Buy Me, Sir

A cigarette. I need a fucking cigarette.

I stumble into a tiny corner shop two streets down, and the assistant is wide-eyed as I bark out an order for anything. Sixty of fucking anything. And a lighter. Make that two fucking lighters.

“Do you need some help?” she asks, and I know I must look like fucking death. “A doctor, or…”

I hand over my credit card as she rings up my purchases. My voice sounds like a crazy man.

“I’m fine,” I say.

She nods politely as she hands over my cigarettes.

I’ve torn into the first pack before I’m even out of there. I smoke it with my back to the wall and light up another straight after.

I’ve been played by a fucking cleaner. My own fucking cleaner.

Of course I’ve been fucking played.

The gemstones, the fucking band, the way Brutus was so fucking fond of her.

Of course he was fucking fond of her. He fucking knew her. He saw her every fucking day.

My hands ball into fists against the pain.

Brown hair to blonde, as though she knew I liked blondes. As though she knew about my teenage fucking crush.

As though she’d peered inside my fucking soul and not the tatty fucking memory box in the storage room.

It takes me three cigarettes before I can trust my legs to take my weight.

Three cigarettes before I feel like I can breathe without screaming my lungs raw.

I hover in the street, contemplating going back to the office and tearing the little bitch a fucking new one.

Scrap that. I should congratulate her fucking prowess and tell her she’d make a damn fucking fine lawyer.

She can have my fucking job if she wants it.

I laugh a bitter laugh as I picture her pretty face.

Oh fuck, she was fucking good.

Good enough that I actually believed she fucking loved me, which is a fucking joke in itself.

Nobody who’s ever truly known me has ever come out the other side still loving me.

I hail a cab to take me home.

I’ve nothing to fucking say to her, and nothing to say to my fucking father, either.MelissaI’m stripped of everything – my ID badge and my swipe card and Alexander Henley’s house keys.

I’m even stripped of my stupid scratchy cap and apron.

Mr Henley Snr. laughs as he finds the resignation letter in my apron pocket.

“So close,” he says. “And to think you nearly got away with it.” He laughs again to himself. “Extraordinary. You’re wasted as a cleaner, most likely as a hooker, too. You should be a lawyer.”

I have to cover my mouth to stop myself being sick.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what would happen if you were foolish enough to contact my son,” he says. “Consider your employment well and truly terminated. Please don’t insult me by asking your manager for a reference.”

I can’t speak. I can’t say anything.

His smile is a sneer. “Believe me, you don’t know anything about my boy. If you’ve any sense at all you’ll stay as far away as possible. He has a penchant for asphyxiation games, as I’m sure you well know. Something tells me you wouldn’t come out the other side of the next one.”

I blink away tears, and I don’t care. I don’t care that I wouldn’t come out the other side of the next one.

I really don’t.

The life insurance would be more than enough for Dean to take care of Joseph.

“Stay away from my fucking son,” Mr Henley Snr. hisses. “You’re fucking dead to him.”

I don’t say a word as he marches me to the exit with a security guard at my side.Chapter Forty-TwoAlexanderI call out an emergency locksmith and barricade myself in tight.

I smoke all my cigarettes and only venture out for more.

I ignore all calls. I ignore the appointments on my calendar. I ignore all the messages from my cunt of a fucking father asking me when I’m going back to the fucking office.

The pill bottles in the medicine cabinet scream my name, but I can’t abandon Brutus.

His furry head on my lap is the only thing that keeps me breathing.

It’s been forty-eight hours when I pull Melissa Martin’s little thank you notes from my kitchen drawer. I head upstairs with a cigarette in my mouth. The gemstone cabinet clicks open with the new code.

I hold her scrawled gemstone identification card next to the note thanking me for muesli, and it’s right there. Right in front of my fucking face.

She’s tried to disguise it, of course. The scrawl is more slanted on the gemstone card, but the loops of her letters are the same.

It was right in front of my face the entire fucking time, I just chose not to see it.

I didn’t want to see it.

My heart pains as I see her lucky quartz. What a fucking bitch. What a total fucking bitch.

I turn it over in my palm as I take the final drag of my cigarette, and then I throw it. Hard. Hard enough that it bounces off the fucking wall and disappears behind some shelving. Fuck it. Fuck all of it.