Page 2 of Read My Lips

Priorities! Why did I even care? Minutes away from a brain aneurysm, I should be calling my gran.

“Are you not going to answer that?” Levered up on his elbows, Luke blinked at me like a llama underneath all his hair.

“...What?”

“Someone’s pretty keen to get hold of you.”

Oh.

A few feet away, the mound of my clothing lurked on the tastefully neutral, intensely vacuumed, anti-shagpile carpet, faintly quaking in the fuzzy pre-dawn blackness.

The buzzing wasn’t anything like a stag beetle, was it? It was exactly like the slightly broken vibrate on my dinged-up phone smothered by my rumpled work shirt and an ultra high-end wool-mix carpet. I should not have finished that last pint. Or the one before it.

My clothes abruptly stopped their little rave. Silence wadded into my ears so thick it felt like I’d gone deaf. Oh god. What if it was my gran?

“Shit.” Decanting myself to the floor, I scavenger-hunted my phone out of my crumpled trouser pocket.

Not Gran. A sturdy raft of floating notifications on the lock screen all had Simon’s name on them. Two missed calls and a batch of New Messages unfurled long enough to make a roadblock.

“It’s work.” What the actual factual hell?

Normally, Simon acted like I stopped existing outside of my agreed hours. He booked me in with careful notice, and was so disgustingly respectful he paid me overtime for the ten-minute chats I tried to grab with him at the end of the day. It bloody did my head in.

“But it’s half-two in the morning!” Luke flipped the bedside lamp on, dousing the room in the unhelpfully-low red glow of mood lighting and Gen Z outrage.

“...And?”

He stood, swaying slightly as he stepped in towards me and I cricked my neck up to look him in the face, already kind of seasick.

“You said”—his finger danced in front of my nose; I blinked at it, cross-eyed, stepping back—“you were an interpreter.”

“I am an interpreter?”

He snorted a laugh. “Whatchoo going to interpret at two in the morning?”

Fantastic question. Either something was going spectacularly wrong, or Simon was bum-dialling me. Repeatedly. I should not care which it was.

“I’m not going to bloody answer, am I? It’s stopped ringing now anyway.”

Right on cue, it started up again. Thank you, Universe.

“Hang on. That’s a video call.” Looking thrilled, Luke snatched the phone out of my hand.

“Yeah, it’s⁠—”

“You think he wants to join in?”

“No, I⁠—”

“I’m going to answer it!”

Time slowed. His thumb hovered with intent, eyebrow hitched up like he thought he was funny. I scrabbled to grab it off him. “Don’t you bloody⁠—”

Click.

“—dare.”

My stomach dropped hard. The line opened out into the fumble-gap of an unexpectedly answered call and the total panic-fest of cavernous silence on both sides.