Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

She’d been surprisingly kinky, way beyond any real-life experience of his own. His cheeks glowed remembering that thing with her finger. God, you’d never have thought it to look at her. Actually, he realized, he barely had looked at her until now. He knew she did something or other to do with solar cells but it wasn’t his field and he rarely went into the Solid State office. He looked at her again, taking in the curly brown hair and freckles. The freckles were on her arms and back too, he could see now. They made her sort of friendly-looking, and were more than a little sexy. Why had he never noticed any of this before? Partly because she usually had more clothes on, of course, but also because he was usually too busy thinking about Eva to notice what was right under his nose.

Eva. The thought gave him a jolt. He’d been typing that email to her when Boris had started to malfunction. . had he hit Send? No, he’d gone to see what Boris was doing and hadn’t finished the message. And then Lydia had turned the power to the whole room off, so it would have been lost. A wave of relief washed over him. What on earth had possessed him? What sort of idiot sends a declaration of love when it couldn’t be any clearer that it wasn’t reciprocated? And anyway, looky here. There were other fish in the sea.

Lydia seemed to sense his appreciative gaze on her and rolled over sleepily, exposing her breasts (large, also freckled). She opened her eyes and gave him a lazy smile. Galvanized by her boldness, he reached out and ran his fingers over the left breast, tracing the outline of the areola.

‘What are you doing this summer?’ he asked, rolling towards her. ‘Have you ever been to Corfu?’

The thick cream envelope was lurking in the stack of post that Eva grabbed from the communal entrance table as she arrived home from work, on top of a pile of takeaway menus and exhortations to apply for credit cards. She noticed it immediately: her name and address handwritten on the front in black ink, the calligraphy stylish and precise. Hand-addressed letters were becoming rarer these days and usually meant a treat, or at least not a bill, so it was the first envelope she opened once she’d let herself in and put her bag down. She slid the card out of its envelope with a pleasant sense of anticipation, and read it three times before bafflement gave way to astonishment. It informed her that a Mr and Mrs Jeremy Price-Kennington requested the pleasure of her company at the marriage of their daughter Lydia Sarah to the Hon. Benedict Michael Waverley, at a church in the Cotswolds some three weeks hence. She was still standing in the hallway staring down at it when her phone started to ring.

‘Have you got one of these?’ she demanded before Sylvie had a chance to speak. ‘An invitation to Benedict’s wedding? Is this some sort of a joke?’

‘Nope, deadly serious apparently,’ Sylvie told her. ‘I just got off the phone to him. We only spoke for a moment before his paramour whisked him away to discuss the intricacies of table decorations but apparently he’s known her all of about ten minutes, which makes sense, because I wasn’t even aware he was seeing someone. Did you know?’

‘I had no idea. The only thing I can tell you is that getting married ridiculously young isn’t considered weird in his family, they all do it. But it says here it’s in three weeks’ time. What’s that all about?’

‘Apparently the unseemly haste is because they wanted to do it before the weather gets cold and so it doesn’t interfere too much with writing up their theses. You know he’s about to finish his PhD?’

Eva turned this over in her mind. ‘I bet he’s got the CERN job and needs to do it before he leaves for Switzerland.’

‘Who is she anyway, this Chlamydia Princely-Cameltoe?’

‘Lydia Price-Kennington? She’s another physics PhD, I knew her a bit when we were undergrads. A horsey sort, a bit ostentatiously sloaney, but then I suppose Benedict’s hardly a pleb himself. Still, he always wore it more lightly than she did. The word in the lecture theatre was that she boinked half the guys on our course, for which I’m sure they were all eternally grateful since that would have been all the action most of them saw in their undergrad years. She should probably be given a medal for services to desperate physicists.’ Eva found herself growing more despondent as she spoke. ‘She had a certain reputation for kinkiness, if I remember rightly.’

‘Pah, the physics crowd wouldn’t recognize kinky if it danced in front of them wearing a gimp suit and waving an armful of tentacle hentai porn. I bet she’s dull as ditchwater and the wildest they get is him rubbing one out in the corner of the bedroom while she recites prime numbers to him. Which come to think of it is kind of kinky, but not in a good way. But listen, are you okay with this? I always sort of thought that you two would get together eventually.’

‘I don’t know, really,’ said Eva. ‘The whole thing’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it? And I always thought. . I mean. .’ What did she mean? That she had secretly assumed Benedict would always be there, that the thought of his actually being in love with somebody else created an unexpectedly forceful ache in her chest? She let the sentence tail off. ‘I’ll just have to get used to it, I suppose. Anyway, it’s been a while since we caught up. How’s it all going with you?’

‘Oh, you know. Still tiding myself over with bar work till I actually manage to sell some paintings.’ Sylvie sounded morose.

‘It’ll come, you’ll see. And wouldn’t you be better off in an art gallery or somewhere till then? You might make some decent contacts. Or at least be something like a designer or illustrator, use your artistic talents?’

‘I’ve been trying but all that’s really on offer is unpaid internships, so you’ve still got to pay your rent and feed yourself while working for nothing. And even they seem to require experience. It’s catch 22: you can’t get experience till you’ve got experience. I actually went for an interview at a gallery in Chelsea yesterday, figured I could do an internship in the day and then go straight to my bar job at night. I mean, who needs sleep, right?’ She let out an unconvincing laugh. ‘Don’t think I’ve got it though, they seemed rather underwhelmed by my 2:2 in art history The fuckers. I mean, I could swallow it if they were actually going to pay, but to be sniffy about your degree when they expect you to work for free. .’

‘Just you wait,’ soothed Eva. ‘When you’re a famous artist you can go back and buy the place and fire them all. See how sniffy they are then.’

They carried on chatting for a few minutes, each trying to inject a bonhomie they didn’t feel into the conversation, before giving up and saying their goodbyes. Eva hung up and sat at the kitchen table looking down at the wedding invitation. That was it then. She was losing Benedict, who’d always been there for her. There had been that moment, towards the end of their holiday in Corfu, when they had very nearly kissed. How different things might be now, if only one of them had actually made a move. Maybe she should have, but it would have been such bad timing, just as she was moving to London and starting her new life. Even as she’d been finally giving up on Lucien and growing closer to Benedict, there had been a part of her that hadn’t really wanted her old life hanging around as she headed off on new adventures. She’d wanted a blank slate and the opportunity to recreate herself however she chose. But over the last couple of years she had started to realize that there weren’t a whole lot of men out there with Benedict’s qualities: his rumpled good looks, his kindness, his gentle humour. She had never met anyone else she found it so easy to talk to. He was one of those people who knew everything and had read everything, so that you never had to stop and explain yourself.