You Don't Have to Say You Love Me Read online

  About the Book

  Sweet, bookish Neve Slater always plays by the rules.

  And the rule is that good-natured fat girls like her don’t get guys like gorgeous William, heir to Neve’s heart since university. But William’s been in LA for three years, and Neve’s been slimming down and reinventing herself so that when he returns, he’ll fall head over heels in love with the new her.

  So she’s not that interested in other men. Until her sister points out that if Neve wants William to think she’s an experienced love-goddess and not the awkward girl he left behind, then she’d better get some, well, experience.

  What Neve needs is someone to show her the ropes, someone like Celia’s colleague Max. Wicked, shallow, sexy Max. And since he’s such a man-slut, and so not Neve’s type, she certainly won’t fall for him. Because William is the man for her … right?

  Sarra Manning is an author and journalist. She started her career on the music paper Melody Maker, then spent five years working on the legendary UK teen mag J17, as Entertainment Editor. Sarra was also editor of Ellegirl and What To Wear.

  Sarra now writes for ELLE, Grazia, Red, InStyle, the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Stylist and the Sunday Telegraph’s Stella. Her teen novels, which include Guitar Girl, Let’s Get Lost, The Diary Of A Crush trilogy and The Fashionistas series, have been translated into numerous languages, and in 2008 and 2010 she was shortlisted for the Book People’s Queen of Teen award. Sarra’s first grown-up novel, Unsticky, was published in 2009, and her latest teen novel, Nobody’s Girl, was published in 2010.

  Sarra lives in north London.

  Also by Sarra Manning

  Unsticky

  You Don’t Have To Say

  You Love Me

  Sarra Manning

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446438961

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  A Random House Group Company

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME

  A CORGI BOOK: 9780552163293

  Simultaneously published in Australia and New Zealand

  in 2011 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Sarra Manning 2011

  Sarra Manning has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Virginia Woolf quote used by kind permission from the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  To the girl I used to be who had the good sense and the

  determination to go on a diet and stick with it.

  Thanks

  As always, thanks to Gordon and Joanne Shaw, Kate Hodges, Sarah Bailey and Lesley Lawson for loyal, long-suffering support. Fittingly I should also thank the staff of the Manor Health and Leisure Club in Fortis Green where I’ve whittled down my body, like Neve, and mended most of my plotholes while swimming lengths and going hell for leather on the cross-trainer.

  Finally I’d like to thank my agent, Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, for her wise counsel and supreme unflappability, and Catherine Cobain at Transworld for being my biggest cheerleader and silk-pursing my prose style.

  http://twitter.com/sarramanning

  Contents

  Part One: Wishin’ And Hopin’

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two: Little By Little

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Part Three: Some Of Your Lovin’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Part Four: I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Part Five: I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten

  Chapter Forty-two

  It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

  Virginia Woolf

  PART ONE

  Wishin’ And Hopin’

  Chapter One

  Neve could feel her knickers and tights make a bid for freedom as soon as she sat down.

  She shuffled to the edge of her seat so she could plant her feet firmly on the floor, straighten her back and yank in her abdominal muscles. It didn’t work. Her doubly reinforced waistband suddenly gave way and she could feel her tummy gleefully push against the seams of the vintage dress that she’d told her younger sister, Celia, she couldn’t get into without the aid of Spanx and bodyshaper tights.

  As usual, Celia had refused to take no for an answer, in the same way that she’d refused to listen to Neve’s pleas to be allowed to stay at home with a pot of tea and a good book. That was why Neve was perched uncomfortably on a neon-pink chaise longue in a hot stuffy club in Soho surrounded on all sides by hordes of fashionably dressed people who were all shrieking at each other to make themselves heard over the reverberating bass-heavy music.

  ‘I hate you,’ she hissed as her sister plopped down next to her.

  ‘No, you don’t, you love me,’ Celia replied implacably. ‘Here’s your drink. There was no way I was asking for a spritzer, so you’ll have to drink your white wine neat.’

  Neve took an unenthusiastic sip as she tried to suck in her gut. ‘When can I go home, Seels?’

  ‘I’m going to pretend t
hat you didn’t even say that,’ Celia said, eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. ‘Now, anyone here take your fancy?’ She nudged Neve. ‘I love that we’re going out on the pull together now. It’s so much fun.’

  Going out on the pull was not at all fun. And anyway … ‘I am not out on the pull,’ Neve said primly. ‘I said I wanted to try talking to single, straight men and maybe work up to a little light flirtation. I’m not at the pulling stage yet. Not for ages.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Celia said. ‘What do you think of Martyn from the subs desk?’

  Neve looked at the man Celia was gesturing towards. He didn’t look as aggressively trendy as the other men present, but he was still out of Neve’s league. But then, even the Big Issue seller they’d passed outside Leicester Square tube station seemed out of Neve’s league when she had as much experience of men as an eighteen-year-old, convent-educated Victorian girl attending her first regimental ball.

  Celia insisted that putting down her books and actually going to places where single men were likely to congregate was all it took. ‘You just smile a little, make eye-contact, think of something to say about the music or how crap the bar staff are and you’re golden,’ she’d proclaimed blithely. ‘But mostly you need to get out of the house.’

  So, here she was, out of the house at Celia’s office Christmas party. In Neve’s experience, office parties usually involved a few tired paper streamers, stale crisps in plastic bowls and one of the secretaries weeping in the Ladies. Except Celia worked on a fashion magazine called Skirt so there were tempura rolls, light installations and a bevy of beautiful girls wearing the kind of cutting-edge fashion Neve had seen in magazines but didn’t think anyone wore in real life. Also, it was the end of January but apparently the Skirt staff were too busy attending other people’s Christmas soirées in December to have one of their own.

  ‘Oh, Celia, please don’t,’ Neve begged as she realised that her sister was frantically waving at the infamous Martyn from the subs desk, who detached himself from the throng with an eager look and hurried over.

  His eagerness turned to rapture when Celia threw her arm round him. ‘Martyn, this is my older sister, Neve. She’s super-smart and knows tons of long words, you two have so much in common.’

  Martyn from the subs desk looked at Neve, then back to Celia, with disbelief. They didn’t even remotely resemble sisters. Neve was good Yorkshire peasant stock from their father’s side of the family, while Celia had soaked up every single one of their mother’s Celtic genes and was all angles and gawky limbs – and even though her face had a pinched, sharp look, that didn’t matter when she always wore an easy grin that was echoed in the sparkle of her green eyes. Her legs wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Vegas showgirl, and her long curly hair was so fiery and red, no one ever had the nerve to call her a ginge.

  Neve, on the other hand, was sturdy, that was a given. But she was soft too. Sometimes Neve felt as if everything about her was vague and indistinct, from the way she looked to the way she could always be talked out of what she thought were deeply held opinions. Celia and her mother insisted that Neve’s navy-blue eyes and straight, thick, dark-brown hair were her best features, and she had a good complexion but everything below the neck still needed a lot of work. Young men were never going to catch their breath as Neve walked past; she could deal with that, but she wished Martyn from the subs desk didn’t look quite so dismayed at the prospect of being stuck with her as Celia muttered something about going to the bar and disappeared.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ Neve said, holding out her hand. She knew she should stand up instead of receiving him like an elderly monarch but she didn’t want her tights sliding down to her knees. Of course, Martyn could always sit down but he stayed towering over her. ‘So, um, do you like being a sub-editor?’

  Martyn shrugged. ‘It pays the mortgage,’ he said. ‘I get free grooming products. That’s about as good as it gets.’

  ‘Terrible queue at the bar,’ Neve continued doggedly. She hoped that Martyn wouldn’t think she was angling for a drink, but he just nodded and continued to look everywhere but at her.

  Neve knew that her flirting skills were so non-existent that they were invisible to the naked eye, but she was beginning to get rather irritated with Martyn from the subs desk. OK, she wasn’t Celia, but if he ever wanted to get inside Celia’s electric-blue jumpsuit, it might be an idea to get her elder sister on side first.

  Still, he’d do to practise on, Neve decided. ‘What’s your favourite word, then? I think mine’s carbuncle. Or maybe bus-station. I can’t decide. Also, is bus-station all one word or should it be hyphenated?’

  Now she had Martyn from the subs desk’s full attention. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I just wondered,’ Neve said, and knew it would be bugging her for the rest of the evening until she could go home and check the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Are you enjoying the party?’

  ‘Look, Eve …’ Martyn was looking at her now with a rueful smile, his hands spread wide. Neve might not know much about flirting but she knew when her number was up.

  ‘It’s Neve,’ she corrected him gently. ‘And it’s OK. You only came over because when Celia waved, you thought she wanted to talk to you and instead you got stuck with me.’

  ‘No, no. It’s not like that,’ Martyn protested. ‘I’m sure you’re really nice. You are really nice but I left my friend getting a round and he probably needs a hand. Nothing personal.’

  Neve nodded understandingly. ‘You should get back to him.’

  ‘It was really nice talking to you, Eve,’ Martyn said, already backing away. ‘Maybe I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Sure.’ But Neve was already talking to Martyn’s back. Now that she knew she was boring and physically repulsive, even to a man who did spellchecking for a living, there was no harm in standing up and giving her tights and knickers a really good yank. Then she gingerly lowered herself back on to the sofa and stared at the toes of her black patent Mary-Janes until Celia and Yuri, her sister’s flatmate, sat down on either side of her.

  ‘How did it go with Martyn?’ Celia asked eagerly, replacing Neve’s glass, which she didn’t remember draining, with a full one.

  ‘It didn’t. Can I please go home now?’

  ‘I told Celia that it would never work with you and that sub-editor,’ Yuri said conspiratorially. Douglas, Neve and Celia’s elder brother, insisted that Yuri was the most terrifying woman in the world, which was ironic considering who he’d married. If Neve hadn’t seen Yuri in her pyjamas practically every morning as she came up the stairs to borrow teabags, milk and occasionally a clean teaspoon, she would have been terrified of her too. Neve had never met a Japanese person with an afro before, or one who sounded like Carmela Soprano, courtesy of the language school in New Jersey where Yuri had learned English. If Celia hadn’t come back from New York a year ago with Yuri in tow and Neve wasn’t Celia’s older sister, which according to Yuri automatically gave her ‘eleventy billion cool points’, Neve wasn’t sure that Yuri would ever have acknowledged her existence. Or happily list all the reasons why Martyn from the subs desk wasn’t the right man for Neve.

  ‘He drinks shandy and he sweats a lot,’ she finished scathingly. ‘Hey, Celia, Neve can do so much better.’

  ‘I just wanted to ease her in gently.’ Celia made her thinking face. ‘What about a male model? They’re not as out of reach as people think. Like, they’re dead insecure about their looks so the bar isn’t that high.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Neve said, wriggling her shoulders in annoyance. ‘Look, it was sweet of you to ask me along but I don’t fit in here. Everyone’s beautiful and cool and I feel like a dowdy maiden aunt.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Celia gasped. ‘You’re rocking the little black vintage dress.’

  ‘Not so much of the little,’ Neve reminded her. ‘I don’t feel comfortable here and that man standing by the bar has been staring and smirking at us for the past five minutes.’
>
  As Yuri and Celia looked over, he raised his glass in acknowledgement and didn’t seem perturbed that the three of them were talking about him.

  ‘He’s not smirking at us, he’s eye-fucking us,’ Yuri informed Neve.

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘Max eye-fucks everyone,’ Celia said nonchalantly. ‘He’s our Editor-at-Large, he’s a complete slut and he is not, repeat not, the kind of man to practise your light flirtation skills on, Neevy. He’ll eat you up for breakfast and still have room for a full English afterwards.’

  Although she’d been trying to ignore him, Neve squinted through the dry ice and the strobe lights to get a better look at this fashion magazine Lothario, but he was now eye-fucking two pretty blonde girls instead.

  ‘I think he was probably just eye-f— looking at you two, not me, and even if he was, I can take care of myself,’ Neve insisted, patting her sister’s hand because all of a sudden Celia was looking very hot and flustered. Though that could have been because her vintage jumpsuit was made of Crimplene.

  ‘You can’t take care of yourself,’ Celia insisted shrilly. ‘You have zero experience of men like that. You’ve led such a sheltered life.’

  ‘You do give off a virgin vibe,’ Yuri mused. ‘You’ve had sex, right?’

  Neve choked on a mouthful of wine. ‘Of course I have! Well, I think I have. I started to, but it hurt a lot and it was just horrible … God, I am not having this conversation.’ She folded her arms and fixed Celia with a stern look. Celia was the only person who ever got her stern look. ‘I’m older than you by three years, so stop trying to pull rank on me.’

  ‘Just warning you off the big bad wolf.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need,’ Neve started to say as she glanced over to the bar again to get a third look at Skirt’s infamous Editor-at-Large, who now had an arm looped round each of the blonde girls’ shoulders. ‘I’ve never seen a genuine cad in the flesh before. He should have a pencil moustache really, shouldn’t he?’