Chapter 33
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
SUNDAY
No missed calls.
Pathetically, I rebooted my phone three times after I woke up in case the signal had jammed. Nothing new came in. The journalists were still circling outside.
Richard’s touching coming-out bit dinged into my feed twelve times.
The fake orchid on the table at Possimus obvious next to the blurry still of his face on all the thumbnails.
An animated GIF of his slowly creeping smile as he glanced off-screen in vomit-worthy adoration trended everywhere. Simon is remarkable.
Fuck Richard. He couldn’t even be bothered to look Simon in the eye when he talked to him half the time.
I wanted coffee.
“Wouldn’t go in the kitchen,” Matt warned me at the base of the stairs. “Cathy took the blinds, remember? Kettle’s in the living room.”
Deep cleansing breaths. In, and out.
In.
And out.
How was I the one with journalists peering in my windows?
Simon must have flooded everyone he could think of with a carefully edited damage-control feature about my tragic childhood and how I didn’t want to be abandoned by my less than warm-and-fuzzy gran.
All he cared about was protecting the bloody cover-up, not my total mortification.
But whatever he’d done, that clip wasn’t trending.
Maybe none of the flocking hoards had seen it either.
For fucksake, if he had to tell the world I was an unlovable loser, couldn’t he do it a tiny bit more effectively?
The monstrous garden table looked even more out of place with the lights off and the sun straining through the drawn curtains. Thank all the deities in the universe Cathy hadn’t decided to take those too.
“I’ll bring the fridge in later. We can do the washing up in the bath if they haven’t cleared off by dinner time.”
My ever-safety-conscious flatmate had rigged a corded extension lead from the overloaded cube sagging in the socket under the weight of all the plugs behind the telly, and it stretched like a circus high wire across the carpet.
He’d used brown packing tape to stick it to the glass top so the whole weight of the rig didn’t pull the kettle over with it.
“Oh god. I can’t live like this.” And if I made myself a coffee with that set-up, I might not have to.
I backed into the hall, looking for a way out.
But the boxes from Matt’s flatpack adventures sprawled from where we’d stacked them, their lazy slump gradually overtaking the carpet.
Evidence the recycling fairy did not exist any more than true love did was mounting.
And I gored myself on the sharpest corner – again.
By now my bruises were wearing sunglasses and making excuses about walking into doorknobs, because I wasn’t like that. Really.
Except, what if I was?
My chest tightened. I’d willfully walked into this much self-sabotage on the off-chance Simon gave a shit about me. As if pretending not to care was ever going to change his mind. What had I been thinking? I must have turned my brain off.
Enough.
No one was waiting to swoop in and save the day any more than they were waiting to magic all these boxes away. I forced myself to breathe.
Tearing the cardboard into long strips ready to wrangle into the bins out back was almost cathartic.
Ripping down runs of over-sized staples with a string of dense, satisfyingly blunt pops felt illegally good.
I went at the whole pile, until all I had left was a window-sized ragged edged, slightly bendy sheet that had wrapped the table-top.
Packing tape in hand, I dragged it through to the kitchen, and clambered onto the worktop like there weren’t half a dozen strangers peering in through the window from the pavement, trying to get a red-eyed, tail-spinning candid of me in my natural habitat.
It’d be a lot easier pretending they were invisible if the front garden was more than two feet deep.
Wrestling the sticky side of an unreasonable length of brown tape, I mangled the card against the PVC frame, blocking off the glass.
No more camera flashes. No more people.
Crack-house vibes for the win.
Matt leaned against the doorframe. “And this is so much better, is it?”
“Monumentally.” At least we had daylight coming in from the back of the house. Until they figured out about the bin alley and started leering over the back fence too.
Stomping past him, I retrieved the kettle from the sitting room and plugged it into its rightful place on the empty worktop. Next to a cluster of #Thisisnotahorse mugs.
Jeeves slash Alfred and friends goggle-eyed me until I rotated them to face the wall. I’d had quite enough judgement from horse-portraits to last through to the next millennium thank you very much.
Matt loomed out of my eye line. Uncharacteristically not passing comment. Remarkably loudly.
The kettle steamed, rocking precariously on its stand as the bubbling water thrashed against the sides. I could feel him judging me. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t jumped in with both feet.
“Don’t you have better things to do with your weekend than being barricaded in here?” Cathy would have put him up in her spare room if he’d asked. He could have avoided all the drama I’d brought down on myself. Fuck knows why he was still here.
Matt wrinkled his nose. “Like I’m leaving you alone with that lot outside. You’d inadvertently confess to single-handedly causing global warming if they suggested it’d be useful.”
“That’s not—”true. Oh fuck. Was it?
Slow motion, Matt tilted his head sideways, peering around me, confusion fogging onto his face.
“I’m not being funny,” he signed, “but Mrs F from next door’s chasing a tiny, angry-looking woman with a dye job up our garden path.”