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“Fuck all this.” I tried to get up. That floor wasn’t going to clean itself.
“No.” He tugged me back down in his embrace. “Stay with me.”
“I’m not going to share the sofa with you.”
“You are. Because you’re all stressed, and I’ll sleep if you’re here.”
“And I’ll wake up with Finn scrubbing the floor and giving me evils.”
“Finn loves you. He knows you’re good for me.”
“Finn would like to wake up in the morning with you in his bed. Not you and me drooling on the sofa.”
“We can top and tail.”
“Mark…”
“Benjamin.” He stared at me.
“I need to go home. You need to go snuggle with your boyfriend and tell him you love him.” Like I was qualified to give relationship advice.
“Okay,” he muttered like a surly teen, but we’d both made our point.
I got up and cleaned the floor, then smacked a kiss on Mark’s forehead before I ran for the last Tube home.
Sometimes I loved my life. Other times, I felt like I was missing something. Like my heart kept skipping some essential beat.
I needed one of those defibrillators. Just stop everything and start again. I’d had actually been defibrillated once. I didn’t remember it, but it was one of my mum’s recurring nightmares. Perhaps it had pushed my life off track. Or perhaps it had put it right. What did I know?
Hugo
“Aword, please.” That was Finn Christensen, the front office manager, nodding his head towards the back office. I was in the middle of something, but he was my boss, and for all his stern ways and picky attitude, he was a decent bloke. So I did as I was told, leaving my desk and following him towards the back of the reception desk, down the corridor. His office door wide open.
I slid in behind him. He closed the door and motioned for me to take a seat.
This was a shared back office and as such was a constant disarray of papers and piles and lost property and things that had seen better days. It smelled of dust, coffee and tears, but also of Finn. He wore a ridiculous amount of aftershave—an expensive one no doubt. The room also housed a large selection of filthy coffee cups that I was sure it was someone’s job to clean. They had been there as long as I’d worked here, and my fingers suddenly itched to gather them up, chuck them in the sink next door and clean everything down with hot soapy water. The office had two very comfortable chairs, though, and I sank into the visitor’s one while Finn sat in his on the other side of the desk, leant forward on his elbows and stared at me with his ice-blue eyes.
He would have been handsome if it wasn’t for all that stiffness and his constantly stern expression.
“I have a few minutes,” he said. “I just wanted to catch up. Anything you feel you need support with? Any more proposals?” He smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile back.
“Nope.” Well, someone had proposed. A very, very drunk man whom security had kindly picked up off the floor and persuaded to release my hand before he’d manage to kiss my poor delicate fingers. Another incident I didn’t quite care to remember, but it had been kind of funny. Surreal. Reuben had been pissing himself laughing behind his counter, and I’d almost died of embarrassment. At least it wasn’t heart failure, although my heart was doing those double beats again. My blood pressure was shit. I knew all of this.
“I’m a bit stressed,” I admitted. I didn’t usually admit to anything, but then Finn had turned out to be unusually patient. Where my previous therapists would sit and take notes and say,“And how does that make you feel today,Hugo?”Finn would just patiently listen and nod. Not that I thought he was a therapist or anything.
“Stress is shit,” he said. “What can I do to make things less stressful?”
I wish I’d had the answer to that, and the frustration made me want to scream.Find me somewhere else to live? Remove me from this planet?
“Full transparency. I rang your former boss at the Greenwood Hotel. Thomas. Great guy. He speaks very highly of you, and because we talked about this before and you said you were happy for me to speak to him…?”
Shit. I had said that. In a slight moment of panic when I’d felt pushed into a corner, I’d accidentally spilled far too many truths to Thomas, and a fair few to Finn now too, but knowing the two of them had been discussing me made my blood run cold.
“I’m really embarrassed now,” I admitted, feeling my chest tighten up.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about, and absolutely nothing that I will pass on to anyone else. I sought his advice because you said you felt very supported at the Greenwood Hotel, and I want to make sure you feel supported here too.”
There was more. Finn was fishing.
