Love Me, Love Me Not: An addictive psychological suspense with a twist you won’t see coming. Katherine Debona
Homemade elderflower gin with a squeeze of fresh lime. Distilled by my own hand, ever since Nana first showed me how. The familiarity soothed my troubled mind, if only for a moment.
‘Patrick.’
My insides constricted, an internal warning of what was to come. I should have trusted them.
In less time than it takes a seedling to sprout, we had mapped out and agreed every step of our future together. A two-bed flat within spitting distance of Covent Garden. Owned by his parents but perfect for his desired placement at the London School of Economics where he could continue his research. In return I’d agreed to pay the majority of the bills and we even drew up a rota to avoid any arguments over chores. We had the conversation about our futures, our ambitions, the understanding being we both favoured career over family. We had ironed out all the wrinkles, all the concerns we thought might arise from moving in together. The only anomaly I hadn’t properly accounted for was my best friend.
‘Why do you ask?’
She tilted her head from side to side. ‘I’ve got this picture in my mind of what he’s going to be like.’
‘And?’
‘You.’ A wicked grin. ‘Only male.’
The insult was clear. But I couldn’t find the words to tell her how wrong she was.
‘I can’t believe you have a boyfriend I’ve never even met.’
There was a reason for that, but not one I could share. It was why I’d been so against him coming to the party, protesting the need for him to move into the flat and set up his study just the way he wanted. That he would hate being surrounded by people who didn’t understand him.
That I was terrified of what would happen if he met Elle.
‘Do you like him?’
‘Of course I do. What sort of a question is that?’
Her eyes found mine in the mirror and I had to look away, to try and conceal the truth behind my guilty words.
‘No, I mean like him, like him.’
The flush on my face was as if she had slapped me and I hurried from the room. She followed me in silence, but it was a silence alive with noise, with unspoken, treacherous things.
I pushed my way through the crowd of well-wishers, people who had filled my life without any kind of meaning, but seemed to think they knew me. I wasn’t interested in their congratulations, I just wanted to find him, to shelter him from this cosseted world.
There he was. Shirt untucked and hair curling around the arm of his glasses. He was nodding at something Elle’s brother was saying, fingers used to nursing a pint now gripping the stem of a champagne flute.
She waltzed past me, pushing the air aside and announcing her arrival so that, as his head turned in my direction, he was overcome by the sight of her instead of me.
‘You must be Patrick,’ she said, going in for the kill with a kiss either side of his mouth, one hand resting on his shoulder to keep the gap between them small.
His face was too open, his thoughts and desires laid at her feet, but she was so used to such adoration she didn’t recognise its perfection. I couldn’t look at him; he looked like I felt.
‘He’s not at all what I expected.’ She was sat on the edge of the swimming pool, long limbs stirring the water. I imagined it to be like the tornado that ripped Dorothy from her home, wondered what would await Elle if she were plunged into another world.
‘What did you expect?’ I handed her one of the platefuls of food I’d busied myself collecting from the buffet. Anything to avoid watching him watching her.
‘Not sure. He’s rather sweet.’
Sweet. That was all she could come up with to describe the most enigmatic, talented and breathtaking person I had ever met? The only human in existence who could rival her? But then Patrick’s appeal was not so transparent, not something everyone would be able to understand.
Maybe I didn’t have anything to worry about after all.
‘So, have the two of you ever…?’ She picked up a smoked salmon blini and popped it into her mouth, along with a long sip of champagne.
‘No.’
‘What, not even after a drunken night out?’
I glared at her, annoyed by her assumption that Patrick would only ever be interested in me sexually if he were inebriated.
‘He understands I want to wait until we’re living together rather than simply doing it in a bed that contains the sexual residue of a thousand past students.’ He said it didn’t bother him, but I had seen the way he looked at her, at the longing that stretched over every part of his skin, and realised it meant he wasn’t bothered because it was me. That while I made sense on paper, Elle appealed to a different kind of reasoning.
‘Huh.’ Another morsel passed her lips.
‘Why do you sound so surprised?’
‘I assumed he was either ugly or gay. Why else would he stay in a relationship where he wasn’t getting any?’
Because, when it comes down to it, what else is there between a man and a woman other than sex? Why bother to have a relationship with someone who stimulates your mind as well as your body?
‘You wouldn’t understand, even if I did try and explain it to you.’
She smiled to herself and I wanted to ask what she was thinking. ‘You just seem so… the same.’
‘In what way?’
‘A bit awkward, a bit unsure of who you are. But then, when you start talking about something, it’s as if you’re the only person in the world who really gets it.’
I thought I could see her point, even if it was tumbled up in nonsensical English.
‘Sounds like he was talking about bats,’ I reply. Ever since Patrick read Dracula as a kid he had been obsessed with the folklore behind vampire bats; how not all cultures believed them to be signs of evil, with some viewing them as symbols of rebirth or long life. I liked to think of them as portals for change, as an opportunity to become something more.
‘Yes. But I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about.’
‘Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats among birds, they ever fly by twilight.’
She drained her glass, then pointed it at me. ‘That’s exactly what he said. But I can’t remember who it’s by.’
Francis Bacon. Not that it would have meant anything to her because Elle’s literary abilities had never stretched beyond the love triangle between a girl, a vampire and a werewolf.
‘Don’t worry, he does it to everyone, especially when he’s nervous.’ It was his failsafe, his way of trying to interact with people with whom he had nothing in common. We used to joke about the way people responded to his theories, would laugh at their ignorance of the world around them.
‘I asked him whether he had a Batman costume at home.’
Okay, I was definitely safe.
‘He laughed and asked me if I had a Catwoman one.’
She did. Skintight latex that was worn to every Halloween party with a fluffy tail she used to entrap that year’s victim. No doubt she showed him a photograph, asked him whether she made a convincing cat. Not so safe after all.
I looked down at the plates of food between us. At the miniature chocolate cupcakes I knew she loved. Four in total. Two with icing slightly darker than the others.
‘You know, I think he likes me.’
But he wasn’t hers. He was mine and I wasn’t about to allow her to steal him from me, to assume she could have