I would start a riot

Ghosts From The Past ~ March 2015

"Dec?"

Fame had forced him to get used to having his name be called with some degree of familiarity by a voice he didn't recognise. He'd got good at fixing a smile on the bad days, turning around and pretending he was reading an autocue whilst simultaneously feeling guilty that he had to feign enthusiasm for someone who was clearly surprised and excited to see him.

Today was a better day. He'd been in a great frame of mind since the auditions where the support for him and Stephen had seemed endless. There was something intoxicating about finally feeling just a little bit invincible. He didn't think the other man felt the same yet but his optimism let him believe that they would both settle back into the limelight soon enough.

What he wasn't expecting was to be greeted by a familiar face. And if he could have picked anyone off the list of people whose voices didn't spark an instant flicker of recognition, it certainly wouldn't have been Martha.

It was the first time he'd seen her since the final PR meeting they had together. Ali had dealt with everything else after that and the problem had disappeared quietly, except for that single news article about it. But all of that distance meant there hadn't been a lot of closure and having Martha right in front of him, flashing a small smile as if they were just a pair of ex-colleagues who had bumped into each other, was suddenly a lot to handle.

Feeling like he should at least sound half-coherent when he spoke, he tried to swallow down the toxic mixture of shock and anger that dried out his throat every time he managed to clear it, eventually getting his head around a single question. "What are you doing here?"

Martha glanced around the shop, letting out a melodic laugh as if they were sharing a joke between the pair of them. "Shopping?"

"Right," Dec replied, trying to get himself off the back foot. But he couldn't work out why she was there.

"I saw you and came over," she explained without prompting. The sickly-sweet smile reminded him too much of the way Stephen described her behaving when he was ambushed. Dec didn't trust anything about this impending conversation. "We didn't exactly leave things positively, I thought maybe, with some distance from everything that happened, we could talk.

Call him morbidly curious, or maybe just really in need of some sort of resolution, but Dec found himself agreeing. Flying high off the back of their success at the start of the year, he had started to settle into the role of being out in public. There was a shield between him and some of the worst criticism that was being directed towards him. Sometimes he even fantasised about being able to change people's minds about people like him and Stephen.

Maybe that would work on Martha. Maybe he could explain to her what had happened and how it had made them feel. Maybe she would acknowledge that what she had done had been wrong.

As they made their way out of the shop and across the road to the café opposite, he texted Stephen. He only hesitated for a second before keeping it generic. He said he was going for coffee with a friend he'd bumped into. He said he might be home a little later than planned. None of that was too much of a lie.

He hadn't even taken a sip of tea before starting to regret agreeing to any of it. Martha was quick to get straight to the point, as if she also thought she could talk him round to her side of the argument. Evidently, she hadn't developed a conscience.

"Of course, we weren't to know what was really going on between you two. All we had to go off was those photos and we thought, maybe it wasn't anything serious - something the two of you could laugh off," she said, trying to justify herself. "We knew the press love you, so we thought they'd probably just go along with it. It was New Year; you could have just been drunk."