My Secret Lover Read Online Free

concentrate on
the screen I have been privately visualizing sharing glühwein and salted nuts
with New Andy in a café at the foot of the piste, our snowboards leaning
against our banquette. Slightly disconcertingly, we are gazing out of the
steamed-up window at three little bundles of Gap fleece standing in a line on
the nursery slope waiting for their first skiing lesson.
    ‘Fine,’ I say.
    ‘Have you talked to him since...?’
    ‘I’m going to send him an e-mail.’
    ‘Use my computer, if you like.’
    ‘No thanks.’
    I’m not that keen to have Michelle
looking over my shoulder while I compose an apology to my fiancé.
    Michelle suddenly does one of those
giggles that you want to keep inside but just kind of bursts out.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Pole dancing with a crucifix!’
    ‘It wasn’t a crucifix.’ I tell her
crossly. ‘It was the war memorial. I thought it was the bus stop.’
    ‘No buses on New Year,’ says
Michelle.
    ‘In the end we flagged down a
minicab.’
    ‘How much did that cost?’
    ‘I think Andy paid.’
    ‘We shouldn’t have had that bottle of
champagne,’ says Michelle, wise now.
    ‘It was two bottles.’
    It was Michelle’s fault, actually,
because she didn’t have a New Year’s Eve Party to go to. She was the one who
came up with the idea that I’d go round beforehand and we’d pretend to be in Tonga or Moscow or somewhere where it was already midnight at six in the evening.
    ‘You were fine when you left here,’
she says, trying to duck responsibility now.
    Tiny snatches of the evening flash
through my conscious mind when I least want them to. Just when I think I must
have plumbed the depths of my embarrassment, I get a clear, bright memory of
something new and hideous.
    ‘I sang “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round
the Old Oak Tree”,’ I tell her.
    ‘Did you remember all the words?’
Michelle wants to know.
    Is it more or less humiliating that I
did? How does alcohol do that to you? You haven’t heard a song for twenty
years, you never liked it anyway, yet you find yourself belting it out to a
group of serious semi-professional musicians you’ve never even met before.
    ‘The thing you have to ask yourself,’
says Michelle, ‘is why you drink so much when you’re with Andy.’
    I hate it when she tries to get
psychological.
    Michelle doesn’t understand because
she’s pretty. She’s confident and fun and outrageous because she’s good looking
enough to get away with it. I’m confident and fun and outrageous if I’ve had
three pints of Stella Artois, or the unit equivalent (which I count as six,
although I secretly think it’s probably more like nine).
     
    I have an animated conversation about
dim sum with the minicab driver who is Chinese. As I hand him the money,
including a generous tip because he has no change and keeps saying, ‘Nice lady,
nice lady,’ he hands me a piece of paper on which he has written, if I
understand correctly, the name of a Chinese restaurant run by his family in
Soho. I clutch it like prize money.
    Andy loves Chinese but we have been a
bit disappointed with the crispy duck at our local recently.
    I shall take him into town for our
anniversary.
    Sod the anniversary, I shall take him
into town this weekend and treat him. As a way of saying sorry for my behaviour
at New Year, and to show that I am not really entertaining silly fantasies
about a bloke half my age.
    Not that he knows that bit.
    No-one does. Not even Michelle.” It
is my secret.
     
    *
     
    I open my home page.
    My mouse glides over:
    War on Terrorism latest
    clicks on: Ten hot looks for a cold climate
    I manage to resist the
    What's your Attitude to Work? Quiz
     
    There are no new messages in my Inbox.
    Click on COMPOSE.
     
    Dear Andy.
    Hi Andy!
    Hi!
     
    Never know how to start e-mails. Andy
just dives straight in as if he’s in the middle of a conversation. No, hello,
dear, or even Lydia—
     
    Dearest Andy
     
    No, because he’ll think I’m drunk if
I start getting