Tick Tock - Time's Running Out

Tick Tock (17)

Chapter Seventeen

Jamie

“So, what are we doing?” I asked Tiff once more. She’d been on cloud nine ever since she’d started dating my brother. I was ecstatic about that – no sarcasm intended. I was really rather pleased that the two of them had decided to grow up and embrace (and admit) the fact that they both really liked each other. Finally, no one was stopping them, and they had got together. However, now that she was all loved up, she was determined to make everyone else loved up too, which wasn’t so fabulous.

Sure, I was really grateful to her – she was trying doubly hard to get me and Darren together now that her love life was going swimmingly. It was a bit ridiculous, because every so often, she’d emerge from Robbie’s room (not quite used to that, yet), and tell me something else to do. Whenever I opened my mouth to complain, she’d skip out my room and call over her shoulder in a sing-song manner: “it’s part of the makeover!”

I mean, honestly, it was like I was doing another subject at school! It was ridiculous – like I didn’t have enough on my plate, what with the new subjects I was doing that could, potentially, get me into university in two years time.

I was a ball of annoyingness.

“We’re de-stressing today,” Tiff told me.

Pah, like I believed that. The way she said it suggested we were going for a massage or something. But no way was that going to happen.

“We’re going to work on your male interactions,” she told me. Yep, I thought it was going to suck. “You need to be flirting with lots of guys, otherwise Darren will clearly see you’re trying to get in his trousers, rather than other blokes, and we want to be blasé about your epic crush on him. Geddit?”

“So…” I said slowly, “I need to be a slut in relation to every guy I come across?”

“By Jove, I think she’s got it!” Tiff said in a fake posh English accent.

“Cool,” I said, nodding, but slightly unsure. “So, how are you going to teach me?”

“By making you interact with a male!”

Oh, dear.

* * *

“No,” I said, resisting. “No, no, no, no, no!”

She wanted me to interact with Darren!

“How is this beneficial?! He’s going to see how dorky I am right now, and then it’ll be no surprise when I become an epic flirt!” I told her. “This is not a good idea!”

“Look, it’s going to let Darren see you in another light. And it means you get up close and personal with him, and so you’re less likely to wig out when you put these techniques into real practice with him!”

I moaned and whinged for another ten minutes, but to no avail. Clearly, this was going to happen, whether I liked it or not. She actually started to physically drag me up the path to Chelsea and Darren’s shared home. As she rung the bell, I was still trying to escape from her clutches.

When the door opened, Darren found me faced in the opposite direction from the door with Tiff hanging on to the bottom of my cardigan for dear life, trying to haul me back.

“You look excited about this,” Darren laughed. In response, I grumbled something incoherent and padded through the doorway, accidentally brushing past Darren as I did so.  “If I didn’t know you better, Jamie, I’d think you weren’t excited about spending the afternoon with me!”