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It was like being back in the Mandarin all over again.
I couldn’t see properly, I couldn’t breathe.
Dying, probably just metaphorically, but maybe also literally?
My neighbour Lucía found me. Dragged me to a bar where I proceeded to make many, many mistakes with Rush Evans in a cloakroom.
Rush and I continued to be on and off whenever he was in town.
I don’t know if it was shittier of me or him. Me, the ex-girlfriend of his best friend. Him, the best friend of my ex-boyfriend.
“Technically, Sam was my best friend,” he’d sometimes say to make us feel better after we’d done it. It never worked.
He went away for a month to shoot a movie and I stumbled literally and drunkenly into the arms of Stavros Onasis, the son of the oil tycoon. That didn’t last so long, which was fine because by then Rush was back. Then he left again for reshoots, and I found that vineyard boy, Dieter Van Lauers.
Not much more to say than that, I don’t think we lasted a month.
Briefly there was a boy from South Africa — a man, I should say — Addington Van Schoor, a school teacher at Nightingale Bamfords. Very handsome, but not much there. Just chemistry and a dead end. All of them are dead ends though. I guess that’s the point.
Rush and I, we drifted back and forth as friends with a lot of benefits. He was a mess and I was a mess, we both knew it and didn’t hold it against each other. We did often hold one another though. He became one of my closest friends, actually, though it cost him a dear one in the process. Rush never ordered a Negroni in front of me, he once told a girl to fuck off because she smelt of orange blossom, he fought an old boy from Varley when I told him he started a rumour about me back at school, he’d take me shopping and let me dress him and he turned the other way at night times, pretend I didn’t have to spray Dark Rum by Malin + Goetz to fall asleep.
Rush and I properly called it around August, a bit because it was well overdue — we started to get complicated. I think there’s only so long you can be what you were before certain things start creeping in —possessiveness and feelings and stupid things like that — so we called it. We also called it because of Jack-Jack.
Jack-Jack was his housemate ways ago. We met through Rush and accidentally kissed one night while he was out of town. He was sort of cross about that, but then not really because we really were technically ‘just friends’, but anyway after that happened Rush said we had to be really done because Jack-Jack is a hardcore romantic and Rush could tell that he was already all-in. Unfortunately for Jack-Jack, I’m never going to be all-in again.
“Are you ready to tell me what happened with Lover-Boy?” Taura asks with a pointed look.
“No.” I snatch the wine from her hands and throw it back. “No, I’m not.”
