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I glanced over at Millsy, smiled sweetly and said: ‘When you've made this lady’s drink, there are some boxes of coffee that need moving from the back door, please.’
Millsy nodded, knowing exactly what he needed to do. The truth is, we don’t even have a back door, that’s just our secret code for teaching a lesson to horrible customers – the ones who truly deserve punishing. Never mess with the people who are serving you food and drinks.
I watched Millsy switch from using regular to decaf coffee with the sleight of hand skills of a seasoned magician. As he poured the two shots of fuck all into the customer’s cup, she applauded him sarcastically.
‘There, that wasn’t too difficult for the two of you, was it?’ she asked rhetorically before taking a sip. ‘Much better.’
OK, so maybe we shouldn't be playing coffee god, but she asked for it, and by the afternoon when the caffeine withdrawal headache hit her like a ton of bricks, I hope it made her realise that she needs to be nicer to people, because if karma doesn’t get you, vigilante baristas will.
Nick, clearly irritated by the fact I’m not rising to the bait, carries on talking to me.
‘I thought Joey was never setting foot in here again?’ he says. I find it weird that Nick calls Millsy by his less used nickname, rather than his preferred name or his actual first name.
‘You were away for the night,’ I remind him. ‘He won’t come over when you’re here because you’re the reason he has to climb out of the skylight for a cig.’
‘I told him he can’t do that either.’
‘Yeah, and that’s why he won’t come over when you’re here, you’ve got so many rules: don’t smoke in the flat, don’t climb onto the roof – you’re a drag, man,’ I ramble, occasionally glancing at the cake as I wonder if I can manage any more without throwing up. Nope, no more.
Nick heads back towards his room. Well, it is way past his bedtime.
I scoop my hair up with my hand and let it fall down around one side of my face, sighing heavily. This catches his attention and he stops before he opens his door.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks, almost begrudgingly.
‘I’m fine,’ I assure him, heading for the sofa and plonking myself down.
I tip my head back and rest my eyes for a second. I don’t know if I’m exhausted from all the late nights and early starts, or if I’m maybe slipping into a diabetic coma from that slab of cake I just effortlessly devoured, but I can’t keep my eyes open.
I give myself five minutes before forcing my eyes open again, only to see Nick standing in front of me, except now he’s got his nerdy plaid dressing gown on – untied, showing off the body he’s spent hours in the gym perfecting.
I stare for a moment longer than I should, stopping only when Nick takes a seat next to me.
‘Want to talk about it?’ he asks.
His moment of concern takes me aback.
‘What do you care?’ I snap.
Nick places his hand on my bare knee and gives it a gentle squeeze.
‘Look, I know we don’t get on, but I’m allowed to care about you, right? I mean, you must care about me a little – what would you do if you found out I left for work one morning and got hit by a car?’
‘I guess I’d care,’ I reply. ‘But, like, about the stress of finding another roommate so I could afford to stay here – I could wind up with someone even worse than you.’
Nick laughs at the joke I didn’t realise I’d made. That’s when I realise his hand isn’t on my knee any more, it’s on my thigh, and the gentle squeezing he was doing before has turned into more of a caressing motion.
I shift my gaze from Nick’s hand to his eyes. He’s looking at me in a way I’ve never noticed him do before.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asks.
‘I’m trying to work out why you’re being so nice to me,’ I reply. ‘It’s out of character.’
‘If you think that’s out of character,’ he starts slowly, as he runs his hand up my thigh, ‘then try this.’
Before I know what’s happening, Nick is pushing me back on the sofa, pressing his body down on top of me. He grabs a fistful of my long wavy locks firmly with one hand as he pulls off his dressing gown with the other. As much as I dislike Nick as a person, I have never been able to deny that he has one hell of a body – in fact, it’s one of the first things I noticed about him when we first met. All that eating clean and exercising near-constantly is really paying off for him, I admit it, but I never imagined I’d wind up in a situation like this with him, and now I’m not just looking at him, I’m really looking at him, and I want him more than anything right now.
He kisses me keenly, like he’s been waiting all these months to do it and now he finally can, he can’t control himself – least of all his hands.
When I came home tonight I figured Nick would be in bed because it was late and he always gets nice early nights. That’s why I felt safe kicking off my heels, slipping off my dress and putting on one of Nick’s gym vests that I grabbed from the dryer, so I didn’t have to make the long trip to my room to find something comfortable to wear while I devoured my birthday cake.
Usually that’s two offences that would land me in Nick’s bad books. My first offence is strolling around inappropriately dressed, the second is wearing Nick’s clothes. He hates that. He says I leave them covered in glitter and stinking like a mid-range prostitute. Perhaps that’s why he’s so keenly pulling the vest over my head, throwing it to one side before running his hands up my body, slipping my bra straps off my shoulders, kissing my collarbone, gently flicking his tongue against my skin.
Just when I think it can’t feel any better, Nick slips his hand into my knickers and I can’t help but moan wildly. My moans of pleasure get louder before quickly changing. As I raise my hand to my aching head and grumble in pain, I slowly open my eyes, only for the sunlight to burn them. That’s when I realise it’s morning, and that I must have fallen asleep on the sofa. I’m still wearing Nick’s vest, which means I dreamt the whole thing. Shit, another sex dream about Nick!
‘Why does this keep happening to me?’ I ask myself.
‘Because you make bad choices,’ Nick replies, startling me. I glance towards the kitchen and see him standing there, smartly dressed, eating cereal as always.
I quickly break eye contact with him, absolutely mortified. I mean there’s no way on earth he could know what I’d been dreaming but I feel like he’s looking straight through me, like he can see it written all over my face.
‘What happened last night?’ I ask him, concerned.
‘Not much, you went on a date with one of your Matcher psychopaths, came back steaming drunk, ate enough cake to kill you and then fell asleep.’
‘Oh. So I didn’t say or do anything bad?’
Nick stares at me for a moment.
‘Erm, no, only all of those things I just listed to you.’
‘That’s OK then,’ I say, exhaling a deep sigh of relief.
‘Well, I’ve got to go shopping and then get to work. Another day of fucking around, is it?’
‘I hope something really gross happens to you at work,’ I reply, massaging my temples.
‘You could use your free time to do something good,’ he suggests.
‘Good?’ I reply, saying the word slowly as I cock my head. ‘What is…good?’
Nick laughs.
‘I’m serious,’ he insists. ‘Do something to change the world.’
‘Like?’
‘Like give blood, that’s such a little thing to do to make such a huge amount of difference.’
I frown.
‘Needles,’ I tell him. ‘Nope.’
‘You’ll only feel a little prick – stop it,’ he snaps at me, before I have the chance to reply with a ‘that’s what she said’.
‘So is that how you spend you free time?’ I ask him.
‘I wouldn’t call it a hobby,’ he replies. ‘But blood donation, platelet donation – what’s twenty minutes or a couple of hours to make a difference?’
I feel my eyes widen with horror.
‘Mate, do you want me bleeding dry or something?’
‘Mate,’ he replies mockingly. ‘It looks like someone beat me to it. You’re looking very pale this morning.’
“Mate” is one of those words that has crept into my vocabulary – something that happens to me all the time with slang words. At first I’ll use words sarcastically, then as in-jokes, then suddenly, that’s it, words like “mate” and “BAE” and “on fleek” are in my day-to-day vocab.
“Mate” is definitely something I have picked up from Millsy, who calls everyone from me to his mum to his doctor it.
Hanging out with Millsy and my brother Woody growing up, I do worry that I’ve turned out “more boy” than I should have. Maybe that’s why I don’t have too many female friends. It’s like when a kitten gets in with a litter of puppies and thinks it’s one of them. It will act just like its adopted siblings, play like a dog, eat like a dog, truly think like a dog and feel like a dog…but at the end of the day, it’s still a cat. I’m a cat amongst the dogs. I find stupid gross-out comedies funny. I swear like a sailor who keeps stubbing his toe on the same bunk bed. I get riled up over football and borderline homicidal when I play FIFA.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to have female friends, but I just don’t seem to get on all that well with girls. Sometimes I think they’re ridiculous creatures, especially when it comes to the opposite sex. They have no chill. They’ll text a guy a million times and wonder why he isn’t texting back. Worse still, they’ll sleep with a guy on the first date, thinking it will win him over, only for him to ghost. And what do they do when he ghosts? They decide not to text him for a few days. Because that will teach him, and if he replies, he must be really interested, right? Surely if you’re trying to figure out a guy, it makes more sense to withhold sex instead of text messages?
‘It’s just my hangover,’ I tell him.
‘It’s not taking care of yourself,’ he corrects me. ‘It’s drinking too much, not sleeping enough, thinking you can eat Coco Pops for three meals a day and survive.’
Chapter 6 (#ulink_24e79f61-e31e-59d3-9263-832ce81f2789)
As I hover around outside Millsy’s flat, I take in the stunning view he has, but does not appreciate. Well, I say it’s his flat, but it’s actually his uncle’s. What Uncle Mills actually does, I’ve never quite understood. He travels around the world, teaching doctors a procedure they need for the company’s weird clinical trials. To me, this sounds a little sketchy, but Millsy assures me his uncle is going to “save humanity, or something”. This may or may not be true, but it affords my best friend a gorgeous one-bedroom bachelor pad in a prime location with a stunning view of the River Aire and the Royal Armouries, rent-free.
Sometimes, when Nick is stressing me out, Millsy offers me his (technically his uncle’s) sofa to sleep on, but with the possibility his semi-nomadic uncle could return at any point, he’ll want his bed back, Millsy will get the sofa, and I’ll wind up homeless. Giving up the flat to Nick would be letting him win, and that’s just not on either – also, with the amount of Matcher birds Millsy has slept with in there, I deem his sofa a legitimate pregnancy risk.
I lean on the wooden fence outside his building and glance around. It’s busy, yet weirdly peaceful – you don’t feel like you’re in a city centre. There are people hanging out on the grass because it’s surprisingly warm for October today, having picnics, fishing – it’s a picturesque Saturday lunchtime.
The reason I’m hanging around outside, admiring the Aire & Calder navigational canal (which I know to be its name now, because I just heard a tour guide telling a flock of tourists that’s what it’s called) is because Millsy has a girl in there with him. We’re supposed to be catching the train home to Outwood to visit our parents, but he needs to ‘finish up’ with last night’s bird before we can go – whatever that means.
Bored, I decide to amuse myself. I take a gold wedding band from my handbag and stand it on its side on the fence in front of me. I use a finger to gently twirl it around in circles before channelling every sad thought I’ve ever had: the fact I’ve lost a charm off the Juicy Couture bracelet my parents bought me for my birthday, the end of that film where the dog dies, the fact I’m probably going to die single and alone – shit, that one was a bit real. Anyway, it only takes a few seconds before my sorrowful frown catches the attention of two twenty-somethings walking past.
‘Are you OK?’ the first girl asks. She’s got her long, bright purple hair up in a bun on top of her head, the structure supported by a hair doughnut so big it looks like a burden. Her naturally red-headed friend, who appears equally concerned, looks like she could’ve been an extra in Pretty In Pink, her hairstyle and outfit positively 80s, even though she was probably only alive for a year or two of the decade.
‘I’m fine,’ I tell them. ‘It’s just…I’ve just found out my husband has been cheating on me.’
‘Oh my God, that’s proper rough,’ the first girl says.
‘Totally,’ the second echoes. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out. We’ve only been married a few months – together for ten years though. I don’t think I can live without him.’
The girls stare at me for a moment, fascinated by the seeming collapse of a stranger’s life.
‘You can’t take him back,’ the purple-haired girl tells me. ‘You just can’t. He’ll do it again and again if you do.’
‘You’ve just got to be strong and start again,’ Molly Ringwald wannabe adds.
I think for a second, my expression dominated by a look of faux anguish.
‘You know what,’ I start, my confidence slowly coming back to me. ‘You’re right.’
I pick up the ring from in front of me and examine it for a second before meaningfully throwing it into the river. I watch as the ripples disappear before exhaling deeply.
‘You go, girl,’ the first girl says as they wonder off, the show over. I turn around and watch them head up the steps, noticing that Millsy is standing behind me. He gives me a slow clap as he approaches me.
‘Bravo,’ he praises me. ‘It’s nice to see you’ve still got it in you.’
‘I act for fun, not work,’ I remind him. ‘Anyway, that was too easy.’
‘Great improv. with that ring though,’ he says, leaning on the fence next to me. ‘I would’ve gone all Andy Serkis, giving it “my precious” and all that.’
‘Oh I’m sure that would’ve had those two girls eating out of your hand – speaking of girls and eating out, where’s your bird?’
Millsy wiggles his eyebrows.
‘I got rid when I came out, during your matinee. I reckon I could handle seeing this one maybe one more time, don’t want her meeting you, do I?’
I furrow my brow.
‘Don’t give me that resting bitch face, Miss Wood,’ he laughs. ‘You know you’re a cock-block. Birds see that I’m close with you and run a mile – God knows why. But most blokes seem to find you fit, so we’ve got to keep you out of the way, you know the score.’
The fact Millsy doesn’t want to sleep with me is actually the highest compliment he can pay me, because Millsy only sleeps with girls he doesn’t plan on keeping in his life for very long.
‘They have no need to be jealous,’ I tell him. ‘I know where you’ve been, I won’t even share drinks with you – herpes is for life.’
‘Fuck you! So I had a cold sore last year. One, once. It’s not the same as herpes.’
I laugh as he passionately defends his cold sore, like he always does when I tease him about it. It’s just too easy.
‘OK, sorry.’
‘Right, we going for this train?’ he asks as he zhooshes his messy brown hair.
‘Sure, right after you jump in and get my ring back for me,’ I inform him, staring at him expectantly.
‘What?’
‘My ring. I saw where it landed. That was a real gold one, I threw it by mistake.’
Millsy looks worried sick, the reflex to help his best friend without question doing battle with his aversion to jumping in dirty water and getting his hair wet.
