3. Oli

3

OLI

Nearly eight years into dating Geoff and I never expect to find him buried five and a half inches deep in a stranger.

I drop my phone onto the hardwood floor with a clatter loud enough to startle the both of them. They're in our bed.

Geoffrey is fucking some twenty-year-old twink on my sheets, the ones I picked out from Frette because Geoff was whining that the perfectly good ones I'd bought online were ‘too scratchy'. The boy's head is on my special anti-allergy pillow. His feet are practically touching it too, where he's folded in half.

'Um,' I say eloquently as Geoff turns his head, still balls-deep in an arse that is definitely not mine. 'What the fuck?'

'Oh.' Geoff's brown eyes fly open. His hips give another thrust. He doesn't even stop thrusting. 'Oli? Why are you home?'

I didn't call because I wanted to surprise Geoff, who'd been complaining for weeks about my work schedule. Never mind that now that he's a managing director at his investment bank he's hardly ever home. He claims all the time that I'm the one who works too much, but I think it's really that he's angry that I'm not always immediately available to him in the moments he's actually here and not at work.

So when I got off work early today, I didn't go out for drinks with the rest of the team. Everyone wanted to blow off steam after another intense week - with the premier happening next weekend, pressure is at an all-time high. The buzz we've been getting has been incredible, but I'm not counting my chickens.

Although right now I'm not counting anything at all. I'm watching my long-term boyfriend fuck another man.

I know we've been having problems. I've been pushing for us to see a couple's counsellor. I've been chalking it up to being so busy, to having fallen into a rhythm of domesticity after a year of living together, sex dropping off to almost nothing because we sit and watch each other floss our teeth every night. Never for a minute did I think that it was because he was getting it somewhere else.

'I wanted to surprise you with a meal.' I even went to the shops and got a bottle of nice wine, ingredients to cook some fancy pasta recipe that I'd found online. Geoff pulls out, and my entire body goes numb watching his dick withdraw. He's not even wearing a condom.

Selfish fucking disgusting piece of shit cunt.

'I can explain.' He gets up, flicking his fingers at the boy on our bed like he's a dog that he's ordering to sit. The intruder gets up, blushing furiously, and starts to get dressed. I can't help but stare at him, because he looks just like a younger, fitter me who has genetically blessed skin and infinite time to spend at the gym. 'Oli, you've just been so obsessed with this stupid book, I was lonely. A man has needs, love.'

'Don't fucking call me that,' I hiss. The pieces are all clicking into place at once. The way that Geoff had reacted with disappointment instead of excitement that night a year ago when I'd announced my new job. He'd covered it up quickly, but I never forgot it. 'How long has this been going on?'

The lookalike-me finishes dressing, pulls on his shoes, and scampers out the door, his feet pattering on the stairs.

'You're always so jealous,' Geoff rolls his eyes and pushes a hand through his generically dirty-blond hair. He's still wearing his Rolex. It's fucking galling. 'It's not that big of a deal.'

'Oh,' I snap, stepping forward to jab a finger into his sweat-coated pec. 'Turning this around on me, are you? It's my fault that you're home from work early so that you can bareback fuck me from five years ago in our bed?'

'I make all my sexual partners show me their test results,' Geoff mumbles, not looking at me.

'You're saying there's more of them?' I scream. 'That makes it not one fucking bit better!'

Geoff finally has the grace to look just a bit embarrassed. 'Plenty of people are in open relationships. Monogamy isn't for everyone.'

I step back like I've been slapped. I can't believe he's trying to rationalise this away. It's probably been going on the whole time we've been together. It's probably why he didn't want me to move to London, so he could fuck me on the weekends and fuck other people the rest of the week.

'Open relationships rely on consent, you prick. I cannot believe you.' My anger is starting to give way to tears, and I absolutely don't want to cry in front of Geoff. Not right now. 'Get out of my sight. Go get a hotel. I'm sure you can find someone else to warm your bed.'

Geoffrey looks stunned, like he can't believe I'm telling him to get out, his mouth dropping open. If he hadn't gotten so much Botox, there might have even been a furrow in between his eyebrows.

I wish I had a dragon on hand to roast him alive. Instead, I turn on my heel, storm out of the bedroom, go down the stairs, grab the bottle of wine I'd left on the kitchen counter, and lock myself in the office. I realise too late that I forgot a corkscrew, so I distract myself from the angry tears running down my cheeks by using a pen to dig out the cork. It's hard. I stab myself three times, but the pain is a welcome distraction.

There's clattering coming from outside the door, and I can't really breathe until I hear the front door to our townhouse open and shut. Geoff left his iPad here, and I'm tempted to open it to see if it has Grindr on it and just how many matches he's made in the last year while we've been living together. But I start chugging the wine - no way am I going to waste a fifty-pound bottle, not when I'm probably about to break up with my rich boyfriend - and open Instagram on my desktop instead.

I'm crying and well on my way to being drunk, but even still I take solace in looking at the metrics on our latest ad campaign, the one I hit go on before I walked out of the office two hours ago. We're doing well. Really well.

I'll be going to my first-ever red-carpet event alone next Friday, but I feel like someone on RuPaul's Drag Race once said that success was the best revenge. I'm going to give Geoff an enormous metaphorical middle finger by making this movie a smashing success, sending the book back to number one on all the lists, and earning every quid of my performance-based bonus. The one large enough that I could definitely move out into my own flat, now that that's something I'm going to need to do.

There's an indecent amount of snot coming out of my nose, which I wipe on the sleeve of my jumper because I'm a disgusting gremlin of sadness and rage right now. I click on Nikos Ridge's Instagram account. His social media manager does a great job interspersing normal pictures - the star going about his day, making a smoothie or working out at the gym - with sizzling nearly-naked shots clearly done by professional photographers. I try to file away some tips from the latest caption, on a post from an hour ago which has already garnered eighteen-thousand likes, and yet my brain fails me.

How is it that I'm on top of the world professionally, about to have my greatest ever success, and yet my personal life has just gone to shit in an instant?

My head hits the keyboard with a thunk, my shoulders shaking. I cry into the arm of my jumper until my head is pounding and my body is wrung out. The wine is gone by then, and I'm well on my way to being shitfaced. I haul myself over to the couch, bury myself in a blanket that I wish could hide me from the world permanently, and pass the fuck out.