The Plus One Read online

  Right now, Maddie was in the adjoining bathroom, putting on her dress, pushed in there by Paige as soon as her bridal hair had been arranged. They were all waiting so that they could go ‘Oooh’ at her when she came out, as though she were a firework. They had all seen the dress already of course, numerous times, but it was tradition. Out came Maddie.

  ‘Aaawww’ said the bridesmaids, consisting of Charlie, Paige, Jane (Maddie’s work friend, the recent loser of a boyfriend and wedding date, not to mention one of the dullest people Charlie had ever met) and Maddie’s childhood friend Lilah, an icy piece of work and one of the strangest choices for bridesmaid imaginable. She’d made her disdain for the sanctity of marriage clear on several occasions. But Maddie always seemed to take Lilah’s comments as part of her delightful quirkiness. ‘Oh, Lilah!’ she’d say with affection, as if she hadn’t just taken a huge shit on Maddie’s upcoming wedding. Charlie was flummoxed, but she guessed that the length of the relationship accounted for Maddie’s willingness to be generous to a woman who was being an unbelievable arsehole.

  Maddie waved off the cooing.

  ‘Oh stop it would you. I haven’t even had my make-up finished yet.’

  ‘That’s true’ said Paige, and snapped her fingers at the make-up artist. She didn’t look like she appreciated being snapped to attention like a serf but she came over anyway, as Maddie sat down in her chair.

  ‘When’s Lucy getting here? I can’t wait to meet her.’

  ‘She’ll be meeting us at the hotel.’

  Charlie watched the make-up artist put the finishing touches to her sister. And for the first time that morning, she wasn’t thinking about how she herself was going to deal with the day. She was hoping her sister was happy, that everything would go right for her. That the day would go off without any major problems. And then she thought, as many poor souls with no idea what’s in store for them had thought before, what could really go so wrong?

  Charlie’s phone rang. It was ‘Rent-a-Date’. Charlie turned to the room.

  ‘Just gotta take this.’

  She legged it out of the front door before Paige could find some reason to stop her. She answered the phone.

  ‘Miss Black, hello…’ said Gary, his tone a little nervous.

  Charlie was immediately on alert.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Then why are you calling me?’

  ‘Before I answer that, I’d like to be clear, everything is going ahead. You still have a date for the wedding.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘The only slight, minor, teeny tiny difference is that it won’t be Yasmin escorting you to the wedding.’

  ‘What. Why not?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but Yasmin had to drop out.’

  Charlie felt a pang of fear. This was a spanner in the works. Yes, she still had a date. But it was not the person she chosen. She could be getting anyone. She’d had hot, exotic Yasmin in her mind all week. She’d gotten used to the idea of her. Yasmin was a sexy safety net and it had just dropped away.

  ‘The wedding is in a couple of hours. What possible reason could she have for dropping out so late?’

  ‘Emergency appendectomy.’

  That stopped Charlie in her tracks.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. She’s very sorry about it. Apparently it had been grumbling for a few days but she put it down to a dodgy curry. Can’t be helped. But we have someone who was able to fill in for her. You’re actually really lucky. She’s one of our most popular Rent-a-Dates. A lot of repeat business.’

  Charlie was beginning to calm again.

  ‘Ok, if you promise she’ll be alright.’

  ‘You have my guarantee of that. She’ll be waiting for you around the corner from the hotel, twenty minutes before the wedding, as planned.’

  ‘How will I know who she is?’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re sending her your file with your picture. She’ll find you.’

  They hung up and Charlie waited for her pulse to return to normal before she went back into the house. She suddenly realised she hadn’t gotten a name. But maybe that didn’t really matter, Charlie thought. She would be calling this woman Lucy, after all. Her real name didn’t matter.

  Three hours later, Amy, the replacement date, was in a taxi on her way to the wedding. She was looking at her phone a shade pensively. So far all she had was the address of the country hotel where the wedding was to be held. She didn’t have the fact sheets with all the information she would need to do her job. And Amy took her job seriously. She liked to be good at it. Although she’d never admit it if questioned, she knew full well she was the best.

  As she continued to refresh her phone, she glanced up to see the taxi driver was staring at her through the rear view mirror.

  ‘Hey, do you wanna maybe keep your eyes on the road?’

  The taxi driver coughed nervously.

  ‘Sorry, I wasn’t-’

  ‘It doesn’t matter’ she said dismissively, already looking back at her phone, the creepy stare forgotten. For Amy, this was standard. She was the kind of woman that could walk down the street and cause, if not an actual car accident, at the very least some serious near misses for hapless drivers whose eyes had been snagged by her beauty.

  Sure, Amy was one of those people for whom genetics had been deeply generous. She was a natural blonde, with proportions that sounded on paper like they were made up. But what made her so attractive was that she didn’t rely on the physical gifts she couldn’t take credit for. She also had intelligence, charisma, wit. And all that added up to one fact. Amy had it.

  And now she was taking ‘it’ to rescue some poor soul who had been dumped before her sister’s wedding. Amy sympathised with that embarrassment. She considered that part of her job, feeling empathy for people who’d found themselves needing her. And that was what made her so good at her job. It wasn’t just some extra money for an out of work actor to her, not like it was for some of the people at her agency. Amy actually cared. She would do her absolute best in every engagement she went on to make the client feel taken care of.

  Which was what made it so frustrating that she was going in unprepared. She wasn’t one to wing it. Usually, by the time she was on her way to a job, she’d have all the information in the file memorised. She knew birthdays, favourite foods, family member names, allergies, anything that might come up. She refreshed her phone again. Nothing.

  It was odd. Gary was usually incredibly efficient and when he’d asked her to do this, he’d promised to email the info immediately. Why hadn’t he sent it? And now the taxi was pulling up to the hotel with Amy still clueless.

  As she got out of the taxi, she looked at her phone again and noticed a strange little symbol in the corner. She dragged down the settings and looked closer. Airplane mode. Christ, she’d accidently switched her data off, no wonder she didn’t have the email. She tapped the signal back on and refreshed. There it was, an email from Gary. She opened the file.

  Charlie was en route to the hotel with Maddie, Page, Jane and Lilah, now dressed to the nines, with full hair and make-up added to the dress. She’d been a little nervous about letting strangers do all that to her, but she had to admit, they’d done a nice job. All she’d been hoping for was to not look like an overly made up clown, but when she looked at the finished product, she was happy to see that she still looked like herself, only better.

  The ride to the country hotel had been a little more relaxed than Maddie’s house. Now that all bridesmaids were sorted out visually, Paige had wound her neck in slightly, thank god. Charlie was grateful for a respite from feeling angry at her, an emotion she was so good at inspiring it had spawned a name: Paige-Rage. But she’d been quiet for most of the car ride and Charlie hoped she’d seen the worst of it now, because slapping the chief bridesmaid on her sister’s wedding day might be considered a social faux pas.

  They arrived and Maddie stepped out first.
The photographer and videographer were waiting, as well as Ed. He was crying before Maddie had both feet out of the car.

  ‘My little girl.’

  Charlie rolled her eyes as they hugged each other. It was all so over the top. Maybe it was a heterosexual thing. Charlie thought she might like to get married one day, but she wasn’t one to picture the day, or wonder what ‘theme’ she might have.

  And their father had not really imagined Charlie would get married once he found out she was a lesbian. He’d just mentally crossed it off. So as far as he was concerned, this was his only chance to walk someone down the aisle. It was his moment to shine and he was going to wring every last drop of drama from the moment.

  Charlie stepped past them while they stood and posed for the photographers. Then the photographer demanded that Charlie and the other bridesmaids pose for a few. Charlie gritted her teeth and smiled, but at the front of her mind was the ‘Rent-a-Date’. She needed to meet her.

  She leaned into Maddie.

  ‘Lucy can’t seem to find the right entrance, can I just go and grab her?’

  Maddie’s camera ready smile never slipped.

  ‘Go on, then. Get back quick.’

  Charlie trotted as quickly as her heels would allow, rounding the bend of the hotel, out of the sight of the wedding party. She saw a blonde woman facing the other way, wearing a backless black silk dress, looking down at her phone. She hoped the front looked as good as the back did. The woman was pure hourglass.

  Amy, unaware that her date approached, was scanning the details of the file, trying to memorise as much as she could. She hoped she might get ten minutes in the toilets at the reception to really seal it in. But as she got to the photo and name, she gasped.

  Charlie coughed to get the woman’s attention and Amy looked up sharply. Charlie said ‘Hi’ and held out her hand, ready to introduce herself. And then her hand simply fell away. There were no introductions necessary. Charlie knew exactly who the woman she’d hired to be her date was. Her name was Amy Sinclair. She was the first girl ever to break Charlie’s heart.

  Chapter Five

  Eleven Years Earlier

  Charlie Black was seventeen years old and invisible. She’d drift down the halls of Harewood Comprehensive like a ghost, unseen by the other students. It wasn’t too terrible to be invisible though. Better to be ignored than seen by the wrong people. Maybe there were schools where a young lesbian could live out loud, possibly even ride on the cache of such a label. But it wasn’t this school. It wasn’t as though people were being outright hate-crimed in the quad. It was just that at Harewood, there was no such thing as ‘out’. And Charlie was not going to be the one to break that barrier. Bugger that.

  So young Charlie sat alone in the cafeteria at lunchtime and sat quietly in the library at any other time not accounted for by lessons. People probably thought she was incredibly studious, working hard on her exam prep or homework. But that wasn’t Charlie at all. She’d never really been interested in anything school had to teach. No, what she was really doing with her acres of free time was planning her life after school, dreaming her future into shape. Because Charlie had an idea that once she’d gotten out of this place, she was going to have a life more exciting than her boring current one. There were some nebulous thoughts on what that might involve, but one thing was not vague. It was well defined. It was the main objective. It was getting to see a girl with her clothes off.

  Charlie had known she was gay for three years, when in her fourteenth year on the planet, she’d been watching TV and seen a girl in a soft drink advert sip her carbonated beverage and then wink at the screen. Charlie had felt that wink right in her downstairs area. Boom, just like that. Charlie’s sexuality bloomed to a full knowledge of its category within something like six weeks from the drink ad. After that, it became a question of waiting to leave the nest to explore those feelings in the anonymity of places that hadn’t watched her grow up. There just wasn’t room to examine her sexuality in a school where everyone knew that she’d gotten her first period on a school trip to the Black Country Museum. So Charlie was biding her time, awaiting what various websites promised would be a time when she could re-invent herself to be whatever the hell she wanted. She wasn’t quite sure what that was going to turn out to be, but she was absolutely certain it was going to be better than being the invisible girl of Harewood.

  So she was waiting. All the while doing diligent research for her approaching real life, reading oral sex how-to’s, watching the relevant videos on the internet, awaiting the time she would get to see a hot girl naked. Charlie knew that was the goal and she had no intention of going in blind.

  In another part of the school, a very different kind of person was also waiting for something. Amy Sinclair existed at the centre of her universe, surrounded by people who had pushed her there. And that was because she had been born into things that everyone wanted. And if they couldn’t have those things themselves, they could certainly be adjacent to them. Those things were easy beauty, plentiful charm and a healthy dose of brains. Amy was also a natural blonde with a fantastic set of breasts. The last two things probably wouldn’t have made Amy as popular as she was on their own, but when added to her general charisma, they certainly didn’t hurt. But Amy’s father, who was not about to let his daughter turn into some vapid fool, had made sure that his daughter knew that she needed to be good at everything to have half a shot at a superlative life. Averageness was not tolerated in the Sinclair household. And if that came at the cost of being able to relax and enjoy her life? Then so be it. His daughter had to be special. And she was.

  So Amy found herself as queen bee of the school. In all truth, she wasn’t sure if the role was a good fit for her. But on balance, she thought there might be worse things to be within the society of her school, so she accepted the crown with quiet poise. And the fact that she hadn’t actively campaigned for the position made her subjects even more loyal.

  In Amy’s favour, she wasn’t a classic mean girl, as many in her station before her have been. But that’s not to say she was particularly nice either. If she saw someone getting the shit end of the stick in the bike sheds, she wasn’t the type to intervene. She could have. It might have made a difference too. She had power and she knew it. But Amy didn’t like to take an active public stand on the way things went at Harewood. She ruled with benign indifference. It was so much easier that way. She would not let herself get dragged into drama. For god sakes, who had the energy for all that? She preferred to coast along on her own wave. Let everyone else coast on theirs.

  Still, she wondered if there might be something beyond seeing the same faces at the same parties, week after week. If there weren’t more to life than being the queen.

  Amy and Charlie obviously didn’t run in the same circles. But they were aware of each other’s existence. Or to be more accurate, Amy vaguely knew there was such a thing as Charlie Black but not much beyond that. And what did Charlie think of Amy? Well, if you’d looked through her browser history, you’d get a pretty good idea.

  She tried not to check Amy’s MySpace (still popular in the pre-Facebook days) more than three times a day if she could help it. But what is a young woman with no sexual outlet to do when someone like Amy Sinclair walks through her field of vision several times a day? Lust horribly but quietly after her, that’s what. In point of fact, the very first time that Charlie’s hands had found her way into her own knickers for an experimental investigation, it was Amy’s aquamarine eyes that drifted into her mind. Her breasts too. Charlie liked them a lot. Amy’s chest was the start of a lifelong career for Charlie as a boob woman.

  But Charlie wasn’t a dummy. She knew that it was a fantasy that was never coming to fruition. Every fantasy she ever had about Amy, and they had to be in the hundreds, they were never set at school. They couldn’t be if Charlie could even begin to get lost in them. It could just never happen. Because at Harewood, Amy was the star of the show and Charlie was just an extra. Amy w
as never going to look twice at her among the throng of shiny people in her world. The smart ones, the beautiful ones, the successful ones. Charlie had never really fallen into any of those categories. She was an average student in baggy clothing and hair that hung perpetually in her eyes. It would be a couple of years before Charlie would push that hair back to reveal a pretty face. Put on clothes that didn’t disguise a good body. Speak loudly enough so that people knew she had a personality.

  So not being amongst the elite of the school, Charlie decided she was happy just to be able to look at Amy occasionally, to catch the scent of her perfume as she passed in in the hall, to imagine what that shiny blonde hair would feel like running through her fingers. But fantasy was it all it could ever be.

  And then came Summer Camp.

  It was coming up to Charlie’s final year. Her Mum was starting to ask annoying questions about what Charlie wanted to do with the rest of her life. Part of Charlie would have loved to have simply answered ‘Sleep with women’ just to see the look on her Mum’s face, but it wouldn’t be worth the follow up nonsense she’d have to endure. Her mother, although she could be a moody cow at times, considered herself a very involved Mum and telling her the truth could only lead to a lot of awkward conversations. No chance. Charlie would drop that bomb once she was out the door. Then she could answer any and all questions over the phone. From a great distance. With the ability to say at any given moment ‘Why, I’d love to talk about sex with you mother. Oh no, my battery’s dying! See you later.’ She loved her Mum and she thought she’d probably be alright with her being gay, she wasn’t stupid about that kind of thing. But no seventeen-year-old wants to discuss all that with a parent.

  For now, the future related questions were bad enough. Particular as Charlie had no clue what she wanted in that department. But the questions were not letting up. And then they started to focus on the upcoming summer break. ‘Charlie, have you thought about what you might want to do this summer? Because it could be a good opportunity to do something that would look good on your university application.’ That phrase ‘Good on your university application’ became her mother’s mantra. Charlie kept waking up to pamphlets for business internships being slid underneath her door. She tended to flick through them for a laugh at how much her mother had completely misjudged her and then chuck them.