Don't Ask by Hilary Freeman

Author:Hilary Freeman [Freeman, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848123236
Publisher: Piccadilly Press

Chapter 13

As soon as my parents had arrived home and Jack had left, I went into my bedroom, shut the door and texted Katie, asking her to call urgently. It was after eleven-thirty but I was sure she wouldn’t be asleep. Not on a Saturday night. She’d mentioned something about going to the cinema with one of our friends, although, to be honest, I’d been so caught up in the dramas of my own day that I hadn’t really listened.

There was a short delay and then my phone began to purr.

‘What’s up?’ she slurred, drowsily, when I answered.

‘You weren’t asleep, were you?’

‘Not really. Not any more,’ she said, irritated. ‘I told you, I decided not to go out tonight because I was feeling a bit dead. Has something happened? Does Jack know you went to the football?’

‘No, it’s not that.’

‘Oh,’ she said, in a voice which suggested I could have waited until the morning.

‘Sorry I woke you. But it’s all got so messy and complicated. I think I need to end things with Alex.’

‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘So you want to terminate Project Jared, do you?’

‘I’m being serious, Katie,’ I said, and told her what had happened, repeating everything that Jack had told me. I’m not sure he meant for me to share the gruesome details about his father with anyone, but he hadn’t actually said, ‘Don’t tell anyone’, and he must realise that girls tell our best friends everything.

Katie listened, incredulous. When I’d finished, she said simply, ‘Wow.’

‘I know. I can’t keep seeing Alex, can I? Not now Jack’s opened up. I feel awful. Poor Jack. And what if he finds out what I’ve been doing? I’m not sure he’d understand.’

‘Too right,’ she said. ‘But you weren’t to know that Jack had some serious stuff going on in his past. You’d never have guessed what his dad did in a million years. He said he was dead, didn’t he? So the way I see it, you haven’t really done anything wrong. Jack lied to you, so you lied to him. You’re even. But now you’ve got to stop it. You don’t need Alex any more. You should just dump her. It’s easy. You delete Laura’s account, you don’t reply to Alex’s messages and you don’t answer her calls or her texts. If you really want to make sure she leaves you alone, you can even change your mobile number – you could just tell everyone it was stolen. It’s a hassle, but it would make Laura completely untraceable.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can just pretend that Laura never existed. Alex will get over it, won’t she? It’s not like she and Laura were ever really close; we – they – had only met once. She’d be a bit confused, maybe a bit miffed for a while, and then she’d forget about me, I mean Laura, and get on with her life.’

‘Exactly. And Jack will never find out. Absolutely no damage done.’

Katie made it sound so clean and simple, so easy. To her, erasing Alex from my life would be no greater an effort than crossing a name off a list.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.