Emma Ever After: A feel-good romantic comedy with a hilarious modern re-telling of Jane Austen

That was probably a shitty thing to do and wasn’t completely fair, she thought. Gee had never lied about dating both men and women. If he had lied then Status Single would still be going. But he hated lying about himself, which she thought was very short-sighted. He could make his life so much easier if he lied or even just prevaricated more. But whoever he dated it didn’t matter because over the years the rumours about Gee and Johnnie’s relationship, ‘Genie’, ran rampant. One day they were supposed to hate each other, the next they loved each other, then they couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other. Or, the one that made them laugh the most, was the rumour that they were secretly married. Whichever version it was, everyone believed it was the reason the band broke up.

Really, it was their record company that had thrown their toys out of the pram when they realised that neither one of them was going to play into the heterosexual rock god persona.

Anyway, she shouldn’t be stirring.

But then again Johnnie had been round the house last night with his overly cute pug, Georgie. Between the pair of them they’d eaten the leftovers she had been saving to have for dinner. And Gee had let it happen. And added to that, Georgie had humped her favourite hugging pillow from the sofa.

No, she wasn’t feeling very gracious towards either of them. Well, Georgie got a pass because he was cute, and it wasn’t his fault Johnnie hadn’t had him fixed.

Emma had a flash of guilt when she thought of the way Twitter was about to explode with ‘Genie’ ship conspiracy theories all over again.

They were big boys. They’d deal with it.

She shook her head to get rid of the distraction. She was working.

Bugger these shoes, she thought as she wobbled on the slightly uneven flooring. Why did your feet have to swell in the heat? What she wouldn’t give for some comfy shoes.

Sadly, comfy shoes were fine for everyday wear but for weddings, nope. She needed to look enough like she belonged at the party without standing out.

She was the power behind the throne, she thought, the person behind the curtain pulling the levers. She could hear Gee’s voice saying, ‘the person holding the puppet strings.’

Chapter Three

An hour and a half later the photos, taken by hired paparazzi conveniently hiding in bushes not too far from the marquee, had been picked over and checked for narrative consistency. They were then sent to the tabloids and gossip sites for publication.

Emma stared at one rejected image which had her and Gee in the background, and he was leaning down to talk to her. They looked… happy, like proper wedding guests. She itched to send it to her private email.

No, that wasn’t professional.

‘Okay, Brooke, Phil,’ she said concentrating on the task at hand. ‘As you know Don Warton from the Daily Planet, has the exclusive interview on the wedding. It is as per the usual agreement Mega! has with them. I’ve already drafted your quotes which have been signed off by your teams so you don’t actually have to speak to him.’ Emma ticked off the list of things in front of her. ‘But just a quick photo as if he were a close personal friend and that’s why he’s a guest. Yes?’

Emma looked up to see the pair pull almost the same completely unimpressed face. It was the face everyone pulled when Don Warton’s name came up.

He might be the worst kind of snake but he was a Mega! paid snake.

She looked back down at the list.

‘So, other than that, we just need you to do the first dance. We’ve chosen Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud, which gives just the right forever love vibe, followed by I Had The Time Of My Life. Then you change into your going away outfits, before going outside for the photos with the car. And once you’re at the airport we have some paps there as well. We’re leaking the honeymoon destination but only when you’re in the air, then we’ll release it all with a congratulations statement from the management and a plea for privacy.’

‘But we have the beach photos booked in, don’t we?’ Brooke asked quickly. ‘I’m not wasting all that dieting and training if we don’t have shots on the beach.’

‘Babe, that could never be wasted,’ Phil cooed as he kissed her cheek. Brooke giggled.

Emma smiled.

Perfect.

She couldn’t have scripted it better herself.

***

‘The wedding looked amazing,’ Jamie said as he crowded round Emma’s desk on the following Monday morning.

It had been amazing, hadn’t it?

She’d checked the gossip sites all day yesterday, up until Gee had threatened to throw all her electronic equipment out of the flat, telling her that gloating wasn’t an attractive look on her.

‘It was stupendous,’ Emma smiled up at her new assistant. ‘It is a pity we couldn’t get you to be part of the team on such short notice. Next time though. Promise.’

Ever since her coup with Phil and Brooke, the powers that be had taken her skills seriously. Now she had a list of their clients who needed her magic fauxmance matching skills – which meant she needed help.

Jamie had come into the interview a few months ago, all gangly legs and eagerness. He’d been the fifth person she’d interviewed that day. He stood out from the cookie cutter blandness of the previous candidates. He’d tripped over the threshold of the meeting room and floundered in, and she couldn’t help but smile. He was like a puppy who was still growing into his feet.

‘If you had your pick of any artist on Mega!’s books and you were told that you had to make a publicity plan for them who would you pick?’ She’d asked her standard question. Everyone up until then had focused on the company’s highest profile clients, Breach Of The Peace, the famous boyband.

‘I’d work with the Candy Rebels,’ he said, mentioning the girl band who were beginning to make waves. Emma sat up straighter. This was at least different.

‘Why?’ She replied.

Jamie had then proceeded to tell her an amazing but completely implausible and unworkable PR and publicity plan for the four-piece band. It was genius. She could work with someone who had that much creativity. He just needed a bit of common sense and direction. She could give him that.

Before she knew it, she’d been standing up, shaking his hand and asking when he could start. Sometimes you had to go with your gut with plans. She could see Jamie as her right-hand man, taking her plans and making them reality.

And she hadn’t been wrong. It was great having Jamie working for her, no one had fitted into her life as well since Gee.

‘I think what you did was fantastic. Actually, properly, matchmaking people.’ He said

She could feel the pleasure unfurl in her at his praise. She knew she shouldn’t care what people thought but she seemed hardwired to want praise for her organisational skills.

Every time something she planned went well, she could shake off the uncertainty and take a step away from the horrible swooping feeling she’d had all her childhood that things were within a handspan of spinning out of control.

What she wanted was a smooth, clean and successful life.

No bumps, no mess. It was all in the planning.

‘Well, I have to say, Jamie, it wasn’t easy. It isn’t just taking two people and smashing them together, there is some science behind it.’

Science might be stretching it but she had done research and pulled the data and insights from the analytics team. This involved looking at the fan demographic for each of the people in the relationship, working out if they could amplify each other’s reach. It was all about making the media coverage larger, which made them more attractive for sponsorships or jobs. They had to be bigger than the sum of their parts.

‘Well I saw the figures you pulled the other week and I was thinking that we could probably design an app to help do the matches. Automate it, pull in the data – get it to suggest matches maybe? Or at least generate a shortlist,’ Jamie said, his arms waving as he got into it. It wasn’t a bad idea, she thought. They could match so many more people, much quicker. See, this was why it was great working with him, he took her ideas and thought differently.

‘I was talking it over, in a purely hypothetical way, with Rob Martin from Tech Dev, last week.’ Jamie finished. His voice hitched as he mentioned Rob.

Was he blushing?

He was.

So, Jamie had a crush on Rob. Which was sweet, she felt an urge to make Jamie’s life better, to give him a plan, almost as a gift. Everyone needed a life plan. And, okay, so she didn’t think he should be dating at this stage in his career; she couldn’t stop him, but she could make sure he was with someone who would help him.

She racked her brain. Which one was Rob? Was that the one who sat by the door on the next floor down? Well, he wasn’t bad, definite potential, he could be an asset to Jamie’s career. Oh no, she was thinking of Jason and he was definitely straight.

She tried to picture the IT team and… oh, hell no.

Chapter Four

This wouldn’t do.

She looked at Jamie, all eyes and legs. He could do so much better. It wasn’t that Rob was ugly, he was just… just… a blank. He blended into the wall, which was why she was still trying to work out what he looked like. She was sure he was perfectly nice, but he wasn’t the sort of person who Jamie should be with. He seemed to lack drive and you needed someone who met you in terms of career aspirations if you wanted to get ahead. And there was something tickling the back of her brain about him…

Oh, now she remembered, she shuddered. It had been last year, a particularly difficult meeting. There had been screaming, and Rob had stutteringly taken the blame for the loss of a whole batch of social data from the Radio One Music Awards. It hadn’t been pretty. And he’d been a complete doormat because it subsequently came out that it had been his boss who’d done it. Nope, it wouldn’t do. Rob wasn’t going to help Jamie get ahead.

‘That sounds like a really great idea,’ she said with a smile, her mind working feverishly. There was no point in going in too hard at the moment, she thought. You had to ease people into these situations. Make it seem like their idea. If she said too much against Rob at this point it would only make Jamie like him more. People rarely knew what was best for them. What she needed was to find someone more suitable, wave them in front of Jamie’s nose and distract him from Rob…

She really didn’t have time for this but she liked Jamie, and she couldn’t stand by while he made potentially disastrous decisions. She looked round the office. Who…

Max, maybe? No, he’d posted a cute coupley Instagram about moving in with his boyfriend last month.

Who else was gay? She tapped her lip.

Oh, of course, Dan Elton. He’d be perfect. He’d moved from Psyco Records’ publicity department six months ago. He was tall, camp and charming, a little too slick maybe, but he didn’t seem to have a boyfriend. And he was the kind of guy who was going places and would drag you with him.

Maybe he was a bit too competitive, Emma wasn’t a hundred percent sure he hadn’t deliberately buggered up the blind gossip she’d planted about Will Elliot and Annie Elliot on the Pride and Prejudice shoot. But he had just started the job then, so she could give him the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, Dan Elton would be perfect for Jamie.

Now she had to work out a way to make it happen.

She loved a good plan.

Chapter Five

‘Oi, Ems. Why do I have a calendar alert saying we’re having a party next weekend?’ Gee called from the front door as he walked through, letting it slam shut.

Emma flinched, which was more movement than she wanted to make in this blistering Indian summer heatwave. The fan in the corner moved the sluggish air round.

Surely, she thought, when planning a party, it was better to just do it without telling your anti-social housemate and beg forgiveness afterwards? Leave it as a fait accompli.

‘It is only a tiny party, positively bijou, more of a soiree in fact. Not much for you to worry about. A few work colleagues…’ The heat was making her less than concise.

His head popped round the door to the living room.

‘Work? Really? All those fake arse publicity types who wouldn’t know the truth or proper talent if it leapt up and bit them on the bottom?’

Here we go again, she thought, rolling her eyes to the ceiling – Gee getting on his high horse about the purity of the music, and how music wasn’t a commodity and that the business was ruined by all the lies.

‘It’s bad enough that you work for the dark side, but now you want to bring it home? You know I hate all those fake smiles and schmoozing.’

‘Gee, you work in the music business too. All you do is hang round with the same sort of people.’

‘Hold on, my sort of people are not your sort of people. Mine are the people you make stories up about. When I see them it isn’t fake, they don’t bring their pretend partners out. And no one is trying to be someone they’re not. Or making other people something they’re not.’

And there it was. Gee having a dig at her job. Again.

It always came down to this. He didn’t respect what she did, because of his experience he had painted all PR and publicity at all management companies as awful.

Things had moved on from ten years ago. He knew that.

‘Look Gee, I know you and Johnnie had a rough time of it. But Mega! isn’t like your old management company. We don’t make someone pretend to be something they aren’t, we just give them a storyline to showcase who they are in a better way, one that works with their brand strategy. And we make sure all our clients are fully bought into any of our plans. They all have a choice, if they didn’t want to do it they wouldn’t.’

‘Ems…’ Gee started.

‘No, I get it.’ She interrupted. ‘Johnnie should never have been blackmailed into having to pretend he was straight or get engaged or any of that horrible mess he went through.’

She shuddered when she thought back to the headlines after his fall from grace, when all the lies were exposed and the blame firmly shifted off the record company.

‘But if you pick it apart intellectually, you could see why it happened. There was a marketing strategy and if all the players had done their part…’

Emma couldn’t finish.

‘Still can’t say it?’ He sighed. ‘How the record company and my own management company were using my sexuality as a weapon? Forcing me to stay quiet along with Johnnie. Making us lie. But you don’t ever seem to get it.’ He sighed as if he were exhausted. Which was probably true, they seemed to have picked over the carcass of this particular argument for years.

‘But I don’t understand.’ She couldn’t help going back over it, maybe one day she’d get it. ‘What was wrong with telling a little white lie, and saying you weren’t bisexual? It wasn’t that big a deal, surely? You could’ve hidden it and then, when you needed to, told people later. It wasn’t about lying, it was more a matter of timing. Because announcing it right before the start of your US tour was, well… And you were dating that girl, whatshername, then anyway so no one needed to know.’

She felt herself wince. No one usually mentioned the tour that never was. It was amazing how many parents in Middle America didn’t want their daughters idolising a band which included two guys who weren’t completely straight.

Tickets stopped selling, and Status Single were ‘has-beens’ almost the next month and the month after that the record company quietly jettisoned them.

‘Her name was Felicity, as you well know.’ He frowned at her. So sue her if she always pretended to forget the names of his girlfriends and boyfriends. She knew it was petty but it relegated them to the insignificant pile, where they wouldn’t encroach on their life.

‘I’m not having this argument with you again, Ems. A lie is a lie. They wanted to deny my identity, is that something you can swear Mega! would never do?’

Mega! wouldn’t. She knew they wouldn’t. Not that any of their acts were LGBT, but if they were…

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said with certainty. ‘Don’t judge me or my job because of something that happened a decade ago. The business has changed, no one has a problem with an out gay artist now. Look at Sam Smith.’ She could feel her hands curl into fists.

Sometimes she wanted to punch him. He was only three years older than her but he always did this holier than thou spiel about how he knew more because he’d been in the industry for years.

There was a pause, the tension between them quivering. Was he going to walk off, with his superior face in place?

She watched as the tension flowed out of him, his wide shoulders in the grey faded T-shirt falling. He reached his hand out, and it engulfed her fist, making her feel small.

‘Ems, please.’ His overly mobile brows scrunched up in a plea, ‘I don’t want to fight.’

Damn it, why did he pull out the big guns? She was incapable of staying angry when he brought out the puppy dog look.

‘Let’s agree to disagree?’ She hated fighting with him too. ‘So, the party?’ She made her eyes big and blinked slowly. She knew she wasn’t in the same league as Gee in terms of physical beauty or charisma but…

‘Damn it, Woodhouse. You know I can’t take it when you do the Bambi eye blink.’ He reeled back from the door, throwing his arm over his eyes as if hiding from Medusa. ‘Not today, Satan,’ he howled dramatically.

And just like that the tension faded, and was blown out of the room by the fan whirring in the corner.

‘That wasn’t an answer, Knightley?’ she called into the hall.

‘Fine,’ he said coming back into the room. ‘You can have your party. But if anyone starts doing karaoke with Status Single songs, I will not be responsible for my actions.’

‘You should probably take the Brit award out of the loo and the Teen Choice surfboard off the landing then,’ she said. He threw himself on the other sofa, landing with a grunt.

Differences of opinion on her job aside, Gee was a great housemate.

Make that landlord.

She stared at him as he slumped across from her, trying to angle his body to get a blast of air when the fan rotated back in his direction.

Their house was in a terrace near Victoria Park in Hackney, and the area had gradually become full of professionals and yummy mummies the longer they’d lived here. Gee had bought it back when he’d been in the band and it was one of the few things he had hung on to, and with the music studio he’d built at the bottom of the large garden, it meant security.

‘It’s my pension,’ he’d explained to her, ‘because god knows I didn’t make much money. Enough to buy this outright, build the studio. The rest of it…’ Gee had made a whooshing gesture with his hand.

He’d told her this a few months into their first year at university, when Emma had come around to work on a project.

Compared to her cramped halls of residence, it had made Gee seem like a grown up. With a plan and a structured life. So far removed from her experience.

Any structure in her childhood she’d put there herself.

And when it was time move out of halls… well, there had been a bit of a mix up but Gee had pulled through and made one of his spare rooms ready for her. Saved her. Maybe it was weird that she was still living in the same house she had lived in all the way through uni, but it was the longest she’d ever stayed anywhere.

It gave her roots that she’d always craved.

She’d made him up the rent as soon as she’d started earning some money. Just because he could afford the house without a tenant didn’t mean she could freeload. There were some things you didn’t do and that was mooch off your famous best friend.

And now that he was one of the most sought after music engineers in the business, he didn’t really need the pension. She couldn’t help but smile, she was so proud of him.

She loved their house – the way it was spread over five floors, with the kitchen in the basement and the living/dining room running from the front of the house to the back on the ground floor; the two battered leather sofas diagonal to each other facing a massive flatscreen TV mounted above the fireplace.

Home.

It meant they had a sofa each. And whoever got into the room first was in charge of the remote control, that was the rule. If there were still wrestling matches and sofa cushions flung on occasions then that was kept between themselves and these four walls.

Filled bookshelves lined the walls either side of the chimney breast.

‘Have you been mucking around with my books again?’ Gee said from his prone position on the sofa.

Emma groaned. This happened every time she picked any book off the shelf, and she was pretty sure she’d put it back exactly where she’d found it.

‘You are so OCD,’ she said, wondering if Amazon could deliver an extra fan in the next hour? How did September end up being this hot? June had been a soggy mess.

‘Little Miss Planner has no cause to throw stones in glass houses, I’ve seen what you can do with a spreadsheet,’ he said as he leveraged himself off the sofa and moved a book from one shelf to another. He stepped back and scanned it before nodding his head.

It looked like too much effort for her, she was sweating just looking at him. And not in a good way.

‘It has been ten years, Ems. When are you going to remember I don’t like my fiction and non-fiction to get mixed up. Fiction on these shelves,’ he pointed, ‘in alphabetical order by author – not title.’ He glared at her.

‘I did that once, when I thought I was being helpful,’ she squawked, some people were so ungrateful.

‘It took me a whole weekend to sort it out.’ He pointed to the upper shelves. ‘And this is where the non-fiction goes.’

‘I know, Gee. You go through it every time.’

‘Well, I’d expect it to stick. Maybe it’s because you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction at work.’

‘Ha, very funny,’ she said. ‘Sit down, I’ve ordered Turkish because I’m not going anywhere near an oven and we’re marathoning the latest season of Ten Peaks.’

‘Ah, the rock and roll way we spend our Friday nights.’ He pulled his T-shirt up to get some of the air underneath it.

Had he been waxing his chest again, she thought?

He usually only did that when he wanted to impress someone. It always seemed to happen just before Emma would start falling over some random woman, or more unusually a man, coming out of his room, who would then use her Nutella and not replace it.

Damn.

She should be happy. She should, no, she was. Of course, she wanted Gee to be happy and if that meant dating, then so be it. Just because her plan wasn’t about prioritising dating at the moment.

Gee worked too hard, he needed someone nice. But… he would have less time for her. Instead of the two of them, there would be three. And other than when it was musketeers, Hanson or Destiny’s Child, three was a crowd.

‘Earth to Ems.’ He chucked a pillow across at her, she was too slow and it smacked her in the face. She couldn’t complain as the displaced air cooled her for an instant before it hit.

‘What?’ She said, letting the cushion fall to the floor without stopping it.

‘Turn on the TV, and there are some tissues on the side table to wipe up your drool as soon as Austen Wentworth comes on.’

‘I don’t drool.’

Gee laughed.

‘You drool just as much,’ Emma muttered as she picked up the remote and clicked onto Netflix. ‘That is the reason Harry won’t invite us to meet Austen,’ she said, mentioning their friend, Harry Harville, who also starred in the show. His husband Lewis worked with Gee.

‘No, Lewis was very clear it was because of your high-pitched squealing when you caught sight of the topless photo of Austen on his phone.’