“I’m starving,” she says through a mouthful of bread.
“I can see that.”
“I didn’t have breakfast this morning.”
“You own a café.How hard can it be to eat something?”
“I only have coffee when I’m at work.”
“Your stomach will be happy.”
“You should worry about your own stomach, Doctor.”
As I lift the first spoonful of soup, my phone vibrates in my pocket.I pull it out with my free hand, but when I see who it is, the spoon slips from my fingers, clattering onto the plate and splashing soup everywhere.
“What is it?”Chris is already leaning in, nosing toward my phone before I’ve the chance to tilt it away.
“It’s work,” I say.
“Well then, it must be something very important,” she says, in that tone she always gets just before the full interrogation starts — lamp in the face, truth serum, the whole lot.
“It can wait.”
“What did the message say?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you’re sweating,” she says.“And your hand is shaking.And because you couldn’t lie if your life depended on it.”
“Anything else?”
“And because the sender said, ‘Captain.’”
Oh, Jesus.Has she got X-ray eyes now as well?
“And there’s only one Captain, right?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So you went ahead with this… thing.”
“There is no thing.”
“Then why is he messaging you?”
I realise I can’t keep avoiding the subject and that it’s pointless to invent another captain, so I feed her some bullshit.
“He is getting me tickets to a game.”
“What game?”
Oh, fuck.How should I know?
“It’s for a friend.”
Way to go, Martin.Bullshit over bullshit.Now you’ll never get out of this.
“Someone you’re dating?”
