OnlyFans
Pete is missing the pub quiz because he is taking Cara Helm out. He never misses a quiz, so it’s:
A. A surprise that he’s ditching it for a girl.
B. That the girl is Cara Helm.
Nina is taking her sixth formers to Hamilton, so this means Josh and I are doing the pub quiz alone.
We always have other people with us, so I thought this would be a cute thing for us to do, but as the questions go by, it’s becoming excruciating.
We are bickering over whether there are five or six human players on a polo team. I think six. Josh insists it’s five.
‘Fine, go with five,’ I say. ‘But I really think it’s six.’
He scribbles down five and drops the pen, and we sit in another silence. GEEZ, this is painful.
‘Shall we just go?’ I say, trying to give him an out.
‘Why would we go? We still have 10 questions left,’ he says, pretending to be unaware of the hostility.
‘Because we’re obviously not in the mood tonight.’
‘I’m in the mood,’ he says, hinting that all the hostility is coming from me. He laughs, in a slightly unhinged way. So, we carry on.
The science ones are in the bag, of course.
And Josh is confident with the geography and football questions, but any other question continues to be a frustrating battle.
How many keys are in the octave chromatic scale?
10 or 12. It was Oliver Twist that started with the line, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ No, it was Great Expectations.
Wasn’t it? We both knew the Banksy question; everyone knows he’s from Bristol.
Now it’s question 30, and neither of us has the energy to fight over the name of the film about the Watergate scandal starring Robert Redford.
‘Something about the president’s men. Shall I put that down?’ Josh mumbles.
‘May as well,’ I mumble back. He scribbles it down and passes the paper to the North London Invasion team to mark.
15 out of 30?! That can’t be right. We huddle over the paper, scanning each answer, trying to find where North London Invasion had made a mistake in their markings.
‘See, I told you it was 12 keys,’ Josh says as if he hadn’t got anything wrong.
‘And I told you it was 1975,’ I argue back.
We both were wrong on the Dickens question and the number of human players on a polo team. There are four. We also didn’t get a mark on question 30 because we didn’t put ‘All the’ in All the President’s Men. I thought this was particularly harsh of Daz.
‘Not even third place?’ Daz says when we don’t raise our hands. ‘Wow. How the mighty have fallen.’ He raises his eyebrows sarcastically and, with a smile, mutters something away from the mic.
‘I don’t want to come here anymore,’ I tell Josh.
‘No, nor do I.’
It’s the only thing we have agreed on all evening.
We get home, and Josh goes to have a shower.
I lie in bed and watch @DrLabby’s latest video, where she is recommending the best shoes for teaching.
A sponsored post by Skechers. I get bored and put it down.
Not her best video. Judging from our friction at the pub quiz, I assume that we will not break the drought tonight.
I listen out to check if the shower is still going, then I put my earbuds in and hide under the covers.
Dennis’s voice trickles into my ear. ‘515,000 mph is the speed at which our solar system orbits the centre of the galaxy. 230 million years is how long it will take to complete one single orbit around the galactic centre.’ The door opens.
I bolt up and out of the covers to see Josh in our bedroom.
He’s staring at his phone, so he didn’t catch me in the act.
‘Look what I found,’ Josh jumps onto the bed. My heart is still thumping, and so is everything below. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks, noticing my flushed state.
‘Yeah. Course. Why?’ I say defensively. He shrugs and shows me his phone. I am expecting to see another gym video of some turtle man lifting something heavy, but it’s not that at all. It’s the video of Fifi in her pink lingerie chopping onions. I almost fly off the bed.
‘Why are you watching that?’ I ask, horrified. Josh is still staring at the screen as if he’s watching a typical cooking programme.
‘It’s only Fifi,’ he says.
‘I didn’t realise you watched OnlyFans.’
‘I don’t,’ he says quickly. Too quickly?
‘I wanted to find the video of Fifi. Thought it would be funny.’ I peer at the screen again.
Fifi is cutting up the onion slowly into slices; now and again she looks up at the camera with a sultry expression.
Her nipples are more prominent on screen than they were in real life.
She holds the edge of the table and sways her hips seductively whilst pretending to consider her next move.
There is a very obvious cut, and that must have been when Josh and I came in.
She then takes a slice and puts it slowly into her mouth.
I gag and put my hands over my face. I watch the rest through my fingers.
She eats another slice and then another, and slowly but surely, we watch her eat the whole raw onion.
Josh goes on her profile, where there is a collection of her eating strange food in our kitchen in her underwear.
‘Is she struggling for money?’ I say, genuinely concerned. ‘Like, perhaps, we need to see if she’s okay.’
‘Lab Rat, she’s fine. She’s making more money than we ever will. Look how happy she looks.’ He points to a thumbnail of her smiling seductively whilst holding up a chilli. The title is ‘Watch Me Eat a Whole Chilli’. ‘See. She’s having fun.’
‘Do you think it’s hot?’ I ask.
‘The chilli, yeah, I imagine so.’
‘No, Fifi eating food in underwear?’
He pauses. ‘No, of course not. It’s weird as fuck. Night, Lab Rat.’ He turns over.
That’s a yes then.