Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (15 page)

“Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s a good idea to know someone’s name before you give them your number,” I said. “Even if it’s just so you can know who it is on the other end of the phone when you answer it.” I was being witty. That was the effect he had on me. I’d never been witty in the whole of my life and here I was, charming him with banter. I wondered for a moment who the dress had belonged to. Which celeb had given me a piece of her allure when I picked it up in the charity shop.

His small laugh brightened his already sparkling eyes.

“My name’s Mal. And yours begins with an ‘S,’ right?”

My eyes widened. “How did you know that? Did your friend tell you that? Is she psychic?”

“No. People have told her that, but she won’t have a bar of it.” Gently he placed his finger a few inches below the well of my throat. “Your necklace.”

My “S” necklace. I felt my face color up.
How embarrassing.
He must think I’m a fool.
“Oh. Yes. My name begins with an ‘S.’ Stephanie. I’m called Stephanie. Or Steph.”

“Steph.” My name fell gently from his tongue, a short, sweet melody. Even though he’d removed his finger from my throat, I still felt the warmth of the impression it had made, a gentle little brand. “You’re cute when you blush. Cuter.”

“Mal what?” I replied, ignoring what he had said, knowing it had made me blush a little more.

“Wacken. I’m Mal Wacken. Is that enough to get your number?”

“I think so.”

My fingers were shaking with excitement and slight disbelief as I wrote down the number for the pay phone outside my studio flat—I couldn’t afford to have my own phone line—on a piece of till receipt the barman had kindly given to me. “I can’t wait to tell Nova that I got the number of the most beautiful woman in London,” he said.

“You can stop the flattery now, you’ve got my number.”

“K.I.S.S.E.S., remember? No flattery, that’d be far too elaborate for me. Just honesty.”

I blushed a little deeper, could feel myself glowing under my carefully applied makeup.

“OK, Steph, I have to be going now. Can I call you tomorrow, or is that too soon?”

“No, that’s not too soon,” I replied.

“I’ll see you,” he said with a grin, but not moving from where he stood.

“Yes.” I nodded. “You will.”

“You might have noticed that I’m still standing here,” he said. “I’m finding it hard to move away from you.”

“I really do want to answer the phone when you call,” I said.
“But I won’t if you start using lines like that. Remember what your friend said.”

His eyes lingered on my mouth. “Kisses,” he said. “Yeah, kisses. Bye, Steph.”

“Bye, Mal.”

Candice and Liz descended upon me the second he left the bar.

“Oh my God!” screeched Candice. “
Who
was he?”

I watched him raise a hand to wave, I waved back as he disappeared. “Oh, no one,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the space he had left in the doorway. “Just the man I’m going to marry.”

“And you know what? Not everybody comes to the gym to reach a goal weight or to become supermodel-thin. Some people need to come to the gym because it keeps them alive and connected, up here. In your mind. Where it really counts.”

He knew my body.

Every mole, every pore, every wrinkle, every crease, every lump, every bump. Every perfection, every imperfection. He had spent the past few hours mapping them out with his fingers, his mouth, his tongue, his eyes, his body.

I was always shy with a new man. Scared of how they would react, what they would think when my clothes were off and the lights were low enough to disguise, but not completely conceal, although bright enough to reveal.

Mal had undressed me slowly, kissing every piece of skin he exposed, touching every piece of skin he unveiled, examining every piece of skin he saw. It seemed to take hours. Hours of
savoring his attention until I could barely breathe with desire. He kissed me all over when I was naked. He touched me all over when I was nude. He made love to me with his eyes first, then his fingers, then his body.

It was making love, not sex or fucking. It was expressing what I felt for him. Even though it was only two months since we met and we had, by unspoken but mutual agreement, decided to wait until now to do this for the first time, I knew I was in love with him. He was my forever. I knew it when I met him in the bar, I knew it every time we met and spoke. I knew it now, curled up like a happy, blissed-out, contented puppy in his arms.

It didn’t matter that we were on an old, lumpy, back-breaking futon that someone had given to me when I moved into my studio. Nor that the tap in the sink kept dripping, and the fusty smell of mold that grew in the corners of the room was strong at the moment because it had rained earlier. None of it mattered. We were together. And he loved me. He hadn’t said so, but I knew from the past few hours that he did.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he whispered, as his fingers stroked through my hair.

I didn’t reply. For a moment I thought of feigning sleep, so whatever it was, he couldn’t say it and couldn’t redefine tonight. Even if it was “I love you,” something I wanted to hear desperately (to my eternal shame), I didn’t want it to take away from this. I wanted, I needed, lots of little bubbles of perfect memories. They were important. When things went wrong—not that they would with Mal, but in life in general—I wanted to have as many things as possible to cling onto in my memory. To shine like beacons in my mind’s eye so I could navigate my way back to happier times. I wanted to have this making-love memory. I wanted to have a separate one of him telling me he loved me. I wanted to have them to sit alongside the memory of meeting
him. The memory of getting his first call. The memory of our first kiss. The memory of eating cold fish fingers and drinking warm ginger beer in Hyde Park. The memory of him taking my hand as we walked down the street and showing the world we were together—two who had become one. All those memories glittered like gems in the jewelry box of my mind. I didn’t want them ruined by whatever it was he was about to say.

“Nova can’t believe I haven’t told you already.”

Her again.
If it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have gone out the night he met me, so there was a sliver of gratitude toward her that would always live in my heart, but still, why did he have to bring her up
now
? He talked about her with alarming frequency as it was, why was she invading this time, too? I shifted in his arms so I could see his face. I used my forefinger to slowly trace the outline of his kiss-bruised lips, which were plump and red like overripe strawberries. I was trying to seal his mouth shut because this was a reminder as to why you needed to fall asleep right after you’d made love. Less chance of talking, therefore less chance of ruining things.

He took my hand gently in his large hand, kissed my fingers and then held them over his heart. He wanted to speak.

“It’s about my name,” he said.

“You’re not called Mal Wacken?” I asked, confused and a little fearful.

“Yes and no.”

“Oh, God,” I said with a small groan, “is this the bit where you tell me you used to be a woman and you were once called Natalie or something? Because if it is, I’d rather continue to live my days in blissful ignorance. The op worked really well, there are no scars, all the bits work, let’s just pretend you were born a man and I’ll die a happy, untraumatized woman.”

“No, nothing like that. My name, my full name, is Malvolio.”

I laughed, he was so funny. Not many people would get that joke, but we met on the night of the twelfth.
Twelfth Night
—Malvolio. I snuggled into him as I laughed gently at his joke. “Very pleased to meet you, Malvolio,” I said through my giggles. “I’m called Steph, but you can call me Sebastian if you like women in drag.”

He sighed. “This is why Nova said I should have told you by now,” he said. “She knew you’d think it was a joke.”

The giggles dried up in my throat and my whole body stiffened in horror as I closed my eyes.
Have I just been laughing at his name? Really?
When I dared open my eyes again, and raised them to see his face, he was staring at me without embarrassment or anger. “Are you really called Malvolio?”

He nodded. “No word of a lie. My mum’s favorite play or something.” He shrugged, nonchalant and unbothered. “No one really knows why. Everyone tried to talk her out of it, apparently. Nova’s parents said they begged her not to do that to me, but she was insistent. So, I’m called Malvolio.”

“Did you get bullied at school about your name?”

“There were far better reasons people tried to bully me at school,” he said, a shadow of resentment darkening his words. “But most people called me Mal from when I was about nine onwards. Only my mum and Nova’s parents and sometimes Nova’s sister, Cordelia, when she’s trying to be funny, call me Malvolio.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wondered for a moment if I would have preferred the sex-change thing instead. At least with that, you could always hide it. With his name … Imagine the snickering in the church when we came to say our vows—there’d only be about five people
not
laughing. Not spending the rest of our natural lives thinking up
Twelfth Night
jokes. I didn’t
like to be the center of attention, to stand out or to give anyone ammunition to make fun of me. Surprisingly, I realized, in this darkened room with its soundtrack of a leaky tap and our breathing, that didn’t seem to bother Mal. He was confident in an unusual way. Not showy or arrogant, simply stable. At the core of him was stability and quiet, unshakeable strength. That was what true confidence gave you. The ability to face up to any situation because you knew without a doubt you could handle it.

Mal,
Malvolio
, could handle anything.

“So, am I allowed to test-drive this man called Malvolio?” I asked, climbing on top of him, feeling the solidity of his form under me, between my thighs.

“Absolutely,” he said with a smile. His large, firm hands ran up the sides of my body, came to rest on my breasts as I arched back and gently rocked against him, teasing him to get ready to play again.

I had to tell him about me, I knew that. I’d always known that. This thing with his name was a bonus, I realized. It showed me the measure of who he was, proved he had the strength that someone would need when I told them the truth about me.

“And sometimes, it’s not his eyes that go wandering, but his heart. And how do you stop that? How do you stop him being in love with someone else at the same time that he’s in love with you? How? By being thin? Because believe me, that doesn’t always work. In fact, it never works. So, how do you stop him splitting his heart in two and giving you only half? When you’re meant to be the one who gets it all, how do you settle for half?”

Nova. Nova. Nova.

That’s all I heard from him. Every other word that came out of his mouth was “Nova.”
Why don’t you just marry her?!
I’d been tempted to say to him on more than one occasion.

What kind of a name is Nova, anyway?
I thought as Mal and I wandered down a cobbled street in East London to the pool bar where we were meeting the amazing Nova.

Who on earth is called Nova?
If you were named that, wouldn’t you simply change it? Wouldn’t you try to fit in with everyone else and
change
it? Unless, of course, you wanted to stand out. You wanted people to remember you. You thought you were soooooo incredibly special that you had to have such a ridiculous name.

Admittedly, Mal had an equally unusual name—probably more unusual than hers—but at least he made the effort to fit in by shortening it to Mal. She … she didn’t.

I knew what she looked like. I hadn’t met her, I hadn’t seen any pictures of her, but I knew what she’d be like: tall and slender, naturally blond hair down to her waist, perfectly applied makeup. She’d wear tight jeans—Guess, because she could afford them—so they would show off her perfect bum as she leaned over the pool table to sink the perfect shot.

It was obvious from the way Mal
constantly
talked about her that he was besotted with her and that she knew it. They’d grown up together, he explained, and they’d never gone out together. But he clearly wanted her.
Clearly.
It was apparent in the way he became animated, excited,
alive
, every time he talked about her. I knew, as well, that she was incredibly confident: you didn’t have a name like hers, be a manager of a restaurant at twenty-five while finishing off a Ph.D. in psychology, without thinking you were God’s gift to the universe. And, obviously, she used Mal’s feelings to her advantage.

The only possible explanation as to why someone as incredible as him was still single was that she liked him that way. He probably told this “
Nova
” about the newest woman he’d started dating. He’d introduce her to “
Nova
” and “
Nova
” wouldn’t like the idea that she was about to be ousted as the most important person in his life, so she’d probably get dressed up in expensive, frilly bits that masqueraded as underwear, put on a raincoat and turn up at Mal’s flat. They wouldn’t even move from the corridor before she delivered her ultimatum: “Dump this woman and you get to have sex with me again.” He might even resist for a little while, try to explain that he liked this latest girlfriend, more than the others, but then she’d undo her raincoat, letting him see the black lace, barely reining in her creamy-white breasts and barely covering her landing-strip-waxed bikini area, and he’d fold like tissue paper. He’d be pawing at her underwear, ripping it off her—she wouldn’t care, she could afford lots of it—and taking her right there up against the corridor wall.