Dr. Fairclough blinked exactly once. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh.” It’s not that I’d been looking for a fight. But I did feel a bit like a matador who’d shown up at the arena only to have the bull politely ask if I needed it to hold my cape.
“After all,” she went on, “it’s a very mean headline. They call you a twit.”
They hadn’t, in fact, called me a twit. “I’ve had worse.”
Dr. Fairclough blinked exactly once more. Sometimes I thought she genuinely was part praying mantis. “Well, thank you for this little talk. I hope you consider yourself to be emotionally supported.”
In a funny way, I did. Yes, I was pretty sure that Dr. Fairclough believed that human feelings were an evolutionary dead end caused by a misguided lack of exoskeleton, but she was trying, and I could give her points for that. “Thanks, Dr. F.”
“Don’t call me ‘Dr. F.’”
“Sorry. Thank you, Dr. Fairclough.”
My life was in a good enough place that not getting told I had to change my entire personality or lose my job felt like relief, rather than elation, but I was still relatively upbeat when I got back to my office and started pinging emails to people who had promised us money at the Beetle Drive.
An hour or so later, there was a knock at my door. This was unusual in itself because CRAPP wasn’t a knocking kind of office. It was a poking-your-head-in, wandering-through-without-being-asked, spilling-hot-coffee-on-you kind of office.
“Come in?” I said without really thinking about it.
And there was Miles. Without his fiancé but still looking like a man who knew full well he was engaged to a tiny ball of sparkling wonder and was borderline smug about it. “Hi.”
I was too shocked to be angry, too angry to be depressed, and too depressed to be shocked. “Hello?” I tried to make it half greeting, half interrogation.
“I… After we met the other night… I got talking to JoJo and I explained who you were and why things had been awkward—”
“Were things awkward?” I asked in my most casual I-definitely-didn’t-have-to-run-away-and-hide voice.
“You know they were. And I know things between us ended badly.”
I almost couldn’t bring myself to call him out on that. But only almost. “Ended badly? You fucking sold me out to the fucking tabloids. That’s not us ending badly, that’s you completely shafting me.”
“I was young and stupid and reckless.”
“You were young and an arsehole.”
“Be fair, Luc.” He gave me that knockout smile of his. “You were kind of an arsehole yourself.”
“Okay, so we were both arseholes. But only one of our arseholes walked away fifty grand richer.”
Somehow, he had the gall to act disappointed. “Don’t make this about the money. It wasn’t about the money.”
“Oh, good. So it was about deliberately hurting me, was it? That makes it so much better.”
Without being asked, Miles sat down in my office’s one free chair. “That’s not what I meant. I…I guess I was feeling trapped and it seemed like a way out.”
“And the cash was just a bonus?”
Finally he had the common decency to look ashamed.
“And so,” I powered on, “you rock up here and tell me this after all these years and, what, that’s supposed to make it okay?”
He hung his head. “Not okay, no. I wanted… JoJo wan— We wanted to invite you to the wedding.”
“I’m sorry.” I glared at him. “For one completely absurd and obviously incorrect minute, I thought you said you wanted to invite me to your wedding.”
“Yes.”
There was no way I was having this. “Let me think. How about…
no? How about no way in fucking hell what are you even talking about you piece of absolute shit.”
“You’ve got a—”
Fuck. It was happening again. I was Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2
with the same shit happening to me twice. “And don’t say I’ve got a right to be angry. I know I’ve got a right to be angry. The thing is, until you barged into my office like…like…like Bargey McBargeface…I didn’t have to be angry because I didn’t have to think about you at all. I could think about ordinary things like my job and my boyfriend and the fact that one of my coworkers doesn’t realise he’s an amateur porn star.”
“An amateur—”