Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble by Alexis Hall

Author:Alexis Hall [HALL, ALEXIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

WEEK FIVE

Patisserie

Wednesday

THISWASFINETHISWASFINETHISWASFINE.

The problem was that when somebody had given you permission not to do a thing, and you’d insisted you could totally do it, that put you under a lot of pressure not to be a wreck. And for all that Tariq was patient and understanding and wonderful, Paris suspected there was only so much of a wreck he could be before he’d thoroughly exhaust his wreck privileges. So he’d got on the Tube, and then on another Tube, and then navigated his way through the streets of Bromley—an area for which he had diligently avoided looking up any crime statistics—using his phone. A phone that, despite the nagging voice in the back of his mind, nobody had mugged him for.

This, he told himself, was A+ boyfriending.

And he was only a little bit sweaty and terrified when he arrived at the venue. It was a… well… it was a blue cube in a car park with the words Laser Vengeance stencilled in white on the side. The lack of windows, coupled with the no-nonsense branding, made it look either like the kind of place suburban husbands went to buy porn in the ’70s or else—actually, no, that was what it looked like.

This was beginning to feel like a joke. To pay him back for some terrible thing he’d probably done without realising it, Tariq had lured him out to a plywood cube in the middle of nowhere, and he’d get to the doors and there’d just be a Post-it note saying ha-ha you suck.

Paris tried to remember what they’d done for his father’s fiftieth birthday. He thought they might have gone to the Guggenheim. At least his parents had—he’d read about it in Hello! a week later. Still, right now he’d have taken sitting alone while people swanned off to New York without him over standing alone in a car park outside a blue box that still might turn out to be full of murder.

Eventually, he did find a door, but he wasn’t quite sure where it led. And he was now realising that I’ll meet you there, while it had sounded breezy and casual at the time, was far too nonspecific. Was Tariq expecting to meet him inside? Or in the car park? Or under one of those big police tents after they discovered his body after he got stabbed in the car park? And of course he could text, but that might look needy or neurotic and what if Tariq was driving and he answered the text anyway and he went off the road and he died on the way to his dad’s birthday?

A car door slammed close enough to make Paris jump but far enough away that he felt awkward looking at it. Except not looking at it began to feel increasingly worse on account of how pointed it seemed, and there was only so much interest you could feign in a blue wall with no signs on it. When he could feign no longer, he turned nonchalantly around and saw a woman approaching, talking on her phone.

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.