“Here we go with the rumors again. What now?”
“Some say that Rile is psychic.”
“You’re joking, and it isn’t funny.”
My friend put her hand on my arm. “I’m not joking. I’ve heard stories about his mum too.”
“What of his mum?”
“You’ve heard of the Cambridge Five, yes?”
“Who hasn’t if they’ve gone to school in the UK?”
“Rile’s mother worked for SIS. It’s said she was the one who exposed the final two. Up until she did, it was the Cambridge Three.”
I cocked my head. At the very least, this ridiculous tale had gotten my mind off my sexual frustration, even if only for a few minutes. “Are you saying she read their minds and found they were Russian spies?”
“I don’t know how she did it but, essentially, yes.”
I stared at her long enough that if she’d been joking, she wouldn’t have been able to maintain a straight face.
“Something happened last night,” I said.
“What? Did he read your mind?”
“The other way around.”
“You read his?”
“I can’t explain it. We were…fooling around—”
“You were?”
“Do you want to hear this?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“I wanted to have sex, but he stopped things.”
“And?”
“Like I said, it was as though I could read what he felt. That he was conflicted. He wanted it too, but he stopped himself. I didn’t think he was rejecting me. It was more that it was too important to him for us to just have ‘sex.’”
“I remember when we were fifteen, and we were at your grandparents’ flat in London, and I was on the phone with my boyfriend.”
“Tony?”
“Yes! Do you remember what happened?”
“Vaguely. Go on.”
“I’d invited him and his best mate over because your grands were out of town.”
I gasped. I did remember. “I told you to call Tony back and tell him not to come, because I thought they might come home early.”
“I thought you were just being a spoiler, but then no more than twenty minutes later, in they came. I was certain they’d already alerted you that they were on their way, but you were stunned enough that I realized they hadn’t.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. It had really thrown me.