A pause. “Of course. Sorry to have interrupted your morning.”
“No problem. Bye.”
I hung up, and it was all I could do to fling my phone onto the bed rather than at the wall.
That Miles had chosen not to come out was not news. That he went to extreme lengths to protect himself was, but shouldn’t have been surprising. Tina hadn’t seriously suggested this had been my fault either, yet anger fizzed through me hot and fierce and I wanted to break something.
Leaving my phone where it was, I pulled on my shoes.
When I left the apartment, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was going straight out for a run or to knock on Miles’s door first, but in the end the decision was made for me. As I drew level with his door, his voice sounded from within and I paused to listen.
“Yeah, I’m hearing you, Tee,” he was saying, no doubt pacing as I had been. “But it’s not a big deal, all right? One person—Yes, of course it’s spread, things do, but come on. Mat is not my boyfriend—Yes, I did, because I drank too much and wasn’t thinking, but he’snot my boyfriend. What is he? He’s the guy I’m fucking because you always tell me I need to be more careful and what’s more careful than screwing one of the few people in the world who has no reason to go to the fucking press? He’s safe. It’s simple. That’s all.”
Nothing I didn’t already know. Hell, I’d told Katie days ago that he was just the convenient hot thing across the hall, yet the words were still a slap and I didn’t need to hear more. I needed to run until the anger was gone. Needed to run until I stopped thinking. Run until this stupid pain in my chest went the fuck away.
KATIE WAS ON the couch when I got back, her laptop open and the remains of her breakfast in a large bowl beside it.
“There you are,” she said, not glancing around. “Snuck off for some morning delight, huh? Well, you’re just—”
“No, I went for a run.”
She looked up then, brows raised. “Oh. Everything okay?”
“Sure. Is that the Wimbledon draw?”
“Yeah, they just started. About to do the women’s seeds.”
“No time for a shower then.”
“Probably not.” Katie gestured to the flowers with a slightly bemused smile. “Yours?”
I turned away to get some water, the small kitchenette like a hole into which I dove. “Uh, yeah. Part congratulations on making the main draw, part ‘your apartment looks sad’. Honestly, I think he just likes having flowers around and took the excuse.”
She didn’t immediately answer, and I kept my back turned rather than risk her expression. If I started explaining what had happened it would all come out in a rush, and while the urge to vent my anger was strong, the desire to cling righteously to it and wallow was stronger.
From the laptop came the reedy voice of the draw announcer,preparing to pull our futures out of a hat. “Third seed, Leia Desrosiers.”
“Oh sure,” Katie said finally, her sarcasm cutting across the feed. “That’s definitely the normal reason people give flowers. Come on, Mat, what—?”
“I think I’ll take that shower actually,” I said, turning toward the bathroom. “It’s not like a few minutes will change the outcome. Scream if they pronounce my name Mat-ee-o again though, yeah?”
Draw announcements were often nerve-racking. A tourna-ment’s draw laid out our first-round opponents, charting which players we might meet later and who we were unlikely to meet at all. When I finally looked at mine, the news was mixed. The good news was that Miles and I were in opposite halves of the draw, making the chance of playing him basically zero. The bad news was that I’d drawn Marco Bicchieri for the first round – the world number three. It was about as bad a draw as one could get and Katie waited, grimacing, for me to say something.
I ought to have been annoyed or disappointed—that the reaction she was waiting for—but my anger was caught up elsewhere and I just shrugged. “It’s fine. I go out there and play my game. Give it a hundred and ten percent. It’s not like I have anything to lose.”
When Miles arrived a few minutes later, he strode in with a broad smile, saying, “You drew Marco! Poor guy is going to think he’s stepping out for a routine first round and won’t know what hit him. You got a good draw,” he added to Katie, along with a good morning as though nothing at all had changed, and because it hadn’t anywhere but inside my head, she greeted him like the third resident of our apartment he had become.
“First round, sure,” she said. “But I have a very poor record against Dasha Sidorova if I have to face her in the second.”
“Poor records are made to be broken.” He leaned against thekitchen bench. Nothing in his demeanour suggested he was keeping his distance, yet he was a whole world away. I hadn’t noticed his habit of kissing me good morning until he’d stopped. “Hey,” he said, looking my way. “Tina said she called you.”
“Yeah, she did.”
If he was hoping for more, he wasn’t going to get it without asking specific questions – questions Miles seemed loath to put into words. He was still smiling, but he’d settled into watchful mode and I knew I was being read. “You okay?” he asked eventually.
“She just asked me to let her know if anyone contacts me.” Not the question he’d asked, but the answer he was getting.
“Likes to be on top of things,” he said. “Nip things in the bud. Along with numerous other euphemistic expressions to let me know she’s taking care of it.”
