After hearing from the Anna Lane Master Class in Second Dates, I’m dressed smartly in a black pleather pencil skirt (sometimes I’m glad that Anna is a bargain-hunter like me, Lela would have insisted on real leather) and a chiffon blouse the colour of milky tea. Apparently the second date is the make-or-break time and is totally different from the first date.
Anna says that Damien has already established that we get along and, by asking me out again, he’s now looking to see where a relationship between us might go. I don’t know how she knows these things, considering most of her first dates are the kind that end up in the bedroom and never progress to a second date.
“You need to wear these shoes.” Anna shoves a pair of nude-coloured peep-toes into my hands.
“Because the right impression to make for a second date is to fall flat on my face?” I question, inspecting the ridiculously high platform heel.
“You’ll be fine,” she encourages. “You have walked in heels before.”
I think of my current shoe collection. It’s mostly made up of trainers or comfy ballet pumps over towering stilettoes. “Can’t I just wear my ankle boots?”
“You mean the ones with the non-existent heel? If you’re showing off your legs, you need a bit of height to elongate them.”
I suddenly look down at my legs self-consciously, checking for any patches of hair missed by my razor (because I don’t want to turn up to the date smelling of hair removal cream, and there’s no way I can bring myself to face the pain of waxing).
“Try them on,” Anna urges, taking the shoes from me and placing them on the floor by my feet.
I slip one foot in like Cinderella, though Anna is far from my Fairy Godmother. They certainly look nice as I swing my ankle from side to side, admiring them. But standing and walking in them is a different matter. I put on the other shoe and push myself up against the sofa. After taking a few wobbly steps, I kick them off again and tell Anna that I won’t even make it to the restaurant we’re going to alive if I wear them.
“You just need some practice,” she assures me, picking the discarded heels up again. “Here, watch.” She bends down and quickly puts the shoes on herself before taking a few confident steps around our living room. “The key is to balance.”
“I don’t think I’ve got any balance.”
“Jade, you are wearing these shoes.”
I curse her silently for being the same shoe size as me; it had always seemed such a desirable quality in a flatmate before my current situation. Taking them from her again, I practise walking the way that she did. My steps aren’t nearly as confident as hers but they get a little steadier as I get used to wearing them.
“See! And you only have to get in and out of the car and to the restaurant, don’t you?”
This reminds me that Damien is picking me up and I feel a wave of nervousness. It’s not like I haven’t been on dates before but I don’t know what he expects of me. I don’t know if I’m wearing the right thing or if I’m going to say the rights things and act the right way.
And, of course, there is still the matter of Lela’s infidelity. Just because she said it wasn’t him doesn’t mean that she was telling the truth. Especially since she’s found out that I went out with him. If it is him she cheated with, would she really tell me about it? Surely not after she knows how hurt I still am over her not telling me about Ash.
But if I can’t drag it out of her, maybe a few subtle questions thrown in Damien’s direction might work. After all if it’s not him, he might have an idea of who it could be.
Damien turns up promptly at eight o’clock in his Ford Focus ST. Not that I know anything about cars, but it’s the kind of car that suits him perfectly. It’s sporty, but not too flashy.
“You look great!” he greets me. “Ready to go?”
I nod politely and slide into the passenger seat. It’s ages since I went on a date with someone who physically picked me up rather than meeting me somewhere. It might give him plus points, but it creates that awkward car silence. What are you supposed to say to someone on the way to a date? At least when we get to the restaurant, we can talk about the décor or something.
Only, the American-style diner we walk into doesn’t exactly hold the most interesting topics for conversation in its plain walls and floors. As we sit down in the red booth seating, I’m already thinking up clever ways to slip Lela into the conversation.
I get my opportunity after we’ve ordered the food when Damien brings up shopping with the other men for their wedding suits. I tell him about the final dress fitting, not that he looks interested.
“Ash isn’t wearing some awful white suit with a pink shirt handpicked by Lela, is he?”
Damien laughs. “Luckily she’s had nothing to do with our choice of wedding attire.”
“I assume you’ve seen our bridesmaid dresses?”
“Only in the pictures Lela insisted on showing me.” He pulls a face. “Is the colour any better in reality?”
I shake my head. “It’s probably worse. I don’t think Lela wants us to actually look nice on the day.”
“Nobody can outshine the bride I guess.”
Before my mind starts reading things into that statement, I force myself to ask, “What do you and the other guys think of Lela anyway? A worthy bride?”
“I tolerate her because Ash wants to be with her. I must admit, I’m sick of all this wedding crap now but I know he loves her,” Damien replies.
I smile. “She can be a pain in the arse.”
“Sure,” he says, “but it’s not me who’s marrying her.”
I closely watch his expression, looking for any signs that he might want to be the one marrying her, but his face remains neutral. “And your mates? Do they like her?”
Before he can answer, our food arrives, and I try to think of a way back onto the subject of Lela and the wedding. “How do the others feel about the wedding?” I rephrase my previously unanswered question, hoping that he won’t notice my desperation to get a response.
Damien frowns. “This isn’t a normal line of questioning for you on dates, is it?”
I hold my breath before I say anything else. I had hoped I could pull off the subtle technique, but he obviously knows that something’s not right. “I think Lela might have cheated on Ash,” I finally say. It’s not how I planned this conversation going, but maybe it’s the only way I can find out what Damien knows.
He moves his fork around his plate without eating anything. “Oh, right.”
“What sort of a response is that? Aren’t you really mad at her for doing that to him?”
He shrugs. “I saw her with some guy a couple of weeks ago and–”
“What guy?”
“I don’t know. She said his name was Josh or James or something and that he’s her ex. They’d bumped into each other apparently but it looked like more than that to me.”
“Josh?” I repeat. “You saw Lela with Josh Graves?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Is that his name, this ex?”
I nod slowly. “Josh was Lela’s first real heartbreak. The one that got away sort of thing.”
Of all the people I had considered, ex-boyfriends hadn’t even entered my head. But it makes sense. Lela was with Josh for some of the time that Ash and I were together. Ash probably even knew him, and would certainly know how serious their relationship had been. For a large chunk of Lela’s teenage years, Josh had been the groom she pictured when she dreamt up the perfect wedding.
I nibble on one of my chips, suddenly not feeling hungry anymore. “Where did you see them?”
“At the smoothie place in town,” he answers.
“Do you think they might have just met up unexpectedly? Lela does like smoothies a lot. She’s always talking about which ones are good for her metabolism or something.”
“I’m not saying they didn’t bump into each other, but it looked like something had happened between them.”
“You mean like unresolved sexual tension?”
Damien fiddles with his beer bottle on the table. “I’d say it was more like resolved sexual tension.”
“She told me she’d cheated on Ash. But she said it had only happened once. I’ve been going crazy ever since wondering about whether to tell him or not.”
“You can’t tell him!” he urges.
I stare back at him, mouth agape. “Why not? Don’t you think he deserves to know?”
“Will it do any good?”
“Maybe not,” I say. “But I don’t know if I can go to their wedding knowing that she cheated. What if he finds out afterwards?”
“Then it’s up to them to sort it out. You can’t do it now when they’re about to commit their lives to each other. Anyway, I knew about it probably before you did so don’t blame yourself for not saying anything.”
“But you didn’t really know for sure. You just saw her with Josh.”
Damien pushes his barely touched plate aside. “There’s something else I should tell you about what I saw.”
I drop my fork and lean closer across the table. “What is it?”
“I didn’t just see them together. This Josh guy kissed her and…well…she didn’t exactly do anything to resist.”
My head snaps up. “What? You knew? And you haven’t said anything to Ash?”
He holds his hands up, palms facing me. “You haven’t said anything to him either.”
“But you’ve got no intention of doing that! At least I know it’s the right thing to do.”
“Is it?” He cocks his head to one side. “Think about it, how is it the right thing to do to break up a marriage?”
“That’s not the same,” I protest. “I just don’t want Ash to make a mistake.”
“Leave it, Jade. Ash knows what he wants.”
Damien might be right about that at the moment. But Ash doesn’t know all the facts about his choice of wife just yet.