Chapter Twenty-Five
Georgia should have realised that there was no way she was going to get away with turning up on Tam’s driveway unannounced, slipping into her car and escaping without interrogation.
The cul-de-sac was quiet, a black cat watching Georgia from high up on a fence as she walked down the road towards their yellow front door.
Tam and Ollie’s smart corporate cars sat side by side, blocking Georgia in.
Georgia squeezed up between them and stepped onto the front step. The front door opened before she could even lift a hand to knock. Tam stepped out, arms crossed across her stomach, wrapping the edges of a cardigan around her, one brow lifted like she’d been waiting for this all day.
“Oh look,” she said. “Road runner returns.”
“Hey.”
“You ran out of the pub like it was on fire, Hotch,” Tam said. “And you didn’t come back in, didn’t even text. You just fucked off.”
“I…” Georgia wanted to protest, but she couldn’t. She’d had the indignation leeched out of her by Caroline’s condescension and Maggie’s bald statements of fact. “I did.”
“And then,” Tam continued, “the next morning you verbally body slammed Matt on live television.”
“Yeah, I did do that too.”
“Which was,” Tam said, picking up a mug of tea from the side table beside the door and taking a sip, “for the record, very hot, but contextually confusing.”
Georgia leaned back until she was almost sitting on the bonnet of the car. The metal was cold under her jeans, biting into the skin of her thighs. She blew out a long breath, focusing on the step beneath Tam’s feet, the crack in the terracotta, and kicked at a mossy patch with her toe.
“He said something stupid, didn’t he?” Tam’s voice had taken on the indulgent tone of a fond parent. Oh, silly boy, what’s he done now? Something annoying, something thoughtless. Nothing serious, nothing to get wound up over.
Georgia winced.
Would she call it stupid?
Thoughtless, certainly. Hurtful. Arrogant.
Stupid suggested he didn’t know any better. That he couldn’t work out why some thoughts were better kept internal. Why some thoughts were better not thought at all.
“Ollie told me,” Tam said into the silence, “after you ran out, that Matt had been guy talking. Nothing bad, he said. Just blokey, you know? Didn’t give me details.”
“He said…” Georgia struggled to phrase it properly. “I overheard his conversation with the boys. Apparently every single one of them is better at rugby than me, just because they’re men.”
Tam blinked at her, stunned. “What?”
Georgia nodded. “Taller, faster, stronger. And therefore, better.”
“Well, first of all, he’s wrong.”
“Yeah.”
“And secondly, fuck him!” Tam reconsidered. “Or, perhaps, don’t fuck him.”
“I won’t again,” Georgia agreed. “He lost that option right about the time he told the whole table that he knew he was better than me, because he’d held my hands above my head while we fucked.”
Tam’s mouth fell open. “He really said that?”
Georgia nodded, grim.
“Jesus, Mary and fuck,” Tam said. “In the pub, on Sunday? Before you made him look like a dick on primetime BBC?”
“Well before. I wouldn't have had that whole meltdown, jeopardised my whole career like that, otherwise.”
Tam’s eyes widened further. “Well, then, he earned it. Deserves every single TikTok takedown.”
Georgia shrugged. “Maybe not all of them.”
Rachel had sent her several videos that pulled grainy footage of Matt refereeing, zoomed in to unflattering angles, edited to send him spiralling through portals to hell, falling through open manhole covers into the sewer.
The speed with which the internet vigilantes had found him was worrying, and the vehemence with which they crucified him was terrifying.
“I was kinda on his side,” Tam confessed. “You just fucked off, with Erin. We all kind of thought you were cheating on him.”
Georgia scoffed, rolling her eyes. “What the fuck, Tam? I’m supposed to be your best friend, and you think I’d behave like that? You’d rather take the word of some guy I haven’t even had the boyfriend/girlfriend conversation with, than mine?”
She knew she sounded frustrated, but - she was. How dare he talk shit about her, about her profession, and then make out like she was the bad guy?
“That’s not what he made it sound like,” Tam said. “He was upset that you’d just disappeared, pissed off. He said…” She adjusted her cardigan. “You don’t want to know what he said.”
“I can imagine. And you believed him, did you?”
Tam couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I just thought you were-”
“Emotionally avoidant and sexually confused?”
It was Tam’s turn to wince. “Yeah, and I’m sorry for that.”
Georgia looked down at her watch. She didn’t have time to get into it with Tam, to go over exactly how uncool that was. That her best friend, who’d known her forever, had been so quick to assume.
She’d thought Tam would be there for her, would take her side. And Georgia supposed she had, now. Now that she’d actually listened to both sides of the story.
“It’s alright.”
It wasn’t, of course, but this was the new Georgia. The palatable, smooth sailing Georgia. The one who wouldn’t ruffle feathers. She forced a grin that was likely more grimace than smile onto her face.
“Okay.” Tam gave her a tentative smile in return. “So he’s cancelled, you’re an internet hero, and I am going to kill Ollie for not telling me exactly what he said. But pre-spousal murder, would you like to stay for dinner? I’ve got fishcakes in the freezer.”
Georgia pulled in a breath. “Thanks, but I’ve actually got plans.”
Tam gave her an appraising look, working out if Georgia was lying, avoiding her. One eye twitched as a sudden thought crossed her face. “Dinner plans? With the woman you’ve been low-key obsessed with since we were sixteen?”
“Maybe.” Georgia shrugged. “She was good to me, the other night. I’d have been up shit creek without her.”
Georgia saw a split second of hurt flicker across Tam’s expression. Then she reconsidered, suppressed it, and instead her face crept into a dirty half-smile. “Well, at least we know who’s turned out to be Mark Darcy, then?”
Georgia shrugged and avoided meeting Tam’s eyes.
“I guess so,” she agreed.
“Just don’t do that thing where you kiss her and then run off into the depths of the closet again, okay?”
“That was one time,” Georgia protested. Then she winced. Okay. Maybe it was twice, if she was actually counting.
“And yet,” Tam replied, “it lives on in legend.”
Georgia rolled her eyes. “And besides, I think I’m done with men for a while.”
Tam gave her a look that was surprisingly soft under all the sarcasm, the teasing. “Good,” she said, stepping down off the step, reaching her Georgia’s arm. “Because, nice as it would be to have my friend dating Ollie’s friend and have you back in Redford, I like you better when you’re happy.”
Georgia swallowed. “Thanks, T.”
She pressed the car keys into her palm, grounding herself.
Tam grinned, back to full, irrepressible force. “Don’t make me come and pick you up mid-heartbreak with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and a playlist called Women Who Should Have Known Better.”
Georgia laughed. “You’d have to fight Rachel for the ‘I told you so’ privilege, I’m afraid.”
“A woman of taste,” Tam said, stepping back into the house. “Text me if it turns into a sleepover. Or don’t, maybe.”
Georgia rolled her eyes and opened the car door. “I won’t,” she promised.
***
Erin’s flat was, for some reason, not how Georgia had pictured it. She’d imagined something like her own - high ceilings and big windows, white, everything packed away in cupboards, its attempt at minimalist clean lines ruined by plants and the shelves of rugby trophies.
Instead, under the low-beamed ceilings of the converted pub, in the higgledy-piggledy layout, nooks and crannies, Erin had embraced dark walls and furnishings, all petrol blues and varnished wood.
Behind the shaker-style kitchen cabinets, the splashback was bare bricks, pots and pans stacked together on open shelves.
Even though December was still more than a week away, it was already decorated for Christmas, the tree hung with charmingly mismatched ornaments, blinking with multi-coloured lights.
Everything had been carefully chosen, from the dark window frames to the hanging pendant lights. Even Crumpet the cat’s bed was plush velvet, warm and inviting.
It smelt like garlic and frying herbs.
Georgia hovered in the doorway. “It’s cute.”
Erin grinned over her shoulder as she stirred the pan in front of her. “I’m hoping that’s a compliment.”
“It is.” Georgia toed off her boots. “I guess I expected something… I don’t know. More minimalist.”
“You expected me to be a steel and concrete lesbian? A high powered, alpha boss bitch who thinks comfort is weakness?”
Georgia grinned. “A little bit, yeah.”
It seemed unthinkable, now, watching Erin in her own environment, barefoot on the stone tiles, sleeves rolled up and hair scraped into a loose knot that was starting to come undone, tendrils of hair snaking down her neck, curling over her ears.
Georgia watched her from her spot leaning against the doorframe, trying very hard not to stare and failing completely.
She hadn’t imagined the flat, and she hadn’t imagined the easy way Erin moved around the kitchen, the casual competence that was stupidly hot. She opened drawers without looking, chopped tomatoes and peppers with ruthless efficiency and a knife large enough to terrify Georgia.
It made Georgia’s brain short-circuit a little.
Erin turned the heat down under the pan. “You want wine?”
“Please,” Georgia said, moving to lean on the wooden countertop. “It really is a cute place. Like, if I tried to do this, it wouldn’t be all cool and eclectic. It would just look like I’d ram raided a charity shop.”
Erin quirked a brow, reaching up for one of the fluted wine glasses on the shelf above the hob. “Thanks, I think?”
She moved to the cream-coloured fridge and bent over to pull a bottle of wine from the lowest rack.