Page 40 of Cover Story

You are going to have to act like you fancy the shit out of me, are you up to that considerable acting feat?was embarrassing enough to hint at, without Connor blanking her like this.

Bel ploughed on.

‘I’m giving you explicit permission for any physical contact during this evening. Anything that a couple would do. You’d not worry about putting your hand on your girlfriend’s knee. If it feels natural, do it.’

‘Right.’

Connor’s flat monosyllable made it clear she had offered a Snickers to someone with a severe peanut allergy.

‘I assume vice versa is allowed, too?’

‘I’ll probably cope,’ Connor said.

Yet she didn’t feel she could grab for his hand. If she didn’t have the courage when no one was watching, how much worse would it be when they were?

‘This is what I mean!’ Belle hissed. ‘The chilly sarcasm.Allgreat as office enemies, but I’m worried it’s going to knacker us cosplaying lovers.’

‘We’re not enemies!’ Connor said, looking surprisingly offended.

‘I wouldn’t call us friends?’ Bel said.

‘We’re colleagues,’ Connor replied.

‘You know how corporate team-building weekends do trust exercises? What’s our equivalent?’

Connor sighed and put his hands in his pockets. They couldn’t arrive like this, Bel thought. You wouldn’t believe they’d share a Netflix login, let alone knocked boots.

‘OK. My bra size is 34DD. I think they’re holding up quite well but if I was on top and lights on, I’d definitely be self-conscious enough to keep my shoulders back, like …’

Bel stopped and gestured a tension in her chest, performing an impression of a heavy-lidded, coital gaze, mouth gone slack. She dropped it and grinned again.

‘I don’t bother with waxing because I’m too lazy. I bought one of those at-home hair removal IPL things. I am worried with my styling skills it looks like roadkill.’

Bel glanced over and Connor was grimacing. He actuallygrimacedat the notion of her nude. He was so not her kind of person: pube jokes were life.

‘Sorry, what’s the point of this?’ Connor said.

‘It’s the private stuff you’d know if we were seeing each other. I’m breaking down our barriers.’

‘I don’t think they’ll ask me to draw a picture?’ he said, with distaste.

Could he give her a tiny bit less of the I Am Repelled By You Physically And In Other Ways Too vibe?

‘I’m fast-tracking a sense of intimacy between us, through the cold water shock plunge of sensitive information.’

‘How do you imagine this will help? Are we walking into a Mr & Mrs quiz, round one: “Is he circumcised?”’

‘Are you?’ she said, brash with nerves.

‘Fucking hell!No.I don’t much want to talk about private stuff as prep if that’s OK? I feel a man doing it to a woman would be taken very differently, too.’

Oof. That hit home, he was right.

‘All right, apologies, zero by way of grot,’ said Bel, holding her ‘New Jersey wife’ red manicured hands up, trying to sound breezily unbothered.

‘I don’t think chatting about our genitalia brings “ease”, in British society,’ Connor said, and although he was at least smiling as he said it, Bel was suitably mortified.

Sharing the state of one’s depilation, only to be firmly put in your place because you were grossing out the listener, was not a pleasant sensation. They walked the rest of the distance in silence, with Bel feeling, thanks to white wine pissedness, self-beclowning and apprehension, borderline tearful.

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