AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Like fuck he will. I storm through to the study and I must have gone faster than he expected because he’s sitting there cuddling Gollum very much not doing any work. He makes a desperate attempt to look busy but all that does is dump Gollum onto his laptop, where he steps on the Windows key and opens the calculator.
“What,” I demand, “is your problem? I’ve roasted a chicken out there.”
Jonathan’s gathering Gollum off his desk. “I didn’t ask you to.”
“No, but you asked me to bring it through to you like I’m your fucking butler.”
“I have a lot going on and I didn’t want you to feel your efforts had gone to waste. If walking twenty feet with a plate is so beneath you, I’ll order something.”
I might kill him. I might actually kill him. “I don’t want you to order something. I want you to come through and have dinner like a human being. I wouldn’t mind, but you’re not even working in here. You’re just hiding.”
“I am not hiding.”
“You’ve shut yourself in a room alone with a cat. That’s hiding.”
Gollum is back on his lap, and he’s stroking him absent-mindedly. “I just want some space. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
“You’ve had plenty of space. Everything from you ordering your parents out to me whacking the chicken on the table was space.”
“Sam”—Jonathan fixes me with one of his intense looks—“we’re not doing this.”
And there he goes again. “You don’t get to tell me what we’re doing. We need to have a talk and we can do it over chicken or we can do it here.”
“What exactly,” Jonathan asks, “do you think we need to talk about?”
“You treating me like crap.”
He flinches very slightly. “I do not treat you like crap.”
So I guess we’re doing it here. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you and your family, but you cannot take it out on me. You also need to stop ordering me around. I know I work for yez, but I’m not your servant. I’m the manager of one of your branches and, right now, I’m your guest.”
“And I’m supposed to be looking after you,” Jonathan retorts, “because you’ve had a traumatic head injury.”
Aye, that he caused. “This isn’t looking after me. It’s just being a dick.”
“For the last time”—Jonathan stands up so abruptly that Gollum shoots off his lap and out the door—“I am not being a dick. I have a lot of demands on my time, and I’m sick of having to justify myself to you and to everybody.”
It’s no use, is it? I tried playing nice and it didn’t work. Itried standing my ground and it didn’t work. I guess I’ll have to go back to Sheffield and tell Claire I’ve fucked everything up. “There’s a simple solution to that,” I say, quiet like. “I’ll leave in the morning.”
He starts to say something—you can’t, or I won’t let you, or whatever—but I’m not listening. I let the door swing shut behind me.
In the kitchen, my chicken’s going cold, but I don’t much fancy eating it anyway. Still, there’s no sense in it going to waste so I carve it up, give a little bit to Gollum, and put the rest in the fridge with the veg.
Then I head up to bed. And maybe it’s just because I gave him chicken, but this time Gollum comes with me.
I don’t sleep very well again, partly because it’s pretty early, partly because I’m stressed, and partly because Gollum keeps sitting on my head. Maybe I should just let Jonathan keep him. Worse, I’m getting these doubts buzzing around my brain, because while I’m glad I stood up to Jonathan, I’m starting to second-guess myself, to wonder if maybe I’m bottling it. I mean okay, he hurt my feelings, but he’s my boss, not my mate. And I’m not here to be friends with him, I’m here to get to know him so as I can talk him into not firing me or breaking up my team.
Except I’ve said I’m going now. And if I back down he’ll never take me seriously anyway. Besides, all this pretending to have amnesia is going to get tiring after a while and it’s probably best to get out while I still can like.
It’s a ways after midnight when I hear movement from downstairs. My first thought is that it’s Gollum, but he’s asleep on my foot, so it can’t be him. My second thought is that it’s Jonathan. And it probablyisJonathan—I’ve only been here a couple of days so I don’t really know what kind of hours he keeps when he’s notchecking up on me every twenty minutes. But my third thought is burglars. And it’s probably not burglars. In fact, it’s almost certainly not burglars. But there’s this little voice in my head sayingit’s burglarsthat won’t shut up. So I shake Gollum off my foot, slip out of bed, drag on a T-shirt and some pants and try to grab something heavy. Only there isn’t anything because Jonathan barely furnishes the rooms he actually lives in, never mind the ones he keeps empty for the guests he never has. In the end, I pop into the ensuite and lift the top off the toilet. It’s a bit too unwieldy to get a proper swing with, but if nothing else I might be able to confuse an intruder into backing down.
I creep downstairs and Gollum creeps after me, even though I try to tell him to stay behind where he’ll be safe. The noises are coming from the kitchen, and they don’t sound like burglary noises, they sound like someone moving around noises, which means I feel a bit of a pillock when I show up in my pants and my bare feet, clutching the top of an Ideal Standard Concept Space close coupled toilet with soft close seat like I’m Moses with the Ten Commandments.
Because it turns out my second thought was right and it is Jonathan. He’s at the fridge, unwrapping my chicken.
“Hang on,” I say. “You said you didn’t want any of that.”
He turns around. “Why are you holding the top of an Ideal Standard Concept Space close coupled toilet with soft close seat?”
