Page 81 of Read My Lips

“No.” Shame prickled across my skin. “I mean, yeah, they are. But—I would have been a kid in a clown costume.” My voice knotted up, so dry it barely came out. Guaranteed, Simon Azie had never psyched himself out of wearing a pair of trousers. “I can’t do purple trousers. I’m this boring-as-anything straight-looking bloke who doesn’t fit in bloody anywhere, trying too hard.”

Simon rounded to my side of the table. His frown shadowed his whole face, and it shouldn’t have even been there, because none of this was his problem. “That’s not true, if you wanted⁠—”

“It is true.” I set the Yoda mug down on the table with a clack. What did I want with it anyway? “My whole life it’s been true. There’s people like you, who get away with however they want to be, and there’s people like me. Who everyone else tells exactly what they are. That’s just how it is.”

“Where did you get that from?”

“Everyone, Simon. Over and over again.”

“Like who?” Certainty he had all the answers simmered in Simon’s eyes. But he was wrong.

“Like most of the blokes I’ve ever hooked up with. Like my own gran.”

“And what would she know?”

“Yeah, alright,” I laughed, and it sounded ugly and dismissive. My smile failed. “She only brought me up.”

“What?” Confusion pinched into his eyes. “Brought you up? You said you didn’t stay with her long.”

Oh bollocks. I had said that. Trust him to remember. And I had nothing good to tell him.

“Well,” I said, and my whole body twanged with adrenaline, ready for the fight. “I lied.”

What was he going to think about his perfect interpreter now?

“Oh.” Simon frowned. Backing down right where I’d started bristling, he diverted his attention to the rack of clothes again.

I watched him straighten. The notches of his spine pulled into line directly over each other, disappearing the slight stoop he got into sometimes, talking with me. Without it he was a solid inch taller. Ridiculous that he pulled himself down for me.

His face shifted, visibly rolling my answer through all those rooms in his head where he must have stored every personal detail he discovered about everyone he’d ever met. I bet he never had liar stacked up to go in his Ben room.

I braced for him to say something spiky I could bat back, but his voice stayed level. Calm. “Why?”

The truth squirmed and thrashed in my gut. I couldn’t let it out. The slippery mud-eel of a thing had teeth. “Don’t know.”

Simon raised a single eyebrow and kept it hovered there. My pulse thudded thickly in my forehead.

He could have called bullshit.

It would have been better than this guilt trip. How come I owed him the truth when he didn’t even want the whole of me? Jaw tensed, I scuffed the yard cobbles, and the stupid broken watch face stared at me from the table.

“Right then.” The tension line of Simon’s mouth softened. “Shall we head back home?”

He picked up the Yoda mug, pulling out his wallet.

“What are you doing?”

“Buying you a mug for the office.”

I frowned. “But⁠—”

“You seemed to like it. It’s only three quid.”

“What about me lying to you?”

“You don’t want to talk about it, so…” Simon made a vaguely bored, dismissive sound, puffing his cheeks out. “Can’t be that important. It is nearly lunchtime.”

I gritted my teeth. “Look, I didn’t want you thinking I was a fraud, alright?” Surely he understood that. “There I was telling you Mam was Deaf, and all about me speaking BSL. My first language, like I’m grass fucking roots. And it was. It is. But Matt’s right. I didn’t use it for years. I had to learn it all again, basically from scratch.”