Page 46 of The Friend Request

‘Yeah, came about twenty minutes ago. Said he didn’t want to overwhelm you straight away, so he hung back. Come on, I’ll reintroduce you properly.’

I can’t feel my legs. Alex takes my hand and leads me back into the living room. I follow because I don’t know what else to do, because saying no would mean explaining everything, and explaining everything would mean watching the warmth drain out of his face, the party collapse around us, and the banner with the upside-down M come crashing down.

So I follow. I smile. I hold my wine glass so tightly I’m amazed it doesn’t shatter.

The crowd shifts. Someone moves aside, and someone else, until there’s a gap. Through it I can see a man standing by the bookshelf with a glass of red wine and a conversation-ready smile that anyone else in this room would read as friendly and warm and completely normal.

‘Here he is,’ Alex says. ‘Kim, you remember Ross?’

Ross steps forward. He’s wearing a dark jumper and jeans, and his face is open and pleasant. His eyes meet mine and hold them with something nobody else in this room can see.

He extends his hand.

‘Kim,’ he says. ‘Happy birthday. It’s been too long.’

He’s inside my house. He’s standing in my living room with my friends and my daughter and my family, and he’s smiling at me with the same vile, grinning mouth that used to kiss me. Back before I realised how evil this man is. Before I learned that he’s capable of stalking.

Now, nobody knows but me.

Chapter Twenty

I saw him before he saw me.

It was a Friday in November, and I wasn’t supposed to be there. Melanie’s seventeenth birthday, a last-minute thing – she’d got the tickets cheap off someone at work and rang me at six o’clock asking if I fancied it. I’d said yes because Ross was busy. Revision, he’d told me. Group session at Jamie’s flat. He’d be back late and I shouldn’t wait up. I’d believed him because I always believed him, because not believing Ross was like not believing gravity. It simply didn’t occur to me.

The club was one of those places in town that looked grim in daylight – peeling posters on the door, a puddle of something unidentifiable on the steps, bouncers who acted like they’d rather be anywhere else. Inside it was dark, loud, and packed with bodies moving under coloured lights that turned everyone the same shade of blue and pink. Melanie bought us drinks at the bar – vodka cranberry, sticky glasses, ice already melting – and pulled me towards the dance floor. I went with her because I was a seventeen-year-old out on a Friday night who needed to dance away the nagging feeling I’d had for weeks that something in my life was off.

We danced for a while. The music was terrible – generic dance tracks that all blurred into each other – but it didn’t matter because Melanie was funny and drunk and kept grabbing my arm and shouting things I couldn’t hear. I was laughing, letting the bass thump through my chest and thinking that I should do this more often, go out without Ross, be a person on my own instead of half a person waiting for him to make me whole.

Then Melanie went to the bar for another round, and I was standing on my own at the edge of the dance floor. I turned my head, stared across the room, and there he was.

Ross. At the far end, near the speakers, half hidden by the crowd but unmistakable because I could have found him blindfolded in a stadium. I knew his shape, the way he stood, the tilt of his head, the way his shoulders moved. I knew him better than I knew my reflection.

He wasn’t at Jamie’s flat. He wasn’t revising.

He was pressed against a girl I’d never seen before, his hands on her hips, his mouth on hers, kissing her like I didn’t exist.

My drink slipped. I caught it before it fell, but the vodka sloshed over my hand and on to the floor. The cold shock of it on my fingers was the only thing keeping me upright because the rest of my body had gone numb. A biological shutdown that happens when your brain sees something it can’t process and just turns the lights off for a second to buy itself time.

I stood there. The music kept going. The lights kept flashing. People pushed past me, and I didn’t feel them. I watched Ross’s hands move to the girl’s waist, watched her lean into him, watched his fingers press into the fabric of her top, and I thought: He touches me like that. Exactly like that. The same hands, the same pressure, the same way of pulling someone closer like he can’t get enough.

I wasn’t special. That was the thought that cut through everything else. I wasn’t special. I could have been anyone.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough for Melanie to come back with the drinks and say something I didn’t hear, then follow my gaze across the room and go very still beside me. Long enough for the song to change. Long enough for Ross to step back from the girl and laugh at something she said, then turn his head casually, scanning the room with that confidence he carried everywhere, and find me staring at him from six metres away.

His face dropped. It fell, like a mask coming off, and underneath was something raw and panicked that I’d never seen on him before. The girl said something to him, and he didn’t answer. He just gawped at me across the dance floor. I watched the colour leave his face, and I thought: Good.

I turned around and walked away.

It wasn’t dignified. I knocked someone’s elbow, and their drink went sideways. They swore at me, and I didn’t stop. I shoved through the crowd, past the bar, down the corridor where the toilets were. The fire exit was propped open with a crate, and I went through it and out into the car park behind the club where the air was freezing and smelled of bins and cigarettes. I bent over with my hands on my knees and breathed and breathed and breathed. The cold hit the back of my throat, and my eyes were streaming, but I wasn’t crying yet because the tears hadn’t caught up with the anger.

Because I was angry. Not heartbroken yet, that would come later, in bed at three in the morning with the lights off and my phone face down on the carpet – but furious. A white-hot fury that consumed me until I could taste it, bitter and metallic, like I’d bitten my tongue.

He’d lied to me. Looked me in the eye and told me he was revising, and then put his hands on someone else like I meant nothing to him. Like three years of us – three years of everything I’d given him, every secret, every first, every night I’d spent tangled up with him in his single bed – could be ignored while he kissed a stranger in a nightclub on a Friday.

‘Kim!’

The fire door banged open behind me. Ross came through it at a half run, jacket in one hand, out of breath, face white in the street light. He stopped when he saw me and held up both hands like I was something dangerous.