We pass the Thames, the surface of the moving river aglow with light from the rows of streetlamps that ran along either side of the embankment. Out of the slightly cracked open back window, I hear somebody call to their friend. A quarter of a mile up the road, we drive by a high tower block of apartments, over half of which are pitch black through their windows, but some are awash with colour, the people inside still awake for one reason or another.
When I finally feel my phone buzz with an incoming call, I hardly check the ID before hitting accept.
I stare into the face of my best friend. “I’ve done something really stupid.”
“You? Do something stupid?” Rosie screws her face up in confusion, the pixels of our phones on our video call highlighting the laughter lines bracketing either side of her mouth. “I don’t believe it.”
Rosie listens as I tell her about accidentally bumping into Hudson at the tattoo shop, not even complaining about the sudden breaks in my story as I pay the taxi driver for my ride, ducking into my apartment complex and racing up the stairs to my home.
Once I’ve locked the door behind me, I rip open my refrigerator to grab my bottle of wine and fall onto the sofa cushions, picking up right where I left off, telling her about our flirting, which I couldn’t seem to stop myself from engaging in, and then finally my agreement to go and grab a drink with him at the local pub.
“So… a date.” She doesn’t phrase it as a question, but rather a statement.
“It wasn’t a date!”
“Sure, sounds like one to me, Gee.” Rosie rolls her hand in the universal sign for ‘carry on’.
“We we’re just talking and laughing and… he mentioned how much he wanted to kiss me and my god all I could think was how muchIwanted him to kiss me and touch me—”
“Because you want to ride him… understandable.”
“Rosie!”
“Why are you video calling me from your apartment if Hudson was all over you? Shouldn’t you be back at his, dimming the lights and getting all freaky beneath his sheets?”
Hudson Millen doesn’t strike me as the type of man who dims the lights at all or fucks a woman under his sheets. He’sprobably an animal just like he is in the gym, pushing, pushing, pushing, until you’ve given him everything you have left to give.
Why does that thought turn me on?
“Because I freaked out.”
“You freaked out?” Rosie repeats.
I bob my head. “He just kept on talking about how there wasn’t any pressure and this and that—”
“That sounds like a good thing, Gee.”
“He said we didn’t have to make things complicated.”
Rosie falls silent, her lips pressing together into a straight line.
“Yep,” I continue. “When I asked him about all the other girls in his contact list, he said we didn’t have to make things complicated. That’s code for, I want to sleep with you, plus every other girl in the Southwest London borough and we both know it.”
“When you put it like that…” Rosie squints. “Gee, are you sure he meant it like that, and it wasn’t just because his words hit a trigger point?”
Ignoring Rosie’s question, I take a healthy gulp of wine. God, this wine is awful, it tastes the way paint stripper smells, but it was the cheapest bottle of wine on sale at the shop beside my apartment.
“Did I mention it’s his birthday tomorrow?”
Rosie’s mouth falls open. “Hudson’s?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you dumped the man on his birthday?”
“One, there was no dumping. You have to be in a relationship, with labels, to dump someone and second, it’s not his birthday for…” I click my screen to bring up the time. 9:07 p.m. “3 hours.”
“Rounding back to my previous question.” I swear in her past life Rosie could have been an attorney at law. She’s all rationaland shit. A peacemaker through and through. “Both you and I know Giselle, that Hudson saying you don’t have to make things complicated is a trigger point for you. A big one at that. But doesheknow that?”
