Page 43 of Just Like You
“It’s private, Juliet.”
“When has anything ever been private in here? How many times have you sat in this very office and spilled your heart out to me? I know you. I know all your little secrets. You came out to me even before I’d handed you your job contract. And now you’re fucking up work meetings and lying to my staff, and I’m not even going to mention the fact that you’re back to your old tricks. Having Taneesha in here, seething at your misogynistic bullshit behaviour, is not top of my list of things I wanted to deal with today.”
Okay. Shit, but yeah. This wasn’t new.
“Sorry. Things have been a bit stressful.”
“How’s Gina?”
“Gina’s good. She’s clean, she’s happy and she’s on the ball. No issues there.”
“Then what is happening here?”
She spoke calmly, letting her fingers grab mine. Her and me.
“I’m not your mum, Kieron, but I sometimes feel like I am. That I have some kind of responsibility for your happiness. But when you constantly fuck up, I am the one who takes the brunt of it, and that has to stop. You have to think of me too and sometimes clean up your own messes.”
“I’m buying Taneesha a Caramel Frappuccino or whatever it is she drinks.”
She laughed out loud. I did too.
“Good. That solves that one then. Perhaps you should say it as well. Apologise for being a dick. She didn’t deserve that.”
“Okay.”
Okay.
I tried to breathe, when she was just sat there, letting me. Like the world slowly spun around us in gentle ebbs and flows.
I liked that. That she gave this to me. The space to just exist with no expectation.
“You’re okay,” she shushed. “Take your time.”
“I don’t have…time. I’m having a bit of a panic here because I met someone, and then? He just…let me go. Nothing. Not even a goodbye and thank you or see you later. He just disappeared, and I don’t know how to deal with that.”
“I see,” she said softly. “You know, sometimes we can’t read people’s subtle signs. I know I am guilty of that and have been many times. I just motor on with my own ideas, my own version of reality, and I forget, that somewhere in my orbit, there is a completelydifferent reality going on. We don’t always mesh. Our worlds sometimes clash, and then we just…bounce. It’s not easy to grasp.”
“Nothing is easy to grasp. Least of all Taneesha and her ability to piss me off.”
“Not her fault. She was just the convenient target in your firing line. That’s what I told her.”
“True.”
“So who were you aiming those bullets at?”
“Julian.”
“Julian.” She tasted the name, like it was something she wasn’t sure of. “Tell me about him.”
“Nothing to say. Gorgeous. Younger than me but not much. Mature. Funny. He got me. Juliet, he seemed to completely understand what I was all about, but I must have got it all wrong because when it mattered? He’s not here to pick up the pieces. All the pieces. I don’t know where I go from here because he mattered. He was so bloody wonderful, and special, and he was perfect. I wanted all of that. All of it, Juliet, and now he’s gone.”
“Don’t be so bloody melodramatic. He’s not gone. He’s just not picking up his phone. Am I right?”
“He’s got no social media. I don’t know where he lives, and he works for a company that doesn’t give out any details of their employees.”
“Neither do we. Standard practice.”
“But I need him.”
