“Liar.”
“I’m not a liar either. See?” I forced a smile that made my reluctant jaw ache. “Now eat your breakfast.”
“It’s six o’clock.”
Like I needed him to remind me a whole day had passed since he hadn’t shown up to eat breakfast and watch that stupid DVD with me. I’d got up assuming he was at the gym and had waited and waited like a chump until it became apparent he probably hadn’t come home from his big dick night out. Freddie’s gloating message had come through a millisecond before I’d seriously considered doing what roommates do when the other doesn’t come home at night for the first time ever and aren’t answering their phone. Boy, was I glad I hadn’t done that.Yeah, sorry, officer. I didn’t realise my roommate actually is the flaky douchebag he said he was.
Micah reached out and unclenched my fist. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I wanted to be, but—”
“Look, I get it, okay? You had a good night and you didn’t fancy rolling home to watch some shitty movie adaptation with me. It’s fine, Micah. It’s not like it was a fucking date. I’m sure Freddie iswaymore fun than me.”
“That’s what you think happened? That I ditched you to party with Freddie?”
“Didn’t you? Because he seemed pretty pleased with himself when he let me know you weren’t dead this morning.”
“Wow. You’re so fucking clever if you got all that from his barely literate message. Last I heard, all he said was I didn’t have my phone.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“Sam.”
“What?”
Micah gazed at me a moment longer, then something seemed to flicker in his troubled eyes. He shrugged and picked up his sandwich. “Nothing. Thanks for the breakfast.”
* * *
Micah
Life had a way of monotonously carrying on when all I wanted was to stop the world and get off. To go back to the way things were before. To those precious few months where Sam had believed I was a better man. Or maybe he never had. Maybe he’d been waiting for me to fuck up all along.
You didn’t fuck up. None of this was your fault.
But it was. Because my fuck-ups had started long before I’d met Sam, and everyone knew it.Heknew it. How else would his first conclusion be that I’d spent all night banging coke with Freddie and sacked him off in the process?
What was laughable was that Freddie had never snorted a line in his life. He liked a posh drink and the attention of a beautiful woman, but he was more committed to the game than I had ever been.
At home, the storm passed. Sam gave me a wide berth for a few days, and I didn’t seek him out. When he was home, I stayed in my room, and when he wasn’t, I sulked on the couch. But eventually, our paths crossed and the silence broke. Normality returned, except it wasn’t normal at all. The easiness of our friendship had gone. The banter. He stopped inviting me places, and I stopped pretending I didn’t want to go.
It was murder. I took on more clients at the gym to keep busy. When that didn’t work, I booked an extra session with the psychologist who’d rescued me from the psychiatric hospital. I was a world away from where I’d been back then, but I knew better than to let shit fester.
My psychologist was Meera, a Bangladeshi woman with kind eyes, beautiful hair, and a different necklace every time I saw her. It was once a month these days, but when I’d been seeing her every few days, her collection had fascinated me.
Today, she wore a copper chain studded with jade elephants. I stared at it for a while, before her patient questioning brought me to life.
“So, it’s unsettled you to fall out with Sam. That’s understandable. You’ve become good friends since you’ve lived together, yes?”
“Not on purpose,” I started, but it was such an echo of the conversation I’d shared with Sam in the pub that I stopped and searched for new words. “We are friends, or at least we were before this. But I never meant to get close to him. I wanted to live with someone who got on with their own life and let me get on with mine.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be left alone. I had so much attention from the press, from doctors, arguments with my family. I just wanted to be... alone.”
“Then why did you rent a flat with anyone at all. Why notbealone if that’s what you truly wanted?”
