Cyber Cinderella by Christina Hopkinson

Author:Christina Hopkinson [HOPKINSON, CHRISTINA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446543873
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Mimi, hello, it’s me, Izobel,” I said weakly. It didn’t matter what your sickness sickie claim was, you always had to do the voice that made it sound like you were slipping in and out of a coma. “I can’t make it into the office today. I vomited all night. I think it must be food poisoning.”

If everybody who claimed to have food poisoning did have it, Britain’s kitchens would have to be the most unhygienic in the world.

Despite my warning from Tracy, I couldn’t face PR O’Create for a second day in a row. I didn’t even care about the prospect of being sacked. Just do it, I thought. Ivan was bound to be there, skulking. I wanted to confront him. That’s what all this detective work had been about, but I wasn’t ready yet.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I really did look ill. It was a rare occasion when a videophone would have been of some use to the malingerer. My hair was lank and I wore an old pair of glasses and an even older pair of tracksuit bottoms. The lips that had been moistened by kissing had now dried and chapped. I had prodded my raw stubble burn so much that it had become infected and there was a little bubble of suppurating sore dripping greenish gunk continually from my chin. From sex kitten to pus galore, I said to the mirror, a feeble quip aimed at cheering myself up. It didn’t work.

It was apt that I should have poisoned stubble burn from having kissed Ivan. He had contaminated me in a way as rancid as any computer virus infecting an e-mail address book. I hated him. I wanted to squeeze my chin’s festering discharge into a vial and dispatch it to his house anonymously. I wanted him to feel hunted and haunted as I had done.

And yet, I didn’t. I wanted him. To be denied him at this point, the moment between kiss and sex, was too frustrating. To think of all that anticipation and to feel that kiss once again still made me tingle and dampen. I felt like I was dripping from all orifices. I disgusted myself.

My mobile was like a Post-it note with the word “Ivan” scribbled across it, stuck at every point in my world as it rang and flashed his name up three times throughout the day. Sometimes he left messages, sometimes not. He never disguised his number though, which surprised me, since anonymity appeared to be his modus operandi in other areas of his pursuit of me.

It is wonderful to be pursued, in theory, but in practice the way that pursuers choose to go about their business negates any succor an object of affection could derive from it.

I put the baseball cap on once again and went to the newsagent’s. The nice man in the shop and George would be my only points of contact that day, I had already decided.

George had been good to me

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