A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger by Lucy Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

engagement.
    Then the curtain was thrown aside and Katy came sauntering in, like a scene from an east London art gallery. She wore vintage sporting breeches, a sparkly cropped bustier and some sort of feather construction clipped into her cropped hair. A pair of vintage pearls hung from her earlobes and she had smudges from last night’s make-up under her eyes, making her look simultaneously dirty and vulnerable. I began to smile. I didn’t see anywhere near enough of Katy: she was too busy being a fashionable electropop singer in London to hang out with her two old-granny sisters in Edinburgh.
    ‘Charley!’ she cried, bounding over and kissing me. ‘Oh, my God!’
    ‘I know,’ I said ruefully, as she squeezed my hand. ‘This is what happens when someone my height suffers the misapprehension that they’re athletic.’
    ‘No!’ she protested. ‘You’re super-athletic! You put me and Nessie to shame with all that running.’ She peered
into the box of chocolates and I took a quick look at Sam who was, as usual, eyeing her up fairly unsubtly. He caught my frown and held up his hands. Quite apart from the fact that Sam no longer had any business perving at girls, I had told him a few years back (when I’d caught him using his infamous Shakespearean chat-up line on Katy at my birthday party) that I would personally cut off his scrotum if he so much as touched her arm.
    Katy, unaware of my fatwah, flopped down on Sam’s knee. ‘Hi, babe,’ she said, patting his leg. Katy was enviably aware of her own sexuality and Sam peeped out at me from underneath her arm, powerless and afraid. I raised a warning eyebrow.
    But I knew it was OK. Sam was in love. He was getting married. The impossible had happened.
    ‘Sorry, Charley, I look like a Blitz prostitute,’ Katy said, pulling off her painful-looking vintage heels. ‘I haven’t been to bed. Gig till three a.m. and then I got Nessie’s messages about you being here. There wasn’t anyone sober enough to drive me up to Edinburgh so Ruben and I waited at King’s Cross for the first train.’
    ‘You didn’t need to do that!’ I said, coughing. Christ, the pain in my throat. ‘And who’s Ruben?’
    ‘Oh, he’s our temporary bassist. We’re having a bit of a fling – it’s nothing.’ She turned round and squeezed Sam’s nose. ‘I heard your news!’ she said. ‘Fucking mental, Sam!’
    Sam looked pleased and embarrassed. I tried to shift slightly up the bed, to check that he wasn’t enjoying having Katy on his knee too much, but was met with a stab of pain from my pelvis so acute that I whited out for a second.
    When I came to, Hailey was standing over me, frightened, and Matty was dragging Moody Nurse in. ‘She just sort of sank,’ he was saying anxiously.
    ‘What happen?’ the nurse asked, looking irritably round the cubicle.
    ‘I tried to move and it really hurt,’ I said faintly.
    Moody Nurse tutted. ‘Girl, don’t move. We told you that. Don’t you move an
inch
, hear me?’
    I closed my eyes, exhausted. ‘I increase your painkillers,’ she said. ‘The CT-scan results arrive. The doctor come and talk to you soon.’
    She shuffled out. Katy was appalled. ‘Blimey, Charley, are you OK?’ she said, visibly shaken.
    ‘Yes, great!’ I said weakly. I didn’t fool anyone, least of all myself. I felt terrible, mentally and physically. I was frightened by the amount of pain I was in and terrified of being there for ever, rotting away in the evil clutches of Dr Nathan Gillies, while back at Salutech Margot stormed my office and took over my job. And far worse than
any
of this was the pain of John having got engaged. That was the end. I had no fight left; I was spent.
    ‘John got engaged,’ I blurted out. ‘To Married Woman. Who isn’t married any more, apparently.’
    There was a silence.
    Then: ‘Fuuuuuuuck,’ Hailey said quietly. I felt my face disintegrate and tried once again to keep it together.
    Sam, who felt comfortable with emotion