Friends without Benefits

Excerpt

Friends without Benefits
Evelyn Fenn © 2023
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

 I bagged a table. U get the drinks LOL!!!!

Clare keyed a quick ok, pressed Send, and dropped her phone into her bag. No matter how much she liked Louisa and how much she usually enjoyed their Tuesday evening get-togethers, Clare wasn’t looking forward to tonight. Only three days before, Clare had broken up with her long-term, long-distance boyfriend, and Louisa was sure to want details.

Clare took a fortifying breath and jogged up the steps that led to the pub’s front door.

The Quill and Scholar, a favourite hangout of postgraduates and lecturers, buzzed with the after-work crowd. Although the pub appeared older than the university, it had opened less than thirty years before when it had capitalised on a fashion for bottled lagers. Since then, the Quill had moved with the times, catering for fashions for real ales and craft beers and, most recently, craft gins.

When she had been a student, Clare had eschewed the Quill’s designer labels in favour of happy hours, Boddington’s, and flavoured schnapps served in test tubes by the chain pubs a couple of hundred yards down the road. Although Clare had never developed a taste for bottled beer and she hated gin, she liked the Quill’s ambience and décor. Plus, nobody could go wrong with the house Chardonnay. Besides, these days, the kinds of places marketed to undergraduates made her feel old.

Clare loosened her scarf, shoved her hat and wrist warmers into her jacket’s pockets, and fought her way through the crowd towards the bar. The room was full of people, many of whom she knew by sight and some by name.

Mikey, an astrophysics postgraduate who moonlighted as a barman, greeted Clare, and said, “The usual?”

“Please.”

He sighed theatrically. “One of these days I’ll get you to branch out. Some of our botanicals are amazing.”

Clare nodded and, not meaning it, said, “One day. Not today.”

While she waited for her drinks, she waved at Sam, an occasional drinking buddy, who was in the throes of writing up her doctoral thesis.

Clare exchanged notes for drinks and change, and then, holding her glasses aloft, she set out to find Louisa.

Clare and Louisa had nothing in common beyond a host of shared memories from their undergraduate days and a friendship that had endured across the years. Clare’s dad had once described Louisa as having more neck than a giraffe. On another occasion, he’d said, “That lass has got more front than the esplanade at Blackpool!” Given that Louisa had, when eight and a half months pregnant, worn a white dress as she headed down the aisle for her second marriage, seeking a blessing in the church of a god she didn’t believe in, Clare supposed Dad might have had a point.

Clare had taken an excessively long time to realise that Dad had a crush on her best friend. Mum thought it was hilarious. She had tried to explain it more than once, but Clare still didn’t get it.

Even though he’d only met her a dozen times over the years, Dad often asked after Louisa. Clare would say that she was fine, and Mum would laugh, kiss the top of Dad’s balding head, and say, “You can dream so long as you don’t trade me in for a younger model or buy a motorcycle!” Then Dad would colour slightly and answer that he was only being polite and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with the mother of his children.

Clare slalomed her way through the crowd and up the wide, wooden staircase that led to the first floor, where the rooms of the converted Victorian villa were smaller, quieter, and cosier. Her favourite, a former bedroom with a large bay window that offered good views along the busy street and thus afforded great opportunities for people watching, was at the front of the building.

Today, Louisa hadn’t been able to bag seats at the window and, instead, had parked herself at a table pressed against a wall, where she was now frantically working the screen of her smartphone.

In her business suit and heavy bling, her overcoat and accessories neatly arranged on a neighbouring chair, Louisa stuck out like a gemstone among pebbles. She had allowed her knee-length skirt to ride up slightly, thus emphasising her long, slender legs, and revealing kneecaps along with a hint of thigh. Thanks to genetics, a lot of self-discipline, soft lighting, and hair dye, Louisa passed for a good decade younger than her forty-and-a-few years. Louisa also dyed her eyebrows and eyelashes; Clare hadn’t known people did such things until they’d shared a flat in their second year at uni.

Even this late in the day, Louisa’s makeup appeared flawless. She wore matching vermillion lipstick and nail polish, the latter almost certainly the result of a mani-pedi, and her eye shadow and eyeliner looked as though they had been applied by a draughtsman.

Clare slid Louisa’s usual in front of her. Louisa glanced up and gave her the barest of acknowledgements as she continued working her phone.

The immaculate nail polish glittered with reflected light as she finished typing and sent a message. “There. Done. I’m all yours.”

“Everything okay?”

“Oh, yes.” Louisa brushed Clare’s concern away. “Just a teensy crisis at work. All sorted now.”

Knowing Louisa and the general nature of her job, Clare was certain that, whatever the crisis had been, there would have been nothing teensy about it. Only major crises got escalated as far as Louisa, who had always been able to make light of the most catastrophic emergencies. Clare envied her insouciant self-confidence.

There was a pattern to their evenings together. Glass one would carry them through an exchange of war stories and a sympathetic hearing of each other’s colleague-related character assassinations. Sometime during drink two, having got all their work angst out of their systems, they would move onto subjects of greater mutual interest. Glass three was when they got to the difficult topics, the ones that laid souls bare. Today was going to be at least a three-glass evening. They wouldn’t get to—let alone through—the interrogation otherwise.

Sure enough, when there was barely an eighth of an inch of liquid at the bottom of Clare’s second glass, and Clare’s perception was blurring around the edges, Louisa asked, “How were the in-laws?”

“The…what?”

“You know. Gavin’s parents. The people you went to visit at the weekend? The parents of your SO?”

SO. Significant other.

“My insignificant other, you mean,” said Clare, doing her best to copy Louisa’s style of banter. “We split up.”

“Oh.”

There was something in the way Louisa said, “Oh,” that made Clare bristle. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well. You and Gavin. You’ve always struck me as a couple more in word than deed.” Clare tried to hide her shock at Louisa’s astute observation by gulping the dregs of her drink. “Did you even do it with Gavin? Ever?”

Clare’s silence spoke volumes.

“What was wrong with him?”

“With…him?” Clare asked. “You tell me. You set us up.”

“I don’t know him that well. So, tell me. What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. We went out a few times. We didn’t click.” She stood up. “I’ll get the next round.” If they were going to have this conversation, she was going to need that third glass, and maybe another after that.

Clare beat a retreat downstairs. As she waited to be served, she leaned on the counter, feeling unnerved. Was Louisa as perceptive when it came to her colleagues as she was with Clare? If so, that would go a long way towards explaining Louisa’s rapid rise through the hierarchy of local government.

Louisa hadn’t been marked for greatness as an undergraduate. She had seldom turned up to her nine-o’clock lectures, instead relying on Clare to take notes for them both. Clare had occasionally wondered how one-sided their friendship was, and whether Louisa was a user. However, they had stayed in touch after graduation, and a true user wouldn’t have done that.

Most of their crowd had had jobs while they were at uni. The majority had worked in bars or restaurants, preferring to work evenings and weekends to avoid conflicts with their lecture schedules.

Louisa had been different. She had made the most of her assets, which included her legs. She had met husband number one while lounging precariously on the bonnet of a high-end sports car, modelling at a motor show.

Luca had turned out to be forty-seventh in line to the throne of a minor European principality, thus qualifying him as a Z-list celebrity. That meant, as Louisa put it, she had been a Z-minus-one celebrity. From the middle of their second year on, he had lured Louisa away from college every weekend. As, in Luca’s world, weekends lasted from Thursday night until Monday evening, Louisa had become even more dependent on Clare’s notes than she had been before.

Louisa had invited Clare to the wedding. Clare hadn’t gone because she hadn’t been able to afford the airfare to Antigua. She had made a point of reading about it in Hello, though.

Louisa and Luca had divorced nine months later. Louisa had done well out of the divorce, which, by some miracle, had not been covered in any of the gossip columns. She had been unexpectedly sensible about the windfall, which she had eventually invested in the care and education of the children she’d had with her second husband, Nick.

Nick had run off with one of their nannies who, in an ironic twist of fate, also had insanely long legs and looked like a younger, softer version of Clare’s glamorous friend.

Louisa’s lacklustre academic performance had reflected a lack of focus and application rather than a lack of ability. Between divorce number one and marriage number two, Louisa had, thanks in part to a short skirt and a middle-aged letch, landed herself a management traineeship in one of the local councils. Her subsequent rise through the ranks had been meteoric.

Louisa always had one or two men snapping at her heels. She enjoyed being looked at and asked out, and she enjoyed dates and sex. Clare knew this because Louisa liked to share the details, never stopping to consider whether Clare wanted to hear them.

Clare carried the replenished glasses upstairs with exaggerated care. She misjudged the distance to the table as she set them down and sloshed wine onto her right hand. Unthinkingly, she lifted her hand to her mouth and sucked. Louisa gave her a look that fell somewhere between amusement and disapproval. If Clare had been one of Louisa’s children, Louisa would no doubt have told her off.

“Are you happy?” asked Louisa.

Wow. That wasn’t what Clare had been expecting. “What sort of question is that? Of course I’m happy!”

“Honestly? You don’t seem it.”

There was Louisa’s straightforward perspicacity again.

Clare reached out and began to pick at a beer mat. “I’m not unhappy. Therefore, I must be happy, right?”

Louisa took a quick sip from her glass. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”

“All right, oh wise and great one, how does it work?”

To Clare’s surprise, Louisa had a ready answer, suggesting that she’d given the question some thought. “The absence of unhappy doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Happiness isn’t a binary state. I prefer to think of it as more of a spectrum. As something fluid.”

Clare stared owlishly at her, too hazy to want to deal with pub philosophy.

“I worry about you,” said Louisa, trying a different tack. “You used to do things for fun. Remember fun?”

“I do things for fun! I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yes. But when was the last time you did anything else for fun? With anyone fun?”

“I go to the theatre,” protested Clare.

“With people from your work.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the people from my work.” But a voice in her head questioned whether that was entirely true. They were people she did things with, so she didn’t have to do them alone, but she didn’t hang out with them beyond talking shop in bars or coffee shops. She never invited any of them home.

“How many people know you knit?”

“A few.”

Louisa tried again. “How many people know you wrote short stories in college?”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“That’s not my point.”

“Then what is?”

“Those things. They’re a part of you. They make you who you are, but all you ever seem to be these days is Clare the Academic, and that’s all your colleagues, even the ones you do things with, see, but it’s not you! You need someone to share yourself with. You need someone to be with.”

Clare peered at Louisa and said mulishly, “How long have you been wanting to say all this for?”

“A while. But after Gavin…”

“You’re beginning to sound like my mother. ‘I want you to be happy. I want you to meet someone. I want to see you settled.’ Oh, God. You’re not going to try to set me up again, are you?”

Louisa hadn’t only set Clare up with Gavin. Before that, she had introduced Clare to Chris, and before that there had been Ian. And that was not to mention a whole raft of other men Clare hadn’t gone out with. She’d agreed to go out with Gavin more to shut Louisa up than in the hope that something might come of the relationship.

Smug couples often wanted to spread their joy onto career singletons, and Louisa was always more inclined to play cupid when she was in a relationship of her own. Louisa had been going out with Gwyn when she had set Clare up with Gavin. Louisa and Gwyn had burned hot and bright but had fizzled out fast. As far as Clare knew, Louisa had not been with anybody since.

“No,” said Louisa. “But you’re right about one thing. I do want you to be happy.”