Free The Spa Day by Nicola Yeager Page B

table and rips half a dozen tissues out of a box and
hands them to me.
    ‘Thank you. I’m sorry.’
    He smiles. ‘It’s OK. I don’t mind. Careful with those;
they’re magic tissues, made by poor urchins.’
    It takes me five minutes to recover. I find myself hoping
that no one can hear me in the waiting room. What would they be thinking if
they could? Maybe they’d be thinking that they’d give the bamboo massage a miss
this time around!
    I blow my nose for the fourth time in a minute and stare at
the ground. James leans against the wall with his arms folded, staring at me.
It’s hard to read his expression, but it looks serious. I don’t think he’s
annoyed or angry, though.
    ‘How are you now?’ He grins. ‘Is it out of your system, yet?
Whatever it is? You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to throw you out. You’ve
still got forty minutes or so.’
    ‘Oh well that’s good. I like to get my money’s worth!’
    ‘Do you want to talk about it? Not for too long, obviously.
I have other clients to see this afternoon and I have to tell you I get bored
really easily.’
    Talk about it? I’m not really sure what ‘it’ actually is.
‘It’ is a whole load of things, overlapping one on top of the other. Once I
start talking, however, the whole lot spills out. All the things I’ve been
thinking about over the last couple of days. Clive’s text. My rapidly
approaching Christmas from hell. When I’ve finished, I look up at James for a
reaction. There isn’t one, at least not one that I can immediately see. On top
of everything else is the fear that I’ve just made the most awful fool of
myself.
    ‘I’m sorry to tell you all that. I know it’s just your job,
working here, doing what you do.’ What am I talking about? ‘You shouldn’t have
to listen to stuff like that. I can’t apologise enough. I’ve been stupid. It’s
just…’
    And then I spill the whole lot. Just like that. I tell him
about Clive’s text, my encroaching Christmas with his family that I’d rather
dine on slugs than go to, the extraordinary fact that with every single hour
I’ve been here, the very idea of Clive, let along being engaged to him, has got
worse and worse. It’s as if I’ve woken up from a bad dream. I tell him about
Rebecca and how I don’t want to end up like her, even though she plainly sees
it as inevitable that I will.
    He slowly exhales, as if he’d been holding his breath
throughout the whole thing.
    ‘Bloody hell!’
    ‘My thoughts exactly! Thank you for putting it into words.’
    ‘Have you ever considered Pilates for personal problems of
this nature?’
    We both laugh, and for a few seconds I feel better, like a
weight has been lifted. He looks at me carefully, as if he’s deciding what he
can say that won’t turn on the waterworks again
    ‘Well! There’s nothing I’ve ever been through that’s similar
to that, so I can’t really give you any advice based on experience. But I’ve
been out with girls who’ve fucked me over, who’ve cheated on me, who’ve treated
me in ways that I would never have treated them. I guess everyone has at one
time or another. I’ve split up with girlfriends and then regretted it
afterwards and I’ve made mistakes with girls – going out with the wrong ones,
going out with some of them long after the magic had gone for god knows what
reason.’
    Blimey – how many has he been out with? Mind you, he is very
good-looking and he’s not exactly a teenager.
    ‘The thing is, Holly, I know I shouldn’t say this to you and
you can report me and I’ll get the sack or whatever, but I feel, well,
compelled. Just listening to what you’ve been saying. It’s really none of my
business, but…’
    I smile at him. ‘Oh, go on! I’m leaving here tomorrow
morning. I probably won’t ever come back here again and I certainly won’t
report you to anybody. Unless what you say is really, really bad and
irreparably damages my self-esteem. My people will make sure