The Spark - Jules Wake Page 0,56

wasn’t the least bit nervous about meeting Sam’s friends. Not really. Not at all. OK, a little.

‘Listen to Aunty Holly.’ She knitted her dark brows together in what was supposed to be her serious face.

‘Do I have a choice?’ I teased, trying to keep things light.

With her dark-lined eyes and heavily highlighted brow bones, she looked more like an angry marmoset. Difficult to take too seriously.

‘They will like you, Jess, because you’re lovely.’

OK, busted. I’d never been more nervous about meeting new people in my life, and it really irked me because that’s not the sort of the thing I usually worry about.

‘But what if they don’t?’ I said in a small whiney voice, which is hardly ever let out of the box. Shelley would have been shocked and then smacked me around the head. Holly was a little subtler. ‘It’s the Facebook thing that’s bothering me. What if … what if one of them is there tonight?’ I said, squirting washing-up liquid into the sink and giving those coffee cups the most thorough clean they’d ever had, before reaching for a tea towel and drying them under Holly’s impatient gaze, which was a dead giveaway because I always leave the mugs on the draining rack.

‘Jess Harper, wash your mouth out with that very soap bottle. You have to forget that. You know what’s it like on social media; people say things they’d never dream of saying in real life. And if they are, they’ll be mortified that they let themselves get sucked in. Social media dehumanises people. Those people who made those comments don’t think of you as a real person. You’re just an avatar, an image; you don’t really exist in their minds. You said yourself that you don’t even know those two girls that said they knew you.’

‘But even so, to say—’ The post might have been deleted but the fact that all those women had piled in with so much gusto … it still grated.

‘It’s mob rule, lovely. Once one person starts and another agrees, it legitimises what they say and gives others permission to be as vile. If any of those people meet you in real life, they’ll be mortified. I promise you.’ She removed the tea towel from my hands, her face breaking into a teasing grin, ‘They’ll soon realise that you aren’t anywhere close to being a skank.’

‘Thanks, Dr Freud.’ I straightened up. ‘You’re right.’

Holly clutched her throat in mock horror. ‘You mean you ever doubted?’

‘No,’ I said, with a rueful smile. ‘You’re always right, Hol.’

‘And don’t you forget it, young lady. Now, go get that man. Have a good evening and don’t spare a thought for me slaving over an essay on cognitive behavioural theories on eating disorders.’

‘I won’t,’ I said cheerfully, giving her a quick hug. ‘Thanks, Hols. See you tomorrow.’

‘This is Jess.’

How could I not fall a little bit more for a man who in three simple words managed to imply to the small group in the pub that I was something really quite special? Especially when it was the first time I was meeting his colleagues, who, from the way he’d described them, had superhero tendencies and could have done a good job standing in for The Avengers.

As he pulled up a chair for me, squeezing it into a space next to the birthday girl and another woman with incredibly twinkly blue eyes, Sam’s colleagues were already offering friendly nods and smiles before I’d even opened my mouth to utter a quick ‘Hello.’

‘Hi, Jess.’ Twinkly eyes immediately squidged up to make more room. ‘I’m Erin and this is Jen, the birthday girl, although you can probably tell from the outsize badges.’

As Sam disappeared to the bar, leaving me in the thick of it, Jen shimmied her shoulders making the two badges rattle together, one saying I am two and the other saying I am nine.

‘They didn’t have a twenty-nine badge,’ explained Jen in a strong Scottish accent, tossing back her pure white Scandinavian-princess blonde hair and giving me an angelic smile. With her clear, glowing complexion she’d have been right at home in one of those old-fashioned soap adverts.

‘They did have a thirty badge, though,’ said Erin, winking at me with a wicked smirk.

‘I refuse to be thirty in front of the children,’ said Jen with a disdainful sniff. ‘Thirty is ancient as far as they’re concerned.’

‘She’s thirty-two,’ Erin’s stage whisper wasn’t the least bit subtle, ‘but in denial.’

At which Jen grinned, her cheeks dimpling, and shrugged her shoulders.