Page 6 of Forever Not Yours

And I shot him an evil grin as I dropped my underwear and pulled the screen shut.

Yeah. I was a dick. But I was also in charge here.

My life.

My body.

And Jakey could go to hell for all I cared.

“Can we talk about this?” he asked from the other side of the steamed-up shower screen.

“Fuck you,” I snapped. So, I wasn’t quite back to normal then, but the shower was helpful, the jets sending prickles off all over my skin as the waterdanced around me. My head was a little cloudy still, but at least I was standing up, kind of, clinging to the soap-thing-dispenser for dear life.

“We need to talk about this, otherwise things will get even more fucked up,” he said. So sensible. So mindful. Fucking demure. Jakey.

“I was just having a bit of fun.” Yeah. Because that was what had happened, wasn’t it? “A stag night is supposed to be fun. Like, you do stupid shit. Mess around and joke about it.”

“What just happened was stupid shit?” he said.

“Yup. Agree with that.”

“But this is me, and I’m no fucking joke. Saying that is fucking cruel, Bastien.”

He was right. I had no problem with Jake being who he was. I never had, because of course I knew. Jakey was Jakey, and we never talked about intimate stuff like that. It just wasn’t who we were. Still, I couldn’t make sense of anything right now. Nor was I managing to get my brain to compute that my phone was ringing out there somewhere or that Jakey was now sitting on the toilet seat with his head in his hands.

All that messy hair. Big hands. That broad back. Shirt still on. Breaths. Deep ones, and I, in my weird messy state, managed to fall over, flat on my face, sliding around in a bathtub like the drunk twat I apparently still was. I would be bruised all over tomorrow, but there we were. Arms and legs seemingly everywhere, slippery white glossy shit under my knees. The towel rail to the rescue, I found my footing. One leg up, foot on floor…and Jake was suddenly gone as I covered myself up in a cloud of white fluffy warmth.

I sometimes said stuff I didn’t mean. I sometimes blurted out idiotic things that hurt people. Juliet had told me enough times.Engage that brain of yours, babe.

I tried to focus on my reflection in the steamed-up mirror. Bloody pen marks on my arm. Numbers. Sensor still in place. Dick still there. All good. Towel over my shoulders, I grabbed my moisturiser and slathered my face in the stuff that kept me looking my best, hissing when I poked the tender skin under my eye. A bruise. I looked awful and suddenly I wanted to cry. What did it matter if I looked youthful and still had allmy hair? Did it make me happy? DidImake anyone else happy?

I wanted to disappear. Just hide under the bloody hotel duvet and sleep all this off. Forget that there was a past and now a future. I wasn’t sure I wanted either of those.

To be truthful, I had no idea what I was doing, and it clearly showed.

“Itold her you were asleep. That you’d gone a bit hypo and that I patched you up and put you to bed,” I said, trying to manhandle him down onto themattress.

Not for the first time, I might add. I’d left him for a few seconds to go answer his phone, and of course, that’s when he’d fallen over in the shower. At least he’d then gotten up to brush his teeth and to moisturise the hell out of his face. There were still streaks of white stuff in the scruff on his cheek. I’d never known anyone as vain as Bastien, nor anyone who carried as much…product in his toiletry bag. He had laid it all out on the bed yesterday, talked me through his skincare regime and let me sniff all the little bottles.

Like a twat.

It made me smile thinking about it, even though my stomach was still in a knot.

Bastien was hard to read. His blood sugar was going up, his eyes were focused, and he wasn’t spitting out swearwords in every sentence. Instead, he was mellow and soft, unusually cooperative yet slightly erratic.

To be honest, so was I, half wanting him to just go to sleep so I could sit in the corner and have a well-needed breakdown. The other half of me wanted to shake him, scream into his face, hurl more abuse than was strictly sane.

But that was me, and this was Bastien, and now he was sitting in bed reattaching the tubes to his pump, plugging things into his charging station and refilling the insulin with precision as if he hadn’t just barely managed to stick a grape in his mouth. Back to himself, he threw all the debris and empty boxes on the floor like the slob he was. I had to go pick them all up and dispose of it all in the bathroom because I was me and he was impossible.

When I returned to the room, he was actually fully under the covers.

“Come lie down,” he mumbled. “Want to talk to you.”

No, you don’t, I felt like replying, since right now I couldn’t trust myself to not say the wrong thing.

“Where’s your sharps bin?” I asked, holding the needle and other junk at arm’s length while I looked around for the yellow plastic box he took everywhere with him.

“Bag,” he muttered and pointed, and I disposed of the offending item, then I stood there, right next to him, feeling a right plonker as usual.

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