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But it didn’t shake, at least, and that felt like a triumph all its own.
Not that Alfie Harding was going to acknowledge that fact.
He just made a disgruntled sound. Then said: “Well I’m not just going to assume, all right. I’m bad with calling people.” Only he didn’t really say it. He shoved the words out from somewhere deep at the back of his throat. It sounded like very churlish gravel being shoved through an extremely sullen cement mixer. But that was fine. Because somehow, it seemed to make her even stronger.
Like his fury took hold of her spine and threaded it through with steel.
I’ll show you who’s a human cupcake, she thought.
Then retorted.
“Because you just do it out of the blue after being really rude to them?”
And oh, the silence that followed was satisfying. She had thrown him, a little. He was on the backfoot now. Probably sitting there in his angry chair in his angry house, stewing angrily over what to say next. Then when he finally came out with something, she didn’t think it was what he’d intended.
“No, because I don’t understand newfangled phones,” he blurted out. Like she’d forced him into honesty, somehow. A lot of honesty, apparently, because suddenly there was more. “I don’t know why I can’t just stick with my old flip one that has proper buttons on it. Now it’s all little pictures that don’t tell you what they are, and next thing you know you’re sending perfectly normal vegetables to Gary Lineker that somehow everybody else knows means you’re wanting to do things to him with your purple penis.”
Then it was her turn to be shocked into silence.
She simply stood there in the middle of her tiny kitchen.
Brain whirring, but nothing coming together enough to enable normal words.
And for so long an amount of time, that in the end she just had to confess.
“I have no idea what to say to any of that,” she said.
“Yeah, and that’s the other problem with doing this.”
“You mean because you leave people flummoxed with absolutely preposterous rants about actual national treasure Gary Lineker?”
“It wasn’t that weird a rant. And at any rate, this evil phone made me do it.”
“Did the evil phone also make you call me a human cupcake?”
She expected another silence for that. After all, her snark was actually getting pretty slick now. In fact, she almost sounded sort of confident about it. Or maybe even amused, in a way she rarely was, when someone was a complete buttface to her. After most insults, she either tried to laugh it off or turned into furious jelly. Her face went red and stayed that way. Every word she said wobbled.
And it only got worse, the more she interacted with the insulter.
Only that wasn’t the case, here.
She wasn’t the flustered one.
Hewas. “Oh look, I didn’t mean all that in the bad way,” heburst out almost immediately. Much to her absolute delight. And apparent ongoing ability to tease him to death.
“So there’s agood wayto refer to someone as a generic baked dessert.”
“Yes. No. I mean wait. Let me just think for a second, you’re going too quick.”
Good lord, whoisthis person, she found herself thinking.
Because it wasn’t just how flummoxed she was making him—a man who once played the entire second half of a game of football after breaking his leg. No, it was the fact that she could hear something in the background. A kind of rustling and shuffling that soundedreallyfamiliar.
Then the dots connected in her head.
“Are you… are you reading from notes right now?” she said, and fully expected to be shot down in some way. Now, she thought, he would come back at her with something good. Something that made sense. Like maybe he’d taken a part-time job in a paper factory. Or was currently reading the script for the sequel to that movie he’d been in about a footballer who gets sent to prison for killing the referee.
Both of which sounded mad, of course.
