No. It was an unusually short message from Oliver, which suggested he was attempting to use comic timing in text. It’s a database.
You have a dick database. A dicktabase?
Now I’m concerned you think I actually have a database.
I bet you have a database, I typed, relieved things between us seemed to be drifting normalwards. I bet you have an intern who updates it for you.
I think making an intern update my database of dick pics would constitute a hostile working environment.
Depends how nice the dicks are.
That certainly wouldn’t stand up in court. Was it weird that I always heard Oliver’s texts in Oliver’s voice? Or was it weirder that Oliver texted exactly the same way he spoke?
Probably for the best. That kind of thing could get you disbarred.
If you think that’s true, he sent back, you know very little about the British legal system.
Dashing off some laughing emojis, I turned my attention back to the fridge. Do you think I should get H?agen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s?
There was a moment of whatever the text version of radio silence is. It’s situational, came Oliver’s typically overthought response. But in the circumstances, I’d suggest getting both.
Between juggling my shopping and wrangling with the self-checkout, I didn’t manage to put my reply together until I was on my way out of Tesco’s, swinging a bag of high-calorie edibles from one hand and texting clumsily with the other. Good call. It’s clearly a two-tub problem.
I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.
I hoped there would be, for Bridge’s sake as well as for Tom’s.
He’d never given me cheaty vibes, and I didn’t want to think I’d been that wrong about him. I mean, sure, he’d dumped me for my best friend, but he’d been extremely open about it.
Bridge lived in a tiny one-bedroom flat in Plaistow. She was doing well enough at her job that she could have afforded better, or at least bigger, but she’d been resolutely committed to the idea that she was staying in her starter flat until she got her dream home and her dream life—which in her world would inevitably have come with the dream husband and the dream wedding. The worst thing was, she’d been this close to getting all of it.
I buzzed on her buzzer, and she let me up without even checking who I was. Which was partly typical poor security on her part, but she did it with a sad edge.
She opened the door wearing a dressing gown two sizes too large for her, fuzzy slippers with half the fuzz worn off, and a look of profound melancholy.
“I got Caramel Chew Chew,” I told her. “Also one of those needlessly huge bars of Dairy Milk and also a Toblerone, but I think that might have been panic.”
“Come in.” She gave me the weakest effort at a smile I’d ever seen from her.
In some ways, Bridge’s flat was as messy as mine had been. It was just that in her case, it was a mess that said, I love everything so much that I can’t possibly bear to be parted from it because my world is full of beautiful memories and not I hate everything, and my pants live on the coffee table now. She sat down on the battered old sofa that she’d been dragging from flat to flat with her since we’d been at university and wrapped herself in an even more battered purple blanket that she’d been dragging with her even longer.
I tucked up next to her. “Just to establish some ground rules,” I said, “do we hate him and think he’s evil, or do we trust him and think it’s a misunderstanding?”
Bridge laugh-cried. “I don’t know. Either? Both. How could he do this to me?”
I thought both would be a bad call, so I picked a lane. And with uncharacteristic evenhandedness I picked the lane marked benefit of the doubt. “He might not have. Liz might have made a mistake.”
“Liz is pretty smart. Plus, she’s a vicar.”
“I don’t think that makes her infallible.”
“No, but it means I feel bad calling her a liar.” Bridge snapped off a triangle of Toblerone. “This was a good call, thanks. I don’t know why we only buy them at Christmas.”
I took a nibble of the Dairy Milk. There was an art to this kind of supportive binge—one I’d learned mostly from being on the other side of it. You needed to share enough that you weren’t just watching the other person eat but not take so much that you actually limited their access to comfort food. “I don’t think she’s lying, just that there’s lots of reasons Tom could be talking to a random woman in a café.”