Page 80 of Cover Story
‘That’d be great, actually,’ she said.
Connor felt a rush of joy that he told himself was the relief of being accepted when you feared you were being annoying.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked, as Connor slid the door shut.
‘The Edinburgh Castle pub?’ Bel said, to a nod from Connor.
As the taxi stop-start picked its way through busy streets, Bel said: ‘The Mayor asked to meet me, I don’t know if you saw. He loves my podcast.’
‘Really?’ Connor said. They both cast eyes at the driver, indicating to each other this exchange would stay anodyne.
‘Real fan of investigative journalism,’ Bel said. ‘Made me feel like I was the only person in the room. That’s some “rizz”. Thefunny thing was, he was telling me he was my fan and I felt I was recruited into being his fan.’
‘Huh. Good to know he likes investigative journalism,’ Connor said.
‘Right?’ Bel said. ‘He praised my likeability. Little does he know I’m going to get more likeable still.’
She held onto the grab handle as the taxi took a sharp corner and grinned.
There was the Bel he knew, so what on earth had happened just now?
Connor realised he was dying to find out who Goatee Shit was. He’d never really thought about Bel’s love life beyond that half-arsed digital stalking of her other ex, but he vaguely imagined a trail of broken hearts.
Bel was the kind of woman that men thought half of their music collection was about.
44
Connor had pulled the tie from the neck of his shirt to look slightly less conspicuous in the witchy, atmospherically lit hubbub of the pub and there was no getting round the fact, Bel thought as she watched him at the bar, he looked Old Hollywood heartbreaking.
She indulged a surprising moment of perving on him, letting herself pretend he was her date. On pure aesthetics, Connor was impressive, but more than that, his swooping in to save the day with Anthony was downright spectacular.
He was attired like James Bond but she’d not expected Connor to act like him too.
In turn, Bel hadn’t expected to behave the way she had: she’d been paralysed. She’d ordered herself not to be intimidated by Ant, reasoning he couldn’t make a scene in a crowded room. Yet she’d hidden from herself that she had been playing a game of odds in her head. A ‘Surely He Won’t Go That Far’ game, and every time he proved that he would. She couldn’t lose again.
Once he had appeared, she didn’t know how to handle it. Losing her shit with him both risked attracting attention and sustained his delusions that they were sexy pyrotechnics. Being calm and courteous wasn’t sufficient deterrent– he used that asa welcome, to insinuate himself. Simply removing herself from his presence was all Bel was left with, and even that failed as he haunted her every step.
Then Connor was simply there, calmly cutting Anthony down to size and extracting Bel, as if he was her paid protection officer. Connor made Anthony insanely angry but Connor, with no stakes here, wasn’t riled in the slightest, so the power balance shifted with ease.
How Connor had figured it out, she had no idea. No doubt she’d pay for his help with Anthony’s antagonism worsening, but it was worth it for Connor taking Ant’s hand off her arm as though he was an autograph hunter with Lady Gaga.
When she told Shilpa, her ovaries would explode.
‘Do you mind me asking who that was?’ Connor said, as he put a gin and tonic in front of her, a red wine for himself.
Bel didn’t mind. She wasn’t at all sure of the wisdom of Connor as her audience, for various reasons, but one strong factor in his favour was that he soon wouldn’t be here. Connor had seen what he’d seen. What the hell.
‘Anthony, who you met there, was on the news desk and then a section editor at my last paper in Yorkshire … it’s a long story, you’re sure?’
Connor saluted her with his glass.
‘OK. Not long after I was hired, he took me for a drink to talk about how I was getting on, he was a cheerleader for my work. He persuaded the big editor to accept me doing a podcast in my spare time. It was all very mentor and student. We’d keep going for lunchtime pints. Inevitably, of course we got to talking about our private lives. I told him about my long-term boyfriend Tim– the wheels were coming off at the time.I didn’t say anything too disloyal, but it became obvious I was at a crossroads, and unhappy.’
‘You lived with Tim?’ Connor said.
Bel nodded, took a deep breath.
‘Yeah we’d been together since our late twenties. Oh God, I am so disgusted by myself even telling you this …’ Bel said.
