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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Boy meets billionaire.
As for Ellery, she came and went at all hours, shamelessly ate my food, and sometimes crawled into my bed to sleep curled up next to me. It was like having a cat, if the cat also took a lot of drugs and threw wild parties.
Because deep down I knew that no matter how sharp and real and inescapable my pain felt right now, it would fade. My life was more than Caspian Hart. Weird as it seemed, he’d shown me that. Shown me how to fly, then pushed me through a window.
I will admit, I missed being able to call him the moment something went wrong. Not because I wanted him to fix all my problems for me, but because having him on my side—knowing he cared about me and wanted the best for me—was its own magic. Like Queen Susan’s horn, he let me find my way through life, sheltered by the promise that help was always close by.
But the gulf between us had grown so impossibly vast that I wasn’t a person to him anymore. I was a problem to be contained. A mistake he’d made once. And that hurt most of all.
“He gives so little of himself away. My gas bill has more humanity.” For some reason, this made me smile; it was so like Caspian.
Thankfully, my priorities are different.” “I thought your priorities were sex and art.” “And not traumatising poppets unnecessarily.”
“I can never tell,” I grumbled, “if you’re threatening me or flirting with me.” She shot me an alley-cat grin. “Fun, isn’t it?” “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.” “You little minx.”
“Nobody’ll think less of you, either way.” I peered up at Caspian’s place of business. His twenty-first-century fortress, coldly gleaming. “I might.” “There’s no shame in love or pain.” “Well”—I pushed open the car door and scrambled onto the pavement—“I’m sick of both.”
No hope today. Just the determination to look Caspian in the eye, and feel whatever I felt, and know I’d keep living after.
He’d been standing behind his desk, crisscrossed by silver-edged shadows. But now he stepped forward, his hand coming up self-consciously so he could adjust his tie when it didn’t need adjusting. And there it was: a dull gleam on his fourth finger. A ring to match Nathaniel’s. “I’m…we’re…” “Engaged,” I said. “Bellerose should have told you. I mean, your magazine.” My world was a platinum circle. It was manacles on my wrists. A vise around my heart. “Congratulations.”
We went to the Starbucks round the corner, where I sat and ugly-cried into a raspberry and white chocolate muffin. Caspian would have had a perfect, probably monogrammed silk handkerchief to give me. George pushed a stack of paper napkins across the table.
“Do you want to have sex?” “Um.” I blinked my sticky eyes. “What?” She shrugged. “Well, I’m really bad at reassuring people and really good at fucking them. But I’m open to either.” “I…I think I’ll try the reassurance?”
“I wouldn’t if I thought he was trying to be cruel to me. In some ways I…I kind of wish he was. Then I could hate him. Instead of…” I put a hand to my chest, which was ridiculously melodramatic, but I was half convinced my poor, ragged little heart was going to bleed right out of me. “Feeling like this.” George was quiet for a moment or two. Then, “The bad will fade in time. And you’ll never forget the good.” “How do you know?” “Because, poppet”—she gave me one of her wryest looks—“I’ve been there, done that.”
“As five very wise young ladies once implied, zig-a-zig-ah is transitory. But friendship never ends.”
For some reason, a brief intermission of feeling less than awful made me tear up again. “Don’t you dare,” George growled. “Or I really will insist on fucking you.”
“I’m not exactly at my best right now.” “And I’m still into you. Isn’t that flattering?”
“So the only thing that matters is this: What do you want? I can take you back to the office, or home if you’d rather. Or you can come back to my place, where you can drink hot chocolate in a fluffy blanket, and cry about your ex some more. Or…” “Or?” “We can have the kind of sex you’ll remember for the rest of your life.” “I find people who boast about their prowess really hot.” But she only grinned. “That’s not a boast, poppet. It’s an amuse bouche.”
“I’m feeling a bit kidnapped,” I grumbled. She flicked a glance my way. “And does it turn you on?” “Maybe.”
“Making people articulate their predilections is rather a kink of mine.” “Are you going to articulate any of your own?”
“Remember, I live in a dog biscuit factory with a feral person. I honestly can’t remember the last time I was somewhere that looked like home.”
“Forgive me a cliché,” murmured George, “but you look good enough to eat.” Needless to say, I was well up for being eaten. I just hadn’t realised how literally she meant it until I felt the too-intimate ripple of her breath against my…well, y’know, my arsehole. “Oh…oh Jesus. F-f-fuck.” Her only answer was a wicked laugh. And something that involved her mouth, like, on me. Right on me. Enveloping me in this wet heat and…God…suction. There was suction. And it was a good job I was chained down, because otherwise I would have hit the fucking ceiling. It was like my sphincter was Monaco and every
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It kind of got me thinking about Pandora’s box. Like, the version I vaguely remembered from when we did Greek myths in primary school is that Hope was the thing the gods put in there to protect us from all the other shit. But I was seriously starting to wonder if it hadn’t just been their final fuck-you to humanity.
I don’t usually have overnight guests, so I’m out of practice.” “You don’t?” She cast me a look of mingled exasperation and fondness. “Yes, yes, you’re a very special mushroom.
“Um, what do you normally eat?” I asked. “Lemon juice and broken hearts.”
Love isn’t a bus during the rush hour. You don’t have to let people off in order to fit more on.
“Your nose is all wrinkled up.” “Yeah, I’m good. Just wondering why you’re always so nice to me.” She subjected me to her most sardonic look. “Because I want to fuck you. Obviously.” “Works for me.”
“If you’d been my tutor at Oxford,” I told her, “I’d have got a first.” “If I’d been your tutor at Oxford, I’d have been fired for fucking you against the fourteenth-century oak panelling.”
“So,” I said slowly, “what you’re basically saying is: You want to fuck people in the heart.”
Let’s try a romance angle with it. Pretty Woman if one of them wasn’t a hooker. Cinderella except with more dicks.”
But this was a big deal. Not career defining, perhaps. But most likely career delaying if I walked away. So fuck it. And fuck Caspian. I chose me.
The scene was still vivid in my mind—the view of the Martyrs Memorial from the Randolph windows, the precise blue of Caspian’s eyes on that grey-golden morning, the restless tapping of his foot as he delivered his mildly indecent proposal—and yet felt so long ago. At the time, it had been confusing and actually a little bit humiliating, but thinking about it now filled me with a strange, sad tenderness. If nothing else, that lost boy and equally lost man were going to have an amazing summer together.
There was no dress code for interviewing your ex-boyfriend and the man he was engaged to about their engagement.
Watching Caspian piss off both his ex and current partner simultaneously shouldn’t have been endearing. But you had to admit, it took some skill.
“Why am I suddenly into tablecloths?” “I’m implying something lewd. Do try to keep up.” “Ohhh. You mean you want me to blow you under the table?” She laughed. “No, poppet. I mean I will allow you to blow me under the table if you’re good.” Guess what? I was good.
“So, like, we’re in this place called a pub. And what pubs do is they own a building, and in that building they sell beer and other alcoholic beverages, and in return for buying the beer and other alcoholic beverages they let people stay, for free, in the building that they own. And from the money they make from selling their beer and other alcoholic beverages, the pub gets to keep their building and the people who bought the beer and other alcoholic beverages get to have fun, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
“Arden, the next time you hiccough, I will give you fifty pounds.” I stared at him wide-eyed and absolutely unable to hiccough. “How…how did you do that?” “I’m magic.” “You are.”
“I even heard him singing in the office once, when he thought I’d left for the day.” “Caspian can sing?” “Most assuredly he cannot.”
My stomach roiled unhappily. “Why the fuck isn’t he in prison?” “Because that’s not what happens to people like him.”
I plonked my head down on the table and lay there for a little bit. Ilya reached out and stroked my hair in a slightly mechanical way. “There, there.” “What…um…what was that?” “I’m comforting you. I think.”
Maybe if I…if things…if Ilya…had been just one squeeze of lemon juice different, then letting him carry me home could have been the start of something. And the end. But we weren’t and it wasn’t. And so we walked back together, with the loss of the man we both loved between us like a shadow.
Eventually she said, “Are you sure you can eat that?” “I’m going to eat it so hard.” “No, I just mean…” Ellery had covered her mouth with both hands, and was now actually rocking back and forth as if she was having some kind of seizure. Well, that was in no way worrying. “I don’t understand,” Innisfree went on slowly. “Ellery told me you were a lactose-intolerant vegan with coeliac disease.”
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his toastie for his friends.”
Gingerly, he manoeuvred his half off the plate and took a bite. I should probably have warned him that toasties tend to fight back, because within seconds he was embroiled in his very own action thriller: Attack of the Sixty-Foot Cheese String. In general, people did not look good with food dangling out of their mouths. But I guess because Ilya was usually so terrifyingly immaculate, I actually found him kind of adorable just then.
I’d invited him back for company and support. Not to bear witness to my wang.
“What I’m looking for is to be owned.” “And is there anything I can do for you now that would feel a little bit like that?”
This is right in my wheelhouse—even though, now I think about it, I don’t actually know what a wheelhouse is, and since I’m not a wheel, then maybe it would be overall a bad thing if I was put in one.” “I think it’s to do with the steering of a ship.”
Basically, it was kind of like being capitally punished in the seventeenth century, and then having to have a polite chat with the judge about whether you were available to die on Monday and if you were allergic to hemp. And no, I hadn’t lost all sense of proportion.
“Tell them to fuck off. One broke your heart, the other is clearly a wanker.” “Yes, but if I don’t go, they’ll know I think that.” “And we care what they think, why?” “Because…because they’ll win if I have emotions.”
Shit fuck wankery shit on a stick up your arse with bells on.
