Chapter 26
26
I’m meant to be working, obviously, but instead I wait for Adam outside the bridge.
I can’t bear the idea that he’s going to get fired and I can’t just get on with work while I wait to hear.
I scroll through the selfie folder of my phone.
So many of them are of the two of us.
Me beaming so widely that my eyes have all but disappeared, Adam’s mouth pressed against my temple so fiercely that it looks like he’s trying to suck out my brain.
His chin on my shoulder on the big wheel at the Liverpool Christmas market, against a background of fake-snow-covered log cabins.
Lying on the grass, squinting against the sun, just before we noticed we were surrounded by enormous slugs.
He’s in so much of my history.
It’s hard to imagine he might not be part of my future.
The door opens and he smiles weakly when he sees me waiting.
He doesn’t seem at all surprised.
‘How did it go?’
‘I’m not fired,’ he tells me, and I sag against the wall with relief.
‘I should be,’ he says.
‘I would be. But we’re too short-staffed. ’
He blows out a breath.
‘Adam. What’s going on? ’
He shakes his head.
‘Not here.’
I nod and follow him down to his cabin.
It’s a mess, clothes piled on what was Nico’s bed and all over the floor.
‘Sorry,’ Adam says, picking up a couple of coffee mugs and taking them into the bathroom where he flushes the loo and then closes the door.
‘It’s me,’ I tell him.
‘I know how disgusting you are.’
He smiles a smile I feel like I haven’t seen for a while before his face creases again and he sits on the floor.
I kick a space through the clothes and sit opposite him.
‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘And I promise I’ll just listen.
I won’t try to fix anything. ’
‘I was a dick about that. Sorry.’
I shake my head.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come and find you that night. ’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. ’
He rubs both hands over his face.
He keeps breathing short sharp breaths through his nose and I wait, forcing myself not to speak, to let him tell me in his own time.
‘I have –’ he sucks in a breath – ‘a gambling problem.’
I have no idea what I thought he was going to say, but it wasn’t that.
Maybe that there was something wrong at home.
That his mum was ill or struggling with money, but gambling?
‘Wha . . . ?’ I start.
‘How? Or . . . I don’t know.
Since when?’ I shake my head.
‘Just . . . tell me whatever you want to tell me.’
He glances over at me then and he looks stricken.
It makes my heart hurt.
‘It started at uni.’
‘Adam. Oh my god.’
He winces.
‘I know. Can you not . . . ?’ He shakes his head.
‘I feel bad enough. Could you just listen and not –’
‘Yes,’ I tell him.
‘I’m sorry. I’m just surprised. ’
He nods. ‘I know. I’m sorry.
It started with . . .
Have you heard of matched betting? ’
‘A bit.’
Some of the boys in our year talked about it.
Once a guy called Jude who I didn’t know but had heard a bunch of rumours about, turned up at a party with a literal wedge of cash, fanning it out in his hand, flicking people with it, generally acting like a massive wanker.
Someone said he’d made it doing matched betting.
I’d googled it and read it’s basically placing opposing bets, so, say, on both teams in a football match, using the free bets offered by bookie sites.
I didn’t really understand how it worked and I certainly wasn’t going to be signing up to any bookie sites and I forgot all about it.
‘There was a club,’ Adam tells me now, ‘at uni. Started with matched betting, branched out into other types of betting. I won a bunch of money to begin with. Remember when we went to Panoramic 34?’
He’d taken me for my twenty-first birthday.
It’s one of the highest restaurants in the UK and much posher than either of us were used to.
The bill came to more than two hundred pounds and the thought of it made me feel panicky, but Adam had assured me it was fine and that he’d saved up to treat me.
‘I’d had a win,’ he tells me now.
‘I thought about telling you that night – I was kind of proud of myself, you know? I thought I was doing something clever. Once I got into it, it was so easy and it just felt like free money. I mean, it was free money at the start.’
‘What happened?’
‘The sites I’d registered for to get the free bets had online games and sometimes they’d offer free goes on them too.
Like bingo and poker.
So I started playing a few of them.
And, again, I won a bit.
And then I started losing.
So I played more to try and make back the money I’d lost.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah. It’s embarrassing.
Like, if someone else was telling me this, this is the point where I’d be saying stop now.
Get out. Forget the money you lost; it wasn’t even that much.
But I was sure I could win it back.
And then Jake suggested going to a casino and I won there too.
And then the same thing happened.
It’s why I wanted to do this. ’
Everything he’s said has shocked me, but I think maybe this shocks me the most.
‘This job?’
He nods, blowing out another slow breath.
‘I needed to get away from temptation. And also to make some money to pay people back.’
‘Adam. Oh my god.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry.
I’ve been a fucking idiot. ’
‘No,’ I say. But then I change my mind.
‘I mean, yes, you have. But also, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this before now.
I could’ve helped.’
‘How? Like, I thought about it. I thought about telling you and I know you would’ve asked Mick for money or done something to bail me out.
I know that. But then what if I’d just run it all up again?
I bailed myself out more than once and promised I’d stop, but then I’d wake up in the early hours, pick up my phone and play poker again.
It was bad enough losing my own money, I couldn’t risk losing yours or Mick’s. ’
‘But you could’ve told me that’s why you wanted to do this job. ’
He shakes his head.
‘I couldn’t. I just needed to get away. ’
‘I can’t believe I didn’t know. ’
‘I worked really hard to hide it from you. I feel like shit about that too.’
‘God.’ I can’t even think about any of that.
About how much he’s lied to me.
About how this whole thing – this big adventure, the two of us together, our future – the whole thing was a front to cover up his gambling.
That he felt like it was easier – or, I don’t know, better – to lie to me.
To get me here under false pretences.
I thought he was planning this amazing future for the two of us together when he was actually running away and taking me along for, what?
Cover? Company? Because he was afraid to do it alone?
First, I lost the future I thought we’d have together, and now he’s rewritten some of our past.