Page 55 of After Felix
There’s an even longer pause. “Max.” It's his long-suffering voice. The one he used when he was landed with a young boy as a stepbrother who was going to look up to him for the rest of his life. And I feel a sudden deep love for the man who has always been my role model for how to behave honourably in life. Maybe if I’d paid closer attention to what Zeb would have done, I’d never have lost Felix. There’s a painful melancholic truth in that. “Max, you can’t do this,” Zeb says. “Don’t make it worse for yourself. It’s?—”
“This is my chance,” I interrupt, my voice too loud in the quiet room. “This is my chance to get him back, and if he had to run me over to get that chance, then I’m happy.”
He sighs heavily. “I live for the day you get back together, and you become his problem again, do you know that?”
“Thank you.” I sniff. “How brotherly.”
“Okay, if you’re still set on this crazy idea, what do you want me to do?”
Ten minutes later, I set my phone back on the table and lie back to finish plotting. My arm hurts, but I’ve planned and plotted through worse injuries than this.
I have a sudden memory of me and Ivo trapped in a cell, words being spat at us as we huddled together for warmth. Sweat breaks out over my body, but then I hear a distant clatter of dishes from downstairs in the kitchen. Felix. He’s here in my house with me. I’m not alone. Taking several deep breaths, I’m able to push the awful memory away,
I don’t know when I slip into sleep, but I fall deeply, waking only to memories of Felix’s hand in my hair in the night and his soft questions.
When I wake up next, it’s to a knock on the door and Felix’s messy head appearing.
“Breakfast is almost ready,” he says. “Want a hand with anything?”
I sit up with a groan, feeling every inch of my years and probably someone else’s too. “Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’d love it if you could go out and purchase me a new body.”
He laughs. “Please can I buy Matthew McConaughey’s?”
“What has he got that I haven’t?” I ask, pulling myself up.
“Well, at the moment a fully functioning body,” he says, eyeing me.
“I’d like to be Matthew. He looks like his exes never run him over with their cars.”
He snorts. For a second, his eyes light up and fully focus on me. I never get to see him like this anymore, and I look at him greedily. He reads something in my expression, because the light in his eyes fades away like the last spangles of colour from a firework. And then we’re back to being awkward again.
I give an unobtrusive sigh and get ponderously to my feet. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I say. When he makes as if to come and help me, I give him a horrified stare. “Please donothelp me,” I say faintly. “I’m more than capable of taking a piss by myself.”
“Your loss,” he says, turning to leave. He pauses by the door. “Oh, your housekeeper said breakfast will be ready in fifteenminutes. I sort of got the impression that you wouldn’t be ignoring her?”
I shudder. “Never,”I say fervently. “It was less trouble to ignore Hitler. That woman is bloody scary.”
“I noticed that,” he says solemnly. “Luckily, she found out that I’m your ex, so she’s treating me like I’m made of glass and likely to break at any second.”
“Probably expects you to collapse in a heap, sobbing from your recollections of our brief time together,” I say before I can think. To my relief, he just laughs.
“She’s treating me as if we’re comrades in some war I wasn’t aware of fighting.”
I shudder. “God help me if the two of you were ever to combine forces.”
“Maybe you should consider that in the timing of your ablutions,” he advises me, and then with a wave of his hand he’s gone.
I used to be able to exist on very little sleep and could be fully awake as soon as I opened my eyes. It’s a talent that saved my life many times, but I’m a slow riser nowadays. Once I left journalism, my early morning rush became a lot more leisurely, almost like a tortoise pottering along. However, today I’m very aware Felix is downstairs, so I rush through my early morning routine as if I’ve got the scoop of the century.
And even though this morning it feels like he ran over every bit of my body, I take the stairs with a smile on my face, listening to Mrs Finch’s laughter as he says something that’s undoubtedly either scandalous or sharply snarky or a mixture of the two.
When I come into the dining room, I find the two of them laughing together. They turn their faces to me, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that they’ve been laughing at me.
“Oh, great,” I say. “You’ve joined together. How lovely for the fate of the world.”
“It’s not the world you should be concerned about, Mr Travers,” my housekeeper sniffs. “Now, I’m off to get your breakfast. Hopefully, you can manage to eat it without destroying another area of the houseand creating work for me.” She looks at Felix. “Gunpowder,” she says and exits the room.
“What is the gunpowder reference? Were you friends with Guy Fawkes in your early years?”
