You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sarra Manning
‘In the hall. He’s not allowed to sleep in the bedroom. He’ll spend all night trying to get on the bed.’
‘But what’s wrong with that?’ Neve had been looking forward to Keith sleeping at the bottom of the bed, preferably on her feet because they got very cold at night.
Max shook his head. ‘I’ve spent a long time establishing some boundaries with him. Don’t undo all my good work.’
She watched Max settle Keith down in his dog bed with a ragged blanket over him and a threadbare soft toy tucked between his front paws. Then there was the water bowl and a plug-in nightlight because Keith didn’t like the dark, and Neve began to wonder just where Keith’s boundaries were.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, when it became obvious that Max intended to stay with Keith until he was asleep.
Neve had spent five minutes with a hand mirror to judge her best angle when she was lying down and another ten minutes reading before Max put in an appearance.
‘So you sleep on the right-hand side,’ he remarked, as if it was a question that had been bugging him for ages. ‘I sleep on the left, so that works.’
Usually she slept in the dead centre of the bed but that seemed like a very spinsterish thing to admit, so Neve put down her book and fluffed the pillows next to her so they’d be at optimum plumpness for Max. You could fault her for a lot of things, she thought, but she was a very considerate hostess.
Max sat down on the edge of the bed and bounced experimentally. ‘Firm mattress,’ he remarked. ‘I do like a bed without much give to it.’
Neve could actually feel her blood pressure start to rise. Sleeping with Max on her candy-striped bedlinen had seemed like a good idea in theory, but the actual reality of Max in her bedroom again felt threatening and thrilling all at the same time. It didn’t help that he was talking in a low, suggestive voice and had a smirky little smile on his face like he couldn’t help but go into seductive mode when he was in a room with a bed in it.
Max was unlacing his Doc Marten boots and Neve quickly picked up her book again. This was all such new territory for her, but she tried to affect an ease that she didn’t really feel.
‘What are you reading?’ Max pulled off his socks and wiggled his long toes. He had nice feet for a man; at least they weren’t too hairy.
Neve lifted up her copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier so Max could read the title, then gestured at the carefully edited pile of books on her bedside table. ‘You’re welcome to borrow one.’
Shirt half-unbuttoned, Max reached across the bed, inadvertently pinning Neve to the mattress, as he glanced through the pile. ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to read this,’ he said, as Neve tried to look over his shoulder.
‘How have you never read The Catcher in the Rye?’ she wanted to shriek but settled for a simple, ‘I think you’ll really like that.’
Neve wished Max would finish getting undressed and get into bed so they could negotiate the next step of their relationship, but instead he was looking doubtfully at her copy of Mansfield Park. Which was just wrong because …
‘If you haven’t read any Jane Austen, don’t start with that one,’ she said with great force. ‘Fanny Price doesn’t work as well as a modern heroine as Elizabeth Bennet does.’
Max put down the book quickly, as if it was coated in something toxic. ‘Well, maybe I’ll try Catcher in the Rye and work my way up to Jane Austen.’ He shifted back so Neve no longer had a dead weight on her legs, and smacked the book against his palm. ‘I promise I won’t crease the spine.’
‘Of course, Catcher in the Rye is Salinger’s most well-known novel, but personally I much prefer his stories about the Glass family,’ Neve heard herself say in the prissiest voice she’d ever managed, as if her mouth was stuffed full of plums. ‘I think Franny and Zooey has the edge over Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, but it’s very hard to evaluate Salinger’s oeuvre as a whole, when it mostly consists of novellas and short stories.’
‘Right. I’ll be sure to remember that,’ Max murmured, and then he stopped talking because he was pulling his shirt and T-shirt off in one easy movement, so watching the muscles in his back undulate was much more interesting than J. D. Salinger. Max was wiry without being weedy, his muscles defined without bulging like Gustav’s did – so that Neve always wondered if he might bust out of the tight Lycra tops he favoured. She held her book to her face and peeked over the top as Max started on his belt buckle, biceps flexing as he pulled the leather free from his jeans.
Neve gulped. ‘One could argue that the only available texts we have from Salinger are technically juvenilia, and that his subsequent reclusion was an attempt to create his own legend rather than admit that he couldn’t live up to the promise of his earlier work.’ She just couldn’t stop talking. Neve winced as she heard her voice getting shriller and shriller, but there was nothing she could do about it. ‘It’s not unprecedented. After all, Rimbaud abandoned all his literary endeavours by the time he was twenty-one.’
Max shot her a slow, lazy smile. ‘Neevy?’
‘What?’
‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about,’ Max informed her kindly. ‘No need to be nervous. We’re just going to sleep in the same bed. Think of me as a lanky teddy bear.’
That was actually good advice, or it would have been if the sound of Max’s zipper going down hadn’t derailed Neve completely. It struck her how ridiculous this all was. There was a man undressing in her girly pink bedroom, not made any less girly or pink by the fact there was a man undressing in it.
‘Did you bring pyjamas?’ she croaked, as Max kicked off his jeans and stood there in his boxer trunks, unconcernedly scratching his chest.
‘Never wear them,’ he assured her, and Neve knew for certain that if he wanted to sleep naked next to her, then she was calling the whole thing off. She was not ready for full frontal nudity and sometimes she didn’t think she ever would be.
She’d been the only clothed member of a naked family and it had been awful. When she was a child, Friday afternoons had been particularly harrowing. As soon as her father got in from work, she was sent out for five portions of haddock and chips. By the time she got back, her dad was sitting in the kitchen in his paisley Y-fronts sipping from a bottle of beer. Neve hadn’t even possessed a swimming costume until she was five and had staged a mutiny on a Margate beach until her father had been dispatched to Woolworth’s to buy her a Barbie bikini, even though she’d really wanted a one-piece.
All through her childhood, Neve had wished that her mother had been like the other Catholic mothers of her Sunday School pals. The kind of mothers who promised brimstone and fire if their daughters dared to wear skirts above the knee or painted their toenails. But no, she had a Catholic mother who said things like, ‘Sure, if everything that God created is beautiful and God created your body, then your body’s beautiful.’
But Neve had known that her body wasn’t beautiful. By the age of five, she could tell that her body was rounder and chubbier than the bodies of her friends. She had a pot belly and her thighs looked as if they had elastic bands digging into them when she sat down.
‘OK, this is your five-second warning,’ Max announced. Neve looked up at him tremulously as he stood over her. It was best to keep looking up, at his face, and not anywhere else, though at least he’d kept his boxer trunks on. ‘I’m just about to get into your bed.’
The covers were pulled back and Neve forced herself to remain perfectly still as Max slid into bed beside her and gave a tiny blissful sigh as he connected with her posture-paedic mattress and memory foam pillows. He slowly stretched out, then frowned.
‘Is that a hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, yes it is,’ Neve said hurriedly, snagging it between her feet and dragging it over to her side.
Max propped the pillows behind his head so he could sit up and survey his resting place for the night. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit warm under all these covers?’ He lifted the eiderdown so he could confi
Neve levered herself up from her recumbent position. ‘But I still have to have the central heating on all day and there’s ground frost and I really feel the cold.’
‘There isn’t any cold to feel,’ Max said. ‘Let’s get rid of the top quilt.’
Neve decided it was time for action, not words. Even though she’d resolved that there would be no touching of any kind, she reached for the back of Max’s neck with one of her icy paws.
‘Fuck! Don’t do that!’ Max yelped, as Neve snatched her hand back and shoved it under the duvet and the quilt, which was staying exactly where it was. ‘God, I didn’t think you could be so mean.’
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Neve said, reaching up to kiss Max’s cheek to take the sting out of her words. He made a big show of flinching, as if he expected her lips to be the same sub-zero temperature as her hands.
‘Hey! Keep to your side of the bed,’ he said, snuggling down under the covers. ‘I won’t be able to sleep if I’m worried that you’re going to jump my bones.’
Neve had been thinking the exact same thing, but when Max said it out loud, she couldn’t help but feel a little bit rejected. Of course she didn’t want him to jump her bones, but she wanted him to want to, except only when they were fully clothed and not in bed together. Despite his manwhore reputation, Max seemed remarkably on-message about just sleeping together. He’d been happy enough to kiss her, but maybe he only fancied her in a kissable way or maybe she was really bad at kissing and he didn’t have the heart to tell her, or … No! She wasn’t going to think of any more ‘or’s and get so stressed out that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
‘OK, fine, no kissing.’ Neve rolled over on to her side, making sure there was at least a metre between them. ‘Goodnight.’ She snapped off the light, without even asking Max if he was ready to go to sleep, but it was her bed, so it was her rules.
They lay there in silence for a while. Neve concentrated on not exhaling too loudly in case Max thought she was a mouthbreather. Her fit of pique had shoved her right to the edge of the mattress, so if she made any sudden moves, she was going to end up on the floor, and there was a big draughty gap because Max had one end of the duvet and she had the other, and basically sleeping with someone else was awful and Neve was beginning to understand why some married people slept in twin beds, or even separate bedrooms. It wasn’t because they were prudish; it was because they valued a good night’s sleep.
‘Are you sulking?’ Max asked suddenly.
‘No,’ Neve said sulkily. ‘It’s just you’re hogging the covers and there’s this gap and …’
Neve was hoping that Max would relinquish his right to the quilt, but he slid across the bed and wrapped one arm around her. It was like being enveloped by a gigantic hot-water bottle. ‘I know I called off the kissing but we can still cuddle,’ he whispered in her ear, which tickled because she’d reached that stage where everything was irritating her. His arm moved lower and she jerked away in alarm.
‘Don’t touch my stomach! It’s the one bit of me that I don’t like people touching,’ she amended at a less ear-perforating volume.
‘OK, you need to relax because you’re not going to get any sleep and I can’t either when you’re sending out distress signals,’ Max said, moving his arm so it wasn’t pressed against her belly, but higher up and brushing the underside of her breasts, but it wasn’t as if she could complain about that now she’d played the tummy card. ‘Just pretend I’m Celia.’
‘You don’t talk as much as Celia,’ Neve offered. ‘And she’s much more bony than you, always poking me with her elbows.’
‘At least that’s something.’ Max’s thumb was rhythmically stroking a tiny patch of skin on her arm not covered by the sleeve of her thermal top and that did feel quite nice, almost comforting. Neve shut her eyes and concentrated on breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. But not too loudly.
It was the heat that woke Neve up. She lay there for a second listening to the hiss and crackle but unable to place it, then she sat up and threw back the covers in one jerky movement as she realised the flat was on fire!
The heat almost drove her back when she opened her bedroom door. Neve fought her way through thick smoke that caught at her throat, and went into the living room where bright orange flames were licking over the walls and streaking over the furniture. Fortunately, there was a clear path to her desk and she took it.
Her mind was running on two tracks. She knew she had to ring for the fire brigade, but at the moment saving her Lucy Keener biography was far more important. OK, there wasn’t much of a biography to save, but Neve was still switching on her computer and rooting through her drawers for a disc and, oh, there was How To Write A Book In Fifteen Minutes Every Day, which she’d borrowed from Philip – he’d kill her if it burned to a crisp.
The flames were creeping ever closer and Neve danced on the spot now because the wood under her bare feet was blisteringly hot. Her eyes were watering, she was coughing and choking and her sodding computer was taking forever to boot up. Finally, there was her Virginia Woolf screensaver. Neve scrabbled for the disc, all fingers and thumbs as she tried to open the disc tray.
‘Why are you bothering to do that?’ a voice said in her ear, and she turned round to see Max right behind her. ‘You know you haven’t got anything worth saving there.’
‘I’ve got five and a half chapters and notes,’ Neve said, as she started dragging the files on to the disc. ‘Don’t you think you should be doing something useful like calling 999 or trying to smash open a window?’
‘Well, I would but I’ve got a very important launch party to attend,’ Max said blithely just as ‘DISC ERROR!’ flashed up on the screen.
‘Bloody hell!’
‘You’ll wish you were in hell, Neve, if any of my Juicy Couture tracksuits get burned!’ Now, Charlotte was standing there, hands on hips, screaming at her. ‘This is all your fault! I bet you decided to bake a pie in the middle of the night because you can’t go an hour without stuffing your gob.’
‘I didn’t,’ Neve protested, flinging open drawers to find another disc. ‘It wasn’t me, it must be an electrical fault.’
‘This is so like Neve, don’t you think?’ Charlotte faded away in a puff of smoke, to be replaced by Chloe and Rose talking in insinuating whispers. ‘You know, she always turns on all three bars of the heater in her office.’
‘You’re right, she does. Someone should tell Mr Freemont that she’s frittering away our funding on her own personal comfort and causing a fire risk.’
‘But my heater has a sticker on it to say it’s been safety checked,’ Neve protested, as she rooted through a stack of envelopes for an elusive blank disc.
‘I told you that you needed to replace the batteries in the smoke alarm every six months.’ Great, now her dad was there to give her a hard time – and in his paisley Y-fronts too. ‘I thought you were meant to be the clever one.’
‘People! You’re not helping. Either make your way to an exit or help me find a disc but really, I can’t deal with the constant criticism right now.’ There was a huge crash as one of her bookcases gave up under the onslaught of the flames and Neve held her hands to her face in horror. All her out-of-print Virago Modern Classics gone!
‘Poor Neve,’ said a much more sympathetic voice and she looked up to see William standing there with that soft, warm smile he always had for her. ‘I hope my copy of Writing and Difference wasn’t on that shelf because I could never love someone who treated books in such a cavalier fashion. Especially books that were on loan.’
‘But it’s not my fault. I didn’t start the fire.’ It was now just Neve and William, and the biography was still stuck on her computer and they were almost engulfed in flames but that wasn’t important. ‘Hey, William, do you notice anything different about me?’
William squinted through the smoke. ??
‘Well, I grew out my fringe … No! What else is different about me?’
‘I suppose you’ve lost a bit of weight, and not before time, but you’re still too fat for me, Neve. I could never love someone who wasn’t a size ten,’ William told her sadly, then he became shrouded in smoke and fire and disappeared from Neve’s sight.
She let the disc she’d just found fall to the floor, and really – what was the point of trying to save the biography or—
Hang on! William was in California, so there was no way he’d just suddenly appear in her flat. How would he have got in anyway? And her computer wallpaper was a picture of two Schnauzer puppies wearing tracksuit tops, not Virginia Woolf.
For the second time, Neve woke up. Properly woke up and this time the flat wasn’t on fire. But she could see why her subconscious might have thought so, because it felt as if she was being boiled from the inside out.
The ends of her artless ponytail were sticking to the back of her neck and her skin was soaked in sweat. Neve didn’t think she’d ever been this hot, not even that time when the air conditioning was broken at the gym; she’d been unable to grab a portable fan and she’d been on level ten of the fat-burn programme on the elliptical machine.
Really, it was no wonder that she was overheating when she was sharing her bed with Max. He was always warm to the touch but snuggled down (and snoring heavily) under her winter-weight duvet and quilt, and with a hot-water added to the mix, he was emitting enough thermo-nuclear rays to launch a weapon of mass destruction.
‘Oh God, get off me!’ Neve hissed, pushing Max’s arm off her. He didn’t even stir, just grunted and rolled over, leaving the covers bunched between them. With an annoyed growl, Neve sat up so she could tug off her socks. Then she burrowed under the covers for the hot-water bottle, which she threw on the floor, along with the top quilt. It felt less like being in a burning building and more like baling out of a leaky boat.
Neve flopped down again, covers off, and tried to achieve some inner calm, until she felt her skin become clammy with cold. She pulled the duvet around her and shut her eyes, even though she had the irrational urge to check the lounge just to make sure that it wasn’t on fire. But that was stupid because she’d definitely turned the oven off after dinner. At least, she thought she’d turned the oven off. She lay there for long moments listening to Max snuffling away like a pig foraging for truffles, but as long as she had the duvet around her and the quilt between them, then she didn’t have to suffer his almighty body heat.