Always and Only You

Chapter Thirty-Nine

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Five years ago

Do you remember what happened directly after the game?

Her memory is fuzzy, probably because of the sneaky tactics of those guys who’d decided it’d be funny to pick on her when they had to nominate someone to drink, and then everyone else had bundled in and joined the fun. She now remembered lying back on the floor when it had finished, thinking she needed a pink boa to match the other girl, and how the room had spun so hard she’d had to get up again. After that, it was pretty much a blur for an hour or more.

Someone put some music on. People started dancing or passing out.

Her next clear memory was being with Megan in the en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom. It had taken her twenty minutes to convince her friend to unlock the door.

Do you know why Meg ran off? The first time?

Her prediction had come true. Megan plus alcohol equalled ‘flight risk’.

No. Not exactly sure. She was dancing, having a great time. Next time I looked, she was gone.

She didn’t know if she’d danced or not, or who with, but some time later, when the fuzz had cleared a little, she realized she hadn’t seen Megan for a while.

When I found her in the bathroom, she was acting really strange, saying that ‘they’ were following her, but I never got out of her exactly who.

She now wondered about the guys Simon had mentioned when they were playing the drinking game. Could it have been more sinister after all? Were they looking for any drunk girl to take advantage of?

Paranoia? he suggests.

She frowns and types Megan usually had two stages of drunk: loved-up and sobbing. I never saw her being paranoid.

But it wasn’t just the drink, was it?

No.

And that would explain it.

What happened in that bathroom? he asks.

She cried, rambled on for a bit, but then she seemed to calm down and she ended up hugging me, telling me what a brilliant friend I was. We tried to get to the landing while hugging, but we got as far as the bedroom, ended up bumping into the bed and falling onto it.

They’d stayed there, too knackered to get up, giggling about stupid things. It was as if the hysterics in the bathroom had never happened.

I started to doze. Not properly asleep but also not paying much attention to anything, and then the door slammed open, waking me up. She was already gone.

You don’t know how much of a head start she had on you?

She thinks about how to answer his question for a few moments.

I can’t have been there on my own for more than twenty minutes. Absolute max. And then your friend came crashing in.

There’s a long pause between messages and she gets the weirdest feeling that everything has suddenly got awkward.

Gil?

Yes. And I was fed up because of King Cup, so I told him I wasn’t carrying Meg home – he was going to have to do it. And he better go and find her too. It was his fault she’d drunk too much and done a disappearing act.

The fire still burned in her when she thought of his face that night. But now she’s thousands of miles and almost nine months away from the tragedy, she wonders if actually she’s angrier at herself.

For drinking more than she’d planned to.

For letting Megan do the same.

For falling back to sleep on that super king bed in the upstairs of Posh Guy’s house, when she really should have been looking for her friend.

And maybe it was easier to blame all of it on Gil than it was to admit she was a part of the reason Meg never made it past twenty-two.