10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall

Author:Alexis Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SOURCEBOOKS Casablanca
Published: 2023-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

I don’t say much because there’s not much to say after someone’s told you in no uncertain terms to mind your own fucking business, but I make him a cup of tea and he takes it sitting on the sofa in the middle reception room with Gollum on one knee and the box of special decorations on the other. It’s open now, and I can see that on the inside it’s full of a mix of all kinds of bits and bobs. There’s a torn-and-taped-together snowflake made from sugar paper, a bright red bauble with a grinning red-cheeked Santa on it, a glass apple and a lot of other random bits of stuff I can’t quite make out as clearly.

“I was going to suggest you put the guinea pig in here,” he tells me. “But that might not be a good idea.”

It’s an old cardboard box with “DECS” scrawled on the top in faded felt tip, so I’m really not sure it can take the immense symbolic weight Jonathan’s putting on it. “Why not?” I ask.

He stares at his tea and doesn’t answer.

“Look,” I try, “about—I mean—if what happened had anything to do with what happened.” Good one, Sam. Clear as mud that was.

He keeps staring and keeps not answering.

And having already brought him a cup of tea, and tried to raise the extremely awkward did you flip your lid at your family because I kissed you that one time question, I’m not sure where else I can go.

“I’m fucking everything up,” he says, and it’s touch and go whether he’s talking to me, his tea, or Gollum.

“No you’re not.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t consider you the best judge.”

So he’s going to be like that, is he? I guess kissing him that one time was part of the problem after all. “I mean, I’m pretty familiar with fucking up, so there’s that.”

The look he shoots at me, then, is half-betrayed and half…well. I’d almost call it longing if we were different people in different circumstances. “You’re not, though, are you? Not in the same way.”

“What’s the supposed to mean?” I ask, because it feels like I’m being accused of something, though I’m not sure what.

“You know how to”—he makes a slightly restrained gesture on account of the tea and the cat—“do all this. People like you, even when they shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t? Why shouldn’t they? I’m not a serial killer or a Big Mac.”

“Oh don’t be naïve,” Jonathan snaps.

You shouldn’t roll your eyes at a man who’s just been crying but I do. “Is this still because I kissed yez?”

“Yes,” he says emphatically. Then, “no,” equally emphatically. He slams his tea down on the coffee table, slopping it everywhere and I’m about to go get some paper towel, then I realise that’d be one part too Stepford. “I knew from the beginning that this was a bad idea. And, believe me, if you’d had anyone else, I’d have sent you off with them and none of this would have happened.”

I’m sure Jonathan doesn’t realise how low that is, but that’s fucking low.

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