LITMIR.BIZ

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my face, covering my eyes. Maybe if I lay there long enough, stayed still enough, I would forget about the text and fall asleep.

      I lasted ten seconds.

      With a loud sigh, I reached for my phone again.

       Hello stranger.

      It was going to be a long night.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      ‘Tell me you didn’t text him back.’

      ‘I did not text him back.’

      It was the truth. I had not replied to Patrick’s text. I’d slept for what felt like fifteen minutes, taken two cold showers, listened to the foxes living and loving in my parents’ back garden, eaten half a tub of Nutella straight out the jar, read several chapters of Starting Over, chosen my least-worst New Job outfit from my limited wardrobe and hunted for my ex up and down the internet to no avail but I had not replied to Patrick’s text.

      Striding down the street, on my way to my first morning at work, I lifted my chin to feel the sun on my face.

      ‘I didn’t text him,’ I said. ‘But I really want to.’

      A short, exasperated sigh whistled down the line.

      ‘I know you do,’ Sumi said kindly after collecting herself. ‘But you can’t, Ros. Honestly, I don’t know why you even still have his number in your phone.’

      ‘I didn’t have his number in my phone, it was in the cloud!’ I protested. ‘When the girl in the shop downloaded all my information to the new one, she used a back-up from the cloud. She said it would be quicker than doing a phone-to-phone transfer.’

      ‘You never save anything to the cloud!’ Sumi admonished me. ‘You don’t really want all your personal information flying around out there in cyberspace, do you?’

      I shrugged. If it meant I didn’t have to remember my passwords or credit card numbers when I wanted to order a pizza, I was happy to be part of the problem.

      ‘Please don’t text him, Ros,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s such a bad idea.’

      ‘Is it?’ I wondered out loud. ‘Because I was thinking about it last night and I think closure might be a good idea.’

      ‘I’ll give you closure, we’ll role-play.’ She cleared her throat and deepened her voice. ‘Hello, Ros, I’m Patrick. I think I’m really clever because I’ve read a lot of books and written one or two but I’ve actually got the emotional maturity of a shoe and not a very nice one.’

      I shook my head and smiled as I walked past a coffee shop, remembering the coffees and pastries he’d brought back to his flat the first morning after the first night before.

      ‘Do you think he misses me?’ I asked. ‘Do you think that’s why he sent the text?’

      ‘I don’t know what he’s thinking,’ Sumi admitted. ‘But I do know he broke your heart and I’m not down for you to give him a chance to do it again.’

      ‘Probably just being nice,’ I reasoned. ‘Replying out of politeness. I did send him the first text, after all.’

      Sumi burst out laughing. ‘Ros. When was Patrick ever nice? Or polite?’

      It was a fair point. He was a lot of things but nice wasn’t one of them. But who wanted nice? Nice was just a polite word for boring. Patrick was adventurous and passionate and bold and even though I tried so hard not to, now he was back in my head, I missed him so much I could taste it.

      ‘It has been a while, what if he’s changed?’

      ‘He could have been turned into a unicorn that’s been tasked with protecting the Holy Grail and I still wouldn’t think it was a good idea to text him,’ she replied, blunt as ever. ‘You were together six months and it’s taken you three years to get over him. Don’t do this to yourself.’

      ‘It was nine months,’ I corrected. ‘Almost ten.’

      Nine months, twenty-two days and twenty-three hours if we were being precise. Accuracy was important to me.

      ‘You were together nine months, almost ten,’ Sumi repeated. ‘Then you were offered an amazing job opportunity that didn’t mean you had to break up but he knocked the whole thing on the head without giving it a second thought.’

      ‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I was there, I remember.’

      ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt again,’ Sumi groaned. ‘This is so like him, so casual, so vague. What if you reply, get your hopes up, and then he tells you he’s married with kids?’

      The thought of Patrick being legally tied to someone else hit me like a wet haddock. I slowed down in the street, suddenly sick to my stomach.

      ‘And you already know it’s a bad idea,’ she added, her voice softening slightly. ‘If you’d wanted someone to tell you to text him, you’d have called the soft-touch, not me.’

      She meant Lucy. Lucy was, in fairness, very persuadable.

      ‘Enough about that Twat-Faced Wank Chops,’ Sumi said, invoking her favourite nickname for him, before I could add fuel to the Patrick Parker conversation fire. ‘Are you excited for your first day at work?’

      ‘Nervously optimistic?’ I replied. Patrick’s message had worn the edges off my giddiness but I was still a bundle of happy nerves when I thought about it. ‘I’ve got loads of ideas, I think it’s going to be good.’

      ‘It’s going to be brilliant,’ she corrected. ‘Have fun, be amazing and do not spend the entire day thinking about Patrick “I’ve got a PhD and not in the dirty way” Parker.’

      ‘But also in the dirty way,’ I reminded her.

      ‘Thinking about his knob is not going to improve matters, so stop it,’ Sumi warned. ‘No thinking about him, no looking at photos of him and definitely no texting him. These are my commandments, Ros, I command thee. Thou hast been commanded.’

      ‘I’m sure I’ll be far too busy for him to even cross my mind,’ I assured her even though we both knew I could be put in charge of air traffic control at Heathrow and I’d still manage somehow. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Love you.’

      ‘Love you,’ Sumi replied. ‘Don’t text him!’

      ‘Sorry for all the smoke and mirrors yesterday,’ Ted said, leading me out of the bright and colourful PodPad HR office and down a markedly less bright and colourful staircase I hadn’t seen the day before. ‘But we’ve signed a million NDAs for this show and I couldn’t tell you anything until you’d signed a contract.’

      ‘No problem,’ I answered without hesitation, jogging closely behind him. Why were we leaving the Cool Office? Why was he leading me into the basement? ‘My curiosity is officially piqued. What’s the show about?’

      Ted stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gave me a grin. ‘What was your last show about?’ he asked.

      Someone enjoyed exercising power wherever he could find it.

      ‘The Book Report?’ I replied. ‘It was a culture show, book-based, obviously, clue’s in the name. The host interviewed a different author every week, asked them about their favourite books, you know, from different stages of their life. I developed it from scratch, got to work with the authors, the publishers, everything.’

      He fumbled with an enormous ring full of keys and opened a heavy security door. ‘You like books?’

      ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘A lot. You?’

      ‘Eh,’ he grimaced as he pulled open the door in a pantomime of chivalry. ‘Not really a book man.’

      

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