Hannah didn’t see it happen. She was turned away from them, laughing with a friend. The first she knew about any of it was on Saturday night, when Chelsea posted the photo on her socials, and Hannah’s phone lit up with people demanding to know what kind of a sister she thinks she is.
I feel sick to my stomach that she’s been dragged into it all.
‘I’m fine,’ she’s told me. ‘It’s you I’m worried about. Nick too.’
Chelsea is the older sister of a girl called Elodie who Hannah’s been at school with since primary. I’ve never liked Elodie, she’s a total user, and I’ve told Hannah countless times to kick her to the kerb. But when Elodie heard that Nick was driving Hannah and the others to the bar, she turned up too, bringing Chelsea with her: all buxom and doe-eyed, with a plumped-up pout and thick, lacquered eyelashes.
‘Just Nick’s type, basically,’ said Felix, when, breaking the no airmen in the attic rule, he came up there to see me on Sunday morning, sitting on Clare’s bed. ‘Come on, Claude. You know there’s no way he wanted any of this.’
I do know that.
I believe completely that Nick had no interest in kissing Chelsea. You can tell, if you look at the photo closely, how stunned he is. He’s told me he was too shocked to immediately react, and pushed Chelsea away the instant he made sense of what was going on. But how,howcould he have been so stupid, getting himself into that situation in the first place?
‘It’s 101,’ I said to Felix. ‘He should have had his wits about him.’
‘Like us, you mean, in Sicily?’
‘That was different.’
‘Not that different. We fell afoul of a camera angle, so did Nick.’
‘We wereacting, Felix. It wasn’t real.’
‘It wasn’t real for Nick either, but you’re punishing him anyway.’
‘I’m notpunishinghim … ’
‘You are. Just like you punished me. And it hurts, Claude. Ithurtme. So much that I actually started to question whether it had all been as platonic for me as I’d thought. No.’ He held up his hands, seeing my widening eyes. ‘No need to panic. I’m not about to declare my undying love … ’
‘Right,’ I said, still panicking a bit anyway.
‘Seriously, Claude, it’s fine. I’ve always known it’s just friends for us. I realised that when we auditioned forThe Go-Between.’ Fleetingly, a smile lifted his leaden expression. ‘It was you telling me about your laxative commercial.’
In spite of myself, I smiled too, replaying his laughter. ‘You snorted Sprite out of your nose.’
‘You acted constipated for an ad that got pulled.’
‘At least it did get pulled.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘small mercies.’
And, as we fell silent, our smiles fading, I looked across at him – my friend, my brilliant friend, for all these years– feeling worse than ever for the pain I’d caused him.
You turned so cold, so fast.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I was thoughtless. Self-obsessed.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘But you were also in hell, and I shouldn’t have flinched. Not the way I did.’ He exhaled. ‘I’ve been feeling like I’ve stumbled into Tim’s story, becoming this point on a triangle I’ve never wanted to be part of.’ He gave me a weary look. ‘I hated having to convince Nick of that. I hate that I ever came between you.’
‘If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something or someone else.’ Such a miserable truth. ‘I really am sorry, Felix. It’s been scaring me that we’ll never get back to how we were.’ I frowned, thinking of the niggling tension that had persisted between us, like an unshakeable virus, reappearing every time I’d started to hope it might have gone away. ‘I love you way too much for that.’
‘I love you too, you idiot,’ he said. ‘But …god–’ he closed his eyes – ‘I’m the one who’s sorry.’ He pulled in a breath. Shook his head. ‘I have to tell you something.’ He sounded so suddenly abject, I genuinely feared he might be ill.
My trepidation grew as he jerked to his feet, pacing the small room, all too obviously summoning the courage to go on.
‘Felix,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’
Warily, he eyeballed me.
