Someone cups their hands around their mouth and yells, “Eggo!” and the room spins at my feet like I’ve been slamming tequilas all through the night.
I’m not even third best.
“I won’t let you down, boss!” Eggo says, getting to his feet and saluting, then twerking.
I don’t drink on a school night—a school night being the night before I have either training or a game—but thankfully tomorrow is media day, and therefore doesn’t count as a school night. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I crack the lid off another bottle of Estrella and down half in one swig.
My flat doesn’t have a garden, it doesn’t even have a balcony, so instead I’ve pulled the Georgian sash window up as high as it’ll go, and I’m sitting on the ledge of my third-floor central Bath apartment, looking down into the pokey back yard my basement neighbour owns.
They have a dog, a noisy little King Charles Spaniel named Luigi. It’s fucking cute. I want to keep him for myself. The sun is getting ready to disappear over the horizon, and Luigi’s shadow is about eight times the size it should be.
I puff out a heavy sigh and take another long swig of my beer. Two weeks ago, the captaincy wasn’t even something on my radar. Now, I’m devastated I got overlooked again. And for my best friend of all people.
I should be happy for him. It’ll be a good distraction from his breakup but . . .
Why does everything come at my expense?
Out of habit and a need to interrupt my thoughts, I take my phone out and scroll through the same two apps I waste hours and hours on—Tik Tok and Instagram. I ignore all my messages. They’re mostly from Pi anyway, and I’m already bummed. I don’t want to end up spiralling further into depression with him. I know I should be there for his breakup like he was there when whatever I had with Lando ended, but I can’t bring myself to deal with his happiness right this second.
Instead, I find myself mindlessly typing the first few letters of Lando’s IG handle into the search bar. I’ve searched for his profile so often since our breakup that it comes up automatically.
@sugar_kanes_ukulele.
His profile loads, including all of his posts, and I almost fall out the window. I grab my bottle of beer before it plummets onto Luigi’s head and wipes him out.
Lando’s unblocked me.
Not only has he unblocked me, he’d never removed me as a follower in the first place. And now I’m looking at a year’s worth of unseen Orlando Oakham-Goodwin content.
I’m not a creeper, don’t be stupid, but I still slide down the wall next to the window and sit with my back to it so I can look at them all completely uninterrupted.
His bio is the same as it was a year ago.
Lock up your daddies, the diva of diarrhoea is in town.
I start with the most recent post—a carousel dedicated to Mathias and Owen’s wedding. Weirdly, there are only photos of the happy couple, random bits of decor like his table setting, and a couple of bathroom-mirror selfies. There are zero photos of Daisy.
The caption reads:Congratulations, guys. What a gorgeous couple! So happy you’ve found your Happy Ever After.
As I scroll back through the posts, there are more and more featuring Daisy, but there are also plenty of random photos—signs and posters he’s obviously deemed beautiful enough to capture, dresses from museum exhibitions, abstract plates of expensive looking food, blurry late-night bar snaps, scenery, and of course selfies. He’s added music to all his posts, and nearly every one of them is Lana del Rey because . . . it’s Lando. I think if he didn’t listen to Lana Del Rey for an entire day, he’d keel over.
Every time I glimpse a photo of him, my insides flip, like someone’s put a fishhook behind my belly button and is trying to pull my stomach out through my mouth.
He’s so fucking beautiful. Just the lines and angles of his face, and the way he holds himself. He rarely smiles in any of the photos, but I can see his smile in my mind.
They were always so easy to elicit. For me at least. I’d just have to make a cruel remark about someone we both disliked—which to be fair was pretty much everyone—and he’d throw his head back, exposing all his perfectly straight white teeth, then he’d lean forward and whisper, “You’re such a bitch, Harry Sebastian Eugene Ellis, and that’s why I love you.”
I land upon a picture of him sitting on the grassy hill behind his house. He’s picked “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” to accompany the post. It’s sunset, a yellow hot-air balloon floats above his head, and at first I think the balloon is the subject matter of the photo, the main reason he took it. But he’s in frame too, and there’s an orange glow across half of his face. His eyes are thrown into shade by something not shown in the shot, but . . . something’s not quite right.
I pinch the screen and zoom in on his face, ignoring the way my internal organs both rejoice and protest at his image. His eyes are red . . . bloodshot. To anyone else, it might seem like he was stoned, but Lando hated getting high, so either he’d changed his mind and had been smoking or . . . he’d been crying.
The date of the post is the second of September 2026. It’s captionless, and it’s the first post after our breakup at the end of August.
@daisymerollingcommented with the hugging emoji.
And@owen_bosley1980wrote“Chin up, mate.”
Shit. Why does that hurt so much?
