High Heels & Pink Glitter (the heavily edited version)

Stain marks

Nate didn't bother contacting Kelly again, which came as no surprise. When she'd told him her prices, his expression said it all. At a meeting with her business mentor the next day in the same coffee shop, the woman flapped her hand.

"He's a personal trainer. A one-man business. That is not your core client target, Kelly. Decent prices are there to weed out time-wasters. It's not just to pay you an appropriate amount for your time and skills."

But the encounter with Nate had triggered something else. An idea she discussed with Leon in early April when at his west end flat, when she moaned that make-up and skincare blogs and vlogs online tended to feature young and very attractive women.

Leon was a rower, and it showed—his shoulders and arms muscular and his torso patterned with lines that defined the much sought after six-pack. He'd let Kelly touch it the first time she'd seen it, her jaw dropped in awe.

"Is that real?" she stuttered, and he smirked. "Too right, sweetpea. The care he takes of his body is what marks a gay man from a straight one. Darling, I'm a slave to the gym."

She rolled her eyes and called him a stereotype, an insult that only made him chuckle. But she blamed him for her impossibly high standards when it came to the male sex. Him, and Daniel, though she hoped she'd always taken enough care to hide that embarrassingly teenage crush on her best friend's husband.

"It bugs me," she told Leon now, pulling up an example on YouTube for the two of them to watch. An earnest school-aged girl lectured her audience on how to contour your face properly.

"I don't want to be patronised by a teenager!"

"So don't be," he said, stretching back luxuriously on his grey velvet sofa and yelling for Martin, his boyfriend, to hurry up with the wine. "There are bound to be a lot of women out there who want skincare from someone who's..."

He paused, studying her face carefully as he assessed how to say the next line tactfully.

She jumped right in. "Old and raddled, and needs industrial-strength foundation and the like?"

Martin, a pixie sprite of a man with the pointy ears to prove it, reappeared from the kitchen, waggling the bottle in front of her. "If the cap fits, Kelly."

She smiled, a grin that didn't quite reach her eyes. She'd be damned if she let him know he'd got to her. Martin, unlike her female friends, didn't believe in sugar-coating anything. When he called her a fag hag, he meant it.

He sat on the floor, his legs in perfect half-lotus position, knees flat on the floor, and turned the screen towards him. The teenager finished off her oh-so-sincere lecture. Don't apply blusher to the apples of your cheeks! Don't. Don't. Don't. It makes you look like a rag doll. Urgh. Sooooooooo bad!

"I overheard and, as much as I hate to say it, Leon is right," he said. "Women in their forties spend a lot of time online looking for skincare and make-up tips. Create a blog for them and post some video tutorials. We could assist with filming."

Martin, like Leon, worked for the BBC. If anyone understood the importance of good production values, if was those two. If they helped her with videos, the footage would look fantastic, rather than as if someone had filmed themselves with a camera phone, as sirens screamed, and a dog barked in the background.

Martin never usually encouraged her, so fuelled by his and Leon's enthusiasm, she started a blog a there and then, signing up for one of the free blogging sites.

"What should I call it?" she asked, running through options with them both. Kelly's Make-up? Total Skincare? All the obvious names had already been taken.