Page 77 of Ex in the City
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I’m woken up by the sound of my phone vibrating on the bedside table.
For fuck’s sake, I’d only just managed to cry myself to sleep.
I reach out and grab it. It’s Dylan, aka the last person on earth I want to talk to right now. I let it ring out before placing my phone back down on the bedside table.
I close my eyes again, for about five seconds, before it starts ringing again.
This time, when I grab it, I reject his call in temper, and place it back down.
Then I hear a message come through.
I snatch up my phone, all amped up, ready to reply to him, to tell him to piss off, and to never contact me again, but then I notice what his message says:
Look out of your window, I’m outside.
The next thing I notice is the time – 3a.m.
I jump out of bed and hurry over to the window. He can’t be serious. And yet he is, he’s standing there, outside the front door, gazing up at the house.
I call him from my phone.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ask him.
‘Nic, can we talk?’
‘No,’ I say emphatically. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Please, just go, you’re going to wake the neighbours. Don’t you think you’ve embarrassed me enough?’
‘Please, Nic, just let me explain,’ he begs. ‘Come across the road with me, hear me out, and if you’re still furious then I promise to piss off and you never have to talk to me again.’
I want to say no, to tell him to piss off again, but I can’t. I sigh.
‘Okay, fine, you’ve got five minutes,’ I say. ‘I’ll just get my clothes on.’
I throw on a tracksuit and head downstairs, meeting him on the doorstep.
‘Hi,’ he says softly.
‘Hi,’ I reply through a frown. ‘Why are you here, at 3a.m., being an arsehole?’
‘Because I need to explain,’ he tells me. ‘And I couldn’t find you earlier, so I thought maybe you had come here, but there was no sign of you. I just woke up, looked out of the window, and saw that your room was lit up – sorry, I should have known you were sleeping with the lights on. You always do when you’re anxious.’
‘Wow, Mr Campbell would be proud,’ I tell him as I pull a face.
‘Erm, thanks, I think,’ he says with a laugh.
Once we’re inside Mr C’s house, we take a seat on the green sofa.
‘I know how this all looks but you have to believe me, it wasn’t me in that photo,’ he explains.
‘Well, if it wasn’t you, then why didn’t you deny it?’ I ask in disbelief.
‘Because it was Mikey,’ he tells me simply.
‘Mikey is married with kids,’ I correct him.
‘Exactly,’ he replies softly. ‘He fucked up, big time, and the last thing I wanted was for his wife and kids to find out about it by reading it online, seeing that photo.’
