Without further ado, p.1
Without Further Ado, page 1
Dedication
To Jess Tory, whose friendship has been constant in all things.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgements
How to Be Second Best
This Has Been Absolutely Lovely
Without Further Ado Sample Book Club Questions
About the Author
Praise
Also by Jessica Dettmann
Copyright
Chapter 1
‘Stop sighing and delete that app.’
Willa looked up from her phone with a start, blinking her way back into consciousness as if a stage-hypnotist had just released her from his control. She wasn’t aware she’d made a sound. She locked her phone, but still men’s faces seemed to float in the air before her, three-quarter profiles and folded arms with bulging biceps burned into her retinas. She wiggled her thumb, which ached from swiping, and stretched out her hand to pat Billy Jowl, the grizzled Jack Russell–bulldog cross curled up beside her on the couch.
Her best friend, Kat, stood before her, holding out a steaming bowl. ‘Take it — it’s burning me.’
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Willa dropped her phone face down onto the velvet upholstery and took the bowl with both hands. Kat sat down on the other side of the sleeping dog and stirred her own bowl with her fork, mixing the meat into the pasta. ‘Voilà, signorina: Pappardelle alle Bolognese.’
‘For a change,’ Willa said. Kat cooked very good spaghetti bolognese, very often. She took a large mouthful, swallowed and said, ‘This is excellent. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look a bolognese in the eye again after dinner with Anders on Wednesday.’
‘Was the date terrible? Please say it was terrible because, although I would try, I would definitely struggle if you went and fell for someone who sounds like his name is a plural.’
‘It was terrible,’ Willa reassured her.
‘Hooray!’ Kat’s face lit up momentarily, before she wiped the smile away. ‘Not hooray,’ she corrected herself. ‘That came out wrong. I don’t want you not to find someone. I’ll just miss these stories when you do. Wait, let me sort the lamps.’ She reached over several stacks of leatherbound hardback books to flick off the overhead light and turned on three artfully placed vintage lamps. It transformed her cluttered living room, with its landlord’s-off-white walls and the thin plywood door to the poky kitchen, into a cosy den. Kat was good at lights and furnishings as well as bolognese. She tapped at her phone to start an ‘Instrumental Taylor Swift’ playlist: their usual soundtrack when relating their dating tales of woe.
Kat picked up her bowl again. ‘Right, okay. Go. Tell me the story of Anders and why that was the last we will be seeing of him.’
Willa fished out a little clump of meat and presented it to Billy, who opened one eye and lapped it carefully from her hand. Wiping her palm on her jeans, she picked up her fork and took another bite, just to make sure she really and truly was safely back on the horse, before telling Kat that ultimately, it was because on their second date Anders washed the dishes from their spaghetti bolognese in the shower — the sexy shower they were taking together — that she had decided there would be no third date with that man.
It had all been going relatively well until then. The first date — a Friday night drink at the pub that turned into going for a green chicken curry, finishing up with a decent pash under the romantic glow of a purple neon sign that read Thai Me A River while Willa waited for her Uber — was better than most and she’d had no hesitation in agreeing to a dinner at his flat the following week.
He’d cooked spaghetti bolognese, which was what men cooked on second dates when they wanted to show you they were down to earth and capable in the kitchen. It was meant to hint at a steady domestic future, even if they were no more interested in a long-term arrangement than they were in hearing the finer details of Willa’s job. They did it to give the impression they had so many other dishes in their repertoires that sometimes they just wanted to make a good old-fashioned spag bol. It generally turned out that all the other dishes in their repertoires were toast.
While no match for Kat’s cooking, Anders’ effort had been a seven out of ten bolognese, which, paired with a decent shiraz in glasses that were almost bigger than the pasta bowls, was good enough to lead to kissing, which was eight out of ten kissing, which was good enough to lead to stripping off together and heading into the shower. Something to do with a spill and a joke about cleaning them both up.
The shower had also been a solid eight out of ten, heading in the direction of nine, when, after a few minutes of kissing and giggling as the water heated up, Anders had stepped out onto the bathmat and said, with a cheeky grin, ‘Wait right here and don’t start without me.’
Willa had been unbelievably turned on, anticipating his return with more wine, or condoms, or, in an ideal world, both. But he’d reappeared with their empty bowls and dirty forks stacked inside the pan he’d cooked the sauce in, all resting inside a larger pan that was coated with stuck-on strands of pasta, caused by not stirring enough. He’d put the messy little cairn down carefully on the tiled floor of the shower recess. It was then that Willa had noticed, lined up alongside his shampoo, conditioner, body wash and shaving cream, a bottle of Lemon Fresh Fairy Liquid.
On hearing this now, Kat laughed so hard she almost snorted sauce out of her nose. She took a gulp of wine, which she also choked on. ‘He what?’ she spluttered.
‘I know.’ Willa scrunched up her face in embarrassment at the memory. ‘Kat, it was so horrible. He wanted to make the washing up part of the foreplay.’
‘Did you say, “That’s not the dirty fork in the shower I was hoping for”?’
‘Of course I didn’t. No one thinks of things like that in the moment. I was paralysed with horror. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Then what happened?’ asked Kat, wiping mascara from under her eyes, where it always migrated when she laughed hard. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Now, where were we?” — you know, all waggly eyebrows — and I asked what the fuck, in a manner of speaking, and he told me he considered washing his dishes in the shower to be the ultimate in efficient living, and that living efficiently, from both a time and resources point of view, was very sexy. And I told him no it wasn’t. I told him that seeing someone you were about to have sex with poking a bit of cooked carrot down the drain with his big toe was very much the opposite of sexy. I got out and got dressed.’
‘What did he do? Did he stay in there and wash the dishes?’ Kat wanted more. ‘He didn’t? Did he?’
Willa bowed her head solemnly and took a deep breath. ‘He did. I waited in the living room for a few minutes, because it seemed rude to actually run away, but he was still in there and I could hear, like, noises from the forks and pots on the tiles and stuff so in the end I just let myself out and walked home.’
‘Hmmm.’ Kat chewed her lip. ‘I think — and this is going to be hard for you to hear — that Anders is not the right man for you.’
Willa faked a sob. ‘You may be right. Back on the express bus to Swipetown for me.’
‘I think you’d have more luck if you were clearer about what you want,’ said Kat. ‘Did you really think Anders was a likely candidate, even before the shower?’
Honestly, thought Willa, no. She knew she wanted to fall in love and be loved. That was simple enough. She just didn’t want a love that turned her into a possession. Being tied to someone by law seemed deeply unappealing: she would prefer a love where both parties were there only because they couldn’t be without the other, and they chose to remain every day. She didn’t want a relationship where she would eventually become invisible, or bored. Her great love needed to be someone who intrigued and amused her, someone who she could wake up next to and learn more and more about, with every passing day. He must contain multitudes.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to tell from five photos and a few sentences on a dating profile whether someone was a fascinating, multitude-containing man with a boundless capacity for long-term passionate affection outside the institution of marriage and happy to live a child-free life.
Mostly Willa adhered to a mantra of ‘I’ll know it when I see it’, and she usually did know from the outset if her date had serious potential. They almost never did, but that was no reason not to entertain herself while she waited for the right one to happen along.
Outside of the apps, there were occasional prospects. She had once, fleetingly, wondered if her friend and colleague Ewan Smith might h ave had potential — until he suddenly got married. Ewan’s older brother, Dougal, whom they also worked with, was gorgeous, but not especially interested in her.
Kat was still talking about Anders. ‘Where would you put him on the Ollie-scale?’
They liked to rank people as better or worse than her ex, Ollie, but it wasn’t always easy, because Ollie had been insidious. Ollie was like climate change: for a long time it was easy enough to ignore his downsides, to not do anything about him, even though deep down she’d known things weren’t sustainable and were worsening rapidly. Until one day, instead of catastrophic floods, devastating fires and starving polar bears floating on tiny ice cubes, there were three of his undergraduate Performance Studies students asleep, naked, in their bed when she got home from work.
Ollie had been in the bed with them, but not asleep. He’d been watching an episode of MasterChef Junior on his laptop. In response to Willa’s curiosity about what was going on, he’d explained they’d been subverting the dominant paradigm by workshopping a version of Macbeth where Macbeth tries to free himself from the influence of the three witches who hold such sway over him by ‘inverting the nature of their relationship’, which seemed to Willa an inadequately persuasive line of argument to justify having it off with a bunch of nineteen-year-olds.
Willa had then subverted the dominant paradigm by snapping out of the fugue state she’d found herself in for the past four years of their relationship and telling Ollie to fuck off and immediately behaving as though he no longer existed. Before leaving for Kat’s place, since the share-house roster said it was her night to cook, she made risotto and invited the three girls to get dressed and join her and the other housemates for dinner. Ollie spent the evening having a very long bath.
It hadn’t even been their bed: it was her bed. A couple of years earlier Ollie had gradually stopped sleeping at his own share house and cleared himself some space in her wardrobe under the guise of helping her clear out a bunch of old clothes she never wore any more. She’d stopped wearing them because he’d said they made her look like a lesbian bookseller. Like that was a bad thing.
That she’d spent five years in a relationship with Ollie shocked her to this day.
Anders the bolognese drain poker was gross, but his impact was not on the scale of Ollie’s.
‘Ollie remains the one to beat,’ she said, and they ate their pasta.
‘I’ve been trying to figure out if it was worse because it was bolognese,’ Willa said a few minutes later. ‘I mean, would there have been a meal that maybe I could have coped with him washing the dishes from in the shower? How much of the horror was literally the sight of tiny bits of minced beef splashing onto his bare feet?’
‘The state of that man’s drains,’ said Kat with a sorry shake of her head. ‘Maybe it was the order of things that was the problem. If he had said he wanted to wash the dishes in the shower, because, I don’t know, the hot water in the kitchen was rubbish or whatever, and you’d gone to do that together and from there it had turned sexy — well that might have been all right, don’t you think? Sexy times coming out of something mundane can be hot. Trying to shoehorn chores into sexy times once they’ve started is not sexy and I don’t think it can ever be. You’re the expert: does it ever happen in your books?’
While Willa’s hobby in the five years since things ended with Ollie was going on dreadful dates with unsuitable men, her job was publishing romance novels. By day she was tasked with finding the happily ever afters, which she packaged up and sold to the terminally hopeful, yet by night she exhibited an uncanny knack for swiping right on men the likes of whom, were she ever to encounter them in a manuscript, would get a note like pls rework: unconvincingly stupid or Why would she, though? This man is the actual worst. Inasmuch as anyone was qualified to judge which situations were inherently sexy and not sexy, Kat was right: Willa was probably as close to an expert as there was.
She thought about which type of romance novel the dishwashing situation would have even half a chance of working in. Probably the best fit would be in a Forced Proximity story — the sort in which two characters are thrown together and can’t get away from each other and they eventually develop Feelings despite all the personality clashes that make that unlikely. Or a Workplace Romance story, where the protagonists finally overcome all their obstacles — professional rivalry, other partners, the likelihood that one or both will be fired for fraternisation — and get it on in a corner office while working late one night. Could a sex scene be improved by one party suggesting they might just reorder the PowerPoint slides for the next day’s sales presentation while their co-worker gives them a proper seeing to? No. It was very unlikely.
If a fictional hook-up wasn’t completely overwhelming, if there was any room left in either party’s mind for anything as quotidian as the washing up, then no reader would deem the scene sufficiently swoonworthy. That moment had to be everything: the heroine had to be Bridget Jones not noticing she was in her undies in a snowy street, Andie MacDowell not realising it was raining while she pashed Hugh Grant in Four Weddings, Sally telling Harry she hated him just as she figured out she meant she loved him while the clock counted down to the New Year. If there was even a chance that either of them was still thinking that their parking meter was about to run out, or worrying whether their mouth tasted like the tuna salad they’d had for lunch, then it wouldn’t work.
‘No,’ Willa told Kat. ‘Bringing chores into sex after it’s begun is terrible. It must go on our list of Things Up With Which We Will Not Put.’ This was not a real list, but she wondered if it should be. ‘Anyway, that’s the last you will be hearing of Anders, singular or plural. Can we start the movie now?’
Kat rose from the sofa and gave a little groan: the sort of groan that someone who didn’t know her well might assume meant she had a slightly achy back, but which Willa knew was a groan of mild protest about what they were about to watch. The reason it wasn’t a bigger groan was that Kat was a true and wonderful friend who wanted to continue to know and maybe one day even understand Willa, even if that meant once a year submitting to watching a particular film whose appeal Kat did not understand. That she annually tried again to figure it out was proof to Willa that there was never a truer or a better friend.
They had watched it once every year for seven years, right back to when Willa had first realised, at the age of twenty-nine, that the secret of narrative romance was right there in front of her.
Kat thought it was a joke, at first, when Willa explained that not only did she want to publish romance novels, but that she wanted to publish only those that made her feel, at some point during her first read-through of the manuscript, the same feeling of giddy elation and thrill she had felt at the age of sixteen, the first time she watched Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version of Much Ado About Nothing on DVD.
Specifically, it was the opening scenes of Much Ado that made Willa’s heart feel like it was laughing, though they always watched the whole movie. In return for Kat sitting through it, Willa allowed her to ask any questions or make whatever comments she felt necessary. And Kat had plenty to say about the film.
Willa pressed play on the remote, issuing in the plucking of a guitar, and Emma Thompson’s strong, soft, occasionally croaky voice reciting the opening lines, displayed in white on the black screen.
‘Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever . . .’
‘Is it a song or a poem?’ Kat interrupted, as always. ‘Is she singing or saying?’
‘Saying,’ Willa said. ‘It’s a poem.’
‘Then why is there music at the same time?’
‘Because it’s Italy.’
Now on the screen were beautiful people, all dressed in white and linen, picnicking and landscape painting and lounging hard on a hillside. No one even possessed a top button, much less had it fastened. Some weren’t even wearing shirts. It was fake-tanned decolletage and bare chests as far as the eye could see. The camera panned over a woman slicing a loaf of bread by cuddling it to her and hacking through it, the knife moving inexorably towards her breast.
‘KNIFE SKILLS!’ Willa shouted at the same moment Kat yelled, ‘That’s not how you cut bread, my god!’
Suddenly the music picked up and a puffed-out young man on an even more puffed-out horse rode up to announce that someone called Don Pedro was coming from Messina. All the loungers found that terribly exciting and there was much giggling and gasping. They learned that Don Pedro was bringing someone called Claudio, and that made the giggling go up to about seventeen on the hysteria scale, especially for the pretty young Kate Beckinsale character, Hero.
