Chapter 30
CHAPTER
THIRTY
The bathroom door fell closed on weighted hinges, and I stared at the gilded mirrors on the wall above the sinks. The wallpaper was dense with hand drawn tropical plants outlined in gold. A leopard peeked out between the leaves and if I stayed where I was, I couldn’t see my reflection.
Maybe I didn’t really exist. A proper fake boyfriend through and through. Vampires didn’t have broken noses, but maybe ghosts did.
What had I got myself into?
Leaning on the counter top – marble, obviously – I slackened my strangling tie, and it felt like giving up. I clashed with everything in here. What was the point?
The door swung again, but it wasn’t Simon who followed me in.
Richard paced over, dabbing at his front with his napkin.
“Bloody olive oil. Can’t take me anywhere.
” He barked a laugh, flipping the tap on like the excuse to follow me wasn’t as translucent as the dotted dribble on his shirt.
Could he not have waited five sodding minutes so I could finish hyperventilating?
He pumped out soap and dabbed and scrubbed, like he wasn’t going to give his laundry to someone else to sort out the minute he got back to his estate.
In the mirror, side by side with him, I absently touched my shirt front too.
This was how the film had so many people fooled.
From the shoulders down, the biggest difference between us was the expense of his suit.
When everything was soft-focus on the shapes of muscles and the tone of skin, I was his three-quarter-sized twin. That’s all I’d been good for.
Water gushed into the basin, running down the drain in a bubbling frothy-soft spurt. Totally wasted. Richard flipped the tap off.
“Bloody awkward out there, wasn’t it?” He ruffled the fall of hair shadowing his eyes, giving me a blokeish nudge.
“Honestly mate, good show trying to help out. But it’d be easier all round if you duck out and let me and Simon take it from here.
He’s still going with that journalist chap.
But all this makes more sense if you’re not trotting out sob stories about your gran, don’t you think? ” He winced. “Bit embarrassing, yeah?”
I bristled. “I didn’t say anything about my gran.” She was the last person I would ever have brought into this. “Simon did.” And he’d had no bloody right to.
“Well. Don’t worry, they’ll get bored of you very quickly now I’m back in the frame. Let us take over.” He straightened, cricking his neck as he rolled his head side to side, like he was warming up for the performance.
Fuck that. Simon should never have mentioned Gran, but I wasn’t letting Richard pretend I’d never existed. “No. It’s fine. I just need a minute.”
“Oh for godsake. Let it go.” Barely glancing at me, he smoothed his shirt even flatter along his stomach, inspecting the damp patch he’d created. “I told Simon there was no need for all this theatre, but he insisted we didn’t contradict your ludicrous attempt at an explanation.”
“What?” Every muscle in my body tightened.
“Catch up.” He straightened his tie. “I only put the film out to shake things up.”
My stomach dropped. The trees in the wallpaper started swaying. I slumped hard against the tiles next to the hand drier to hold myself up. “You leaked the footage? Yourself?”
“A little quieter, will you?” He glanced towards the door as if Luke might hear me all the way back at the table.
I didn’t drop my voice. “You nearly got Simon fired!”
Richard balled the wet napkin he’d been mopping up with, shaking his head. “Did not. You’re as bad as him, going on about reputations.”
I wanted to hit him, standing there, not even looking at me properly. Treating both of us like nothing.
“Maybe because ours matter!” We couldn’t snap our fingers and have new branding opportunities appear at our feet. One clear swing, right in the gobshite’s aristocratic nose so it looked like mine would be some kind of justice. But the fall-out from that would burn me worse.
“How could you land Simon in it, and not even tell him?”
Richard turned away from the mirror, finally looking at me.
“I never meant for the audio to get out.” Something softened his expression.
It almost looked like remorse. “It was supposed to be anonymous enough no one got pinned with it – a talking point I could use to segue into publicly coming out before the wedding. I swear I deleted the sound.”
“Bullshit.” People like him walked over everyone. He might have been taller than me and richer than me, and five times more handsome than me, but right now, I couldn’t see how anyone found him attractive at all.
“It’s not, unfortunately. Don’t know what I’m doing with computers. I’m only useful in the middle of a muddy field.”
Lazy, Sev had said. Only tick-boxed on the upload. All that tracked with a guy who outsourced uploading his own vlog entries.
“And why ruin someone’s career yourself when you can pay to have it done for you, right?”
Richard’s lips pinched thin. “I’d never intentionally hurt Simon.”
We eyeballed each other. As if I had a chance at breaking him.
But, stepping back, Richard shook his head and plucked a paper towel from the pristine ivory pile on the ledge behind the taps. He made a show of drying his hands.
“I’ve offered him a job,” he muttered. “He’s sorted, even without Mapp and Green, if he wants to be. You’re making a fuss about nothing. You know, I was stupid enough to think you might understand.”
“You’re unhinged, mate. Why would I understand any of this?”
He took aim with the scrunched up paper towel, tossing it into the wicker waste basket in a clear, easy arc. “Because you also appear to have a weakness for badly thought-through plans. And,” his voice dropped, “you’re just as stealth as me.”
My teeth gritted, jaw tense.
“I’m nothing like you.” But my certainty wobbled.
People made assumptions about the way I looked. It didn’t mean I wanted them to. With Simon, in the middle of all the lies, I’d let myself be honest. No more going along with what other people wanted just to keep the peace.
“Aren’t you?” Richard eyeballed me again.
“No.”
Whatever he’d deluded himself into thinking, we were different. He only cared about keeping his privileges intact. And between him and Simon it sounded like they had that all tied in a bow.
“Look,” Richard said, “whatever you think of me, if it didn’t come out before the wedding and Temp got a chance to say she knew – that it was all okay between us – I’d have to shut up about it forever, or Temp would get painted as perpetually the foolish woman, too weak to leave her cheating husband, which is whole lot of rot we could both do without. ”
“Why are you even getting married then?” I didn’t care about his poor little rich boy sob story.
“Because I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and she’s having our daughter, and if we don’t abide by the social lay of the land and legally and financially entwine, it all gets rather complicated with the titles and the questions and the inheritance.”
“Oh give over. It’s not Pride and fucking Prejudice.”
“No. It’s not. It’s the entire world thinking they have a right to comment on our wedding venue and our guest list and our private lives. The whole thing’s a circus, and it’s swallowing us whole.”
That, right there, was the most human I’d ever heard Richard be. This was why Simon chose to do what he did. This man with everything had got himself more trapped than I had ever been.
“Temp hates it,” Richard continued. “We’ve been turning into cardboard cutouts of ourselves ever since the bloody engagement.
And I thought – I thought if we could just shake things up a bit...
Then the footage turned up at the end of the interview reel, and it seemed like fate.
Before you two swanned in with this ridiculous plan to get me out of my own mess.
And now I’m sitting in my favourite restaurant with one of my favourite people swearing blind he was with you instead of me, because if I don’t go along with the idiocy, all four of us are trashed. ”
“Don’t blame me,” I muttered. “You dumped Simon in it without warning him. We didn’t have a choice.”
“It wasn’t supposed to touch him,” Richard shot back. “Genius plan by the way. We would have been absolutely fine if you hadn’t barged in.”
“All three of you?” How dare he blame me when it was his fault?
Richard exhaled. “Yes.”
“And what if Simon doesn’t want that?”
The dickhead actually rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to let him speak for himself?”
Ouch.
“I—”
“I think we’re done here, don’t you? For all our sake, just keep out of the way.”
The hinges on the door squealed as he shoved it open, and I slumped back against the edge of the sink as it hushed closed behind him. The bathroom was empty again. I was on my own. Like it turned out I always had been.
I didn’t go back to the table. Out there, Luke would have another go picking me apart and I’d have to listen to Simon knitting everything into the perfect excuse, and Richard confessing all. I’d have to dodge journalists snapping shots they could slap that paperbagjob hashtag all over.
I stood still so long the automatic lights turned off. Then I sat on the closed toilet seat in the propped open end stall, as the hum of chatter from the restaurant got quieter and quieter.
The light flashed on again when the door hinged wide. Simon’s ombre-toed shoes marked a sharply defined path across the tiles, and stopped in the doorway of my hideout. “Luke’s leaving,” he said, a little too loudly. “We got away with it. You can come out now.”
I forced myself to stand up.
“You should have seen him.” The spark in Simon’s eyes was back.
“He’s spitting tacks – we’ll have to brace for publication.
But Richard’s got a feature booked in with Beau Monde to get his version down formally.
That’ll eclipse Luke’s editorial temper tantrum if he does still go to press. We got away with it.”
Energised by the win, he didn’t notice I wasn’t smiling back. Normally his beaming grin would be enough to sweep me up too. Today, static buzzed in my ears from everything Simon had told Luke, and everything Richard told me.
“Why did you say all that, out there?”
“What?”
“To Luke. With the camera on. About me. About my family.”
Simon frowned. “Because it’s the truth. Are you feeling okay?”
He reached out, but I knocked his hand away before he touched me.
“It’s not though is it? None of this bloody is.
” A knot of horribleness twisted deep down in my gut.
“We didn’t say anything because it wasn’t us.
Because this whole thing is a crock of shit, and you just – filmed yourself talking about things I’ve only ever told you to try to prove to the bloody internet it isn’t. ”
“Ben…” Simon visibly stopped himself reaching for me, voice as calm as ever, because Simon Azie never shouted. “Look. You didn’t have an answer for him and—”
“I didn’t need an answer, did I? With Richard right there with his grand coming-out gesture two weeks too fucking late, telling me he’s got everything sorted.”
“Please don’t shout.” His eyes were soft, but I didn’t believe them. I should have never believed them.
This was all on me. He’d warned me he had the advantage, only I hadn’t believed him. I was the only one who hadn’t thought I was disposable to him after all these years.
“I get it,” I spat. “I see now, how you’re so bloody wonderful at this job of yours. You use everything you’ve got to make life come across how you want it to be. So why shouldn’t I be just another bit of kit in your fucking armoury.”
Simon’s face hardened, all the kindness in him blanked off completely. He looked like a stranger. And I hated it.
“You have never been that.”
“Then what the hell was that?”
“I did my job.” If that wasn’t shouting, I didn’t know the definition of the word. “You’re the one who came up with this ridiculous plan. I’ve been doing everything I can to sell it. To make it stick, against all the odds. And that’s what it took to make that vulture back off!”
“I get it. Worst idea I’ve ever had in my life. No one in the universe believes you’d want to shag me!”
“That is not what I said. You’re the only one who thinks that. All I’ve been doing is making sure Mel buys the bloody video, or you’d be hauled over the coals right along with me.”
I scoffed. “She never bought it anyway. It’s one big joke to the lot of you.”
“She bought you. She sees what we’ve got.”
My laugh twisted up my throat, coiling like razor wire. “We don’t have anything. Remember? It’s convenient sex to make Richard look better. And he doesn’t even bloody well want that.”
“That’s really what you think this is?” All the lights in the room haloed around Simon, dimming and flickering as his intensity rose. Except they hadn’t flickered at all – they weren’t – it was all the happiness sapping right out of the room.
“What else is there?” The words grazed my throat raw. “It’s a holiday. That’s what you said.”
“From me being your boss.” Urgency pitched into Simon’s voice, but I didn’t want to hear it.
“You are my boss. You’ve always been my boss. And I’ve always been your useful little tool.”
Simon’s eyes sank closed, cutting me off so I couldn’t touch him. I watched the race of his swallow down the front of his throat.
Was he thinking about everything he’d fed me?
Talking to me soft in the middle of the night, and curling in around me, and making me want to learn how to cook with him, and make him laugh until his eyes crinkled.
I’d wanted all of that, even when he told me he didn’t want my feelings.
He couldn’t have it both ways. He should be thanking me for keeping them out of his bloody way.
Simon’s smile flashed harshly false. Shields up.
“Right.” His eyes were dulled. His body hardened to sharp, tense angles. “Glad you’ve been getting what you wanted out of it all, despite everything.”
Under my feet, it felt like the room wobbled. What was that supposed to mean?
“We both were, weren’t we? That’s the whole point. No one’s got to feel guilty. There’s no problem. We’re on exactly the same page.”
Simon laughed, but he pitched it wrong, and it came out flat and gutting. “That is what I thought, yes.”