“No,” I said sternly. I might not be able to dress myself or get my house back in order, but I did have some backbone. Somewhere.
Mrs Patel picked her plates off my draining board with more clatter than was probably necessary, turned around and walked out the door, letting the door slam behind her.
She’d be back. She always was.
The parcel? I’d almost made my way back to bed when I remembered, shuffling back out there and ripping the envelope open. No note. No return address. Just a plain envelope with my phone inside. The sigh of relief was immediate, but of course. Dead. Chargers. I stood there, in the middle of the room, looking around in disbelief.
I usually had a charger in the kitchen. One that the boys no doubt had pilfered. Was there one in my bedroom? Maybe…or was that the one from the kitchen?
And here it was, Mrs Patel no doubt returning to deliver another dose of guilt-tripping abuse. Heavy banging on the door, as I braced myself for whatever she was going to hurl at me this time.
I wasn’t watching the goddamn show. I didn’t need food. I could feed myself, and I wasn’t completely useless, and if she mentioned the damn grass again…
I flung the door open, ready to go straight into battle.
Instead I stood there like a fool, catching my breath in my throat.
He just stared at me, his body all tense. It was him, of course it was, and how he’d found me was beyond…
Him. Oliver. Seemingly taller than I remembered him, more put together than in my hazy memories. Yet, of course it was. And the very fact that my body tensed up at the same time as I could feel myself boiling up on the inside. And then relax. What…what the…
“You’re…” I started, trying to take him in. All that curly brown hair, looking particularly messy. Very him. He was smartly dressed. A soft jumper over proper trousers. Brown shoes. He looked tired, though. Frazzled. Those plump lips of his getting bitten by his teeth as he looked to the side. Hands in his pockets. Rocking on his heels. Then he stared at me.
“You left,” he hissed out from behind gritted teeth. “You just fucking left.”
I had. Truth. But?
That had been so long ago. It weirdly felt like years.
I took a step back, kind of weirdly motioning something with my arm. Like, step inside my strange, dark abode. Where I tried to clean but did aterrible job of it. And once again, the way I smelled hit my nostrils as I must have grimaced in shame.
“I’m not leaving,” he hissed, “until I have answers.”
“What is it with people demanding answers today?” I said, sounding completely unhinged, but then I supposed I was. Rattled to the bone.
Oliver. My Oliver, the guy… I couldn’t make my thoughts make sense. He was my Oliver, and I had…left him. There had been reasons. And anyway?
He looked pale. He looked angry. Fumingly so.
“So you’re just here, like nothing ever happened,” he gritted out, walking past me and then…stomping around my front room. He hadn’t stopped pacing since I’d closed the front door behind him. And my heart was beating out of my chest.
“You didn’t even leave a note. No number, nothing. I tried to get hold of you, and your practice nurse was bloody useless, and the production company won’t take my calls, and I am so…”
He stopped for a minute, making a guttural sound somewhere at the back of his throat.
“You left me, Peter. Just fucking left me in there.”
“I know,” I admitted, trying to swallow through the dry sensation in my mouth. “I had to.”
“You didn’t have to do shit, Peter! We were good. We were talking, and you promised. You said we’d have each other’s back!”
Had I?
“Oliver, it was such a blur. Everything was so wrong, and I just…”
“And what about me? What about me?”
“Not everything was about you.” I tried to make my voice soft, but instead it just came out in weird stutters. “I had…I had to leave.”
