Chapter 8 #2
I sniffed and wiped my eyes. “Okay, new strategy. How about I try not to throw everything back in your face and blame you for all my fuck ups, and you keep my phone away from me when I start to obsess?” I was trying for levity but probably failing.
“I’m not sure what you get from the next week, but you’d be helping me immensely. ”
He looked up at me, and slowly a grin crept over his face. “I get to hang out for a week with my best friend. Sounds like a win to me.”
He returned to his seat and tapped my plate with his fork. “Eat. I did not spend I-don’t-want-to-admit-how-long trying to figure out the buttons on Verity’s oven, which is like something out of fucking Star Trek, to have you ignore my very fashionable brunch.”
I sniffled a bit more. “True. You could charge ￡20 for this in Shoreditch.”
“Right?” he said.
I sighed. Perhaps this was the worst of it.
It was not the worst of it. In fact, Tuesday was much worse as several other MPs and public figures had their nudes leaked in what the media called ‘copycat attacks’.
“I have never seen Laura Kuenssberg look so awkward,” Ollie said from beside me on the sofa on Tuesday night as we finished off the bottle of wine we’d opened with dinner.
“She did have to say the word ‘frottage’ on the ten o’clock news,” I countered.
Ollie grunted in agreement. “Honestly, I thought that Yorkshire MP’s pegging habits being exposed was much worse. His wife doesn’t look the sort.”
“How do we know it was the wife doing it?” I asked.
“They issued a statement this afternoon saying it was an invasion of their privacy. If he’d been getting pegged by busty Britney from down the Coach whatever it was, it was incredibly calorific, so I was doing him a favour by eating it.
Half an hour later, the door banged again, and in came Kennedy, who went straight to his water bowl in the corner and began to lap like his life depended on it. Ollie, at a much slower pace, followed him in. I did a double take. “You did not go running in this weather?” I asked.
Ollie was bright red with sweat coming off him in rivulets.
His hair, which was the exact shade where blond turned to brown, was much darker than usual and slicked back with moisture.
His sweat-wicking T-shirt was plastered to his body from his perspiration.
His arms below the sleeve were baby pink from their exposure to the sun.
“Please tell me you were wearing sunscreen?” I asked, looking at his arms and then down at his legs, which were surely the same.
“Like I mentioned earlier, I love this weather.”
“Ollie – you’re Scottish,” I said. “Your people were not designed for summer. You shouldn’t be outside, and if you do go, you should hide under a sheet and run from shady patch to shady patch.”
Ollie scoffed, the effort of which seemed to nearly do him in. He leaned on the counter and gulped a pint of water down.
“Remember Valencia?” I told him. Our first anniversary had been around the same time as Ollie’s thirtieth birthday, and when my book was going to get its first big print run in the US market.
We’d celebrated with a fortnight in July at a luxury villa in Spain, where we sat by the pool all day, ate carbs, and tried our best to destroy the four-poster bed in the master bedroom every night.
Well, we had, until the mercury kept going up every day, and Ollie had taken against it and become a walking lobster person.
Even when he took ice-cold showers, he was bright red and looked like he’d run a marathon.
People came up to him in restaurants and asked if he needed to lie down.
Spanish grandmothers approached him as we toured beautiful old churches and tried to make him take their seats in the shade and force him to drink lemonade.
To make Ollie’s mood worse, my Slavic genes discovered a lost Mediterranean side, and I never burnt nor had a moment of discomfort the whole time, instead I got darker and darker, until by our last night I was basically mahogany.
Ollie sulkily accused me of doing it on purpose.
I’d crawled up him as he sat stoney faced on the bed and tried to entice him with my newly discovered ability to tan to place his hands all over me.
It had worked. Eventually. I don’t think he properly stopped sulking until months later, when he saw me looking at myself in the mirror and smirked over my now completely faded tan.
“I can handle heat,” he said and walked to the utility room next door, where he deposited his top in the washing machine and came back in shirtless. My eyes roamed to his large, hairy pecs, which were damp and shiny with sweat …
I apologise, reader, I got a little distracted there. I cleared my throat. Ollie knew exactly what he was doing. We both knew it. So, when he came up behind me while I sat at the table, we both knew it as well. He put his hand on my shoulder to read my screen.