Saving from Monkeys (9 page)

"Going to get badgered by the missus, are you?" He grinned. "
Did she ask you to get the rundown on me and Rox? What is this? Grade 7? Do you want me to pass you a note to give to her?"

"Piss off," Jonah said amiably and Elliot knew he'd been right.

"Sorry, buddy, but there's nothing to report back," he said honestly. "Just a couple of third wheels trying to avoid as many of the pricks that come here as possible, with a bit of dying Nan talk thrown in for shits and giggles."

Instantly solemn, Jonah nodded, adopting the 'if you feel you need to talk about your feelings I'm braced for it' expression he wore any time Elliot brought up
the Nan situation. He appreciated it, but Elliot had had enough emotional crap for one night and he shook his head to show that his mate was off the hook.

"Bit of a dick move leaving Rox
on her own, by the way," he said instead. "When I turned up some guy was grabbing her arse."

"Was it you?" Jonah joked, but seeing Elliot's expression
, he turned contrite. "Right, sorry, dick move."

"Yeah, I don't reckon Rox'll be coming back here anytime soon," Elliot
added after a pause. "We all know she's not my number 1 fan, and as well as me and the guy who grabbed her arse we had a bit of a walk down memory lane tonight when Henderson and co turned up."

"Lucky you," Jonah said sarcastically, fiddling with the wrapper on his beer bottle. "I take it they're still arseholes?"

"Prime examples of," Elliot agreed. "Why the hell didn't we notice that when we were at school?"

Jonah ripped a long shred of paper from his bottle and smiled bleakly as he said, "Reckon we were probably arseholes too, mate."

It was an uncomfortable thought, but Elliot couldn't really deny it. Seeing his old rugby teammates and the way they'd behaved was bringing up all sorts of faintly unpleasant memories of his time as the self-imposed king of his castle.

"Do you think it was shit, being Rox and being around us when we were growing up?" He asked suddenly, unable to stop himself even though he was pretty sure he wouldn't like the answer.

Jonah looked at him knowingly, but obviously decided to take pity on him and only said, "Yeah, I reckon it probably was."

"Still,"
he added after a loaded silence, "she's over it now. Killing it in her studies, Abi reckons, and it's not like anyone gives her heaps about how she used to be a cleaner or anything."

Except that they just had, Elliot thought to himself. Did he like getting under Rox's skin himself? Yes. Did that mean he wasn't going to punch Henderson's lights out if he ever again referred to her as the help? No.

"I know that face, mate." Jonah poked his bottle towards him, his expression apprehensive. "It's not a good face. That's your ‘do-gooder with awful consequences’ face and if you're getting that face on in relation to Cinders then I'm telling you right now, you should just drop it. You want to do good towards her I reckon she would say that staying away from her would be enough."

"Yeah," Elliot smiled grimly, Jonah's warning coming too late, "but where would be the fun in that?"

Chapter 6 – The Invitation and the TV on Fire

That should have been it for a while. After spending just about the whole evening with Elliot, I felt sure I'd earned a couple of days reprieve from him.

No such luck.

The day after my Haze outing I was by myself in the tiny side kitchen of the ref making up the pre-made sandwiches ready for the lunch rush. It was a boring job and cling wrap was my mortal enemy, so I was already contemplating a full on tantrum even before I heard Elliot's voice right by my ear say, "Hey, Rox."

I whirled around in surprise and had the satisfaction of seeing him take a massive leap backwards as the bread knife in my hand whisked through the space he'd previously been occupying.

"Christ!" He exclaimed. "Watch it!"

"C
alm down." I deliberately turned away from him and continued cutting up the sandwiches, trying to appear unfazed by his sudden appearance even as my heart clapped wildly in my chest. "I'm really good at fighting the urge to stab you with anything more dramatic than basic cutlery."

"Good to know," he murmured, his voice all deep and, I'm sure
he
thought, sexy.

God
, he was so annoying! How dare he saunter up and say 'Hey, Rox' like that, as if him seeking me out for a conversation was the most normal thing in the world? We weren't friends, we weren't
anything
, a fact I'd had to spend a good half hour convincing Abi of in the toilets of Haze the night before.

My best friend seemed to think she was sensing something between me and Elliot; an attraction or partiality that was just fundamentally
not there
. We'd slept together, so what? Plenty of people had sex without it meaning anything; it was just a body parts thing. If Abi had sensed anything last night it was presumably just a joint freak out at the mortality of Nan, but I defied anyone to turn
that
into a saucy situation.

Still, Elliot was here now, and his proximity was making my skin itch weirdly, what was that all about?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him obviously get bored of me ignoring him and hitch himself up onto the counter with that long legged superiority of his. Cheeky monkey.

I sighed, put down my knife and snatched up the tea towel that was hanging on a hook next to where I was working. Rolling it up with a deft twist, I turned and whipped him hard on the leg.

"This is a food preparation area," I scolded him as he let out a particularly un-macho yelp and jumped straight back off the counter to escape my attack. "It's bad enough that the poor students who go here have to put up with your pretty boy posturing, they don't need to be infected with your germs as well."

OK
, maybe by 'students' I meant me, but honestly! He might think he was above everyone else, but he was
not
above basic kitchen hygiene standards.

"Pretty boy posturing?"
He repeated in bemusement as he made a drama out of dusting himself off even though I knew for a fact that the counter and tea towel were spotless. "I can't believe I never noticed before how out of your way you go to call me pretty."

I ignored that, mostly because there was no getting round that he
was
pretty; just because he was also a self-involved tosser didn't mean I was blind.

"What are you doing
back here?" I demanded instead. "This isn't Haze; you can't expect special treatment here. Go out the front and order like everyone else."

"Order what?
Food? From
here
?" He deadpanned and I quickly looked down at the sandwich I was making so he wouldn't see my battle to not smile. Lord knows the trouble I'd got in last time he'd made me laugh.

"Madness, I know," I said sarcastically. "To think that some students can't afford high quality cuisine delivered straight to their door is repulsive. Poor people are gross."

"Yeah," he nodded and leant back against the bench,
much
too near to where I was standing, "and I hear that people sit on the counters in the food preparation area at this place. Very unhygienic."

I will not smile, I will not smile, I will not…

"You're smiling," he said obnoxiously, "which is weird, because last night you said I wasn't funny."

"Your face is funny." I wiped my hands down on the apron tied at my waist in the most officious, 'I don't have time for this' kind of way I could. It was the least I could do after retorting something my 6 year old self would've been proud of. Folding my arms
, I turned to look at him and said bluntly, "Right, we've established that you're all witty and everything, but I need to get back to work. What are you doing here?"

My abrupt question seemed to sober him up sharpish and he ran a hand through his dark hair almost sheepishly before saying, "Abi told me where you were."

"…which doesn't answer my question," I pointed out, even as I groaned internally. If he'd gone and asked Abi where I was, that was hardly going to support my 'there's nothing weird going on with me and Elliot' stance.

"Fair enough,
" he admitted, before he cocked his head to one side and enquired, "Do you want to go to Papua New Guinea?"

OK
,
not
what I'd been expecting.

I blinked rapidly as my brain processed his words, double checking them to make sure he had just asked what I thought he had.

When I was convinced that, yes, he
had
just asked if I wanted to go to Papua New Guinea, I tried to read him to see where the hell that question had come from. No luck there, his gaze was steady and his expression held nothing but a bland look of polite interest in my answer.

Huh.

Reaching blindly back behind me for support, my hand landed on some bread and I whirled round to grab it and start spreading margarine across it.

"As in ever?"
I asked, super casually.

"As in next week."

Oh yes, well, that cleared
that
up…

Determined to match his nonchalance, I continued constructing the sandwich and said lightly, "I can honestly say that I don't have plans to go to Papua New Guinea next week."

He nudged my hip, making me look at him in surprise, and then grinned so suddenly I was momentarily blinded by the dazzling display of his bright white teeth.

"Yeah," he said, while I was still trying to recover from this blast of charm, "but I do. Wanna come?"

There was a ringing silence, broken only by a wet slap as the salami slice I'd been holding hit the tiled floor.

"
I'm sorry…did you just…?" It wasn't that I couldn't put the words together properly; it was more that I didn't even know what words I needed.

"Was that an
invitation
?" I finally managed to choke out.

He shrugged unconcernedly. "Yeah, guess it was."

"To Papua New Guinea?"

"Yeah."

"With
you
?" My voice was strangled and the last word came out as little more than a squeak.

"Yeah," he said again, although, just as my eyes started to narrow at his thoroughly unhelpful repetition of that one word, he added, "well, me and a bunch of other guys. And Abi's going."

Of all the ridiculous things he'd said so far, this struck me as by far the most out there and I snorted. "No, she's not."

"Yeah, she is."

Right. That was it.

I reached down to snatch up the salami slice I'd dropped and then thwacked Elliot in the forehead with it.
As he blinked in surprise at the, admittedly odd, processed meat attack, I repeated, "No. She's. Not."

I threw the meat into the bin and wiped my hand on the tea-towel, while he rubbed his sleeve across his forehead and stared at me incredulously.

"Trust me on this, Sinclair," I continued crossly, "I know my best friend and I know she's not going anywhere next week. One of her pieces is being displayed at a gallery in town and I don't think she's going to leave its side, let alone the country."

Elliot still seemed focused on the fact that I'd just hit him with a sandwich filling which was perhaps why he sounded so vague as he replied, "Maybe Jonah hasn't asked her yet."

Salami to the face or not, who the hell was this blasé about the idea of no more than a couple of days advance notice of going overseas? It was this 'whatever' attitude that really made my blood start to boil. Of course, why hadn't I realised it before? Elliot really
didn't
see anything strange about impromptu international travel.

"God, you're from a different planet, you know that?" I said loudly, any sort of nonchalance well and truly behind me.
"You and Jonah both. You can't just drop a trip to Papua New Guinea on someone the week before! People need to prepare for travel, they need to organise shifts at work and save up and-" I stopped abruptly as my whole body went suddenly cold.

"How
exactly
were you suggesting I'd pay for this trip to Papua New Guinea?" I asked slowly, my voice becoming so incredibly dangerous that Elliot instinctively straightened up and away from where he'd been slouched against the counter.

As if knowing the actual words 'I'd pay for you' would be the ones that would see him run through with a bread knife, he simply levelled a long, serious look at me that said it all.

The rustling of the thin plastic hygiene gloves I wore told me that I'd actually started to shake with fury.

"Out," I said fiercely. "Get out, right now."

He looked for a moment like he wanted to argue, but then he shook his head as if deciding it wasn't worth it, and started for the door. Still, I saw that momentary defiance and it blew away any of my desire to finish this so early. How dare he get to leave this thinking that
I
was the unreasonable one?

"Wait," I said, running past him and putting myself firmly back into his path, blocking the doorway. "I've changed my
mind, you don't get off that easily. I want to shout at you for a bit."

I saw the tiniest flicker of what better not
have been amusement cross his face, but then he just lifted his eyebrows as if to say 'go on then.'

I took a deep breath and drew myself up tall, although I was swelling more from self-righteous anger than from the oxygen I'd inhaled.

"You have no right to come into my workplace and do this," I started, finding the words easily enough now. "Did you think you could just flash me the Sinclair smile and I'd forget that I wouldn't let you buy me
lunch
let alone a trip to flippin' Papua New Guinea? Seriously, after all these years, how can I make it clearer to you that I don't want your money?"

"I wasn't offering you money-" he started to say, obviously trying to distinguish the purchasing of tickets from actual money, but I cut him off.

"Of course you were!" I almost howled. "How else were you planning to get me there? Barter system? Thievery? Were you setting up some elaborate scheme where I stowed away on a fishing boat? And even if you
had
organised for me to roll around in a cargo hold singing sea shanties and sustaining myself on barrels of rum on the journey, what would possibly posses you to do it? Why do you even
want
me to come...? Oh,
monkeys
!"

The answer to my own question hit me squarely between the eyes.

"For God’s sake," I snapped. "This is about last night, isn't it? You feel bad because your mean old friends were being typically awful and you wanted to reassure yourself that you're not like them anymore. You wanted to make it all better by buying me off. That's it, isn't it?" I'd been looking pretty much anywhere other than at Elliot as I'd ranted, but my last question I directed straight at him, seeing the defensive set to every line of his body.

"Seriously, can the dramatics, Rox," he drawled, his tone dismissive, but his eyes sparking in a way that told me I'd well and truly got to him. "No-one was trying to buy anyone off."

"Yes, you were," I contradicted him, knowing I was right and pretty much incandescent with rage at his denial, "and you know where you can shove your rich boy guilt, don't you? I don't want or need it. You want to iron the wrinkles out of your upper class soul, you send some do-goodery the way of people who
do
want and need it, there's plenty of them out there. Just don't ever pull anything like this with me again."

His expression slammed shut at that, leaving him looking down at me as if he didn't even know who I was. So there I was, my chest heaving, my body aching with anger and frustration, and there he was, cool as a cucumber.

"Are you done?" He asked, not even rudely, just as if he was genuinely interested in making sure I'd finished having my say.

I nodded, my words having suddenly dried up again.

"Right, OK." He turned and let himself out the side door, without so much as another glance at me.