‘Oliver-’ I pinched the bridge of my nose.
There was a beat of silence. He made a noise in the back of his throat, ‘I get it. We got caught up in a moment.’
‘Can wepleasego back to how it was?’ The words tasted wrong on my tongue. I didn’t want to go back. And my vagina certainly wasn’t ready to let go of that night just yet, but that ever present looming sense of dread forced me not to retract my words.
‘You want to forget it ever happened then?’ he said quietly.
No.My entire body screamed at me to tell him no. The humour that laced his words moments earlier was gone, and I wanted to crawl through the phone, grip his face, and tellhim how much that night meant to me. How muchhewas starting to mean to me.
The word that actually fled from my lips was, ‘Yes.’
‘Consider it done.’
I opened my mouth to sayanythingelse, but before I got the chance. He hung up. Pain punched me through the chest as I stared blankly at the frozen vegetables before me—wondering how everything had become so messy.
33
FALLON
It took a couple of weeks for us to go back to our unspoken routine. Oliver would come round, arms laden with coffee, and, if he was in a good mood, croissants from the bakery near my flat.
And still, a thick layer of tension sat between us. We coped by doing exactly what he’d promised to do,pretend it never happened.
Over the last two weeks, I’d amassed a plethora of material. Pages of notes were littered around my bedroom, where I spent most evenings pouring over them; trying to construct the perfect narrative. Oliver was clear on how much of his personal life he wanted in the book; it was painfully little. If I ever stepped too close to a particular subject that was off limits, Oliver would shut down. His jawline would sharpen, and his eyes grew stormy telling me without words to tread carefully.
I’d taken his cues and not pushed, but as I looked over the bits and pieces I had written a sinking feeling settled in my stomach.
People weren’t going to pick up this book if all he talkedabout was football. His rise to fame and the dedication he put into his career was admirable, his work ethic put mine to shame, but that wasn’t enough to pull readers in.
It was eight o’clock in the evening and the beginnings of a headache started to throb in my temple. I sat, legs crossed, in the middle of my bed, papers scattered around me on all sides. Ink smudges marked my fingers where I’d tried to decipher my own hand-writing in my notebooks. My blonde hair hadn’t seen a brush in weeks, and my face was red and splotchy from the amount of times I’d rubbed it.
I’d gone over and over the paragraphs of his early youth. How do you write someone’s childhood without mentioning any sort of family? You can’t. I’d tried several variations, trying to beef out the sections with the smallest amount of information I had, but I couldn’t make it flow.
Heaving a frustrated sigh, I straightened out my legs that ached from being crossed for so long and did a cat like stretch.
I needed to convince Oliver to let me put in things about his family. I needed to tap into the box he nailed shut and let it out.
How do you get someone to open up? It’s not like they’re a pickle jar and you run them under hot water. Although, that wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
Okay, I definitely needed to stop working if my only solution to my tight lipped Oliver problem was potentially waterboarding him.
The cardigan wrapped around my shoulders fell down when I threw the duvet back.
Holy fuck it was cold.
The wooden floors of my bedroom were ice to my bare feet. Pulling fluffy socks out of my chest of drawers, I pulled my cardigan closed and checked my radiator on the opposite side of the room.
Stone cold.
‘What the hell?’ I breathed, padding out to my living room to check that one but it was just as cold. Since I hated having the main light on, a dozen or so lamps were littered about my flat. All still on, but they flickered occasionally, like the power keeping them on was on a thin tether.
Bending down, I fiddled with the knob of the radiator, but no matter which way I turned it the thing didn’t budge.
Shivers rattled through my body, the cold making my fingers stiff.
‘Bollocking fuck buckets.’
If the blasted thing wasn’t going to do it’s one and only job then I’d have to rely on a good old fashioned hot water bottle. I’d call maintenance in the morning, although the prospect of calling my creepy landlord sent a whole different kind of shiver up my spine.
