Page 9 of Read My Lips

Simon grimaced.

The grim line of his mouth crumpled my last hope like an empty coke can under the heel of his perfectly ombre-toed shoe. A wall of silence where he should have been scrabbling for denial.

“I gave you that tie.” Undigested beer swilled in my stomach, all acid and wrong, and the back of the car shuttled back and forth behind my eyelids, slow motion and horrendous. Sweat prickled onto my forehead.

“Ben, don’t.” Simon’s face hardened, solidifying the line of None of my Business. Bit late to pull down the steel trap on professional and personal now.

“I gave you that tie.”

“I know you did.” Simon almost looked guilty. Almost. “I forgot I’d been wearing it.”

Wearing wasn’t the word. He only cared because it meant I’d caught him out. No doubt it was Simon giving Richard such thorough seeing to, now. How excellent for both of them.

What a wake-up call. No one went from banging an ex-rugby playing underwear model with off-shore accounts and a country mansion, to thinking their vertically stunted, hit-by-a-frying-pan-chic interpreter with a bus pass and a buzz cut was a bit of alright. Simon had never been going to wake up one fine day and realise I was who he’d been looking for all of his life. I was never in the running.

Dots danced behind my eyes. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to. Tugging at my strangling collar didn’t help. The car was too hot. Too sticky.

“Ben are you alright?”

Cold saliva welled around my tongue. What if I was never in anybody’s running?

Shit.

Snapping the release button for the seatbelt, I lurched forward, death-gripping the driver’s headrest. “Can you pull over?”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Stop the bloody car!”

Robo-driver swooped in sharp to the kerb and I yanked the door open, tumbling out – less Mission: Impossible, more Impossibly Mullered. Grotty grey pavement ran up under my shaking legs, and I stumbled, catching myself against the grimy glass side of a bus shelter.

Buckling like I’d been sucker punched, I folded in the middle and heaved.

“Better?”

Behind me, the taxi’s engine idled. Standing next to the open car door, Simon’s face set into the kind of expression usually reserved for incontinent, scrabble-clawed, tumour-riddled Labradors. Or maybe just drunk idiots like me.

Woof.

“Not really.”

He didn’t get to look at me like I was the only screw up here. I could already see the headline.

Shameless PR Company Employee Shags hot Peer-to-Be and blows up his Entire Life in Mad Gay Sex Scandal!

Or something much more catchy. There was a reason Simon did the words.

I slumped hard on the narrow, plasticated bench inside the shelter. Everything was brighter in the circle of the street light, and I didn’t want it to be.

Mapp and Green were going to throw him under one of these buses. Then reverse it, drive over him again, twice. Then bury him. In concrete. And double-speak everyone into believing he never existed. You did not mess with Mel Booker’s company reputation. She cancelled people for breakfast.

“Cherry menthol Fisherman’s Friend?”

My eyelid twitched. “No I don’t want a sodding Fisherman’s Friend.”

The little striped paper packet he held out sagged in his hand. He could read my lips here then.

“At what point were you planning on telling me I won’t have a job on Monday?”