Our Little Secret Read Free

him suddenly, like time has just run out, like it’s the last moment on Earth. He kisses me, gasping with desire, like he’s never known desire before. His lips, his smell engulfs me, and the power. It’s a whole new kind of aphrodisiac. It hits my veins like a drug.
I made this happen
, I think, my senses screaming. It’s single-handedly the most exciting moment of my life.
    Behind me, Scott speeds up and cries out as he comes.

3
    Leticia lolls against the counter in the reception area, one long, elaborately decorated claw of a fingernail scratching against the corner of her TV magazine.
    ‘If there was a hell, do you think this would be it?’ I ask her.
    Her dull brown eyes flick up at me and then lazily over to where the fifty or so under-fives are screaming around the shabby play area in the FunPlex Dome where we both work. Why doesn’t the noise bother her? How can she shut it out?
    It’s Monday morning, but the place is still crammed with buggies and exhausted-looking mothers, who have brought their hyper toddlers to bounce in static joy down the bumpy slide. The sound is deafening, not least because the FunPlex radio-station playlist that Dean, the manager, insists upon us playing all day is thumping out Pink at full volume. I sniff the FunPlex uniform Aertex shirt I’ve had to borrow this morning, having come straight from Scott’s. It stinks.
    ‘Yeah, but’s it a job. Better than McDonald’s.’
    Sometimes Leticia’s lack of aspiration floors me. But then her bovine attitude to life appears to mean that she suffers far less angst than someone like me, who feels like I’m suffocating most of the time; like I’m caught in an hourglass, the sand slipping away beneath me.
    ‘I thought you liked kids, anyway,’ she says, accusingly, flipping over the page to study the Photoshopped ‘fat’ pictures of some poor soap star.
    She’s right. I do like kids, but this wasn’t what I imagined when I got the job here. I thought that working with children would be fun. That’s why I qualified as a nanny, after all. But nobody around here can afford a nanny, it seems. Even the footballers’ wives have been slow on the uptake to employ me, opting for Polish live-ins, who will empty the dishwasher, clean, iron and cook
as well as
doing the night-feed.
    I haven’t told Scott, but I’ve sent my details off to an agency in London, but it’s a pipe dream, of course. Could I really cut it as a nanny for a posh family in Chelsea? Would I fit in with those cashmere Fionas, with their tight jeans and designer handbags? Would I be able to drive the family Range Rover around the streets of London, to drop the little darlings at the overpriced nursery school?
    Yes, I would
, part of me thought as I sent off my application, kissing the envelope for good luck. I’ve imagined it, these past few days, spinning across the countryside to London, in a shimmering, sparkling, magical glow. But I’ve heard nothing back, and the truth has dawned. There are a million better-qualified nannies, with more experience and better references than me. Let’s face it, real-life Fionas want to be nannies themselves these days.
    So I’m stuck here in FunPlex until something happens. And please, God, let
something
happen.
    Leticia sighs and heaves her considerable bulk off the counter, as the door opens and there’s a blast of icy air and the next gaggle of women and kids pile through the door.
    One of the women in the front is new. I haven’t seen her before. I notice her because she has nicely highlighted hair and her kid in the buggy is wearing a tanktop and cords. Posh, then.
    She has tastefully done make-up and normal eyebrows, which is rare for our clientele. She has what looks suspiciously like a proper designer leather handbag on her arm, and she’s holding a large Starbucks coffee cup in her manicured hand. I watch her kid, a sweet little boy with curly blond hair, wriggle free from his buggy and make a beeline for the