‘Not my finest moment.’ And another worry to add to the heap. The heap that is currently in front of me because I think I’m still too stunned to process any of it.
‘No,’ she agrees, ‘but I get why you were and why you reacted the way you did.’ We’re back to the parable of the prick and the ring again. ‘I told you he was a snake, didn’t I?’
‘Yeah, you did.’ What I don’t add is that she said so after the fact. Not that it would’ve made any difference. Love is blind, or so they say. If you ask me, I think love is just really, really dumb. Or else it makes people complete idiots.
‘So you got stuck in Harry’s dog door,’ she says with a smirk. ‘Totally sounds like a euphemism.’
‘Yep, this I know, too.’
‘And then you had sex.’
I chew the inside of my lip and nod. ‘But not while I was stuck in the dog door.’
‘I’m glad you’ve cleared that up for me,’ she adds with a snort. ‘But why wouldn’t you tell me?’
Oh, God. That’s not the half of it.My stomach swirls with anxiety. If only I could get to the point where I can tell her the rest.
‘Because I had sex with a stranger in a stranger’s house, and when I woke up in the morning, he wasn’t there. After the year I’ve had—Tamara, Cameron, the ring, and my parents—I didn’t want to admit to any more fuckups.’
I’ve just one more to add to the pile. Spit it out! Any minute now.
‘Mir.’ She draws out the sound over a hundred syllables. ‘None of that stuff reflects on you. You didn’t cheat. You didn’t sell someone a dream and deliver poo. And your parents have screwed things up themselves. Their marriage isn’t a reflection on you.’
‘It sounds so simple when you say it like that, but it’s not simple, is it? Because then there’s him. And even if he wasn’t there for good reason, I’ve had sex with him again. And then I let him finger me in our boss’s office today!’
So I might’ve suffered from a little verbal diarrhoea earlier in the conversation while trying to find the words to explain the mess I’m in.
‘Want to say that a bit louder?’ She tries and fails not to giggle. ‘There’s a guy on the other side of the bar that didn’t quite hear.’
‘Go ahead. Yuck it up.’ It’s the least I can allow her now that I’ve appointed her my confessor. Forgive me, Heth, for I have sinned. A lot.
‘At least he didn’t keep your knickers this time.’
‘Not helpful.’
‘Might’ve been worse. It might’ve been the Batman ones he kept.’
‘Urgh!’ I drop my head into my hands, only emerging again once I’ve scrubbed them over my face. ‘It’s not the sex, or the office, or anything like that.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘He’s older,’ I say, beginning to tap the points off against my finger a little manically. ‘He’s mega rich, we’re socially on different stratospheres, he’s our boss’s husband’s mate, he knows the sex noises I make, and he wants to hear me make them again, and I’m fucking pregnant.’
‘Sophisticated and rich. I can’t see a problem,’ she says, reaching for her cup again. Then it clatters against the saucer as she puts it down again. In a hurry. In a state of shock. Though I can’t be sure because my eyes seem to be perspiring.
‘Pregnant.’
My lips purse against a deluge of great gulping tears.
‘Definitely?’
‘According to the test.’ I nod emphatically, the words wet and bubbling. God, I hate giving in to tears.
‘Taken when?’
‘This afternoon in the staff toilets.’
‘And you’ve worked all afternoon, listening to me waffle on about Facebook and Twitter and their algorithms? Moan about Jorge’s sense of dress? And not once did you think to take me to one side?’
