Twenty-Eight
She hadn’t just let it happen. She’d initiated it.
She had opened the curtain and flung herself at Ashley with force.
It was a tactical error of massive proportions.
It made her stomach feel hollow and weirdly hot now, so she decided to simply pretend it belonged to a different timeline.
Because it did. It was a hangover from another time.
It had nothing to do with now. They were business partners in a fake-relationship scheme designed to save Ashley’s pop career and get Molly into an audition room. That was it.
Yes, right, the audition of Molly’s career. That was something to think about, wasn’t it? The big one. Eyes on the prize, Sullivan.
She was up for the role of Clare, the younger of the money/garment laundering sisters. The scene she had was Clare breaking up with a bloke named Gary in the middle of a crowded pub because he’d managed to lose their deposit on a flat.
Molly tried the line out loud. ‘I’m not doing this, Gary. I’m just not.’
It sounded flat. It sounded like a woman reading words off a piece of paper.
She was getting nowhere. But she needed to look completely focused when she next saw Ashley.
Otherwise, there would be questions, and questions led to talking about feelings, which Molly was buggered if she was doing.
She wasn’t letting Ashley clear her conscience with the old, ‘Hey, I want you to know you mean a lot to me. As a friend.’
Fuck that.
The bathroom door clicked open and Molly, despite her firm intention not to meet Ashley’s eye, immediately looked up.
Ashley walked out wearing an oversized black tour hoodie with her own face on it and a faint smudge of toothpaste near the collar.
Her blonde hair was tidy now, completely stripped of the sex ruffle Molly had given it.
‘Alright?’ Ashley said.
‘Fine,’ Molly said, keeping her eyes glued to the script. ‘Just rehearsing. After a fashion. Where’s the trio of tits?’
‘God knows.’ Ashley padded down the aisle to the bus kitchen area, picked up the kettle, shook it to check the water level, and plugged it in. ‘How’s it going?’ she called back down the corridor.
‘Great. Perfectly. I’m just preparing to shit the bed at this audition. They were right to resist me. I can’t do the drama part. I’m a court jester. Hey, do you think it’s easy to get started as a children’s party entertainer? Or do you think it’s who you know?’
‘You’re going to be fine.’ Ashley filled two mugs from the kettle, watching her across the narrow space.
The silence between them grew heavy, full of the unspoken weight of the previous night’s bunk-creaking.
Ashley cleared her throat, a small, awkward sound. ‘Look—’
‘I need a reader,’ Molly interrupted, her voice a bit too loud, a bit too fast. ‘For the scene. If you’re not doing anything right now.’
Ashley walked back down the aisle and stood right next to Molly’s bunk. Molly realised Ashley was holding out a steaming mug of coffee for her as well as her own. She refused to be touched by the gesture.
‘I can read. Gimme the pages,’ Ashley said.
Molly swung her legs off the edge of the mattress, letting her feet dangle over the carpet as she swapped her script pages for the coffee with a muttered thanks.
She took a hot, deliberate sip, letting the warmth hit her throat while Ashley leaned against the wooden frame of the bunk across the narrow gap, squinting down at the paper.
‘Am I Gary?’ Ashley asked.
‘Yes. You’re Gary. I start.’ Molly took another sip of coffee, lubing her throat. ‘I’m not doing this, Gary. I’m just not.’
Ashley looked at the script, her delivery completely flat, like a child reading in assembly. ‘What do you mean you’re not doing it? We’ve already put the holding fee down.’
‘But the rent is gone, Gary. You bet it on the football.’ Molly sighed. ‘You always do this. You make a massive mess, and then you look at me like I’m the one who broke the Hoover.’
Ashley lowered the papers slightly. ‘Gary doesn’t say anything about a Hoover here.’
‘I’m improvising because I don’t know the lines yet,’ Molly snapped before taking another sharp gulp of coffee. ‘I just need to find tone. Just read your line.’
Ashley read from the page. ‘Fine. “It was an accumulator, Clare. It would’ve paid out three grand if United hadn’t bottled the ninety-fifth minute. I did it for us.”’
‘You did it for you,’ Molly said. The script said she was supposed to turn away here, but that seemed weird, so she stayed locked on Ashley.
And suddenly, she found it. The feeling.
Then she heard emotion coming out of her mouth.
‘You always do things for you, and you pretend it’s all for me.
Like I’m supposed to be grateful that you’ve ruined my life. ’
Ashley’s head came up. ‘Is this still the scene?’
Molly was pissed off. She’d been in the moment, and Ashley had broken it. ‘Yes, it’s the scene.’
‘Because you’re looking at me like… you’re looking at me,’ Ashley said quietly.
‘I’m trying to get a job,’ Molly said, her throat tightening uncomfortably. She set her coffee mug down heavily on the tiny wooden shelf inside her bunk. ‘I’m trying to rehearse a scene about a woman whose boyfriend is an irresponsible idiot. It has nothing to do with anything else.’
‘You started it last night, Molly,’ Ashley said, her voice dropping an octave. ‘You came to my bunk. And now you’re acting like I’ve…’ She stopped, unable to put her finger on exactly what Molly’s unspoken accusation was.
‘It was just, just, just…’ Molly said quickly. She snatched the script from Ashley and rolled it into a tight tube. ‘I was just horny, and you were there. Like when people eat dog food in a famine.’
Ashley’s mouth fell open.
Molly wanted to take it back the second it left her lips. But what would be the point? What would it serve? There was no repair possible. No way back. All there was to do was act like she wasn’t hurting herself too.
Ashley shifted her weight; her face went hard. ‘I’m dog food?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Ashley said, leaning in closer. ‘You wanted to have sex last night. I wanted to have sex too. It wasn’t a famine, Molly. It was just… us.’
‘Well, “just us” is a mess,’ Molly said, her voice cracking slightly on the last word. ‘We are fake dating for a reason. The fake part works. The real part makes me want to jump out of a moving tour bus.’
‘Then why did you come to me last night?’ Ashley asked, stepping closer, her brow furrowed and a small vein throbbing near her temple. ‘If it’s such a disaster, why did you come to me?’
‘Because I’m stupid,’ Molly said, her chest heaving as she sat pinned on the edge of her mattress. ‘I forgot for a minute that you’re the centre of the universe, and I’m only ever someone passing through your orbit. Now leave me alone so I can learn how to dump Gary.’
Ashley stared down at her for three long seconds. She didn’t offer a dramatic rebuttal. She turned and headed towards the exit.
‘Don’t spill your coffee in the bunk,’ Ashley said, her voice flat and completely devoid of the heat from a moment ago. ‘It’s a bitch to clean.’ She grabbed the handle of the door.
And Molly felt that terrible, awful, destructive need to have the last word.
‘Hey! The worst I did was give you a new song to write. You’ll call it “Dog Food”. But give it a fast rhythm, like the kids like. Don’t make it some maudlin guitar song. No one likes those.’
Ashley paused with her hand on the bus door handle for a moment but didn’t turn around.
Then she pushed the door open and stepped out into the cold service-station air, letting it click shut behind her, leaving Molly sitting on the edge of her bunk, alone with the terrible person she’d been for the last five minutes.