathered in night cream and her mind made up, she opened the bathroom door to find David standing there.

‘It’s all yours,’ she wanted to say. Or, ‘I’ll be out of your hair by tomorrow afternoon,’ but she said nothing. David didn’t say anything either.

Then Ellie’s wash bag landed on the floor with a thud because all her arms wanted to do was to hold him and they were kissing again, without rhyme or reason, but simply because they couldn’t not.

They kept kissing as they moved along the corridor until David awkwardly nudged open his bedroom door with his foot. It was unknown territory, because she wasn’t a snooper, but as she was gently draped on top of a pristine white duvet, Ellie opened her eyes wide enough to take in a spartan room and another set of those glossy cupboard doors that looked like walls, behind which, no doubt, all of David’s suits and shirts, even his socks and ties, were arranged in serried ranks.

When she thought about that side of him, how he hid away anything that might reveal too much, Ellie wondered what she was doing here. Then David was lying next to her on the bed with her, not holding her or kissing her, but gazing at her in the lamplight like she was a work of art.

‘You are beautiful, though, Ellie,’ he said, like that was a huge problem, and anyway she wasn’t. On a good day she was pretty but right now she could sense that her Origins night cream was still sitting on the surface of her skin and her hair was scraped back and she was frowning. ‘If we simply kiss for a few more minutes, then what’s the harm in that?’

‘No harm at all,’ she concurred, reaching out for him.

But these weren’t just kisses. They were kisses that made her fall apart a little. They were kisses that were fierce but sincere. Kisses like they’d never get enough of each other, of the taste and the graze of teeth on bottom lip or a tongue dipping lazily in and out of a mouth.

These kisses were a line that should never have been crossed, so when David’s fingers found the tie on her wrap dress again, Ellie rested her hand on top of his.

‘No,’ she said unequivocally. ‘We are keeping our clothes on. All our clothes on.’

He smiled against her mouth, though Ellie didn’t think there was anything much to smile about. ‘Noted,’ he murmured, and his hand settled on the dip of her waist and he kissed her with his eyes open as if he couldn’t bear not to look at her.

His eyelids fluttered and his kisses got slower, then his limbs slackened because it was late and they’d both had a lot to drink and a lot to argue, and he was falling asleep on her.


Ellie shifted so she was lying on her back and David curled himself around her, arm across her belly, anchoring her to the here and now. By rights, she should have been sleepy too, except it was too hot, because it was always too hot now – even having a sheet over her felt like a fourteen-tog duvet – and she was still wearing her clothes, and though David hardly had an ounce of fat on him, he was heavy slumped against her.

She lay there for a while. The room grew stuffier because if you left the windows open then you were feasted on by every mosquito in Western Europe, according to David, which was why he shut all the windows every night.

It was impossible to sleep when the air conditioning made a high-pitched whistling sound, and David kept nuzzling against her neck. Ellie hoped he didn’t want to snuggle and she really hoped he didn’t snore, and then she realised why she was too wound up to sleep.

‘I don’t manipulate people.’ Her voice sounded deafening in the still of the room. ‘And I’m not a people pleaser. I’m just … I try to be nice.’

There was no reaction. She should have brought this up much earlier, probably between coming home and snogging on the sofa, but at the time she’d been much more preoccupied with snogging on the sofa.

‘You want to do this now?’ David struggled to prop himself up on one elbow.

‘Generally, in my experience, if you’re nice and friendly to people, they’re nice and friendly back,’ Ellie said, because no, this could not wait until tomorrow. ‘How is that manipulation?’

‘Are you nice and friendly even to people you don’t like?’ David asked idly, but his questions were never idle, they were calculated, always.

‘There’s something likeable about everybody,’ Ellie insisted. People put up walls to hide their vulnerability, because they were afraid of rejection or because they didn’t want anyone to know they were shy, but they were just walls and walls could be knocked down with a genuine smile and enquiry about their general wellbeing. If that failed, Ellie would find something, anything, noteworthy about the person who was giving her a hard time, whether it was their charity work, latest art acquisition or new handbag.

It was always validating when people called the gallery and asked for the ‘friendly girl’ rather than the ‘posh girl with the attitude’ or ‘the posh girl who was too busy gazing into space to take any notice of me when I wanted to buy some art’.

‘Everyone has at least one redeeming quality,’ she clarified. ‘Yes, I try to find that redeeming quality so I can establish some rapport with them, but that doesn’t mean I’m manipulative.’

David sighed as if he knew that he wouldn’t be going to sleep any time soon. ‘I didn’t use those exact words,’ he said calmly. ‘And I’m sorry to break it to you, Ellie, but there are plenty of people who do not possess one solitary redeeming quality, and if you tell me that Hitler was a vegetarian and that he loved children, I will open the window but only so I can dangle you off the balcony.’

‘I’m just saying that it was a very unfair accusation.’ Arguing with a lawyer who had a string of letters after his name to prove just how good a lawyer he was should have been daunting, but after tonight David seemed a lot less daunting. Anyway, she had right on her side. ‘No one goes through life scowling and being rude, and still expects people to like them. Only the very rich or the very famous.’

‘The rich and famous are my stock in trade, and I’ve yet to meet anyone from either camp who wasn’t avaricious, amoral and/or utterly lacking in anything approaching a conscience.’ He said it without heat or outrage, but as if he was discussing a very dull book he’d just read. ‘They may seem wide-eyed the first time they arrive in my office with a contract that their record company or their agent wants them to sign, but as soon as they’re halfway to their first million, they’d sell out their mothers for a bigger slice of the pie.’

‘That’s not true. I’ve met plenty of rich and famous people and yes, OK, they can be demanding, but they can also be very nice.’

‘Ellie! How can you be so na?ve?’ David sounded less bored now and more exasperated. ‘Nice is just an angle.’

‘No it’s not!’ Ellie was about to venture that they should probably agree to disagree because she didn’t want a prolonged argument, when David sat up. ‘I don’t want to shatter your dreams,’ he said, then proceeded to do exactly that.

Without once breaking lawyer–client privilege, he painted a world where there were no such things as scruples or decent, honest folk. Everyone had a price. Whether it was the movie star who grudgingly agreed to pay off his girlfriend after he’d beaten her up so badly she needed reconstructive surgery. Or the tween pop idol who made his entourage sign a non-disclosure agreement so they wouldn’t tell the press he was banging his forty-year-old female manager. Or the much-loved but much-closeted A-lister who dated a selection of beautiful, leggy Z-listers, who were each under contract – a contract that was terminated two weeks after his annual appearance on the red carpet at the Oscars.

And finally, there was a lawyer who would draft these contracts and non-disclosure agreements and, representing the best interests of his clients, would draw up verbose sub-clauses, addenda and codicils, which ensured that the wide-eyed hopefuls that tripped into his office would barely make a penny even if their songs or their screenplays touched the hearts of millions. He was witness to all the schemes and machinations of the great and the good to ensure that they stayed great and good and he did nothing to stop it.

‘On the contrary, I facilitate it,’ David told her. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, his shoulders so hunched that Ellie longed to knead and smooth until all his tension melted away, but she didn’t think he’d let her. ‘So, please don’t tell me that people are pure and good and righteous because it’s simply not true.’

If David believed that, then Ellie wondered if he still believed that she’d been complicit in her own downfall; that she and Richey had split the thirty pieces of silver between them. Or that this was her revenge on a father who’d never once expressed an interest in her. It didn’t even matter what her supposed angle was. What was important was that David believed that she had one.

After everything that had happened tonight, if he still thought she was on the make, that she wanted to cash in on her notoriety, then Ellie knew that they could keep arguing about this until the sun came up and the sun went down again, but there was no point. It was all entirely hopeless.

‘You should get some sleep if you want to get up at dawn o’clock to do some hideous training run,’ she said softly, and she caught him by one bony wrist so she could tug him to lie back down next to her. ‘Come on, think some nice, happy thoughts to get you snoring again.’

‘I told you that I don’t have happy thoughts and I certainly don’t snore,’ he said a little huffily. ‘I have excellent peak respiratory flow. People with excellent peak respiratory flow don’t snore.’

Maybe he was joking. Ellie couldn’t tell. She lay next to him in the dark, staring at his clean, precise profile, and again she longed to rub the furrow in his forehead with her fingertips and smooth it away, but she didn’t. She just kept hold of his wrist and measured out the beat of his pulse until it was slow and steady and he was asleep.


Ellie knew that she wasn’t going to sleep. Not tonight. Because this was going to be the only night she spent with David Gold and she wanted to stay awake to see what his face looked like when he was dreaming and to prove or disprove the snoring theory, and if by some miracle he got cold and shivered in his sleep, she’d be there to put her arms round him.

She was going to let herself have this one night and then it would be over. Her other lovers – the lame ducks, the fixer-uppers, the men who needed mending and putting back together – were never going to be the sort of men that Ellie couldn’t live without.

But David didn’t need mending. He didn’t have habits that needed breaking or a problem that could be solved by a couple of nights of chatting it out and persuading him to seek the help of a trained professional.

David was a finished product. He could make his way through the world and navigate life without any help from Ellie. His cynicism was deeply engrained and invisible to the naked eye, like a glass wall, so that every time Ellie tried to get close to him, she’d end up smashing her face against it.

Worse than that, she’d revert to type. She’d try to fix what couldn’t be fixed and it would break her heart that he could never truly be happy. And how could you really love someone who didn’t know how to get happy?





London, Camden, 1986

Billy came back to her on Christmas Eve. He didn’t come crawling back on his knees to beg forgiveness but he had roses, champagne, his custom-built Collings acoustic guitar ineptly wrapped in Christmas paper and a hangdog look on his face.

‘I love you, Ari. I love you better than anyone else,’ he said. ‘You said you loved me too. Have you changed your mind?’

Ari would never know how you could love someone with everything that you were, but not like them very much. ‘Next time you leave, I won’t have you back,’ she told him, but she let Billy wrap her up in a blanket and take her into the house, where in deference to her condition and because it was December, the playwright and the playwright’s crazy Japanese girlfriend, who’d once accused Ari of stealing her Christian Lacroix coat (like that would ever, ever happen), had agreed to let them have a centrally heated room on the third floor with an en-suite bathroom.

They lay in bed together, not sleeping, but holding each other, and on Christmas Day Billy cooked them beans on toast, which they washed down with the champagne, and instead of giving him a present, Ari gave him ten pence so he could phone his daughter and wish her a happy Christmas.

Ari suspected that Olivia had thrown him out for good, but she didn’t care because Billy was there and he was all hers now, refusing to leave her side. He wouldn’t stop telling her that he loved her and saying stuff like, ‘My life didn’t really begin until you were in it, Ari.’

It was like how they used to be or, if she was being honest with herself, how Ari always wanted them to be, but they never were.

Billy’s parents had finally cut him off, but they borrowed two hundred pounds from Carol for three more days of studio time and finished the backing vocals on the last track on the last day of the year.

‘I feel sad,’ Ari said to Billy as they walked home to Primrose Hill through the backstreets, away from the distant sounds of New Year’s Eve parties. ‘Like nothing good is ever going to happen again.’

‘Only good things are going to happen,’ Billy promised. ‘You’re going places and I’ll be there with you every step of the way.’ Then he kissed her under the glow of a streetlight. The taste of him made Ari forget that there was something important she had to do before she could get on with her destiny.

Hours later she woke up with a dirty grey pain clamping its teeth around her stomach.