Thirty Five
thirty FIVe
Felix
W hen I get home from meeting Christian, Ava is watching Bake Off with one eye and doom scrolling with the other.
“Hey,” she says without looking up. “How was the foreign secretary?”
“As though you care.”
“Hey, I pretend I do and that’s what matters.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, and there’s leftover roast chicken in the fridge if you’re peckish after your… exertions.”
It would be so easy to come clean. I should, I know that. But I also know that if I do it will likely become something that I don’t want to and can’t deal with right now. Not after just about stabilising my equilibrium with my form and with Nico.
I’ve been feeling so grown-up about this whole thing with Christian too. Like how, despite my misgivings, Christian is determined to be my friend even though we’re not fucking anymore. How we just had dinner like two adults who used to fuck but are staying on good terms for the kids. How he gets me. How he even gets this entire Nico thing, which I myself do not. ‘ I think you’re falling in love with him, sweetheart, ’ he’d said tonight. ‘ And yes, I know you’ll want to argue the toss about that, but I can see it. How your face lights up when you talk about him—but then, it actually always has.’
I’d love to be able to tell Ava about Nico, about how I might well be falling in love with someone, but I can’t risk anything knocking me off-course right now. But maybe I could give her part of the truth.
“So, we’re not fucking anymore,” I announce as I flop down next to her.
Finally, her eyes leave her phone. She sits up and fishes around for the remote, pressing pause on Bake Off . “Come again?”
“Christian and I aren’t fucking anymore. We ended it, it was all very grown-up.”
Ava blinks and stares. “Why?”
I shift, avoiding her curious stare. “Well, for a variety of reasons. All grown-up ones you wouldn’t understand.”
“Right…”
Picking at a loose thread on my jeans, I say, “I’ve just got a lot going on right now with the show, Ben is one loose entrechat away from kicking me out, and I need to give it all I’ve got. Believe it or not, sneaking around with a prominent member of the British government can get quite stressful. Oh, and he told me tonight that Patel is probably facing a vote of no confidence in the commons next week and they’re all looking at him, so like, he might be the next bloody PM. Which would make any kind of liaison between us impossible anyway, so yeah, it’s entirely sensible for us to just be friends. And since he’s on the board of LBC it’s also perfectly reasonable for us to have dinner together in public without people assuming we’re fucking. Which we did tonight. It’s good. It’s better.”
She nods her head very slowly a few times, taking it in. “Well, shit. That is quite grown-up of you. I’m impressed. You okay, babes?” She reaches out, settles a hand on my thigh, and squeezes softly. “Wait, is this why you’ve been a mess in rehearsal?”
“Excuse you, bitch.”
“Whaaat? You were? I mean, not now. You’re doing better, much, but yeah, it was a close thing for a couple of weeks back there.” She fake wipes sweat from her brow. “Even Nico was panicking, and that guy is like the fucking terminator.” She moves a hand over her face to demonstrate a very serious expression. It’s moderately Nico-like. “He was like ‘ what are we going to do with him, Ava? Help me, Ava, talk to him, Ava .’”
That brings me up short. “Nico spoke to you about me?”
“A few weeks ago. I told him to fuck off and that you’d find your feet again at some point, and I was correct, you did. You’ve been killing it. So, I guess that means not fucking a Tory is sort of an immediate performance enhancer. But honestly, I never understood how you ever managed to get it up for one in the first place.”
I burst out laughing at that. “Shut the fuck up. He’s the only decent one, like who’s ever lived, I think.”
The look she gives me says she doesn’t buy it.
Fuck it. “He’s… actually been helping me with rehearsal.”
She looks confused. “Christian?”
“Nico.”
She raises a perfectly-threaded eyebrow. “He has?”
“We rehearse together in the morning and after workshop.”
This appears to blow her mind. “That’s why you’re blending protein shakes in the middle of the night?! And you haven’t murdered him yet? Christ, you are growing up. I’m so proud of you, my large, adult son.” Another squeeze of my thigh this time coupled with a condescending look.
“There’s still time for murder. But yeah, he’s kind of… not as bad as I thought.”
“Yeah, he is, begrudgingly, a decent guy,” she admits.
I manage to stop myself from agreeing with her because I feel like I’ve already said too much.
“Okay, well, I’m going to have a bath.” I stand from the couch and lift my bag. “You got any plans tonight?”
“Ciaran is calling in a bit, but no.”
“Things going well with Topol then?”
“If you call him that to his face I’m going to piss in your shower, Felix, I fucking mean it,” she warns in her most Irish accent.
“I’ll be nice, I promise. Is it next weekend he’s coming over?”
She gives me a threatening look. “Yes. I was going to book a hotel. You know, just to reduce the opportunities you’ll have to make Fiddler on the Roof jokes at him.”
I chuckle. “I’ll disappear for the weekend, promise.” I can stay at Nico’s. Happily. An entire weekend of him inside me is just what I need, honestly. I hadn’t been fucked in, no—surely not — ten fucking days? Yeah, I was so going to Nico’s to get railed tomorrow.
“Where will you go?”
I shrug. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.”
“Okay, thanks, you’re a babe.” She reaches for the remote.
“What time is he calling? You wanna binge Drag Race after my bath?”
She looks at the clock. “In about ten minutes. Let’s binge Ru after then.”
I leave her to Bake Off and her fiddler and head upstairs to run my bath, dousing it with my favourite Penhaligon’s bubble bath. As it runs, I send a text to Nico.
Me:
Do you know it’s actually been TEN days since I’ve had a cock inside me?
Me:
I’ve not gone this long without cock since I was 17, Savini. A little concerned about the health risks if I’m honest.
I don’t take my phone into the bath and I’m a little surprised—and insulted—that he’s read all three of my messages and hasn’t responded. Well, fuck him. Was he annoyed about me missing practice tonight? He hadn’t seemed to be when I told him (lied to him) about why I couldn’t make it. But maybe he was hiding it well. Okay, and this was pathetic. A boy leaves me on read and I start playing the ‘what have I done wrong and why doesn’t he like me anymore’ game. No, fuck that. I don’t do that. I don’t play games and I’m not playing his. If this is a little bit of mind-gaming, then he can play by himself. But when he messages back, you best believe I’ll leave him on read for at least a couple of hours.
The following morning, I wake up to an ungodly electronic shrieking next to my head. At first, I think it’s my alarm, but it’s Saturday, and as I come more awake I realise it’s my mobile ringing. Fishing it out from under my pillow, I hold it out to see that it’s a number I don’t recognise. Fucking sales call most likely. On a Saturday morning? Pricks. I decline it and begin almost immediately to dose off before it wakes me again.
“Not interested,” I croak into the phone.
“Felix, it’s me. Where are you?” Christian asks in a very serious tone.
“Um, I’m in bed, it’s 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning.”
“Alone?” he asks in that same tone.
“Yes.”
He lets out a sharp breath and says, in a very desperate tone, “Felix.” I’m immediately alert, sitting all the way up.
“Christian, what is it? What’s wrong?” Because it’s very clear that something is. “Are you alright?”
“No. No I’m not.”
“You’re scaring me, what the fuck?”
“They know, Felix.”
My heart does a horrible stutter in my chest. I don’t have to ask, I don’t need him to clarify, because I fucking know.
“I’m coming over.” I’m already climbing out of bed. “I just need to get dressed and I’ll come—”
“Don’t be bloody absurd!” he hisses. “You can’t come here. What on earth would that solve except make it worse.”
“I don’t understand, how can they know? No one knows.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true, now is it, sweetheart?”
I stop still in the middle of my bedroom. “Ava would never tell a soul, Christian.”
“I wasn’t talking about Ava, Felix. A little over a month ago we were caught in an extremely compromising position by one of your greatest rivals. Someone who, by your own admission, you have long been convinced is trying to ruin you.”
I swallow. No. Nico wouldn’t. “He wouldn’t do this. He’s not… like that. He wouldn’t. He told me he wouldn’t and I… believe him.”
“And I believed you, sweetheart. And yet here we are. This man has quite possibly just ruined both our lives, so I suppose we were both trusting bloody idiots.”
Nico hadn’t done this. He hadn’t. Except…
Why hadn’t he replied last night? Why hadn’t he contacted me at all? Even just to see how dinner with my father had gone. He texted most nights before bed and that he hadn’t last night wasn’t exactly an indication of guilt, but it was strange.
“Let me talk to him,” I say, moving across my room again. “I’ll talk to him.”
Christian sighs sounding very, very tired. “It hardly matters now. The Independent is running it on Tuesday morning—they’re giving me Monday to respond, or rather, resign—so it will be show over by the afternoon.”
I stumble back and sit on the foot of the bed, head in my hands. He’ll never be prime minister now. The one good politician in the fucking country and they were going to ruin him. “How did you find out?”
“They called for a statement.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes, exactly that,” he says.
My head is spinning. Loud and chaotic. “Can’t we just deny it? I’ll deny it, say it’s a lie; it’s a smear campaign.”
“But it’s not a lie, is it? I try to lie as little as possible in the course of this job, Felix, it’s called honesty. Besides, they have the evidence to prove it.”
“Evidence? What bloody evidence?”
“WhatsApp transcriptions, downloaded and emailed. Years of it. Photos, too. I’m ruined, darling. Oh, look, that’s what they’ll call me in the papers: Ruined Darling .”
“WhatsApp transcriptions? How? I don’t even…”
There’s a long pause before he puts the final nail in Nico’s coffin.
“Someone has taken it from your phone, Felix,” he intones as though it’s obvious. “Someone close to you with the means and opportunity. I know Ava wouldn’t do such a thing to you, despite her feelings about me, and so by my count, it leaves only one other possibility.”
I can see the rehearsal room. My phone lying there, open so we could use my preferred playlists. I’d insisted. He’d even made a joke about looking at my gallery, that he would bet money on there being albums called ‘dick pics’ categorised by date and state of arousal. He’d made comments about Christian. Wanted me to stop fucking him; he didn’t know that I had. I think about the recent messages I’d gotten from Christian and how they could easily be misunderstood, construed to mean that we still were.
Fuck.
Nico had done this. Out of jealousy or spite or some other unknowable reason. Christ, I didn’t want to believe it. It wasn’t the Nico I’d come to know over these last months… it just wasn’t. But who fucking else?
Nico had to have done this.
And I was going to fucking destroy him for it.