Free The Home for Broken Hearts by Rowan Coleman Page A

an interest in them only when they were in front of the camera, and the makeup-and-hair girl, a pretty redhead called Carla, dusted their breasts with glitter with all the erotic tension of basting a turkey. Even Pete seemed more interested in checking his emails on his mobile than watching what was going on.
    The real test came when, during a break, Lindsey, a twenty-one-year-old from Doncaster, came over to talk to him.
    “You’re from up north, too, right?” she asked with a pretty smile. Matt tried very hard not to look at her breasts, which was difficult, because they were big and naked. And breasts.
    “Yeah, Manchester—just got off the train this morning actually. You been down here long?” He attempted nonchalance.
    “A couple of months.” Lindsey’s voice was sweet and light, which didn’t seem to fit with her impressive physique, which Matt knew had to be natural because
Bang It!
didn’t do fake, it was magazine policy. “It’s all right once you get used to it—a lot like home really, only everyone’s got a funny accent.” Lindsey laughed and her natural breasts jiggled in Matt’s peripheral vision. He prayed to all the gods he could think of that he would not blush. Until quite recently, all the women he was really attracted to made him go red from the tips of his ears to the ends of his toes. He’d literally boil with embarrassment, finding it impossible to make conversation with a girl he liked, unable to believe that any woman would take him seriously, even as a candidate to buy her a drink, never mind as a prospective sexual partner. It had taken Matt well into his twenties before he realized that women actually liked him, and he didn’teven have to try that hard to make them. They thought he was funny, his girlfriends told him, charming, and, best of all, good-looking. They went on about his thick, blond hair and his intense blue eyes. Apparently he also had the kind of backside that a lot of women liked, and one girl had told him he had the sexiest hands that she had ever seen, although Matt failed to see how hands could be sexy.
    Gradually, Matt’s confidence had grown, and with it, his success with the opposite sex. He liked testing his luck, seeing how far he could get with girls who should, by rights, be well out of his league. He discovered that most women were accessible. All you had to do was make them laugh, look them in the eye, and really listen to them. Or at least appear to be really listening to them. He’d started writing a column about his dating exploits for the paper on which he was a music writer. It had started as a filler on the music-review pages one week when they didn’t have quite enough column inches and advertising was down. It was meant to be a one-off, but loads of people emailed in, said they’d liked it, that it had made them laugh. Before he knew it, it was a regular thing. Friday and Saturday he’d be out with his mates, looking to hook up. And on Monday he’d be writing it up for the paper. He never used girls’ real names, of course—but some of the things that happened, it was enough to make a grown man blush—only not him. Not anymore—not since the day he realized that a woman hadn’t made him blush in months and he believed that he was cured. But rarely were the girls he met already mostly naked, and he wasn’t sure if gently jiggling all-natural 34 Gs might set him off again.
    “I’m only doing this while I’m at university so I don’t end up thousands in debt.”
    “Wha… what are you studying?” Matt asked her.
    “Forensic science; I want to be like the one on
Bones,
” Lindsey told him. “So far I’m on track for a first, so not just a pretty pair, hey?”
    Matt could not have been more relieved when they were interrupted.
    “Back on set, please, girls, we need to get your school ties on,” the photographer bellowed.
    “God, I hate it when they make me wear a costume,” Lindsey joked, rolling her eyes. “Nice to meet you,