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And before you know it, you’re a wreck.
A shambling mess.
Holding everything together with spit and a grimace.
And no one can know, because you’re the boss, aren’t you?
You’re Alfie fucking Harding, nothing can ever put a hole in you.
But it can, and it does, and when that time comes, well.
You look around and find you’ve got nothing to lean on.
Twenty-FiveWhen You Only Think You’re Waving
She did her best to not put too much credence into that whole drowning thing. After all, she did feel quite a bit better about things once she’d gotten a good night’s sleep. And spent a bit of time doing normal things at home. She made breakfast and watched some daytime TV, and Connie stopped round to see how she was doing.
She breezed in looking as cool as she usually did. Currently blue hair still in the shape it had probably gotten into the night before, pale cheeks perfectly highlighted with something pink and something slightly sparkly and something shadowy. Favorite armchair in Mabel’s flat already commandeered, so she could regale her with her latest escapades.
“… and then it turned out, he wastrying to flee the country,” she finished breathlessly, while Mabel was still trying to catch up with the first part of the story. She had questions, and Connie was already moving on—to the actually exciting thing that was supposedly happening to her.
Even though it wasn’t exciting in the way Connie thought.
And so she couldn’t actually say anything much about it all.
In fact, even the stuff she thought she could say seemed impossibly difficult.
“So,” Connie said. “Is he as hot in the sack as I always told you he would be?”
And she had to actually think about it. She had to go over what was okay to say and what wasn’t, what was a lie and what was truth, and for so long that Connie started to look puzzled. “Hey, did you break?” she asked.
Then Mabel had to scramble.
“No, no,” she said. “I was just thinking about how hot it was.”
And thankfully that got a throaty cackle out of Connie.
“I knew it. I knew that lass wasn’t lying. He can go for hours, right?”
Well, he probably can when a fake relationship and my inexplicable horniness and us making things forbidden isn’t ratcheting up the ridiculous sexual tension to levels neither of us can cope with, she thought. But of course she couldn’t say that. So now she was split right down the middle, between the person she was and the person she needed to be for Connie.
And it wasn’t just difficult.
It was gross. It felt gross to do this to her best friend.
“Oh yeah,” she gasped, in an even more exaggerated version of her usual bubbliness. And for the first time it didn’t just feel like armor, or a kind of secondary part of her, but actively fake. Silly and dishonest.You should be telling her about how stressful and exciting and awful and amazing all this is right now, a little voice whispered to her.She’d be able to help you with it, at the very least.
But instead, she exclaimed over how sexy he was.
How good he made her feel.
Without ever letting on that her heart was breaking a little bit over the idea that he’d never be able to make her feel that way forever. All she could manage was a little hint of worry on the end. “Of course I know it’s not going to last,” she said.
But even that didn’t help her.
“I wouldn’t bank on it. He looks smitten in every picture I see of you both,” Connie said. So now she had to somehow temper her friend’s expectations. Brace her for what was undoubtedly going to be some kind of horrible fallout.
“He probably just had a flash in his eyes.”
