Page 116 of Read My Lips

A razor-edged ache strangled my throat closed. I hauled the duvet up over my head. Screw daylight. Screw holding it together. I was done with all of it.

Darkness lasted three point seven-five seconds before Matt whipped the covers off.

“Get up, Ben.” His signs were large and loud enough to make me wince.

Bloody teacher – far too used to standing in front of a room full of people who did exactly what he wanted. I sniffed hard, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes, tensing everything until the ache passed.

Matt was still standing there when I looked up.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “What are you going to do about that lot out there?”

I shrugged limply.

Missed call from: Simon.

“Hide. Obviously.”

Matt vetoed that plan. But I ignored him.

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.