“Well, brother…” Damien’s lost interest in me, and now it’s back to Aidan. “We – the committee, that is – have been looking at the guests we’d like to invite to come on over to New Orleans next year. The official invites haven’t gone out yet, but seeing as we’re all friends here I don’t think it would be too much of a problem for me to say that we’d love to bring you over as one of our guests of honour!” He rocks back on his heels slightly, waiting for…what? A round of applause?
There’s a stony silence, punctuated by a tapping sound from the other end of the table as Dad aggressively stirs his coffee. The tumbleweed should be blowing through any second; either that or Dad and Damien are both going to throw down and wrestle for the title of Winning Convention Organizer. And now Dad’s got his cane…
It’s Aidan who speaks first though, smiling at the Brother as though they’re the greatest friends in the world.
“I don’t know what to say. That’s…so generous. And such an honour. But – and I’d have to check the dates to be absolutely sure – doesn’t New Orleans clash with Max’s first convention of the year?”
The Brother opens his mouth and closes it like a goldfish that’s fallen out of its bowl, and my heart is suddenly so full I’m almost sure it’s going to burst.
Aidan, as politely as possible, continues: “Because, obviously, when it comes to conventions, Max has first call on my time after all the support he’s shown me this year. It’s the least I can do.” Under the table, the tips of Aidan’s fingers brush my palm as he takes my hand.
Dad takes a sip of his coffee and looks – on the surface at least – completely unmoved. But I know what this will mean to him; above everything else, my dad cares about loyalty. It’s why he has the same people around him that he’s had for years. It’s who he is. And Aidan has just bumped himself right to the top of his friends’ list without even really trying.
More than that, it shows that Aidan understands. He understands all of it.
All of me.
And that, I guess, makes me an idiot for what I did after the wedding. For once, I’m okay with having been an idiot. I’m actually happy about it.
Well. As happy as I can be, given the circumstances.
Making a swift recovery, the Brother’s smile is back. “Of course, of course. You have to do what you have to do. But if those dates don’t work for you, brother, how about Miami? Or Dallas, in July? We were hoping you’d be able to let us in on some of the plans for your next book, give us a bit of a scoop, seeing as Max here got the jump on us and found you first…”
“You know I can’t do that. I’m not telling anyone anything! But don’t worry – they’re all safe in here.” Aidan taps the side of his head, then pats his phone on the table. “And here.”
“You’re a tease, brother, but I see how it is.”
That conjures up a terrible, terrible mental image. Thanks for that.
The Brother shakes Aidan’s hand and sighs. “You’ll still get that email. Let us know, won’t you? It’d be a pleasure to have you any time.”
“You’re too kind. Thank you.”
Aidan lets go of Damien’s hand, but Damien holds on just that tiny bit longer…and then releases him, disappearing across the breakfast room in search of another victim. Or breakfast, maybe.
I raise my eyebrows at Aidan. “Everything Max has done?”
There’s another chorus of “Oooooooh!”s – and Dad splutters into his coffee.
“Aidan, I wanted to talk to you about something.” Time to get all our cards on the table, clear the air…pick a metaphor: one way or another, I have to know.
“Sure.” Oblivious, he slides a hand around my waist and pulls me closer, so I’m walking with him and it’s the easiest thing in the world, like we were always meant to be in step. We’re crossing the lobby; I’m about to open up registration for the day – and double-check that Sam’s handiwork yesterday has been put right – and he’s going to look in on the Writing the Strange panel. So it seems like a perfect time to talk. Of course it does. If it was a big deal, I wouldn’t be asking this now, would I? It’s just…casual. Yes.
“When you were away last month…”
“I still feel bad about that.”
“You do?” Mild panic, nothing I can’t handle. What does he feel bad about? What? What happened? Why should he feel bad?
“Not being around when your dad was taken to hospital. In case you needed…” He pauses. “Someone.”
“That? That’s not what I meant at all!” I realize how this sounds. Because of course my father being rushed to hospital in an ambulance doesn’t matter. Nope. I try again. “I mean, thank you, obviously. But I really meant that I wanted to talk about the whole…photos thing.”
“The photos thing?” He looks at me blankly, but it’s too late to pull back now so I might as well charge straight on.
“Umm. So, funny story. Stupid, probably. But the editor of SixGuns came up to me at the time and asked if we were friends and, if we were, did I know anything about you and…whatsherface. From the film. At breakfast. Because there were photos of you together in Naples and there was breakfast and it was in a hotel? But I didn’t, and I don’t, and I just wondered whether it was anything I need to know about so…umm. That. All that.”
Smooth, Lexi.
“You mean Carly?”
Oh.
Carly. Not “Carly Senekal, who’s been cast as Ali”. Just Carly.
Well. That’s just dandy.
“She was down the coast shooting while I was there for the literary festival, and she wanted to meet up. She had some questions about Ali’s backstory – stuff she wanted to bring into her performance or something. The only time we were both free was crazy early one day though, so she came up to the hotel.”
“Mmmmph.”
“Lexi?” He studies me carefully. “Photos?”
“It’s nothing. I mean, I didn’t even see them, so…” If I thought I could fit my entire fist in my mouth, I would do that now. I couldn’t possibly look like more of an idiot than I already do.
“Hold up…you mean those shitty pictures where they’d cropped everyone else out? The ones that made it look like it was the two of…” He tails off. He understands.
“I…everyone else?”
“Hang on.” Shaking his head, he slips his phone out of his pocket and scrolls rapidly through screen after screen of pictures. “Maybe this’ll show you what I mean.” He hands me the phone, flicking away a low battery warning as he passes it across.
I recognize the setting immediately from one of his Instagram photos: the stone balcony, the blue sky. Definitely Italy. But this one includes a starched white cloth across a table…and gathered around it, at least a dozen smiling faces. It wasn’t just Aidan and Carly having breakfast; it was half the crew.
“That’s Tony, the unit director,” he says, pointing out a guy in sunglasses at the end of the table. “And Rhodri, the location scout. That’s Tash and Anna, and Marina…and that” – he taps a handsome suntanned face at the very edge of the shot – “is Rufus, Carly’s husband.”
I blink at him. Luckily, he has no idea what’s going on inside my head. Good. Instead, he’s tucking his phone away – still talking.
“You’d love it out there. It’s amazing. Naples, Ischia…you should go sometime.” He pauses. “Maybe we could go sometime. You know, if you wanted?”
“Husband.”
In my head, I’m casual and I smile and I dismiss the whole thing with a mere wave of my hand…but what actually comes out of my mouth is: “Husband.”
I mean, forget the fact that he just asked if I wanted to go to Italy with him, because there are too many things in my head and not enough space for all of them.
OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, LEXI. GET A GRIP.
“Husband,” Aidan repeats. “They’re pretty private, and she keeps it quiet – it’s bad for her image or something. I don’t know. But I can see how it might have sounded if you hea
rd about it from SixGuns, of all places…”
“Sorry.” I feel small and stupid, like a kid who doesn’t want to share the toys at nursery.
I have to share Haydn. I know that.
But it’s Aidan who lays his hands on either side of my face and gently – so gently – tilts my face up towards his; looks into my eyes like they’re all he wants to see and everything else is just dust.
“Aidan Green? Dude! Is that you?”
Both Aidan and Haydn are snatched away from me by the stranger standing in the middle of the lobby, grinning and looking right at us.
“Nick?” Aidan’s hands slip from my face.
“Ade! I thought it was!”
And now the stranger with a buzz cut and skinny jeans with too much stuffed in the pockets is striding towards Aidan, who is frozen to the spot.
Nick.
Nick?
Nick…
Nick, Aidan’s friend.
Nick and…
Suddenly she’s there and she’s as annoyingly pretty as I expected she’d be.
She looks just like he described her in the book. Long, glossy hair. A perfect smile, eyelashes as long as my arm – and to add insult to injury, she’s exactly the same height as he is.
Ali.
“Oh. Ali. Ali…hi.” Aidan is blinking like a deer caught in oncoming headlights. Headlights attached to a tank. “What are you doing here?”
“Thought we’d come and check out the…convention.” Nick leaves the slightest gap before the last word and sniffs after it.
I do not like Nick.
“Right, okay. I didn’t think you came to conventions?”
I’m about to step forward, to say hello – to do anything – when Ali opens her irritatingly perfect-shaped mouth and blows me out of the water.
“Not exactly. But I was in the bookshop down the road and I saw a big poster in the window for this…” She holds up a very familiar book and my heart sinks. “And it just happened to have your photo at the bottom.” She flips it open with a smirk. “Haydn Swift, hmmm? Oh, don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Is she…is she flirting with him? Despite the fact her other arm is looped through Nick’s?
Christ, no wonder Ali ends up badly in the book. I always liked Lizzie better anyway.
“Hi, I’m Lexi.”
Clipboard up, smile on and Effie Trinket the shit out of it. This is your Hunger Games, Angelo.
They both look at me, and then through me. I am invisible. I am nothing.
Well, you know what? Clipboard or not, bollocks to that.
“Are you here to pick up your convention memberships? Day memberships over to the left, full memberships to the right. Banquet and ball tickets should be in your membership packs…”
“We’ve already got ours, thanks. Just here for the day,” says Nick, pulling a lanyard from his pocket and waving it at me.
“Fantastic.” My voice is too shiny. Too sparkly, like glass on a pavement. “If you could wear those at all times that would be really helpful. Otherwise security might accidentally throw you out – and we don’t want that.”
All three of them are now looking at me like I’ve turned into a horse.
No, not a horse. An ass.
An actual, giant, talking ass.
So much for not having to share Aidan…
“I’ve got to run, okay?” I say to him. I have to scrunch my fingernails into my palms to stop myself from touching him, from laying some claim on him. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
I’m gone before he can answer, but as I walk away I hear Ali asking: “Who was that?”
“Sorry – that was Lexi. She—”
Nick cuts him off. “Nah, nah, never mind her – tell us what’s been going on with you! What’s up with this book?”
And then Bede runs up to tell me one of the inflatable ghosts in the ballroom has exploded, and I’ve never been so happy to see him in my life.
I spend my day scuttling between the ballroom and the ops room. I can’t face checking in on any of the panel rooms, or the readings. I don’t even walk the halls in case I run into them. Am I hiding? No. I’m not hiding. I’m working. Not hiding; working. There’s a world of difference, even if my work happens to be keeping me in a closed room away from all the people. But I’m definitely not hiding. Instead, I busy myself with filling balloons from the helium cylinder. What was Aidan about to say? Was he going to tell them I’m a friend? A member of the convention staff? Nobody?
Sorry – that was Lexi. She’s nobody.
No. He didn’t say that.
Ali though.
Ali. The girl he wrote into a book.
I’m not sure how I’d feel if I were her (other than, you know, amazing because, well, those eyelashes). About being written into a book, I mean, because it’s not like it’s the real her, is it? It can’t be; could never be. All fictional Ali can ever be is Aidan’s impression of her.
Which was obviously pretty good.
I am not helping myself.
Ali. Ali is here. The real Ali; walking around my convention.
The girl he wrote a book for. My book.
The balloon I’ve been filling goes BANG, jerking me back to the ballroom and out of thoughts about people I don’t even know. I overfilled it. I sigh, and peel the remains off the nozzle and reach for another one – just as Sam comes crashing through the door with a bag of ribbons.
“So this is where you’re hiding!” She hurls the bag onto a table. It scoots straight over the top and lands on the floor; she looks at it for a moment, then shrugs. “It’s fine there. I thought I hadn’t seen you in ages.”
“I’ve got a headache,” I lie. “Figured being away from the crowd would be a good thing. I don’t want to feel shitty tonight.”
“Mmmm. And this ‘headache’” – she makes finger quotes around the word – “wouldn’t have anything to do with those friends of Aidan’s turning up, would it?”
“How do you know about that?” I open the nozzle on the cylinder and the new balloon fills up with gas.
“He’s looking for you.” She takes the balloon from me and ties it, looping a ribbon and weight around it and letting it go. It rises, then drops, hovering a metre off the floor.
“He’s with his friends.”
“You’re his friend. And if you ask me – which of course you will, because I’m me and I have many, many wise things to say as always – he’s not that fussed about the pair of them. So leave me to do the balloons and stop moping.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Your mother,” she says, pointing a finger at me, “is my guru.”
“You have no idea how disconcerting it is to hear a girl dressed as a superhero say that.”
“Disconcerting…or amazing?” Sam pulls herself into a full-on power pose; chin raised, hands on hips.
“The first one. Definitely.”
She’s right. This is stupid. It’s more than stupid; it’s embarrassing.
“Here.” I pass her the packet of balloons. “They all need doing.”
She snaps into a salute. “Yes, ma’am. Now get out there!”
“What’s that accent even meant to be? Texan? Because it wasn’t.”
“I have no idea. It just felt like the right thing to do.” She clamps a balloon over the nozzle and fills it – then lets it go. It flies around our heads with a prrrrrrrrrrrp noise, and she snorts. “You know I’m going to keep doing this till you go, right?”
By the time I make it to the door, she’s done it another three times.
The first person I see outside the ballroom is Aidan, walking straight towards me.
Alone.
I can feel my heart expanding a little more in my chest with every step he takes; by the time he actually gets to me, my heart will be too big for my ribs and will either explode or break out and go flying around the ceiling making a prrrrrrrrrrrp sound just like Sam’s balloons.
“Hey,” I say,
and all I want to do is throw my arms around him.
But something’s off. Something’s not right.
“Lexi. I need to talk to you a minute.”
“What’s the matter?”
There’s some tiny little sensor built into everyone that automatically responds to a particular tone of voice, a particular look in the eye, with “What’s the matter?”
“My phone.”
“You cannot be serious.” He’s joking. He has to be, after last time. It’s his attempt at a particularly unfunny in-joke, right?
“Lexi, I’m completely serious. It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“It’s either been stolen or…” He stops; frowns.
“Or what?”
“Or Nadiya’s lost it.”
I don’t understand. “Why would Nadiya have your phone?”
“You really want to have this conversation in public, Lexi?” Aidan gestures to the groups wandering past us. He’s right. This isn’t a conversation I want people to eavesdrop on, not if something’s been stolen.
“Okay. Right. We’d better carry this on in the ops room.”
“Lexi?”
“Yep.”
“You should know – if anything from that phone gets leaked, I’m in real trouble.”
Uh-oh.
“Trouble…how?”
“I’ve got emails on there about the film. Script drafts. Set photos. It’s not just notes for the next book – although if those get out I’ll be screwed anyway. But I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with the studio, so if any of the film stuff ends up online, I could be sued. For a lot of money.”
Yeah, that sounds like trouble to me.
I rest my hand on the ops room door and stop. I don’t look at him, because if I do that, it’ll be too hard.
“Aidan, before we go in there, I need to know how serious this is. Is this Aidan-from-the-roof who’s lost his phone again, or is this an author with an issue?”
“Does it matter?”
“Aidan, please. If there’s a problem, I need to deal with it. If it’s just you, and you’re freaking out because you’ve forgotten your phone in your room or something, that’s different.” I pause. This is not going the way I expected: his expression is getting colder by the second. “It’s not like this would be the first time you managed to lose your phone, would it?”
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