Chapter Six #2
‘We’re all happy you’re here,’ said Kristoff, wafting his hand to take in the whole group. ‘Who wants another drink?’
Lucy had barely been asleep a couple of hours before she woke up with a raging thirst, too much wine and Aperol having left her throat feeling like the lining of a budgie cage.
There’d been a bottle of water in the room when she arrived earlier, but that was long gone.
Lucy had no idea if the tap water was OK to drink – logic suggested that Swiss mountain water was probably cleaner and fresher than whatever came out of her taps in Bristol, but equally she wasn’t willing to risk spending the weekend welded to her bathroom toilet.
She pulled on a hoodie and joggers, thinking there might be some bottles in the breakfast room downstairs.
The Alpina was more of a boutique B gossip that huge would send him into meltdown.
Two pints on a Friday ensured Jonno spilled his guts on all kinds of things that Lucy shouldn’t know – the artworker on the Pukka Paws account getting fired for watching Pornhub in his lunchbreak, the data analyst who was in treatment for a gambling habit, the big row over exec bonuses that Jonno had heard about from a mate in Head Office.
They told each other everything, but in the years they’d worked together, there’d never been anything this big and potentially explosive. She sighed heavily and silently apologised to him, because on this occasion, in the spirit of the sisterhood, she was going to pretend she’d seen nothing.
Lucy hurried back to bed and hunkered down under the duvet, rubbing her feet on the sheet to warm them up as she mentally reconstructed her view of Nate.
She’d thought he was surly and dull – human wallpaper, Jonno had called him.
But now he was reborn as Sasha’s hot toyboy, leaving the party early so nobody would catch a whiff of the sexual tension and guess that he and Sasha were planning a late-night liaison.
Lucy smiled to herself, ashamed to admit that it made Nate considerably more interesting.
It’s always the quiet ones you have to watch.