I had said that. Because he was easy to talk to, for me.
‘The last couple of years have been so shitty, everything has been so difficult.’ Her dark curls fell forward, covering her face as she looked down at her feet. ‘I’m broke, I hate my apartment, my acting career is in the toilet and ever since my cool roommate moved back to Ohio, I’ve been so lonely. Then I saw Ren and for the first time it was like, pow.’
‘Love at first sight,’ I said softly.
‘I was going to say it felt like my vagina exploded, but sure.’
There was no response I could come up with for that.
‘It’s been months, Phoebe, months of trying to work up the courage to speak to him, and now I have my shot and I’m throwing it away. I’m going to lose the love of my life because I can’t string a simple sentence together,’ she said, her voice softening. ‘If only you could help me like you did with the letter, until we’re comfortable with one another.’
‘What do you want me to do,’ I asked. ‘Hide in the bushes and feed you lines?’
She lifted her head, looking at me like she’d just figured out how to get the ads out of her Instagram feed and I heard alarm bells ringing in my ears.
‘I am not hiding in the bushes and feeding you lines.’
‘Not in the bushes,’ she replied, pointing at my phone. ‘You can stay on the terrace.’
‘Because that’s so much more dignified?’
Clasping her hands together under her chin, she looked at me with huge, pleading eyes.
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘How would it even work?’ I asked. It was embarrassing how quickly I caved. It was impossible to say no to those big brown eyes of hers. ‘You can’t exactly put me on speaker without him noticing.’
‘You can hear us from the terrace, right?’ Bel said with renewed enthusiasm as she produced a shiny white AirPod from her tiny bag, tucking it into her ear. ‘Then it’s simple. You call me, I’ll wear my Airpod so I can hear you, and you tell me what to say. It’ll be like we’re on a movie and I’m the actor and you’re the script supervisor feeding me lines. Actors do it all the time.’
‘They do?’ I was both shocked and appalled.
‘The sucky ones,’ she nodded. ‘All I have to do is fix my hair.’
She combed her long dark curls over to one side and wove them into a loose braid that covered her ear. The AirPod disappeared completely.
‘This seems very risky,’ I muttered, brushing my hands through my own, straight blonde hair. ‘What if he sees the thing in your ear?’
‘I’ll tell him I forgot it was there. He already thinksI’m a total ditz, it won’t be too much of a stretch. OK, call me.’
Half convinced this was doomed to failure and half cat-killingly-curious to see if it could work, I swiped through to her details and hit the call icon.
‘Can you hear me?’ I asked. ‘Testing, testing, I must be an idiot.’
She tapped at her ear, the tip of her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth. ‘It’s totally going to work. It has to, Pheebs, he completes me.’
That was it. I was defenceless against a nineties romcom.
‘Like Jerry Maguire,’ I said, smiling.
‘No, it’s a line from Austin Powers,’ Bel replied. ‘You know, Dr Evil and Mini-Me?’
‘Go on, go, before he thinks you’ve run away,’ I ordered, marching back up to Suzanne’s house as Bel skipped away. This was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the stupidest things I had ever done. More stupid than the time I tried to make a sanitary towel out of toilet roll and safety clips in year eight. More stupid than the time I wiped out the entire office computer network by trying to open nude photos of Chris Evans and accidentally downloaded a virus instead.
