Chapter Text
"You shouldn't be doing this .... you really should NOT be doing this."
You repeat the mantra as you walk with intention, your pace as fast as the heart barely contained inside your chest. On your way to him where it would likely disintegrate. Like before.
You pictured your nagging, disapproving conscience as an old librarian, complete with a beige cardigan and matching pleated skirt, pristinely pressed of course. Her hair had that lilac rinse that the interfering pensioners always had, the kind that demanded you give up your space for them on the bus. Well your conscience, like them also thought she knew everything, and her hair sat in a tight-ringed perm like the queen's, with an attitude to equally match that royal sense of entitlement.
She sat on her throne of perfection as she wagged her finger at you and your ever-disastrous life choices. Like the time you got that pointless and juvenile cherry tattoo or the time you moved to London thinking it was the answer to all of life's problems.
Well fuck the queen. And fuck the librarian because you were doing this ... you had to. How could you stay away after last time.....
Your phone pinged again as you walked. Once. Twice.
He was always relentless in his pursuits... like a dog with a bone, but you loved it, you loved his attention and he knew that, that's why he kept giving you it.
Opening another image you turned the phone horizontally to try and grasp what it was on the screen.
A metal snake? Like a brass snake belt buckle? What in the name of....
The message read:
"look at my snake"
Oh he was evil.
*
One hour previously.
You had been minding your own business, having a mid week preening session in preparation for the weekend and the office party you had to look exemplary for. If your ex wanker, sorry banker- boyfriend Christopher was going to show his face like last year with Mrs new-boobs-barbie-face, then you had to at least make some kind of effort to look half-decent in comparison.
Your nail polish had still been wet and you had just applied a pore strip to your nose, having poured a second or was it the third? glass of wine.
Your phone going off was unusual these days since you weren't dating anybody and your friends all seemed to be busy doing just that. You frowned at it sitting in its charger port, seeing a message displayed. It was probably just your mother to be honest, wanting to give you yet another lecture about how you were massively failing at life, and bullet points on how you could actively improve it this week. Like by agreeing to go out with her neighbours grandson Matthew, the tall spectacled one who smiled eerily at you from his garden every time you went to visit your mum. Also known in my head as Matthew the bush pervert.
Well sorry Matthew tonight you will not be seeing stars in your eyes because I'm going to be: declining.
Anyway I digress, I digress in my mind whilst I argue with my royal librarian just as much as I digress in real life.
Someone once said that I'm like them because they also have voices in their head, voices they have learned to contain. Someone else said that, someone I know. So it must be true.
The message sent to me was a photograph, well two to be precise.
He was wearing suits, I think. I kind of lost the ability to process what I was actually seeing after I got hit with the sight of them, because he hadn't text me in over six weeks. And then this ...
"Right, which suit for Dunkirk? ... I can't be shagged to choose, You choose and I'll wear it."
I free-falled for a little while... he had that effect on me. He had done even before I fell head over heels in love with him a little more every day of my employment.
He gave me foggy brain syndrome that made everything seem like it was happening in slow motion, voices far away, the insistent sound of that rush of my own blood in my ears.
I nearly dropped my third.... no second .. glass of wine when the text came through as I sat in my dressing gown, with hair in a top knot. But of course I don't drop wine, not like I drop everything for him every time he gets in contact like this.
Tom Hardy should not have been texting me.
Tom Hardy should leave me alone.
Because last time... that's exactly what he did. It's exactly what he said he didn't want to do, what he knew I didn't want him to do, but what he still did anyway.
And as I had stared at the messy haired photographs he had sent to my iPhone, One wearing a crisp open shirt, and one sat casually vaping in the very toilet room he had fucked me in BEFORE, I knew I was about to let him do it all over again.
Sorry Queen Librarian. I can't resist him.