Page 137 of Almost Ours

Irritation starts to prickle beneath my skin, as if I’ve done something to him instead of keeping something private about myself when we barely knew each other. “Why are you acting like I planned some great deception?”

“Because you did. You made up going to an entire society.”

I shoot him a glare. “And you’re always completely honest with me, are you?”

He wags a finger in warning. “Don’t twist this around on me.”

“I’m not twisting anything.”

“You are.”

“Josh,” I plead. “You are still very much keeping things from me.”

“Like what?” He hotly demands.

“Like why you literally can’t breathe around your ex for a start.” I see him open his mouth to interrupt but I push on. “And that’s fine, you have things you’re not ready to tell me or whatever, but it’s the same for me.”

“How has me not talking about Bonnie got to do with you lying about joining the newspaper?”

“Will you shut up and listen?”

He gives me a long, hard stare before he breathes sharply and spreads his hands. “Alright. Explain.”

“Okay, look.” I wiggle straighter, my back like a rod and heart thundering. I’ve no idea how this is going to come out, but I know there are things I’m not ready to tell him yet. “I had a really shit year when I was sixteen. Like, the worst year ever.”

Josh studies me. “How so?”

“It was just a lot of horrific family stuff. And I’ve moved past it now but some of it is still… I don’t know, it’s still there.”

“Right?”

I can do this. I can tell him. It will be okay. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just that the world can be nasty, and when I was sixteen, I realised it doesn’t care about happy endings the way I do. Or how things should be. And for a while that really fucked me up.”

“Rubes, I’m sorry but I still don’t fully understand?”

I draw in a breath, trying to untangle my thoughts in a way that sounds logical. “It’s sort of like… I don’t know. I guess I used to think if you were good enough, or careful enough, or loved people hard enough, then things would work themselves out. Like there was some invisible rule that meant awful things only happened when somebody had done something to deserve them, which is obviously so stupid because that isn’t how life works at all.” I automatically change gear, watching the backlights of the car in front of me blur a little. “People lie. People leave. People can look you in the face and make you believe one thing while doing something completely different behind your back. You can think you know someone and then find out you never really did. And I really struggle to understand that. I don’t get how people go through life just smashing into things and not caring about the destruction they leave behind.”

“Okay,” He moves his hand on to my thigh. Nodding slowly. “I kind of get it.”

“I hope so. I’m trying to explain it as best as I can.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Thanks.” I shift my hand on the steering wheel and wipe my palm against my jeans before putting it back, feeling achingly exposed. “The therapy isn’t because I’m secretly falling apart every Wednesday and nobody knows. Half the time I go in there and talk shit for an hour. Sometimes it’s uni, sometimes Mum, sometimes Oscar being overbearing. Once we spoke about the fact I used to make my barbies scissor.”

Josh rears away from me so violently you’d think I’d just confessed to murder. “You used to what?”

“Make my barbies have sex.” I roll my eyes to him, then regret it. He looks downright horrified. “Don’t be so freaked out, everyone used to do it.”

“I really doubt that.” He shakes his head and tries to wrap his tiny little mind around what I’ve just said. “What the fuck did your therapist say to that?”

“He said everything is relative.”

Josh stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“God, you’re so weird.”